Mike Burrows's Blog, page 24

Deeper (but not too deep) into obstacles

From the 2nd edition of Agendashift – no dates on that yet, I’m still on chapter 1! – a followup to a post from January, The language of outcomes: 2. Framing obstacles.

One topic for last week’s Lean Coffee-style #community Zoom (see the channel of that name in Slack) was how to deal with “Lack of quality”, an obstacle that never sat well with me. Which of our checks for poor framing are failed by this obstacle? Potentially several of them! Based on our very helpful discussion, I’ll be updating the workshop exercise Deeper (but not too deep) into obstacles and below is the relevant extract from the 2nd edition.

For context, We’ve done the Ideal and Obstacles parts of the True North exercise (see last week’s post) and will soon move into Outcomes, completing the IdOO pattern (or one realisation of it):[image error]

For your opportunity to experience all of this, check out the two Leading with outcomes (aka IdOO!) workshops listed at the end of this post, both in September.

Deeper (but not too deep) into obstacles

When you’re done, review each obstacle carefully. This isn’t the time for deep analysis – likely under the circumstances to be unhelpfully speculative – but the opportunity avoid some unproductive framing. The objective of this exercise is to reword any poorly-framed obstacles such that they would be recognised by the people closest to the problem and invite the widest possible range of solutions.

Here are some common traps to watch out for:

Scarcity language – obstacles that identify a “lack of” this or that:

Language that suggests a particular kind of solution or relies on a particular theory, thereby excluding others
Language that could be perceived as judgemental
Language that identifies only one side of an imbalance

Tribal shorthand:

Jargon
Finger-pointing
Language that identifies in-groups and out-groups

Often, these are easy to recognise. For example:

“Lack of a knowledge management system”, which very obviously identifies a solution, not the obstacle it is supposed to overcome
“Lack of the X mindset” (for some X) – over-generalising a potential multitude of real obstacles, too theoretical to be universally received, and prone to failing the tests for judgemental and in-group/out-group language
“Lack of people/money/time”, which fails to acknowledge the demand/workload management side of the equation, often the easier side of the imbalance to address
“Management” (or some other group) – hardly a good place to start when their cooperation will likely be needed to address whatever the real obstacle is

Sometimes it’s more subtle. Consider another common obstacle, “Lack of quality”. Which of our traps apply? Is it judgemental? Finger pointing? Quite possibly! If it might be received that way, try looking at the issue as an imbalance. Now it’s a problem with two or more sides, each with its respective needs and expectations. What stops them from being met? What gets in the way?

Recasting your obstacles this way has two important benefits. The first is that it encourages you to be specific. Specific obstacles are both easier to overcome than over-generalised ones and harder to dismiss. The second is that you increase both your range of possible solutions and their sources, removing unnecessary constraints and unhelpful barriers to agreement. In a nutshell:

Identify real and relevant obstacles, avoiding language that needlessly excludes people or possibility

For participants, that’s a memorable lesson in the language of outcomes. For the host organisation, it’s a lesson in authentic engagement. Expert practitioners must take special care also; with their particular ways of looking at things, they can be especially prone to falling into the traps!

Upcoming workshops

8-9 September, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), APAC-friendly timing:

Leading with Outcomes (APAC)
17 September, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:

Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (EMEA)
22-23 September, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), Americas-friendly timing:

Leading with Outcomes (Americas)
07 October, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:

Probe! Stories, Hypotheses, Challenges, and Experiments (EMEA)

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Published on August 20, 2020 03:17

True North, tweaked

Just a single-word change, the insertion of the word “ideal”:

[image error]

Why? Not to change the meaning of anything, but simply to resonate with the IdOO pattern – Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes. See below the Leading with Outcomes (aka IdOO!) workshops in September and October for your opportunity to have a play, two sessions of 2 hours each.

True North (agendashift.com)
Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes (IdOO) (agendashift.com)
Yes IdOO! Leading with Outcomes (July)
Agendashift as framework (April)
Doing Agendashift online (4 of n): Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes (IdOO) (April)
It’s mashup time: Adaptive challenges accomplished at their ideal best (December 2019)

Upcoming workshops

8-9 September, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), APAC-friendly timing:

Leading with Outcomes (APAC)
17 September, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:

Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (EMEA)
22-23 September, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), Americas-friendly timing:

Leading with Outcomes (Americas)
07 October, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:

Probe! Stories, Hypotheses, Challenges, and Experiments (EMEA)

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Published on August 13, 2020 04:07

What I really think about Scrum

[This post on LinkedIn and HackerNews – comments welcome in your preferred venue]

Let’s look at Scrum through the lens of last week’s inverse square law of framework scaling, its power as a framework being the product of:

The incisiveness of its point of view – its core paradigms, principles, values, and so on
The ease with which its key patterns combine – both with each other and with those from outside the framework

Being small, Scrum should do well on both counts; I’ll take them in reverse before returning to how it scales.

The ease with which its key patterns combine

Scrum scores really well here.

Look at Scrum merely as composition of smaller patterns (dangerous, but bear with me just for a moment) and you have to give it significant credit for normalising the practices of daily standup meetings, small-scale planning meetings, retrospectives and so on. Not for everyone an unalloyed good (“too many meetings” is an easy complaint to make if for whatever reason it’s not working), but certainly a mark of Scrum’s success.

And it gets better: Scrum as a whole is small enough that it combines easily with other things. Scrum+XP has been a thing for a long time. I’ve worked with Scrum and Lean Startup in combination (in the government sector, no less). Scrum+Kanban (Scrumban) isn’t just one thing, but several; in Right to Left I describe four common combinations and elsewhere I have counted more (it’s not hard: just consider the different ways in which their respective scopes might or might not overlap).

The incisiveness of its point of view

Here’s where it gets awkward. Scrum isn’t one thing, but two:

Left-to-Right Scrum: the team working its way through a backlog that is determined for it, mostly in advance
Right-to-Left Scrum : the team iterating goal by goal in the direction of its overall objectives

Left-to-Right Scrum is a process that’s mediocre (or worse) to experience, and doomed to deliver mediocre results at best. And it’s easy to see how it happens:

Little room in the project for learning about the customer’s real needs or for exploring different ways of meeting them
Thinking that the job of Sprint planning is to fill the Sprint to the maximum, a misconception amplified by story points and velocity (the problem not being that they’re nonsense metrics that cause otherwise intelligent people to bestow mystical properties on Fibonacci numbers, but that they reinforce a dysfunction)
Reviews not of what’s being learned about the team’s customers, its product, and the team itself, but of progress against the plan
Retrospectives that lack the authority to address strategic issues, and that fail to follow through even on the issues over which it does have influence

I’m convinced that Scrum would be considerably less prone to these failure modes if only it would maintain a clearer point of view. Scrum’s tragedy is that it’s presented as a backlog-driven process so often that its core paradigm as an iterative, outcome-oriented process gets lost in the noise. And from that failure, disengagement. All that hating on Agile? You don’t need to look far for causes.

Scaling it up

For the most part, disappointingly predictable and predictably disappointing:

Take Scrum and layer on hierarchies of organisation structure &/or work breakdown structure
Plug it into a project/programme structure that almost inevitably works in left-to-right terms and is given no reason to think otherwise
Compounding it all, the rollout project – failure after failure, but still we do it!

Again, the tragedy is that it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead of layering on so much process that you disconnect teams from strategy and organisation development, invite them in! Instead of losing faith with self-organisation, invest in it! Instead of solution-driven imposition, outcome-oriented engagement! Honestly, it’s not that hard.

We’re in the business of building wholehearted organisations. Need help reorienting your Scrum implementation so that it can work as it’s meant to? Want to put authentic engagement at the heart of your transformation? Get in touch – we’d love to help!

My inverse square law of framework scaling

A framework’s power is the product of:

The incisiveness of its point of view – its core paradigms, principles, values, and so on
The ease with which its key patterns combine – both with each other and with those from outside the framework

Both tend to decline with scale.

Corollary 1: As a framework’s scale increases, confidence that your context’s particular challenges will be addressed speedily and proportionately relative to the cost and pain of implementation declines

Corollary 2 (the human impact of corollary 1): In the absence of a coherent strategy to mitigate and reverse it, the risk of significant staff disengagement increases with scale.

If you enjoyed that, check these out:

The middle two chapters of Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (print and ebook 2019, audiobook 2020) – the framework chapters of a singularly outcome-oriented take on the Lean-Agile landscape
Too harsh? – change management vs engagement model (linkedin.com)
Outcome-oriented (linkedin.com)
What I really think about SAFe (October 2019)

[image error]

My thanks to the Friday #community Zoom group (details in Slack) for feedback on the initial draft of this post.

Upcoming workshops

8-9 September, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), APAC-friendly timing:

Leading with Outcomes (APAC)
17 September, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:

Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (EMEA)
22-23 September, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), Americas-friendly timing:

Leading with Outcomes (Americas)
07 October, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:

Probe! Stories, Hypotheses, Challenges, and Experiments (EMEA)

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Published on August 07, 2020 07:45

Agendashift roundup, July 2020

In this edition: 2MBM; Campaign mode; Deep Dive done; Upcoming; Top posts for July; Friday community Zoom

2MBM

July wasn’t really a month for the blog (more on that in a moment) but a couple of posts early in the month did do well.

In the followups to the last Wholehearted:OKR workshop we identified a new pattern, 2MBM:

[image error]

2MBM gets a new page in the patterns section of the Agendashift site, and two blog posts:

#2MBM: Meaning before Metric, Measure before Method
#2MBM: After strategy and ideation, operation

Campaign mode

For most of the month, instead of blogging I have been experimenting with using LinkedIn to establish/promote some key terms, and it seems to be working well. Check these out:

Outcome-oriented – Agendashift’s defining feature
Engagement model – its category, distinct from change management
Wholehearted – our mission statement

Further to the second of those and prompted by a conversation on social media, the revival of a classic:

Engagement: more than a two-way street

Deep Dive done

By the power of Zoom I’ve been in Canada this week, leading an 8-session Deep Dive. I’m very happy with how it went – not that I won’t still want to improve it of course! Tons of positive feedback, but let pick out a few comments which relate to recent developments:

IdOO is the killer app of purpose and alignment
Learning the pattern language in Agendashift
Feels less prescriptive than the book
Multiple options to choose from for a workshop

Prescription is and always was an anti-goal, and introducing Agendashift in terms of patterns really works! This augurs well for the 2nd edition of the book I’m sure, and on that, a first rough draft of a completely rewritten intro is available in the #agendashift-book channel in the Agendashift Slack.

Upcoming

All with me, except for the first one which is led by Julia Wester:

4-5 August, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), EMEA-friendly timing:

Leading with Outcomes (EMEA)
8-9 September, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), APAC-friendly timing:

Leading with Outcomes (APAC)
17 September, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:

Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (EMEA)
22-23 September, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), Americas-friendly timing:

Leading with Outcomes (Americas)
07 October, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:

Probe! Stories, Hypotheses, Challenges, and Experiments (EMEA)

Top posts for July

Recent:

#2MBM: Meaning before Metric, Measure before Method
I’m really enjoying Challenge Mapping (June)
Outcomes all the way down (June, video)
#2MBM: After strategy and ideation, operation
Yes IdOO! Leading with Outcomes

Classic:

Engagement: more than a two-way street (September 2018)
There will be caveats: Warming cautiously to OKR (September 2019)
My favourite Clean Language question (January 2019)
From Reverse STATIK to a ‘Pathway’ for continuous transformation (October 2019)
Stringing it together with Reverse Wardley (February 2019)

Friday #community Zoom

Finally, a reminder that as of the past few weeks our Lean Coffee-style Friday Zoom calls are now at 14:00 BST, 15:00 CEST, 9am EDT. Details in the #community channel in Slack or ping me for them.

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Published on July 31, 2020 02:57

Yes IdOO! Leading with Outcomes

Leading with Outcomes – aka the IdOO! workshop – is the new name for the short (2-session) training workshop Learning the Language of Outcomes.

Why Leading with Outcomes? It can be understood two ways, and both apply here:

Putting outcomes before solutions, being outcome-oriented
The language of outcomes as an essential leadership discipline

Any why IdOO!? That’s a reference to the IdOO pattern, so good we use it twice!

[image error]

Whatever your role, if you’re in the business of encouraging innovation, change, and transformation – helping people engage meaningfully in change-related work – then this workshop is for you. Among its sources and inspirations are Clean Language, Solutions Focus, Challenge Mapping, Lean, and Agile. The Agendashift delivery assessment is included in the second session.

I’m giving this workshop twice in September:

8-9 September, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), APAC-friendly timing:

Leading with Outcomes (APAC)
22-23 September, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), Americas-friendly timing:

Leading with Outcomes (Americas)

But you don’t have to wait that long! Julia Wester does it in August (whether that’s with the old branding or the new is to be confirmed):

4-5 August, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), EMEA-friendly timing:

Leading with Outcomes (EMEA)

The single-session Mapping and Probe! workshops complement the IdOO! workshop and each other:

17 September, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:

Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (EMEA)
07 October, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:

Probe! Stories, Hypotheses, Challenges, and Experiments (EMEA)

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Published on July 23, 2020 07:14

#2MBM: After strategy and ideation, operation

Excellent response to last week’s #2MBM: Meaning before Metric, Measure before Method! Before the main business of this post, a couple of updates:

In the interests of referenceability (if that’s a word) I’ve since given it a url: agendashift.com/2mbm (as shown in the image below) redirects to agendashift.com/frameworks/patterns/2mbm
In the patterns pages, I’ve incorporated 2MBM into the definition of Right to Left:

Right to Left: Ends before means, outcomes before solutions, and the two MBMs – meaning before metric and measure before method (2MBM)

[image error]

Last week’s post was about keeping metrics in their proper place with respect to strategy and ideation. This one is about the use of metrics as the strategy swings into action, the ideas continue to flow, and so on.

I’ve hinted already that you probably want a multiplicity of metrics. Chapter 5 of Right to Left gives some suggestions, and they’re organised by the layers of the outside-in strategy review, or OI-SR (as practiced in the Wholehearted:OKR workshop and as supported by the free OI-SR template):

Customer: Customer satisfaction; helpdesk calls and hours spent on them; customer complaints, endorsements, and reviews; user growth and retention
Organisation: Financial metrics, progress against relevant organisational objectives, and so on
Product: Usage analytics; funnel metrics; market comparisons
Platform: System performance and capacity metrics (along with plans to keep capacity ahead of anticipated demand – another good reason for the outside-in review); new capabilities and capabilities under development
Team: Lead time distribution, throughput, and work in progress; quality metrics (defects escaped to production, for example); data on blockers and their impact; staffing levels; skill distribution and development

That’s quite a long list, beyond the capacity of most people to maintain on their own, and to be clear, they’re only suggestions. Both to make it practical and to help avoid the oppressive imposition of metrics:

Each layer is represented by one or two people (two being preferable, creating mentoring opportunities and making it easier to broaden the range of seniorities involved in the meeting overall), each closely identified with their respective layer(s)
The choice of which metrics will be presented is theirs (and by extension, their respective team’s¹); the meeting’s facilitator can coordinate across layers to help ensure good coverage

In the outside-in service delivery review (OI-SDR), those layers define the top-level agenda. The sequence helps to expose any misalignment between what we’re trying to achieve and the work we’re actually doing – not just within each layer but with respect to what’s been heard already. Within each layer, we go right to left:

A narrative update that includes an affirmation of we’re trying to achieve
What this layer’s metrics seem to be telling us
What has been learned from our experiments completed since last time
What experiments we currently have up and running and what we hope to learn
What’s in the pipeline

I was asked in a meetup last night what I would do if I could implement only one thing. Five years ago, I would have answered with “Validation”; today, my answer is the OI-SDR. It’s a piece of deliberate organisation design, building in the strong expectation that learning will be happening – learning about our customers and learning about ourselves. An opportunity for double loop learning. And to do it justice, you’ll soon be practicing validation anyway!

Find out more

The OI-SR and OI-SDR are described in chapter 5 of Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile. Available in the usual places and (since May) as an audiobook.

Check out the workshops pages also – not just for Wholehearted:OKR and other strategy workshops but also for Implementing your OI-SDR among the short training workshops.

¹ ‘Circle‘ might be a better word than ‘team’ here. I’m alluding to Sociocracy, and that’s covered in Right to Left chapter 6.

Related posts:

The audiobook is out! Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (May)
Wholehearted:OKR (December 2019)
It’s out! Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile

Upcoming public workshops

July:

27-30 July, 8 online sessions (2 per day) of 90-120 minutes each, Americas-friendly timing:

Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation

August, Julia Wester stepping in:

4-5 August, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), EMEA-friendly timing:

Learning the language of outcomes (EMEA)

Autumn:

8-9 September, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), APAC-friendly timing:

Learning the language of outcomes (APAC)
17 September, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:

Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (EMEA)
22-23 September, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), Americas-friendly timing:

Learning the language of outcomes (Americas)
07 October, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:

Probe! Stories, Hypotheses, Challenges, and Experiments (EMEA)

The Agendashift events calendar always has the latest public workshops – watch this space for another (and updated) Wholehearted:OKR – and visit the workshops page if you’re considering doing something privately – chances are we have something of interest.

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Published on July 08, 2020 06:01

#2MBM: Meaning before Metric, Measure before Method

In the models-sources-inspirations picture shared in the June roundup earlier this week you may have noticed one or more less-than famous acronyms upper right. I did leave a breadcrumb or two, but as was my plan all along, let me spell them out.

[image error]

The newest acronym – just days old – is 2MBM. From the patterns page (the Right to Left link points to my book/audiobook of that name):

Right to Left: ends before means, outcomes before solutions, and the two MBMs – meaning before metric and measure before method (2MBM)

MBM 1: Meaning before metric

I’ve been using this one for a while. Some clues here in From Reverse STATIK to a ‘Pathway’ for continuous transformation (October 2019):

This [understanding fitness for purpose] is OK as far as it goes, but the faster it turns … into a conversation about metrics, the less time anyone spends actually exploring purpose. If I’m honest, this part leaves me a little cold … .

My real concern here is with a common behaviour: consultants and other practitioners leading too hard with a favourite metric. My advice: whether they’re pushing lead time, velocity, or NPS, if they’re not also demonstrating an interest in connecting deeply with your purpose, politely show them the door.

More reason to trust your instincts when you feel yourself go cold at the mention of metrics is when they’re imposed as targets. It’s when OKR (Objectives and Key Results) turns into MBO (Management by Objectives), and there’s a reason why the latter is discredited, disowned by its creator (Drucker). Particularly when they’re tied to compensation and advancement, imposed targets inspire creativity of the wrong kind, too-clever ways to meet the goal. In a word: dysfunction.

MBM 2: Measure before method

So… metrics are bad? No! As we’ll see in a moment they can be a source of healthy creativity if explored at the right time. If the first MBM translates to “not too early”, then the second translates to “not too late”. In fact, there’s “too late”, and then there’s “way too late”:

“Too late”: having a solution idea and then coming up with the metrics that it is likely to impact, justifying it on that basis
“Way too late”: implementing a solution idea and looking for benefits afterwards

Not so much alignment as post hoc rationalisation, severely limiting the likelihood of any real learning taking place, and missing some vital input into the ideation process.

To illustrate that last point, here’s how we now teach it in Agendashift:

Reacquaint ourselves with the outcome we’ve chosen to work on (remember that with us it’s “outcomes all the way down” and we haven’t even got to the bottom of that stack yet) with Challenge Mapping
Having explored around it, identify a list of success indicators for that outcome
With the conversations of steps 1 and 2 still in the air, generate solution ideas
Select the fantastic option, the one most likely to significantly outperform – relative to the others and disproportionately (non-linearly) relative to its cost and risk

TASTE and ODIM

And finally to two more of the acronyms on my picture (plus a bonus).

Karl Scotland‘s TASTE stands for True north, Aspirations, Strategies, Tactics, and Evidence. What we’ve known for a while – in the Agendashift material we have deliberately made this a two-part exercise to emphasise this point – is to leave Tactics until last. Cross-referencing them in an X-Matrix, we’re asking this question:

Inspired by and aligning to our True north, what Tactics (collectively) will support our Strategies and deliver the Evidence of success we hope for? (Aspirations are already correlated with Strategies and Evidence at this point)

Larry Maccherone‘s ODIM stands for Objectives, Decisions, Insights, and Metrics. One creative way to think of it is in behavioural terms:

For this objective to be achieved, what will people need to do differently? If that involves them making different decisions, what in their immediate environment will guide those? What then do we need to measure?

In the latest iteration of the Wholehearted:OKR workshop we use TASTE when we’re exploring alignment between levels, a way to build coherence at scale. ODIM is introduced near ideation time (previously it came too early, reducing its impact – no pun intended).

One last credit: I took “Measure” and “Method” come from Salesforce’s management process V2MOM:

Vision— what do you want to achieve?
Values — what’s important to you?
Methods — how do you get it?
Obstacles — what is preventing you from being successful?
Measures — how do you know you have it?

Type 1 MBM but not (as presented here) type 2. Still, it starts in the right kind of place, and for that I’m glad. Thank you Steve Pereira and Tom Kerwin for an interesting Twitter conversation.

Upcoming workshops

July:

22-23 July, 4 online sessions (2 per day) of 90-120 minutes each, EMEA-friendly timing:

Core Agendashift: Facilitating outcome-oriented change
27-30 July, 8 online sessions (2 per day) of 90-120 minutes each, Americas-friendly timing:

Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation

August, Julia Wester stepping in:

4-5 August, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), EMEA-friendly timing:

Learning the language of outcomes (EMEA)

Autumn:

8-9 September, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), APAC-friendly timing:

Learning the language of outcomes (APAC)
17 September, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:

Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (EMEA)
22-23 September, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), Americas-friendly timing:

Learning the language of outcomes (Americas)
07 October, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:

Probe! Stories, Hypotheses, Challenges, and Experiments (EMEA)

The Agendashift events calendar always has the latest public workshops – watch this space for another (and updated) Wholehearted:OKR – and visit the workshops page if you’re considering doing something privately – chances are we have something of interest.

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Published on July 02, 2020 02:23

Agendashift roundup, June 2020

In this edition: Outcomes all the way down; Agendashift’s “inspiration map”; Weekly #community Zoom; Summer & autumn workshops; Top posts – recent and classic

Outcomes all the way down

I had a lot of fun with the SquirrelNorth guys this month and the recording of our webinar together is now up:

Outcomes all the way down

Agendashift’s “inspiration map”

Funny how one thing leads to another…

[image error]

Last week I posted a rough sketch which I called my “inspiration map”. Not only has it sparked some very interesting conversations as it evolved over those few days (prompting some content improvements), it has spawned a new visual identity for Agendashift.

It will take me weeks to work through everything that now wants updating, but the Framework pages are done (there or thereabouts). Do check it out! Content-wise, the most interesting place to start is probably the Patterns page.

Weekly #community Zoom

Quick public service announcement: Our weekly Zoom calls have moved to the later time of 14:00 BST, 15:00 CEST, 9am EDT. Still every Friday, Lean Coffee style, details in the #community channel in the Agendashift Slack (or ping me).

Summer & autumn workshops

Apart from Implementing your Outside-in Service Delivery Review (OI-SDR) which I’ve marked as private-only for now, in recent weeks I’ve done the full set of short training workshops publicly and at various times of day to suit participants from all timezones. We’ve done Deep Dive and Wholehearted:OKR too, so we can say with some confidence that we know how to do this stuff online!

In July I’m doing two of the longer workshops. Over multiple online sessions they cover the equivalent of the 1-day Core and 2-day Deep Dive:

22-23 July, 4 online sessions (2 per day) of 90-120 minutes each, EMEA-friendly timing:

Core Agendashift: Facilitating outcome-oriented change
27-30 July, 8 online sessions (2 per day) of 90-120 minutes each, Americas-friendly timing:

Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation

The first of those is in conjunction with Agile Israel (until Covid-19 happened I was due to visit Tel Aviv in July), the second with my friends at SquirrelNorth (see Outcomes all the way down above).

In August I’m taking break from public workshops but Julia Wester steps in:

4-5 August, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), EMEA-friendly timing:

Learning the language of outcomes (EMEA)

I’m back in September/October with the increasingly-familiar range of shorter training workshops:

8-9 September, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), APAC-friendly timing:

Learning the language of outcomes (APAC)
17 September, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:

Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (EMEA)
22-23 September, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), Americas-friendly timing:

Learning the language of outcomes (Americas)
07 October, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:

Probe! Stories, Hypotheses, Challenges, and Experiments (EMEA)

The Agendashift events calendar always has the latest public workshops – watch this space for another (and updated) Wholehearted:OKR – and visit the workshops page if you’re considering doing something privately – chances are we have something of interest.

I’m really enjoying Challenge Mapping

Over the past few weeks I’ve taken every opportunity to play with Challenge Mapping and I’m really enjoying it. I even sneaked it into my ‘Outcomes all the way down’ webinar appearance the other week!

For the uninitiated (and also for the seemingly many who have seen it without knowing it by name), it’s a great way to generate those How might we…? (HMW) questions often associated now with the Design Sprint movement. Challenge Mapping and HMW have a much longer history than that however, and I’ve included some references in the page for the Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes (IdOO) pattern.

One of Challenge Mapping’s pioneers was Min Basadur, and here from him is a tweet showing some example output:

We use Challenge Mapping to solve problems. Here's an example from one of our workshops! #problemsolving #ahamoment pic.twitter.com/9rrCNupj52

— min basadur (@DrMinBasadur) June 21, 2016

How Challenge Mapping works, very briefly: From an initial, anchoring challenge – something we’d like to achieve or solve – variations on these two questions:

Why is this important?
What’s stopping us?

Answers can be re-framed in HMW form as required.

Visually, the Why and What questions respectively take us up and down. As well as that vertical axis – typically showing increasing levels of abstraction going up – “Why else..” and “What else…” allow for some sideways expansion also.

Try it! Here’s a little example suggested by my Challenge Mapping buddy Andreas Wittler:

Assuming for the purposes of this exercise that any legal barriers are now behind us, start by naming a key challenge (work-related or otherwise) around returning from lockdown.
Why is this important?
And perhaps: Why is that important?
What stops us?
Why is that important?
What else stops us?
etc
Note down your answers and after you have finished, try reframing them HMW-style

My first opportunity to experiment came about a few weeks ago thanks to our weekly Agendashift #community Zoom (named after the #community channel in the Agendashift Slack). In a hastily-arranged practice session with Andreas, we tried Challenge Mapping as a simpler, 2-question alternative to 15-minute FOTO, Agendashift’s Clean Language-inspired coaching game and our go-to tool for generating outcomes. We then trialled it as the opening exercise for a Strategic Mapping with Outcomes workshop.

It was a very interesting trial and let me say a big thank you to all my workshop participants! It borderline failed but with some great learning: it was more involved than I wanted for a kick-off exercise and it requires some extra work to generate outcomes, but still it does the job it was designed to do extremely well. We now use it not as a FOTO alternative (whew!) but either side of it in these two places:

To explore the vicinity of an obstacle, adding some extra depth to the first O of the abovementioned IdOO pattern
To refamiliarise ourselves with an outcome – IdOO’s second O – as we begin to action it – moving into ideation, solutionising etc

Its next outing comes as soon as this Thursday, where we’ll be using it for the second of those two purposes. The Probe! workshop is a short (2-hour), standalone version of the our longer workshops’ Elaboration, with some fun new material borrowed from Impact! and Wholehearted:OKR. Join us if you can!

Upcoming workshops

With yours truly unless otherwise indicated:

25 June, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:

Probe! Stories, Hypotheses, Challenges, and Experiments (EMEA)
22-23 July, 4 online sessions (2 per day) of 90-120 minutes each, EMEA-friendly timing:

Core Agendashift: Facilitating outcome-oriented change
27-30 July, 8 online sessions (2 per day) of 90-120 minutes each, Americas-friendly timing:

Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation
4-5 August, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), EMEA-friendly timing:

Learning the language of outcomes (EMEA)

Julia Wester
8-9 September, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), APAC-friendly timing:

Learning the language of outcomes (APAC)
17 September, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:

Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (EMEA)
22-23 September, two 2-hour sessions (1 per day), Americas-friendly timing:

Learning the language of outcomes (Americas)
07 October, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:

Probe! Stories, Hypotheses, Challenges, and Experiments (EMEA)

And for the latest, check the Agendashift events calendar.