In practice, any standup format where developers show up and basically perform to some standards set by a “master” or “coach” is kind of doomed to feel a little bit like a circus show.
The problem is the existence of someone else running the show in these meetings. The best standup I’ve had were those run by the engineers themselves. Adding a “coach” or “master” just makes everything worse unless the team is really bad at communicating with each other, in which case you have bigger problems.
Lord knows what people are calling coaching these days. But if they're actually coaching, then yes, getting the team to run the meeting was exactly my goal when I did that kind of work.
But that can be tricky. The biggest issue is to train managers to not make it about the manager. For that, an external coach is especially helpful, because it's the rare engineer who can sit their boss down and say, "Look, you're destroying this meeting. How about you not show up for the next two weeks, and then optionally show up but never speak for a month after that?"
But even once you've created a space where power doesn't distort everything, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. People who talk too much or too little. People are unkind, rude, cutting, or outright mean. People who talk about the wrong things. People who don't even know what to do if there isn't a manager around to try to please.
The truth is that for most people in the industry, their median meeting is bad. People with shorter careers may never have experienced a good meeting. So expecting them to just figure out how to have an excellent meeting every day is asking a lot. Especially a stand-up, which has pretty sharp constraints. If a team already knows or quickly figures it out, great. But a coach can really help.
In practice, any standup format where developers show up and basically perform to some standards set by a “master” or “coach” is kind of doomed to feel a little bit like a circus show.
The problem is the existence of someone else running the show in these meetings. The best standup I’ve had were those run by the engineers themselves. Adding a “coach” or “master” just makes everything worse unless the team is really bad at communicating with each other, in which case you have bigger problems.