CAL2
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CAL2
CAL2 equips leaders with enterprise‑wide systems thinking, strategic agility, large‑scale adoption tactics, value‑stream management, and advanced change leadership, enabling them to design and execute transformative agile initiatives across complex organizations.
Who Should Take This
Mid‑level to senior managers who already lead cross‑functional teams and have foundational agile experience are ideal candidates. They seek to deepen strategic insight, scale agile practices enterprise‑wide, and steer value‑stream optimization, positioning themselves as transformation architects within their organizations. The certification validates their capability to lead large‑scale change and deliver measurable business agility.
What's Covered
1
Domain 1: Enterprise Systems Thinking
2
Domain 2: Strategic Leadership for Business Agility
3
Domain 3: Leading Large-Scale Agile Adoption
4
Domain 4: Value Stream Management
5
Domain 5: Advanced Change Leadership
6
Domain 6: Leadership Identity and Legacy
What's Included in AccelaStudy® AI
Adaptive Knowledge Graph
Practice Questions
Lesson Modules
Console Simulator Labs
Exam Tips & Strategy
20 Activity Formats
Course Outline
65 learning goals
1
Domain 1: Enterprise Systems Thinking
4 topics
Complex adaptive systems in organizations
- Apply complex adaptive systems theory to model how emergent behaviors arise from local team interactions and how small changes can cascade into large organizational shifts.
- Analyze organizational dynamics through the lens of attractors, boundaries, and feedback mechanisms to identify where the system is self-organizing versus where it is stuck.
- Design organizational probes and safe-to-fail experiments at the enterprise level to test hypotheses about systemic behavior before committing to large-scale change initiatives.
Systems modeling and visualization
- Apply systems modeling techniques including causal loop diagrams, stock-and-flow models, and system archetypes to map organizational impediments and their interconnections.
- Analyze reinforcing and balancing feedback loops within an enterprise to identify systemic patterns such as fixes that fail, shifting the burden, and limits to growth.
- Design intervention strategies based on systems analysis that target high-leverage points to shift organizational behavior toward sustained agility.
Organizational boundaries and coupling
- Apply concepts of loose and tight coupling to analyze how organizational boundaries, team topologies, and communication structures affect the flow of value and information.
- Analyze the impact of Conway's Law on organizational agility and evaluate how team structures and communication patterns shape the architecture of products and services.
- Design team topology strategies using patterns such as stream-aligned teams, enabling teams, platform teams, and complicated subsystem teams to optimize organizational agility.
Emergence and self-organization at scale
- Apply principles of emergence to create enabling constraints that guide self-organization across multiple teams without imposing rigid top-down control structures.
- Analyze the tension between standardization and autonomy at enterprise scale to evaluate where alignment is essential and where diversity of practice should be encouraged.
- Design governance frameworks that balance enterprise-level alignment with team-level autonomy, enabling consistent delivery standards without stifling local innovation.
2
Domain 2: Strategic Leadership for Business Agility
4 topics
Aligning transformation with business strategy
- Apply techniques for connecting agile transformation goals to business outcomes including revenue growth, time-to-market reduction, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement.
- Analyze the alignment between an organization's stated business strategy and its actual operational practices to identify where agile transformation can close strategic gaps.
- Design a transformation strategy that explicitly ties agile adoption milestones to measurable business outcomes and creates feedback mechanisms for strategy adjustment.
Adaptive strategy processes
- Apply iterative strategy development approaches including strategy sprints, OKR frameworks, and Hoshin Kanri to replace annual planning with continuous strategic adaptation.
- Analyze the effectiveness of an organization's strategic planning cadence by evaluating cycle times, responsiveness to market changes, and alignment across organizational levels.
- Design an adaptive strategy process that incorporates regular inspect-and-adapt cycles, decentralized decision-making, and real-time market intelligence for strategic agility.
Building an agile-friendly executive coalition
- Apply executive coaching techniques to help C-suite leaders understand their role in agile transformation, shift their mental models, and adopt behaviors that enable organizational agility.
- Analyze executive team dynamics to identify power structures, competing priorities, and political dynamics that either accelerate or impede enterprise agile transformation.
- Design executive alignment programs that build shared understanding of business agility, create accountability for transformation outcomes, and sustain leadership commitment.
Measuring business agility
- Apply evidence-based management frameworks including Key Value Areas, Current Value, Unrealized Value, and Ability to Innovate to assess organizational agility maturity.
- Design a business agility measurement system that combines leading and lagging indicators, flow metrics, and outcome measures to provide actionable insights for transformation leaders.
3
Domain 3: Leading Large-Scale Agile Adoption
4 topics
Transformation architecture and roadmaps
- Apply transformation architecture principles to design a phased approach to enterprise agile adoption that accounts for organizational readiness, risk tolerance, and resource constraints.
- Analyze the trade-offs between top-down mandated transformation, bottom-up grassroots adoption, and middle-out approaches to evaluate which strategy fits the organizational context.
- Design a multi-quarter transformation roadmap with explicit decision points, success criteria, pivot triggers, and escalation paths for managing large-scale agile adoption.
Multi-team coordination strategies
- Apply coordination mechanisms including Scrum of Scrums, integration events, shared backlogs, and dependency management practices to synchronize work across multiple agile teams.
- Analyze cross-team dependencies, handoff patterns, and integration bottlenecks to identify structural impediments to flow and recommend organizational interventions.
- Design organizational structures and coordination mechanisms that minimize cross-team dependencies while maintaining alignment to shared product and portfolio goals.
Scaling governance and program management
- Apply lightweight governance models that provide visibility and accountability at the program level without introducing excessive overhead or undermining team autonomy.
- Analyze the effectiveness of existing governance structures by evaluating their impact on team cycle times, decision-making speed, and delivery predictability.
- Design a program-level governance framework that balances strategic oversight with operational agility, incorporating adaptive planning, rolling-wave budgeting, and outcome-based reporting.
Building internal change agent networks
- Apply community-of-practice design principles to build networks of internal agile coaches, champions, and change agents who sustain transformation momentum beyond initial training.
- Design a change agent development program that identifies, trains, supports, and retains internal transformation leaders across all levels of the organization.
4
Domain 4: Value Stream Management
4 topics
Value stream identification and mapping
- Apply value stream mapping techniques to identify end-to-end flows from customer request to value delivery, including handoffs, wait times, and process bottlenecks.
- Analyze value stream maps to quantify waste, calculate process efficiency ratios, and identify the highest-impact improvement opportunities across organizational boundaries.
- Design value-stream-aligned organizational structures that optimize flow, reduce handoffs, and empower teams to own the full lifecycle from ideation to customer value delivery.
Flow optimization and Lean principles
- Apply Lean flow principles including work-in-progress limits, pull systems, batch size reduction, and queue management to improve delivery throughput across value streams.
- Analyze flow metrics including lead time, cycle time, throughput, and work-item age to identify systemic bottlenecks and evaluate the impact of improvement experiments.
- Design a flow optimization strategy that integrates Lean principles with agile practices to achieve predictable, sustainable delivery cadences across multiple teams and value streams.
Portfolio-level value delivery
- Apply portfolio management techniques including lean portfolio management, cost of delay analysis, and weighted shortest job first to prioritize investments across multiple value streams.
- Analyze portfolio-level trade-offs between exploration and exploitation, short-term delivery and long-term capability building, and standardization and innovation.
- Design a lean portfolio management approach that funds value streams rather than projects, uses outcome-based metrics, and enables rapid reallocation of resources based on learning.
Customer-centric value alignment
- Apply techniques for maintaining customer focus at the enterprise level including customer journey mapping, outcome-driven innovation, and jobs-to-be-done frameworks.
5
Domain 5: Advanced Change Leadership
4 topics
Transformation sustainability
- Apply techniques for embedding agile practices into organizational DNA including policy changes, hiring practices, performance management reform, and leadership development programs.
- Analyze the indicators of transformation regression including reversion to waterfall practices, coach dependency, and zombie agile to evaluate sustainability risks.
- Design sustainability mechanisms including agile health checks, maturity models, community reinforcement, and continuous coaching that prevent transformation decay over time.
Coaching executive leaders
- Apply executive coaching approaches to help senior leaders develop agile mindsets, shift from output-focused to outcome-focused thinking, and model agile behaviors for the organization.
- Analyze the specific challenges executives face during agile transformation including loss of predictability, reduced direct control, and shifting power dynamics.
- Design executive development programs that build agile leadership capabilities across the C-suite and senior management, creating a critical mass of agile-minded leaders.
Navigating organizational politics
- Apply political mapping techniques to understand formal and informal power structures, competing agendas, and hidden stakeholders that influence transformation outcomes.
- Analyze the political landscape of an organization undergoing transformation to identify allies, opponents, fence-sitters, and shadow networks that can accelerate or derail change.
- Design politically astute transformation strategies that build broad-based support, neutralize opposition constructively, and maintain ethical integrity throughout the change process.
Transformation through disruption
- Apply crisis leadership principles to leverage organizational disruptions such as market shifts, mergers, or technology changes as catalysts for accelerating agile transformation.
- Design a resilient transformation strategy that can sustain progress through organizational turbulence including leadership changes, budget cuts, and strategic pivots.
6
Domain 6: Leadership Identity and Legacy
4 topics
Leadership identity evolution
- Apply self-assessment frameworks to examine how personal leadership identity has evolved through the agile transformation journey and identify areas for continued growth.
- Analyze the relationship between personal leadership values, organizational culture, and transformation effectiveness to evaluate alignment and identify dissonance.
- Design a personal leadership development trajectory that integrates ongoing learning, peer mentoring, community contribution, and progressive challenge-seeking.
Mentoring the next generation of agile leaders
- Apply mentoring frameworks to develop emerging agile leaders by sharing transformation experience, providing coaching, and creating growth opportunities within the organization.
- Design a leadership succession strategy that ensures transformation continuity by developing a pipeline of agile leaders at multiple organizational levels.
Contributing to the agile community
- Apply knowledge sharing practices to contribute transformation insights, case studies, and lessons learned to the broader agile leadership community.
- Analyze transformation case studies from diverse industries and organizational contexts to extract transferable leadership principles and patterns.
- Design a thought leadership strategy that synthesizes personal transformation experience into frameworks, models, or practices that benefit the agile leadership profession.
Ethical leadership at enterprise scale
- Analyze ethical challenges unique to enterprise agile transformation including workforce displacement, surveillance-oriented metrics, and performative agile adoption.
- Design ethical guardrails for enterprise transformation that protect employee well-being, maintain transparency, and ensure that agile adoption serves people as well as business outcomes.
Scope
Included Topics
- All topics in the Scrum Alliance Certified Agile Leadership II (CAL2) learning objectives: advanced organizational transformation strategy, enterprise-level systems thinking, leading large-scale agile adoption, portfolio and value stream management, and strategic leadership for business agility.
- Enterprise systems thinking including complex adaptive systems theory, organizational dynamics modeling, emergent behavior in large organizations, and applying systems-of-systems perspectives to transformation design.
- Strategic leadership for business agility including aligning agile transformation with business strategy, building adaptive strategy processes, managing portfolio-level trade-offs, and creating organizational structures that sustain agility at scale.
- Leading large-scale agile adoption including multi-team coordination strategies, program-level governance, managing organizational dependencies, and designing transformation roadmaps that span multiple quarters or years.
- Value stream management including identifying and mapping value streams, optimizing flow across organizational boundaries, reducing cycle times at the portfolio level, and aligning teams to customer-centric value delivery.
- Advanced change leadership including designing transformation architectures, coaching executive leaders, building internal change agent networks, and sustaining transformation through leadership transitions and organizational disruptions.
Not Covered
- Foundational agile leadership concepts, basic leadership styles, and introductory change management covered by CAL1 certification.
- Team-level Scrum mechanics, events, artifacts, and accountabilities covered by CSM and A-CSM certifications.
- Hands-on coaching techniques and ICF-aligned competencies covered by CTC and CEC certifications.
- Technical engineering practices, DevOps tooling, and software architecture decisions.
- Product management tactics, product discovery, and backlog management covered by the Product Owner track.
- Specific scaling framework certification content for SAFe, LeSS, or Scrum@Scale beyond strategic awareness.
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