CAF
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CAF
The Certified Agile Facilitator (CAF) exam validates a professional’s ability to apply core facilitation techniques, design collaborative sessions, manage group dynamics, employ visual tools, and resolve conflicts within agile environments.
Who Should Take This
Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, and team leads who have at least one year of experience facilitating agile ceremonies and seek to deepen their practice should pursue the CAF certification. It equips them to demonstrate measurable facilitation competency, earn peer credibility, and advance toward senior facilitation or agile leadership roles.
What's Covered
1
Domain 1: Facilitation Fundamentals
2
Domain 2: Designing Collaborative Sessions
3
Domain 3: Group Dynamics and Participation
4
Domain 4: Visual Facilitation
5
Domain 5: Conflict Facilitation
6
Domain 6: Facilitating Agile Events
What's Included in AccelaStudy® AI
Adaptive Knowledge Graph
Practice Questions
Lesson Modules
Console Simulator Labs
Exam Tips & Strategy
20 Activity Formats
Course Outline
61 learning goals
1
Domain 1: Facilitation Fundamentals
4 topics
The facilitator's role and mindset
- Identify the core responsibilities of a facilitator including guiding process, maintaining neutrality, ensuring equal participation, and protecting the group's decision-making autonomy.
- Describe the distinction between facilitation, coaching, teaching, and mentoring and explain when each approach is appropriate in agile team contexts.
- Apply the principle of facilitator neutrality to guide groups toward their own decisions without imposing personal opinions, biases, or preferred solutions.
Creating safe and inclusive spaces
- Describe techniques for establishing psychological safety at the beginning of facilitated sessions including check-ins, working agreements, and confidentiality norms.
- Apply inclusive facilitation practices to ensure that diverse perspectives are heard including structured turn-taking, anonymous input methods, and multiple modality participation.
- Analyze session dynamics to identify when psychological safety has broken down, evidenced by withdrawal, side conversations, or performative agreement, and intervene appropriately.
Facilitation ethics and boundaries
- Identify ethical principles for facilitators including confidentiality, informed consent, power awareness, and the responsibility to intervene when group dynamics become harmful.
- Apply boundary-setting techniques to manage situations where the facilitator is asked to take sides, make decisions for the group, or serve dual roles.
Facilitation presence and energy
- Describe the elements of facilitation presence including body language, voice modulation, spatial positioning, and energy management that contribute to effective session leadership.
- Apply energy management techniques including energizers, breaks, tempo changes, and activity variety to maintain group engagement throughout extended facilitated sessions.
- Analyze group energy patterns to identify fatigue, disengagement, or heightened tension and evaluate when to adjust the session plan, call a break, or change facilitation approach.
2
Domain 2: Designing Collaborative Sessions
4 topics
Workshop design principles
- Identify the key components of workshop design including purpose definition, outcome statements, participant analysis, agenda structure, and material preparation.
- Apply the diverge-emerge-converge facilitation pattern to design sessions that generate ideas broadly, identify themes, and drive toward decisions or action plans.
- Analyze a workshop design to evaluate whether the activity sequence, timing, and facilitation techniques align with the stated outcomes and group characteristics.
Facilitation technique selection
- Describe a repertoire of facilitation techniques including brainstorming, World Cafe, Open Space, fishbowl, gallery walk, and liberating structures and their appropriate contexts.
- Apply facilitation technique selection criteria including group size, time available, purpose, participant familiarity, and desired output format to choose the right activity.
- Analyze the effectiveness of specific facilitation techniques in past sessions to evaluate their suitability for different group sizes, contexts, and facilitation objectives.
Time management and agenda flexibility
- Describe timeboxing principles for facilitated sessions including setting clear time boundaries, communicating time remaining, and techniques for graceful wrap-up when time runs short.
- Apply adaptive agenda management to respond to emergent needs during sessions including recognizing when to extend productive discussions, cut short unproductive ones, or restructure the agenda.
Remote and hybrid facilitation
- Describe the unique challenges of remote and hybrid facilitation including technology barriers, reduced nonverbal cues, attention fragmentation, and inequitable participation dynamics.
- Apply remote facilitation techniques including digital whiteboarding, breakout rooms, asynchronous pre-work, and engagement polling to maintain collaboration quality in virtual settings.
- Analyze the trade-offs between in-person, remote, and hybrid facilitation formats to recommend the most effective approach for specific session objectives and participant constraints.
3
Domain 3: Group Dynamics and Participation
4 topics
Understanding group dynamics
- Identify stages of group development including Tuckman's forming, storming, norming, and performing stages and describe how each stage affects facilitation approach.
- Describe common group dynamic patterns including groupthink, social loafing, anchoring bias, and the Abilene paradox and explain how facilitators can counteract these patterns.
- Analyze group behavior during facilitated sessions to identify emerging dynamics, power imbalances, and unspoken tensions that may affect session outcomes.
Managing participation patterns
- Apply techniques for managing dominant participants including structured turn-taking, parking lots, time limits on contributions, and private sidebar conversations.
- Apply techniques for drawing out quiet participants including pair discussions, written input before verbal sharing, direct but gentle invitations, and small-group formats.
- Analyze participation patterns across multiple sessions to identify systemic imbalances related to seniority, personality type, or cultural background and design inclusive mitigations.
Decision-making facilitation
- Describe group decision-making methods including consensus, consent, majority vote, delegation, and advice process and explain when each is appropriate in agile contexts.
- Apply decision-making facilitation techniques to guide groups toward clear, committed decisions including gradients of agreement, fist-of-five voting, and Roman voting.
- Analyze decision-making quality by evaluating whether the group reached genuine agreement versus superficial compliance and identify factors that undermined authentic commitment.
Cross-cultural and neurodiverse facilitation
- Apply culturally sensitive facilitation techniques that respect differences in communication style, hierarchy perception, directness, and participation norms across global teams.
4
Domain 4: Visual Facilitation
4 topics
Visual thinking foundations
- Identify the principles of visual thinking including dual coding theory, the picture superiority effect, and how visual artifacts improve group comprehension and retention.
- Apply basic visual facilitation skills including simple iconography, text formatting, color coding, spatial layouts, and visual metaphors to capture group thinking in real time.
Visual collaboration tools
- Describe visual collaboration tools and templates including affinity diagrams, impact-effort matrices, empathy maps, customer journey maps, and retrospective canvases.
- Apply visual collaboration templates to structure group activities, capture ideas spatially, enable pattern recognition, and produce visual artifacts that serve as shared references.
- Analyze the effectiveness of visual artifacts produced during facilitated sessions to evaluate whether they accurately captured group thinking and supported decision-making.
Synthesizing and harvesting
- Describe techniques for synthesizing group output including thematic clustering, priority voting, summary statements, and action item extraction from visual artifacts.
- Apply harvesting techniques to transform raw facilitation output into actionable deliverables including meeting summaries, decision logs, action plans, and visual reports.
- Analyze the quality of session harvesting by evaluating completeness, accuracy, actionability, and whether the captured output reflects the full range of perspectives expressed.
Digital visual facilitation
- Apply digital visual facilitation tools including Miro, Mural, FigJam, and similar platforms to replicate in-person visual collaboration dynamics in remote and hybrid settings.
5
Domain 5: Conflict Facilitation
4 topics
Understanding conflict in teams
- Identify the types of team conflict including task conflict, relationship conflict, and process conflict and describe when each type is productive versus destructive.
- Describe conflict escalation models including Thomas-Kilmann conflict modes and Glasl's conflict escalation stages and explain how facilitators can intervene at each level.
- Analyze the underlying causes of team conflict to distinguish between surface-level disagreements and deeper issues such as value clashes, unmet needs, or structural misalignment.
De-escalation and mediation techniques
- Apply de-escalation techniques including acknowledging emotions, reframing positions as interests, separating people from problems, and calling for process pauses during heated exchanges.
- Apply structured dialogue techniques including talking sticks, fishbowl conversations, and empathy circles to create space for conflicting parties to hear and understand each other.
- Analyze the outcomes of conflict facilitation interventions to evaluate whether the underlying issues were resolved, merely suppressed, or transformed into productive creative tension.
Transforming conflict into collaboration
- Apply interest-based negotiation principles to help conflicting parties identify shared goals, explore creative options, and reach mutually beneficial agreements during facilitated sessions.
- Apply retrospective conflict debrief techniques to help teams extract learning from past conflicts, establish preventive agreements, and strengthen team resilience.
- Analyze recurring conflict patterns within a team to identify systemic triggers and recommend structural or process changes that reduce destructive conflict frequency.
Facilitator self-management during conflict
- Apply self-regulation techniques to maintain facilitator composure, neutrality, and effectiveness during emotionally charged or high-conflict facilitation situations.
6
Domain 6: Facilitating Agile Events
5 topics
Sprint Planning facilitation
- Describe the facilitation objectives for Sprint Planning including establishing the Sprint Goal, selecting backlog items, and creating a plan for the Sprint that the whole team owns.
- Apply facilitation techniques to help teams craft a compelling Sprint Goal, decompose work collaboratively, and identify dependencies and risks during Sprint Planning.
Daily Scrum facilitation
- Describe facilitation approaches for the Daily Scrum that maintain focus on Sprint Goal progress, surface impediments quickly, and prevent the event from becoming a status report.
- Apply techniques to revitalize stale Daily Scrums including walking the board, focusing on flow, rotating formats, and coaching teams toward self-facilitation.
Sprint Review facilitation
- Describe facilitation strategies for Sprint Reviews that promote genuine stakeholder feedback, collaborative inspection of the Increment, and adaptive product planning.
- Apply interactive facilitation techniques to transform Sprint Reviews from demonstrations into collaborative working sessions that generate actionable stakeholder insights.
Retrospective facilitation
- Describe retrospective facilitation principles including creating safety for honest reflection, varying formats to prevent staleness, and ensuring actionable outcomes.
- Apply a diverse repertoire of retrospective formats including sailboat, timeline, starfish, four L's, and appreciative inquiry to maintain team engagement across successive Sprints.
- Analyze retrospective effectiveness by evaluating whether improvement actions are being identified, committed to, and followed through, and recommend facilitation adjustments.
Refinement facilitation
- Apply facilitation techniques for backlog refinement sessions that promote shared understanding, right-sized decomposition, and collaborative estimation among all team members.
Scope
Included Topics
- All topics in the Scrum Alliance Certified Agile Facilitator (CAF) learning objectives: facilitation fundamentals, designing collaborative workshops, group dynamics and participation, visual facilitation, conflict facilitation, and facilitating agile events.
- Facilitation fundamentals including the facilitator's role, neutrality, process versus content, creating safe spaces for dialogue, and the distinction between facilitation, coaching, teaching, and mentoring.
- Designing collaborative sessions including workshop design principles, agenda structuring, activity sequencing, time management, and selecting facilitation techniques appropriate to the group's purpose and context.
- Group dynamics and participation including managing energy levels, encouraging diverse perspectives, handling dominant participants, drawing out quiet voices, and reading room dynamics.
- Visual facilitation techniques including graphic recording, visual templates, affinity mapping, dot voting, and using visual artifacts to capture and synthesize group thinking.
- Conflict facilitation including recognizing productive versus destructive conflict, de-escalation techniques, mediating disagreements, and transforming conflict into constructive dialogue.
- Facilitating agile events including Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective, and refinement sessions with techniques that maximize engagement and outcomes.
Not Covered
- Professional coaching competencies, ICF-aligned coaching skills, and advanced coaching stances covered by CTC and CEC certifications.
- Organizational transformation strategy, enterprise change management, and leadership development covered by CAL1 and CAL2 certifications.
- Scrum framework mechanics beyond their facilitation aspects, including Product Backlog management, Definition of Done authoring, and Sprint Goal setting.
- Technical engineering practices, DevOps, CI/CD, and software architecture decisions.
- Product management, business analysis, and requirements engineering techniques.
- Training design, curriculum development, and adult learning theory at the depth covered by CST certification.
Official Exam Page
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