Mike Burrows's Blog, page 25

Outcomes all the way down

“Outcomes all the way down” is an Agendashift catchphrase that my friends at SquirrelNorth (squirrelnorth.com) picked out as the title of a webinar we gave together last week. Here’s the recording:

Overview:

(3:00) What Agendashift is – the wholehearted, outcome-oriented engagement model – unpacking those terms in reverse order(17:40) Me interviewing members of the SquirrelNorth team – Martin Aziz, Fernando Cuenca, James Steele, and Alexei Zheglov“What’s happening when you’re reaching the right customers, meeting their strategic needs?” (the beginning of the Outside-in Strategy Review as described in Right to Left, chapter 5)How they each respond to an Agendashift assessment prompt of their choice(48:15) What Agendashift provides – framework, tools, models, workshops (more on that last one in a moment)(55:30) Q&A

Parts 1 & 3 above follow a structure that’s easy enough to remember / follow and I did it without a slide deck. See the recent post Revisiting ‘wholehearted’ for a stepping stone to that structure; in the process of developing the talk (mostly in my head with a few sticky notes around my screen just in case) the Home and About pages went through a couple more iterations too.

The webinar is part of our preparations for an upcoming Deep Dive workshop. It’s timed for the Americas (SquirrelNorth are based in Canada) and scheduled in manageable chunks spread over 4 days:

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

It’s already well subscribed but at the time of writing there are still places available. We’d love to see you there!

Related: Revisiting ‘wholehearted’ The audiobook is out! Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (May) Agendashift as framework (April) There will be caveats: Warming cautiously to OKR (September 2019)Upcoming workshops

With yours truly unless otherwise indicated:

17-18 June, two 2-hour sessions, Americas-friendly timing:
Learning the language of outcomes (Americas) 25 June, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:
Probe! Stories, Hypotheses, Challenges, and Experiments 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
Julia Wester

And for the latest, check the Agendashift events calendar.

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Published on June 15, 2020 08:10

Probe!

Quick one…

The name “Stories, Hypotheses, and A3” was proving ironically unwieldy for a short training workshop. It now goes by the handle of the Probe! workshop; full title and details of its first outing on June 25th (EMEA-friendly timing) here:

Probe! Stories, Hypotheses, Challenges, and Experiments (eventbrite.co.uk)

That is all!

Related Workshops in June New online workshops added to a reorganised portfolio (April) The Agendashift Experiment A3 template (agendashift.com)

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Upcoming workshops

With yours truly unless otherwise indicated:

17-18 June, one 2-hour session, Americas-friendly timing:
Learning the language of outcomes (Americas) 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

For some brief commentary:

Workshops in June

And for the latest, check the Agendashift events calendar.

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on June 11, 2020 08:41

Revisiting ‘wholehearted’

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Agendashift’s strapline is “the wholehearted engagement model”, and I’ve been reflecting again on just what we mean by wholeheartedness. That in turns leads me to revisit how I introduce Agendashift – what it is, what differentiates it, and why we do what we do.

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Starting with my reflections on that word, I’m drawn to two clusters of qualities:

Engagement, commitment, and purpose(fulness)Alignment, integration, integrity, and wholeness

For an organisation to be wholehearted, both sets of qualities must apply. Crucial to developing and sustaining them are participation and outcomes:

Participation, because 1) people disengage when they’re denied the meaningful opportunity to influence on how their working environment operates, and 2) you can’t have integrity and wholeness – or for that matter self-organisation and other hallmarks of the modern organisation – when the organisation’s parts don’t relate both between and within themselves frequently and richly enough.Outcomes, for the simple reason that they’re what people align on, and for the more subtle reason that it’s easy to destroy engagement when solutions are put ahead of outcomes. Keep outcomes in the foreground (and not a rationalisation or afterthought) and you create the opportunity for acceptable, effective, and often innovative solutions to emerge at the right time, no imposition needed.

With all of that in mind, Agendashift is best introduced as the wholehearted, outcome-oriented engagement model. Unpacking that backwards:

The term engagement model is our preferred shorthand for the kind of thing that Agendashift is, a framework for agents of participatory change and transformation. The framing there is deliberate; we find it necessary to keep a certain distance from the failed solution-driven change management models of the last century and don’t wish to be numbered among them! Neither is Agendashift a model only for continuous improvement, a process that while necessary is not a substitute for strategy.Agendashift is outcome-oriented to such an extent that this is its defining feature. It’s “outcomes all the way down”, dealing coherently, humanely, and strategically with everything from the most aspirational of goals to the impact of the smallest experiment. With outcomes generated, organised, and developed through participation, agreement on outcomes follows naturally; solutions come as they should on a just-in-time basis, lightly held as hypotheses to be tested until some other approach is understood to be safe.We – Agendashift’s founders, partners, and supporters – are wholehearted in our commitment not just to participation and outcomes but beyond those to the wholeheartedness of the organisations with which we work. We strive to develop all the qualities identified above, building organisations that create meaning continuously, through both their discourse and their ability to anticipate and meet needs.

We’re in the business of building wholehearted organisations. Are you?

RelatedAgendashift as framework (April)Making it official: Agendashift, the wholehearted engagement model (January)Towards the wholehearted organisation, outside in (May 2018)Engagement: more than a two-way street (September 2018)Upcoming workshops

With yours truly unless otherwise indicated:

04 June, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:
Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (EMEA) 8-9 June, 2 days online, EMEA-friendly timing:
2-day Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching & leading continuous transformation (EMEA)
Mike Burrows , Kjell Tore Guttormsen , Halldor Kvale-Skattebo 17-18 June, one 2-hour session, Americas-friendly timing:
Learning the language of outcomes (Americas) 25 June, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:
Stories, Hypotheses, and A3 (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

For some brief commentary:

Workshops in June

And for the latest, check the Agendashift events calendar.

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on June 01, 2020 03:41

Agendashift roundup, May 2020

I’ll keep this one brief – this month’s top posts say it all really! The top 5 are all from this month (yes, we’ve been busy):

The audiobook is out! Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile My kind of… Phases 1 & 2 of the agendashift-open project Two months in Workshops in June Agendashift as framework (April)From Reverse STATIK to a ‘Pathway’ for continuous transformation (October 2019)Devs not clear about strategy? It’s likely way worse than that (April)There will be caveats: Warming cautiously to OKR (September 2019)How the Leader-Leader model turns Commander’s Intent upside down (June 2018)

Very glad to say that the runaway winner is the audiobook announcement, not entirely surprising but I take nothing for granted! I shall leave it there, except to invite you to check out i) the other posts too, and ii) the list of upcoming workshops in its usual place at the end of this post.

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Upcoming workshops (all online)

With yours truly unless otherwise indicated:

04 June, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:
Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (EMEA) 8-9 June, 2 days online, EMEA-friendly timing:
2-day Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching & leading continuous transformation (EMEA)
with Mike Burrows , Kjell Tore Guttormsen , Halldor Kvale-Skattebo 17-18 June, one 2-hour session, Americas-friendly timing:
Learning the language of outcomes (Americas) 25 June, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:
Stories, Hypotheses, and A3 (EMEA) 04 August, two 2-hour sessions, EMEA-friendly timing:
Learning the language of outcomes (EMEA)
with Julia Wester

For some brief commentary:

Workshops in June

And for the latest, check the Agendashift events calendar.

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on May 29, 2020 02:55

My kind of…

Two years ago almost to the day, I was among a group invited by Pierre Neis to answer this question:

What kind of Agile is your Agile?

I was writing Right to Left at the time, and “my kind of Agile” was already a feature of chapter 2. Here it is (the short version at least):

People collaborating over working software that is already beginning to meet needs

That’s just a starting point. To put it into practice, we work backwards from there, keeping needs and outcomes always in the foreground as we go. Understand how that “right to left”, outcomes-first kind of Agile differs both philosophically and practically from a “left to right”, backlog-driven kind of Agile – a kind that too often involves imposing process on people for the sake of mediocre results (at best) – and you’ll understand why the book needed to be written.

If you appreciate that essential difference already, you’ll enjoy the book’s singular perspective. If you don’t, you’ll find it a highly accessible introduction to the Lean-Agile landscape, one that avoids the mistake of explaining Agile in the terms of the models it seeks to replace, a mistake that undermines it every time it is made.

I opened this post with Pierre’s question of 2 years ago because I was delighted this week to speak at his invitation on “My kind of Agile” at an online meetup he hosts. In preparation I put up a new page:

My kind of…

In the print and e-book editions, My kind of… is Right to Left’s Appendix B. It’s a glossary of sorts, a gathering together of some informal definitions that are especially characteristic of the book. It starts with two versions (shorter and longer) of “My kind of Agile” and continues in that same vein.

If you’re listening to the new audiobook edition – out just a few days ago – the appendices aren’t included, so here you go!

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Upcoming workshops (all online of course)

With yours truly unless otherwise indicated:

04 June, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:
Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (EMEA) 8-9 June, 2 days online, EMEA-friendly timing:
2-day Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching & leading continuous transformation (EMEA)
with Mike Burrows , Kjell Tore Guttormsen , Halldor Kvale-Skattebo 17-18 June, one 2-hour session, Americas-friendly timing:
Learning the language of outcomes (Americas) 25 June, one 2-hour session, EMEA-friendly timing:
Stories, Hypotheses, and A3 (EMEA) 04 August, two 2-hour sessions, EMEA-friendly timing:
Learning the language of outcomes (EMEA)
with Julia Wester

For the latest workshop and speaking events check the Agendashift events calendar.

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on May 27, 2020 04:12

Workshops in June

But first, some of what they said about this week’s 2-day Wholehearted:OKR workshop:

Loved the focus on outcomes
Insights on end-to-end strategy for Agile implementation
Learned how to design the process in practice
Great new facilitation exercises
Lots of new things to try
Strategy deployment for Agile ways of working
Highly interactive, great mix of presentation and activities

To our surprise, the majority of participants (albeit a self-selected and possibly unrepresentative group) would choose the 2-day online format again – that’s two full days online. We thought that the long-arranged Deep Dive workshop (June 8-9 below) would be last time we would offer this format but we may have to reconsider!

And so to June…

June 4th (2 hours from 10:00BST) Strategic Mapping with Outcomes

This standalone workshop is based on the string of three exercises from the Mapping session of the Deep Dive workshop. There are no prerequisites, but it’s one of two natural followups to the popular Learning the Language of Outcomes workshop. Also, if you’ve attended Agendashift workshops before January last year, it’s your chance to try Option Approach Mapping (the exercise formerly referred to as Reverse Wardley Mapping). No quadrants or clusters will be (ab)used in this workshop!

Limited spaces left.

June 8-9 (2 days, 09-00-17:00CET), Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and Leading Continuous transformation

They said a 2-day online workshop couldn’t be done, but (as demonstrated above) it can! We will of course be offering other online formats for our flagship workshop – 8 sessions over 4 days for example – but this way it is at least easy to schedule. Either way, it’s with new content designed especially for online.

For this one and the one below, the Agendashift Delivery Assessment is given as prework so you’d be advised to book at least a week in advance.

June 17 & 18 (Two 2-hour sessions from 16:00BST/11EST): Learning the Language of Outcomes

These are happening with increasing frequency, enough that we can put them on at different times to suit participants in different time zones. June’s will be for the Americas, here meaning that it will be late afternoon UK time – I won’t be checking passports!

June 25th (2 hours from 10:00BST): Stories, hypotheses, and A3

Another short standalone workshop and a natural followup to Learning the Language of outcomes.

This workshop is a standalone Elaboration session from the Core and Deep Dive workshops kicked off with a fun new exercise taken from the Impact! and Wholehearted:OKR workshops. As per Right to Left (of which the audiobook edition came out only last weekend), we move easily between stories of various kinds – including but not limited to user stories and job stories – and hypotheses, then develop them Agendashift-style with our Experiment A3.

Hope to see you at one (or more!) of these, and keep an eye on the events calendar for July and August, a couple of exciting things in store for Asia and the Americas.

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Published on May 20, 2020 03:14

The audiobook is out! Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile

I’m thrilled to announce that my 2019 book Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile is now available as an audiobook, read by yours truly. It has been a long time coming and I don’t mind admitting that I’m a little relieved too!

Find it here:

Audible (where you can hear a preview) – .co.uk and .com
Amazon – .co.uk and .com

Or search “Right to Left Mike Burrows” in the iTunes store.

Enjoy!

PS Please like, re-share, retweet, etc! LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook

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Right to Left is the third book by Agendashift founder Mike Burrows, doing for Lean and Agile in digital delivery what his 2018 book Agendashift did for change and transformation. Do you see in digital technology the opportunity to meet customer needs more effectively? Do you recognise that this may have profound implications for how your organisation should work? Do you want to help bring that about?

Regardless of whether you consider yourself a technologist, if your answer to those questions is “yes”, you are what we refer to in this book as a digital leader. If you are a digital leader, aspire to be one, or think that sometime soon you might need to become one, then this book is for you. Whatever your current level of knowledge of Lean and Agile, you will find here both an accessible guide to the Lean-Agile landscape and a helpfully challenging perspective on it.

The book is organised into six chapters. The first four have a strong right-to-left theme, which means consistently, deliberately, and even provocatively starting with outcomes – with needs being met – and working backwards from there, keeping outcomes always in the foreground:

Right to left in the material world – introducing Lean, the strategic pursuit of flow
Right to left in the digital space – introducing Agile and Lean-Agile
Patterns and frameworks – popular Lean, Agile, and Lean-Agile frameworks and how they combine and complement each other
Viable scaling – the Agile scaling frameworks, organisational viability, and the challenges of change

The last two chapters approach questions of organisational design and leadership from angles complementary to that core theme:

Outside in – strategy and governance in the wholehearted organisation
Upside down – Servant Leadership and the supportive, ‘intentful’, customer-focused organisation

©2019 Mike Burrows (P)2020 Mike Burrows

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Published on May 16, 2020 08:57

Phases 1 & 2 of the agendashift-open project

I’ve finished moving the source files for two sets of pages on agendashift.com to a public git repo, asplake/agendashift-open. In the process I’ve reformatted them from HTML to CommonMark – slightly limited but very much easier to maintain, a worthwhile tradeoff in this case.

The two sets of pages concerned are these:

Agendashift as framework – principles, patterns, and activities
Agendashift Workshops

Look around in either of those areas and you’ll see that each page links to its respective source file just below its license notice.

All 29 pages of this content were already Creative Commons, specifically CC-BY-SA. This change just makes it easier for others to reuse, comment on, or contribute fixes to these pages, and potentially to fork them and create create derivative works under the terms of that same license.

Let’s be clear what that means: Just about all the workshops and consulting services I offer are defined by this content and I accept the commitment to curate it carefully; others are free (within the quite generous license terms) to use it. It attracts some to join the community; some collaborate actively (see for example the Wholehearted:OKR page, very much a collaborative effort); some become Agendashift partners, gaining access to other tools and materials on a commercial basis; some corporate clients arrive via this route too.

Phase 3 will involve doing the same for the all CC-BY-SA content in the Resources area. Some of the pages are quite substantial and the conversion will require a little bit of effort, but worth it I’m sure. Making (for example) the page for Featureban page more community-maintainable must surely be a win.

Thank you John Grant for the nudge. Channel #open in the Agendashift Slack.

Upcoming workshops (all online of course)

With yours truly unless otherwise indicated:

14-15 May, two 2-hour sessions, APAC time zone:

Learning the language of outcomes (APAC)
18-19 May, Europe time zone:

Wholehearted:OKR – Bringing OKR to life with Agendashift (Europe)

Mike Burrows , Kjell Tore Guttormsen , Halldor Kvale-Skattebo
04 June, one 2-hour session, Europe time zone:

Mapping with Outcomes (Europe)
17-18 June, two 2-hour sessions, Americas time zone:

Learning the language of outcomes (Americas)
25 June, one 2-hour session, Europe time zone:

Stories, Hypotheses, and A3 (Europe)

For the latest workshop and speaking events check the Agendashift events calendar.

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on May 11, 2020 08:55

Two months in

Correction: Two months, not three. Feels like longer!

It’s three two months since I got back from an Agendashift Deep Dive workshop in Malmö, Sweden. Arriving home after midnight, I gave the house a miss and headed straight to the “studio” (a nicely-converted double garage, my office by day and self-contained living accommodation for us when we have carers in for our daughter) and a week of solitary quarantine. Comfortable enough but weird! A couple of weeks later the UK was officially in lockdown, but for my wife and I the strategy was already clear: for our medically vulnerable daughter’s sake, catching the virus wasn’t an option.

I’m well used to working from home and am well set up for it. I’m fully reconciled to travelling very much less than before, if at all. I’m embracing a strategic shift here: instead of holding out for a return to how things were, Agendashift is (to borrow a phrase) digital by default. If physical presence is the exception (and perhaps a rare one), we design for online first.

Those Powerpoint decks? Screen-sharing a slide-based presentation over Zoom isn’t a great look, and the transitions between that and conversational group work is jarring, to put it mildly. They’ve been relegated to design documentation, just a tiny and steadily diminishing fraction of slides finding their way into other, more collaborative media. Out with my material, in with your shared workbooks.

In some ways it’s liberating. In the past week or so I’ve done whole workshops without sharing my screen even once. Similarly, a whole meetup without slides, live-chatting a few prepared quotes, links, and instructions for breakouts – definitely doing that again!

There will be things that I’ll miss about the old way, but having concluded that it’s a fool’s errand to try to replicate it faithfully online, I’ve moved on. Online is different. We’re making it work. We’re taking advantage of its advantages (and they’re real), minimising its weaknesses (yes they’re real too). We’re digital by default, online first, and honestly, that’s ok.

PS: While we’re here (it’s kinda related, in that the tech of online transported me temporarily to New Zealand), I was interviewed for the Joekub podcast early morning UK time last Saturday. Listen to it here:

Joekub Episode 15 – All in on outcomes with Mike Burrows

And a nice bit of feedback:

I also have a friend who loved the podcast, bought Right to Left and she said she would start explaining agile in a different way now

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Published on May 07, 2020 07:20

Agendashift roundup, April 2020

In this edition: Agendashift as Framework; Online first; Assessment updates; Featureban online; Upcoming; Top posts

[And apologies if you were hoping for an announcement about the audiobook edition of Right to Left; ACX (Audible) are quoting 30 business days (6 weeks plus) for their review stage]

Agendashift as Framework

There were multiple contenders for the biggest thing in Agendashift-land in April but I must go with this one:

Agendashift as framework

It has been well received and it’s an important step in my preparations for a 2nd edition of Agendashift, the book.

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Online first

Another big bit of work was reorganising the Agendashift workshop portfolio to accommodate some new short training workshops to complement the existing Learning the Language of Outcomes workshop. Also, public online workshops are now specifically timed to suit different parts of the world – Europe, APAC, and the Americas. For me in the UK this means mid-morning, early morning, and late afternoon/early evening respectively. Even since this change we’ve had people from all three timezones and from north and south of the equator in one workshop, so feel free, take your pick!

See the events calendar at the end of this post, and the details in this announcement below. This mentions workshops not (or not yet) in the calendar which may be of interest:

New online workshops added to a reorganised portfolio

Assessment updates

Quite a bit happening with the online assessments too:

A simplified English (‘EN-simplified’) version of the mini assessment. A joint effort, but a special shout out to Alex Pukinskis who saved us all a ton of work
A Farsi language translation contributed by Asad Safari
To be deployed shortly, some updates by Kirill Klimov to the Russian translation

Non-partners can test these translations (and others) in two ways:

Via the Agendashift global survey by switching language at the first page after signup
Via the free trial , creating a survey with the template of your choice

Those are limited to the mini (18-prompt) templates. For access to the full 42-prompt version, check the the partner programme:

Become an Agendashift partner

Featureban online

As per the Featureban page on Agendashift.com:

Play Featureban online!
We’re thrilled that our friends at Kaiten have created a free online version of Featureban. Play it here:

Featureban 3.0 Online

Evgeniy Stepchenko has produced this guide:

Featureban Online: The Facilitator Guide

Featureban is (and I quote): a simple, fun, and highly customisable kanban simulation game. Since its creation in 2014 it has been used by trainers and coaches in Lean, Agile and Kanban-related events the world over.

See also Changeban, the Lean Startup-flavoured version of Featureban. Of the two, I use Featureban when I need to teach certain Kanban-related practices (metrics in particular) to a mainly technical audience, which these days I mostly leave to others; otherwise, Changeban is more fun.

Online versions, translations, adaptations all made possible by open sourcing these games (they’re both CC-BY-SA). One of my smarter moves!

Upcoming workshops

With yours truly unless otherwise stated:

14-15 May, two 2-hour sessions, APAC time zone:

Learning the language of outcomes (APAC)
18-19 May, Europe time zone:

Wholehearted:OKR – Bringing OKR to life with Agendashift (Europe)

Mike Burrows , Kjell Tore Guttormsen , Halldor Kvale-Skattebo
04 June, one 2-hour session, Europe time zone:

Mapping with Outcomes (Europe)
17-18 June, two 2-hour sessions, Americas time zone:

Learning the language of outcomes (Americas)
25 June, one 2-hour session, Europe time zone:

Stories, Hypotheses, and A3 (Europe)

For the latest workshop and speaking events check the Agendashift events calendar.

Top posts

Agendashift as framework
Devs not clear about strategy? It’s likely way worse than that
New online workshops added to a reorganised portfolio
Doing Agendashift online (3 of n): The assessments (March)
Doing Agendashift online (4 of n): Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes (IdOO)