Mike Burrows's Blog, page 21

Out on Monday, the Agendashift 2nd edition

Thrilled and relieved in almost equal measure, I have the great pleasure of announcing that the 2nd edition of Agendashift: outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation is released on Monday. It is available meanwhile for preorder here:

Amazon UK: print | Kindle Amazon US: print | Kindle Waterstones: print

An ePub edition is imminent also – expect to find it very soon on Apple Books, Google Play, Kobo, and elsewhere.

Make no mistake, this is a big update. Not just three years of refinement and stress testing in the field, we’ve dug deep, established solid foundations, and from there grown in scope, substance, and confidence. Some chapters have been entirely rewritten, a new chapter 6 added. But don’t worry, it’s still Agendashift, just older and wiser

The list of people to whom I am indebted is long. To mention just a few of those most directly in Agendashift’s development: Dragan Jojic, Karl Scotland, Andrea Chiou, and Steven Mackenzie – there from the beginning, and Patrick Hoverstadt, Jonathan Sibley, Andreas Wittler, Tom Ayerst, Matthew Dodwell, Kjell Tore Guttormsen, and Teddy Zetterlund in relation to the 2nd edition specifically.

Less directly involved but influential, helpful, and supportive (and in parentheses the communities they represent, all of them intersecting significantly with Agendashift’s): Gervase Bushe (Dialogic and Generative Organisation Development), Dave Snowden (Cynefin), Simon Wardley (Mapping), Pia-Maria Thorén (Agile People), Judy Rees & Caitlin Walker (Clean Language both), Daniel Mezick (OpenSpace Agility).

The foreword to the 2nd edition is by Pia-Maria. Daniel’s 1st edition foreword remains; as will be explained in this edition’s completely rewritten introduction, his contains a hidden gift. Sincerely, thank you both.

We’re in business of building wholehearted and deliberately adaptive organisations. If that sentence could one day describe you too, read the book!

PS. While you wait for your copy to arrive, let me recommend the new cheat sheet agendashift.com/leading-with-outcomes-cheat-sheet. Consider it a taste of the first two chapters.

PPS. Likes & comments on this post on LinkedIn would be hugely appreciated. And when the time comes, reviews!

Upcoming27-28 April, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Leading with Outcomes (EMEA)04 May, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (EMEA)24-25 May, Online conference:
Lean Agile Global 202114-17 June, 8 online sessions (2 per day) of 120 minutes each, Americas-friendly timing:
Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation (Americas)6-7 July, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), APAC-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Leading with Outcomes (APAC)

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 26, 2021 08:50

Leading with Outcomes: a cheat sheet

To whet the appetite, a cheat sheet for:

The Leading with Outcomes workshop – there are two interactive workshops upcoming (see below) and watch this space for news of new online self-paced trainingThe first half of the Core , Deep Dive , and Outside-in strategy workshops; we’ll shortly be adding a Deep Dive at an Americas-friendly timeLast but very definitely not least, the first two chapters of the book, Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2nd edition March 2021)

Yes, you read that right: March 2021. Publication imminent!

Go to agendashift.com/leading-with-outcomes-cheat-sheet or click on the image below for download information, references, etc. It’s Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA); by subscribing you’ll get not just the PDF but the original .pptx file too – translations and other adaptations welcome. Enjoy!

Upcoming27-28 April, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Leading with Outcomes (EMEA) 04 May, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (EMEA) 6-7 July, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), APAC-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Leading with Outcomes (APAC)

Comment & reactions on this post appreciated: LinkedIn | Slack (join ours) | Twitter

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 16, 2021 05:46

15-minute FOTO version 10

Quick one: the facilitation deck for our Clean Language-inspired coaching game 15-minute FOTO is now at version 10. Changes:

Added a slide for a quick practice: the two and three most important questions (the questions in bold on the card, the ones that do most of the work in the game) on your most concrete and most abstract obstacles, respectively without and with the What kind of… question ( my favourite ). You can do it as a facilitator-led demonstration and/or a short breakout (doing both isn’t overkill in my experience).Removed a slide titled Essential: Launch from a clear challenge, go deep. Essential it might be, but it’s smoother to cover the point while on the preceding slide.Moved the And when X... slide to improve the flow.Updated the reference material at the back to mention the now-imminent 2nd edition of the book.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve recorded myself using this version and am much happier with the flow now.

More: Go to agendashift.com/15-minute-foto for tips, download instruction, and an ancient but still fun video.

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 12, 2021 06:21

Neat hierarchies vs self-expressed strategy

Oh dear, a “vs” in the title on a subject where perhaps some nuance is called for. My apologies – naming is hard – but then again, on this topic I do take a strong and (I suspect) non-mainstream position.

Last week I put this question to LinkedIn:

At scale [across multiple organisational units], do you:
1) maintain neat hierarchical work breakdown structures (saga, epic, feature, story, task, perhaps)
Or 2) allow each level and each unit within – down to team if not individual level – to express their respective strategies in their own language as they are fit?

To be clear, the intention behind this question is not about terminology (not method-level terminology at least)

Quite a range of answers, many of them describing organisations that were much closer to one extreme than the other, with aspirations to reverse the situation. The really funny thing: this went in both directions. People working with neat hierarchies aspiring to greater self-organisation, and people at that end aspiring to consistency and to what they saw as a source of alignment.

So where am I on this? Pieter Mulder’s comment represents my thoughts pretty well:

My opinion is very much that point 1 will only let you scale so far and it must take a heck of a lot of effort to maintain that as you continue to scale and it comes with risk when teams or individuals don’t conform and the whole system breaks down – also, who decides the structures and how do you change them when they don’t work? Point 2 can scale infinitely as the decision-making and accountability sits much lower down so it is much easier to optimise the system (smaller experiments, smaller tweaks, smaller risk to the whole).

Teams are living organisms which are never the same. What works for one team doesn’t always work for another (even if they are seemingly identical).

I am completely biased as I have never seen 1 work well (and have seen it fail or frustrate too many times) and I have seen 2 work really well.

Late 90’s, before Agile was even a thing, two investment bank projects sealed it for me.

The first of these projects impacted borrowers and lenders of fixed income securities in the UK (Gilts most especially) and was sponsored by the Bank of England. I was hired as a contract developer into the relevant front office team and was surprised (in a very good way) about how things were organised. Quickly I found myself taking the lead in agreeing interchange protocols with middle and back office systems and we all got on with our work. For the purpose of this project, each system had its champions in various parts of the business, and between us all we worked out how testing would be conducted, both separately and integrated. Project managers meanwhile stayed mainly out of our way, looking after the BoE relationship. On launch night we converted literally billions of pounds worth of stock between old and new trade models, and one minor hiccup aside (fixed in minutes), we were live. My first experience of a “front-to-back” project was a very positive one.

Since many of my front office colleagues preferred more trading-focussed projects it wasn’t surprising that I found myself as the front office tech lead for another front-to-back project, completely rewriting a mission critical system in the year leading up to the launch of the Euro. What would have been a high profile project at any time became a truly high stakes project. And the really great thing: we followed much the same model but with two enhancements:

Even greater business involvement, to the extent that across all impacted systems (of which there were several), people co-opted from “line” jobs to work as subject matter experts and testers easily outnumbered the developersAn early focus on testing (one of my first bits of development helped to make testing a largely self-service activity, a few hours coding that paid for itself countless times over), supporting a highly engaged and iterative process

In early autumn we went into parallel running, started migrating trading books a few at a time and then in larger numbers until we were fully live. Not only were we ready in good time for the Euro conversion, we were earlier than anyone’s best predictions!

20-25 years have passed since those projects and despite all I’ve experienced since, there’s very little that I would change about them. And if self-organisation can work on projects of such scale and significance, why is it not more the norm? Or perhaps it is, but we don’t like to own up to something that looks messy, and surely those nice, neat hierarchies are what counts for “doing it properly” these days?

In more recent years my opinions have only hardened. I know that context is everything, but show me a beautifully-groomed backlog and two worries spring immediately to my mind:

When the work gets to the front of the queue, will it still be relevant?How much does it cost to incorporate everything that’s been learned meanwhile?

To make that learning process work at scale and speed, you’ve got to be truly exceptional. For the unexceptional – and I’m referencing Right to Left here – the big risk is that you end up ploughing through backlogs of requirements, a mediocre experience leading to mediocre results, hardly Agile at all (if that’s a goal).

More recently still, and in the process of appreciating and integrating models as diverse as OKR, Viable System Model, Sociocracy, and Leader-Leader, I keep landing on a common theme: autonomous teams (and other organisational units) each expressing strategy in their own words, strategies negotiated, developed, and aligned through collaboration and participation.

To the top-down extreme, in the Agendashift 2nd edition (due later this month) I express my feelings thus:

It’s a funny kind of autonomy when strategy is something that happens to you. [And] it’s a funny kind of adaptive strategy if it doesn’t know how to listen.

Again, to make a hierarchical approach work effectively at scale and speed, you’ve got to be truly exceptional. Maybe you are; more likely you are not. Whether or not you are, please let’s agree not to describe it as the default “doing it properly” approach to which all Agile organisations should aspire.

While we wait for the 2nd edition (subscribe here for news), let me recommend Allan Kelly’s Succeeding with OKRs in Agile: How to create & deliver objectives & key results for teams, foreword by yours truly. Highly relevant to this topic!

Coming soon, the 2nd edition!https://www.agendashift.com/books/agendashift-2nd-edition

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on March 01, 2021 07:00

Agendashift roundup, February 2021

At the end of an unpredictably busy week, this month’s roundup is another quick one. Watch out over the course of the next month for the 2nd edition of the Agendashift book (very excited about that) and more. If you haven’t already, now’s a good time to subscribe!

Upcoming workshops

The list below looks shorter than usual but expect a flurry of activity after the book launch!

09 March, one 2-hour session, Americas-friendly timing:
Probe! Ideation and Experimentation (Americas) 04 May, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:
Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (EMEA)

All the usual discounts apply: repeat visits (not uncommon), partners, gov, edu, non-profit, country, un- or under-employment, bulk orders. If you think that one might apply to you, do please ask. Many of those considerations apply to private workshops also.

Updates to the Agendashift True North exercise

An update to material that has served us very well for a long time! A True North for Lean-Agile? was posted in 2017, and my last update to the material is nearly a year old although not announced until last August with True North, tweaked.

The Agendashift True North statement remains unchanged this time:

What have changed are two of the setup questions, questions that gently lead participants through a Discovery discussion (usually in breakout groups, perhaps 1-2-4-All style). Previously:

(When that’s happening) What new stories could we tell?In those those stories, whose needs are we meeting?

Now:

(When that’s happening) Whose needs would we be meeting?What new stories could they tell?

I’ve done more than just swap those bullets around. Notice that the storytellers have changed: what was “we”, is now “they”. The change is subtle, but it does a better job of directing attention to what’s happening when needs are being met, when (to use JTBD language) we’re helping people make progress in what today are their moments of struggle.

I’ve put the complete set of setup questions in the facilitation deck – two versions of them in fact, one intended for workshop settings and one more suited to less formal occasions, meetups and the like. The deck is published under Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA) license and you can obtain it via the True North page. Be my guest!

Upcoming23-26 February, 8 online sessions of 120 minutes each, 2 per day over 4 days, EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation (EMEA) 09 March, one 2-hour session, Americas-friendly timing:
Probe! Ideation and Experimentation (Americas) 04 May, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:
Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (EMEA)

All the usual discounts apply: repeat visits (not uncommon), partners, gov, edu, non-profit, country, un- or under-employment, bulk orders. If you think that one might apply to you, do please ask. Many of those considerations apply to private workshops also.

For the Deep Dive especially, if you think that you might become an Agendashift partner, partner discounts make it well worthwhile to get on board before you sign up to the workshop.

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on February 18, 2021 03:15

Eating our own dog food (3/n): Harvesting

This is the third post in what has become a series:

Eating our own dog food (1/n): Our outside-in strategy review (OI-SR) : Eating our own dog food (2/n): The strategy review’s assumptions Eating our own dog food (3/n): Harvesting (this post)

From the first of those posts:

What it would be like if the Agendashift partner network was making a point of eating its own dog food (so to speak), in the powerful sense that it models a lot of what it’s like to be a wholehearted, deliberately adaptive organisation, its work happening in self-organising, self-governing circles, reviewing its strategy outside in, conducting outside-in service delivery reviews, and so on.

Yesterday we started an outside-in strategy review (OI-SR). As suspected, we didn’t get through all five questions in the limited time available, just one hour. And in my haste to get started we glossed over something important: In the question (below) for layer 1. Customer, who is there “we” here?

1. Customer: What’s happening when we’re reaching the right customers, meeting their strategic needs?

If from the preceding posts you’ve seen me explore some of the assumptions behind that question, you’ll have an idea of why I’m kicking myself! The one time I didn’t kick off with the Celebration-5W exercise was the time I most needed it…

Despite that little hiccup, some great stuff was captured for the first two layers, customer and organisation. That work was done in breakout groups (5 of them); we then had a brief whole-room discussion for Product and Platform before we ran out of time.

1. Customer

Who are those “right customers”?

Organisations that have the need and desire for change but not the know-howOrganisations that are stuck, needing clarity about their situation (framing their obstacles in ways that will help them get past them), wider perspectives, more optionsOrganisations that want to create shared awareness and from that define a way forwardOrganisations that have suffered a bad experience of change and are looking for a better wayOrganisations that want to adapt and innovate fasterPioneers or those who have gone full circle – ready to get past the the “doing Agile” vs “being Agile” thingLeaders willing to engage, organisations committed to supporting thatLeaders with skin in the game, taking responsibility

Their struggles:

Repeated attempts at change that don’t stickThe feeling that they have plateauedFeelings of overwhelm and helplessness, no longer owners of their own destiny

Wrong customers:

Those unable to think beyond the linear project (not meant judgmentally – paradigm shifts are hard) Those unwilling to experiment (ditto – risk appetites differ, sometimes with good reason)Those who want it all done for them (and again – old habits die hard)

Over-investing in these “wrong customers” in the short term would waste of not just our time but theirs. However, we’re not writing them off. Their struggles are real enough, and the long game here is to inform the passive and (later) active seekers of help.

2. Organisation

When that customer part is working at its ideal best, what must be happening on our side? Answers below organised by circle (this was a two-part exercise):

Learning & other self-help:Helping each other by sharing experiences of what did and didn’t workCase studies (valuable also for marketing), “Agendashift from the Trenches” (see footnote later under Product)Building the confidence of partners with less experienceHow-to’s for engagement proposals and other commercial aspectsContent development & curationTools, exercises, models, etcMarketingEventsOther launchesPromotion generallyDomain-specific, for example:SMEsDevOpsRole-specific, eg senior leadership3. Product

We really only had the time to discuss stuff that’s already in the pipeline or beyond:

The 2nd edition of Agendashift – very close to being able to announce a publication dateA conference (our first) to celebrate thatSelf-paced learning optionsThe assessment tools :Continuing some great work done on the language of the mini assessment and extending it to the full versionTwo new assessment tools for the 1) wholehearted and 2) deliberately adaptive organisationDoing a better job of promoting something we’re rightly proud of!

And a footnote on “Agendashift from the Trenches” (see 2. Organisation above): I wasn’t part of this breakout conversation but I have shared with the 2nd edition’s review team an idea for a collaborative book project. I’m thinking Wholehearted: Up and down the deliberately adaptive organisation, two key models from the 2nd edition brought to life through experience reports.

4. Platform

Some discussion (not completely conclusive) on technologies to support the work of those circles.

Despite my initial oversight, that’s a good haul for just one hour’s discussion – the outside-in structure delivers again! And let me repeat: If this kind of strategy review could work for you, do get in touch.

Upcoming

Tomorrow’s workshop below is nearly sold out but I’ve added another for early May. Keeping April free for book-related stuff!

23-26 February, 8 online sessions of 120 minutes each, 2 per day over 4 days, EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation (EMEA) 09 March, one 2-hour session, Americas-friendly timing:
Probe! Ideation and Experimentation (Americas) 04 May, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:
Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (EMEA)

All the usual discounts apply: repeat visits (not uncommon), partners, gov, edu, non-profit, country, un- or under-employment, bulk orders. If you think that one might apply to you, do please ask. Many of those considerations apply to private workshops also.

For the Deep Dive especially, if you think that you might become an Agendashift partner, partner discounts make it well worthwhile to get on board before you sign up to the workshop.

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on February 12, 2021 05:27

Eating our own dog food (2/n): The strategy review’s assumptions

Graham Hill asks in response to Monday’s Eating our own dog food (1/n): Our outside-in strategy review (OI-SR):

Competitors? (source – linkedin.com)

Great question!

The five main questions of our outside-in strategy review (OI-SR) are worded to be non-prescriptive – to the point of generative – but that doesn’t mean they don’t hide some assumptions. Some were called out in that initial post but there are others. Moreover, identifying assumptions like this is a really helpful facilitation technique; through them the question can be unpacked and the conversation encouraged to unfold productively.

Here in full is the relevant passage from the forthcoming 2nd edition:

Assumption 1 (the first of three) is that “reaching the right customers, meeting their strategic needs” is actually worth talking about. It usually is, but it doesn’t hurt to check! And this key phrase begs three further questions:
Who are those “right customers” ?What does “reaching” mean for us here?And to those “strategic needs”(their needs, our strategy – the needs that help define our mission): What are they, and how will we know that we’re meeting them?
Assumption 2 is that there is a meaningful “when”. Is there a timeframe in which those customers and their strategic needs will coincide with our ability to reach and meet them?

Assumption 3 lies in the “we” of that sentence. Why us? Why not a competitor? And for an internal strategy review, why not another organisational unit, outsource even?

Bringing those back together, it should be clear that this single question combines a stimulating and potentially provocative generative image with concepts of positioning, timing, and competition. Not the last word on mission-oriented and multi-agent competitive strategy, but a start!

Or in other words, manoeuvre strategy, although that term is a little militaristic for some tastes. An excellent book on the corporate form is written by friends of mine: Patterns of Strategy, Patrick Hoverstadt & Lucy Loh, (Routledge, 2017)

To Graham’s question, let me address assumption 3 in the context of tomorrow’s review. Why us? Why not a competitor?

I see two main competitors to Agendashift:

Other engagement modelsOld-school change management

Two quite distinct categories, the former representing a paradigm shift from the latter. OpenSpace Agility is our most notable competition in the engagement model space, and we complement each other far more than we compete. Our respective communities overlap significantly, and there is real innovation happening right now in that intersection.

Our challenge with old-school change management is helping people understand its limitations. It is so entrenched that people still regard as “doing it properly” a model that fails repeatedly when applied to adaptive rather than technical challenges – change that’s about culture, leadership, innovation, and yes, engagement. You don’t upgrade your organisation like your upgrading your email server!

This is well understood by the workshop’s participants – Agendashift partners – for whom an important motivation for joining is the contrast between the two paradigms. Much of the challenge for the rest of tomorrow’s review lies in making sure that not just our products and services but also how we organise ourselves best amplifies that message.

Upcoming

Tomorrow’s workshop below is nearly sold out but I’ve added another for early May. Keeping April free for book-related stuff!

09 February, one 2-hour session, Americas-friendly timing:
Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (Americas) 23-26 February, 8 online sessions of 120 minutes each, 2 per day over 4 days, EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation (EMEA) 09 March, one 2-hour session, Americas-friendly timing:
Probe! Ideation and Experimentation (Americas) 04 May, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:
Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (EMEA)

All the usual discounts apply: repeat visits (not uncommon), partners, gov, edu, non-profit, country, un- or under-employment, bulk orders. If you think that one might apply to you, do please ask. Many of those considerations apply to private workshops also.

For the Deep Dive especially, if you think that you might become an Agendashift partner, partner discounts make it well worthwhile to get on board before you sign up to the workshop.

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on February 10, 2021 05:46

Eating our own dog food (1/n): Our outside-in strategy review (OI-SR)

Update (Feb 10th): Eating our own dog food (2/n): The strategy review’s assumptions

Last Thursday we held the first of two partner meetings over Zoom, the second happening this coming Thursday. The overall plan: a discovery session (facilitated last week by Kert Peterson) and a second session that’s more about ideas for the coming months.

At last week’s session I wondered out loud what it would be like if the Agendashift partner network was making a point of eating its own dog food (so to speak), in the powerful sense that it demonstrates a lot of what it’s like to be a wholehearted, deliberately adaptive organisation, its work happening in self-organising, self-governing circles, reviewing its strategy outside in, conducting outside-in service delivery reviews, and so on.

I suggested that we were months away, but why wait? Why not make this coming session an outside-in strategy review? Why not indeed!

So… with more here than probably we’ll have time for, an outline. It’s pretty much the standard questions as per the template and our workshop materials, contextualised just a bit. Not shown here, by Thursday I will line up some breakout exercises to support each of the 5 layers and their corresponding questions.

1. Customer: What’s happening when we’re reaching2 the right customers1, meeting their strategic needs3?

1Who are those “right customers”?

2What does “reaching” mean for us here?

3To those “strategic needs” (their needs, our strategy – the needs that help define our mission): What are they, and how will we know that we’re meeting them? When we’re meeting them, what new stories could they tell? What is their struggle? How do we help them make progress? [1]

A bit of a steer: The “right customers” question can be surprisingly tricky sometimes, and it certainly is for us here. Who are they? Client organisations? Their staff? Members of the partner network? Current? Prospective? Yes, all of those and perhaps more!

2. Organisation: When we’re meeting those strategic needs, what kind of organisation are we?

This one is effectively answered by this review’s context (see my preamble above), so we’ll dig down a bit. Let’s turn that “What kind of…?” question into something that’s more like a “What’s happening…?” question:

With that customer part happening as we’d wish, identify what activities must be happening on our side

And then:

What set of circles would best be responsible for those activities? (Give names to them)

For the purposes of this exercise, a circle is defined only loosely, as a self-governing group of people responsible for a domain, business, technical, functional, geographical, or whatever. For stronger definitions, see Right to Left [2], We the People [3], and the Wikipedia page for Sociocracy [4]. Right to Left remains by the way the best source for our outside-in strategy review (OR-SR); the forthcoming Agendashift 2nd edition [5] covers it too but not in the same depth.

3. Product: Through what product and services are we meeting those strategic needs?

An opportunity both to mention some things that are in the pipeline (to be announced here at the appropriate time) and to ask if we’re missing anything important.

4. Platform: When we’re that kind of organisation, meeting those strategic needs, delivering those products and services, what are the defining/critical capabilities that make it all possible?

In support of all we have discussed so far, what are we currently lacking in terms of infrastructure (technical or otherwise), intellectual property, and so on?

5. Team(s): When we’re achieving all of the above, what kind(s) of team(s) are we?

Time for another strong steer. What if part of being a wholehearted and (especially) deliberately adaptive organisation was developmental [6] at the level of individual partners and prospective partners? More widely? How do we:

Help each other grow where each of us currently is?Help each other identify and grow into new opportunities?Help each other step far enough back to look with some objectivity at our relationship with the system as it is and could be?

In other words, development that’s simultaneously personal, collaborative, and systemic. Can we organise ourselves to encourage this? I think we can.

I don’t know that we’ll get through all of that – certainly not the Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes (IdOO) bit – but it will be fun to try! And if this kind of strategy review could work for you, do get in touch.

[1] “What is their struggle? How do we help them make progress?”: This new wording is inspired by connections I’m seeing connections between our outside-in strategy review (OI-SR) and Jobs to Be Done (JTBD). See Demand-side Sales 101: Stop selling and help your customers make progress, Bob Moesta (2020, Lioncrest Publishing)
[2] Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile by yours truly (2019, audiobook 2020)
[3] We the people: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy, John Jr. Buck & Sharon Villenes (Sociocracy.info Press, second edition, 2019)
[4] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy
[5] Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2nd edition due March 2021)
[6] An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization, Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey (Harvard Business Review, 2016)

Upcoming

Tomorrow’s workshop below is nearly sold out but I’ve added another for early May. Keeping April free for book-related stuff!

09 February, one 2-hour session, Americas-friendly timing:
Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (Americas) 23-26 February, 8 online sessions of 120 minutes each, 2 per day over 4 days, EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation (EMEA) 09 March, one 2-hour session, Americas-friendly timing:
Probe! Ideation and Experimentation (Americas) 04 May, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:
Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (EMEA)

All the usual discounts apply: repeat visits (not uncommon), partners, gov, edu, non-profit, country, un- or under-employment, bulk orders. If you think that one might apply to you, do please ask. Many of those considerations apply to private workshops also.

For the Deep Dive especially, if you think that you might become an Agendashift partner, partner discounts make it well worthwhile to get on board before you sign up to the workshop.

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on February 08, 2021 06:04

Eating our own dog food: Our outside-in strategy review (OI-SR)