PLIANT SOLUTIONS • PRESIDENT
Darren
Hoevel
Leadership & Agile Coach • Organizational Evolution
Nothing is more influential than the soles of one's own shoes and the courage of one's own vision.
Darren Hoevel is a people person with 7.125 billion friends and counting. As co-founder of Pliant Solutions, his work spans leadership coaching, organizational design, and change management— helping leaders and teams do more than survive change. He helps them get good at it.
He doesn’t coach from a distance. He brings two decades of real-world experience, a genuine love of people, and the kind of presence that makes hard conversations feel less like surgery and more like a breakthrough. (He’s pretty dang good at analogies.)
How He Works with You
01
Know who you are and exactly where you’re growing— no glossing over the uncomfortable stuff.
02
Vulnerability isn’t a liability. Darren helps leaders turn it inot a source of genuine strength.
03
See the whole, not just the parts. Patterns, constraints, and opportunities become visible.
04
You and/or your team learns to navigate uncertainty with intention— not just survive it.
Ready to Evolve?
No pressure. Just a real talk about what’s possible.
Darren's Full Story
HIS BELIEF
Lasting performance emerges when people, purpose, and systems align. Not through mandate. Not through templates. Through trust, honest reflection, and the willingness to ask the hard questions — and stay with the work.
His influences range from Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead and Grounded Confidence to Organizational Relationship Systems Coaching, interpersonal neurobiology, Lean thinking, and radical acceptance. In practice, this means he can hold space for a team falling apart and design the system that helps them rebuild — often in the same room, same day.
BACKGROUND
Before co-founding Pliant Solutions, Darren built deep expertise in agile product delivery, organizational design, and coaching across both the public and private sectors. He has partnered with large enterprise clients to scale new ways of working, improve cultural health, and design organizational structures that support sustained performance.
His facilitation and coaching work is rooted in evidence-based practice, emerging research, and real-world experience — not theory handed down from a podium.
Discover
Understand the system, the people, the real challenges
Design
Build the coaching or transformation approach together
Evolve
Iterate, learn, and grow— beyond the engagement
GUIDING PHILOSOPHY
Leadership begins not when you find the answer, but when you are willing to ask the hard questions and do the hard work.
Today, Darren continues to support organizations, teams, and individuals in navigating complex change, cultivating human capability, and designing systems that reflect both strategic intent and the full humanity of the people within them.
CREDENTIALS
Organizational Relationship Systems Coach (ORSC)
Certified Dare to Lead™ Facilitator (CDTLF)
LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® Facilitator (LSPf)
Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) Program Consultant (SPC)
Certified Scrum Professional (CSP)
Certified Scrum Master (CSM)
Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO)
ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Coaching (ICP-ACC)
ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Team Facilitation (ICP-ATF)
Masters in Business Administration, George Fox University, ID
SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS
2024 Global Agility + Innovation Summit
2024 AgileDC
2020 NCMA Leadership Summit
2020 Agile After Dark
2020 Agile Charm
2020 PMC for Excellence
2020 Agile Richmond InnoVAte Virginia
2019 Lean + AgileDC
2019 Washington, DC PMI
2019 Agile Alliance AgileXP 2019
2019 Agile Alliance Agile2019
2018-19 AgileDC
2016 AgileDC
COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT
2024 AgileDC Organizer
2013-17 AgileDC Organizer
2015-19 MeetUp Organizer: DC Organizational Agility Practitioners
