Mike Burrows's Blog, page 26

May 7, 2020

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

April 30, 2020

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)

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Published on April 30, 2020 06:04

April 23, 2020

Devs not clear about strategy? It’s likely way worse than that

A quite common issue surfaced by the Agendashift Delivery Assessment is that so-called delivery teams (and I don’t just mean developers and other technologists) aren’t clear about things like vision, purpose, and strategy. Digging into what was apparently a source of real frustration at one client a few years ago, I asked a product manager what he and his colleagues in the product team were doing to keep these things at the forefront of minds and conversations in their technology team.

His answer?

“They never asked”

I was unable to stop my jaw from dropping! At my unguarded reaction he tried hastily to row back, but not very convincingly.

Show me a development team not involved in the strategy conversation and I’ll show you one that delivers code but not insights, features but not intelligence, and products that are mediocre at best, meeting the spec but failing to satisfy. You don’t want that. No strategist worth his salt wants that. No business can afford that kind of failure for long, but work in a strategy bubble and it’s what you get.

The systems theory around this issue is well known, developed since the middle of the last century. A key lesson is that if you neglect the necessary interplay between organisational processes such as strategy and delivery (to name but two), you put your independent existence – your viability – under real threat. Happily, much of the associated practice is now highly accessible to a 21st century audience – the startup community lives by it – so there’s little excuse not to be guided by the theory.

As for Agendashift, it’s built into our mission statement, right there in the middle:

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The practical side is reflected in the bottom half of the new framework overview (see the recent announcement Agendashift as framework):

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The pattern Just-in-time (JIT) strategy deployment is the second of two key generative patterns in Agendashift, and is itself several patterns for the price of one. It describes strategy as being (and I quote):

“developed and refined collaboratively (with varying degrees of participation) over time and in response to the feedback generated through its implementation, solutions emerging from the people closest to the problem”

Agendashift has always been about strategy – whether transformation strategy specifically or strategy more broadly – but it can’t (and doesn’t) ignore delivery. If you’re struggling to connect the two adequately, read that page and take (I hope) some inspiration. And for a whole book’s worth, start with the highly accessible Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile. If you’ve not read any of my books before, this one is almost certainly the one to pick first.

Upcoming online workshops

All online, and all with your truly (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise specified:

28-29 April, two 2-hour sessions, Americas time zone:

Learning the language of outcomes (Americas)
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.

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Published on April 23, 2020 08:38

April 17, 2020

New online workshops added to a reorganised portfolio

Rather than post the next installment in the Doing Agendshift Online series this week, it seemed sensible to wait until after next week’s public workshop and after that share some of the new things we’re trying.

Meanwhile, far from using this enforced period online as an excuse to withdraw, we’ve been working hard to round out the overall offering. The result: two new short training workshops (both of them online-first of course) triggering a reorganisation of the portfolio.

One wholehearted engagement model, three workshop families:

The transformation strategy workshops that we’re best known for
The outside-in strategy workshops that take us deeper into strategy deployment – still highly compatible with Lean and Agile but less about them
A set of complementary short training workshops, more skills-focussed than organisation-focussed

With the two new short training workshops, Mapping with Outcomes, and Implementing your OI-SDR (more on those in a moment), this structure doesn’t seem like overkill. Here’s the relevant bits of sitemap:

The workshops:

Transformation strategy – Core, Applied, and Deep Dive:

Core Agendashift: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change
Applied Agendashift: Co-Creating Your Transformation Strategy
Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation

Outside-in strategy – OI-SR (the generic platform on which the other two are built), Impact!, and Wholehearted:OKR:

Outside-in strategy review (OI-SR)
Impact! Story, strategy, and outcomes for products and services
Wholehearted:OKR – Bringing OKR to life with Agendashift

Short training workshops – one to two online sessions of up to 2 hours each:

Agendashift Online: Learning the language of outcomes
Mapping with Outcomes
Implementing your Outside-in Service Delivery Review (OI-SDR)

The new short training workshops

We’ve been doing Learning the language of outcomes online since last summer (see the calendar below for dates, with more added recently). The first of the two new additions is a natural follow-on to that:

04 June – one 2-hour session, Europe time zone:

Mapping with Outcomes (Europe)

It covers the following:

A quick reprise of Plan on a Page, the simple visualisation used in Discovery
The “string” of exercises defined for the Mapping activity, each exercise valuable both in its own right and for making its successor easier:

The Cynefin Four Points Contextualisation exercise (Snowden), introduced under the pseudonym Option Approach Mapping
Option Relationship Mapping (Keogh/Scotland, Wardley), previously known as Reverse Wardley Mapping
Pathway Mapping (User Story Mapping meets Reverse STATIK)

An introduction to Changeban and its simple kanban system for managing a portfolio of experiments

The second addition, Implementing your Outside-in Service Delivery Review (OI-SDR) complements the strategy workshops. It’s about how you set yourself up for success, before or after the strategy workshop – ie groundwork or follow-through – or as a standalone exercise in organisation design. Its agenda will resonate with anyone who has read Right to Left:

Thinking in circles:

Interlinked circles of responsibility
Concentric circles of alignment

Metrics:

Performance measures
Health indicators

Stories, hypotheses, and experiments:

Framing for maximum learning
Focussing for maximum leverage

The nuts and bolts of the OI-SDR meeting:

Agenda:

Outside in (customer & environment first), then
Right to left (outcome first)

Protocols, participation, and preparation

Initially at least, we’ll be offering this workshop only privately before deciding whether (and how) to make it available publicly. Do this workshop with your colleagues and you will be well on your way to implementing your own OI-SDR successfully. With that, you will be building into your organisation design some powerful expectations: that experimentation will always be happening, that the strategy will be advancing, that service continues to improve, and that intelligence and insights will be shared – all of this in a structure specifically designed to create leadership opportunities and to cause misalignments to reveal themselves.

Finally, a reminder that we make all our workshop materials available to partners for use with their clients. It’s easy and inexpensive to join; details here.

Upcoming online workshops

All online, and all with your truly (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise specified:

22-23 April – two 2-hour sessions, Europe time zone:

Learning the language of outcomes (Europe)
NEW! 28-29 April – two 2-hour sessions, Americas time zone:

Learning the language of outcomes (Americas)
NEW! 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
NEW! 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)

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

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Published on April 17, 2020 02:24

April 7, 2020

Agendashift as framework

So here it is, slowly revealing itself online over the past few weeks, and now ready for the formal announcement and some background. It’s the biggest update to Agendashift since the 2018 book and it prepares the ground for a second edition.

New &/or updated:

Agendashift as framework (new)

Agendashift’s five principles (updated, principles 1 & 5 reworded)
Agendashift’s generative patterns (new)
Agendashift’s five core activities (updated to reference the patterns)
Models, sources, and inspirations (new)

Previously announced, and updated again in line with the above:

Agendashift Home
About Agendashift
Our mission: Wholehearted

The last of those is of course the basis of Agendashift’s recent rebranding:

Making it official: Agendashift, the wholehearted engagement model (January)

Agendashift as framework

From the framework page:

These pages describe Agendashift – the wholehearted engagement model – as an open framework for continuous, outcome-oriented transformation.

Agendashift is primarily for use by agents of strategic change, with or without an explicit Lean-Agile agenda. It is not intended as a replacement for the likes of Scrum, Kanban, or SAFe; neither do we consider it a way to choose between them. Our clear opposition to the imposition of frameworks on the unwilling does not make us anti-framework; rather we’re pluralists, celebrating frameworks as exemplars and sources of patterns that combine in interesting ways.

We don’t however pretend to be neutral. Outcome-orientation is not a neutral stance. If these pages give you a fresh perspective on other frameworks and help you avoid yet another failed or mediocre implementation, that’s definitely for the better. Moreover, it’s not hard to see that whole system engagement and strategy deployment are useful models for delivery in complex environments.

In the past I’ve been a little reluctant to describe Agendashift as a framework, for reasons similar (I guess) to those of the Kanban community: compared to Scrum, SAFe etc, it’s not the same kind of thing at all! Then in Right to Left I made a point of always describing these as process frameworks, solving that problem. And from chapter 3, Frameworks and patterns:

[The word ‘frameworks’] has multiple meanings. Some of them – Scrum and Lean Startup most especially – are frameworks in the sense that they provide some minimal structure into which specific practices can be introduced. Others – DevOps and Design Thinking for example – are frameworks in the different sense that they provide a particular perspective to an organisational problem and an array of techniques with which to approach it.

Within the context of change and transformation, both definitions apply to Agendashift. What makes the second one particularly interesting is that Agendashift’s needs-based and outcome-oriented perspective has an impact on how you think about and operate delivery too – certainly if you take it to the level of a resolute stance (which of course I do). You could say that this is how I went from Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2018) to Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019). Read that and you’ll never look at a process framework in quite the same way again.

Key changes
Principles

I’ve tweaked the wording of principles 1 & 5 (there’s a before & after comparison on the principles page):

[image error]

This feels like a good place to start so I’ve made them a little more prominent.

Patterns

This is new. Agendashift can now be summarised as two generative patterns:

Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes (IdOO)
Just-in-time Strategy Deployment

Understand those, how they relate to each other, and how they challenge the status quo, and you’re a long way towards understanding both how Agendashift works and why it exists.

I’m presenting the patterns ahead of the five core activities – Discovery, Exploration, Mapping, Elaboration, and Operation – a demotion for those if you like. Certainly I see this as a significant change. Although the patterns are an addition, it’s one that seems to crystallise and simplify; one of the reassuring things about Agendashift is that the more it develops, the easier it becomes.

You may have noticed that I sneaked IdOO into Monday’s post Doing Agendashift online (4 of n): Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes (IdOO). Behind the scenes there was a flurry of activity making everything ready in time!

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No doubt I’ll be referencing the second pattern – Just-in-time Strategy Deployment – in a later installment of the Doing Agendashift online series and I’ll keep my powder dry for now. Give it a read meanwhile!

A new overview picture

Bringing it all together:

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Don’t worry: despite appearances my long-held caveats on the subject of cycles remain. I leave you with this post-workshop tweet from friend and workshop participant Allan Kelly:

"PDCA cycles are not perpetual motion machines, you have to work to sustain them" key insight from @asplake today

— allan kelly (@allankellynet) February 14, 2020

Upcoming online workshops

22-23 April – two 2-hour sessions on consecutive days (UK morning):

Agendashift Online: Learning the language of outcomes
18-19 May – Kjell Tore Guttormsen & myself, two full days, Europe-friendly time

Wholehearted:OKR: Bringing OKR to life with Agendashift
17-18-June, online – two 2-hour sessions on consecutive days (UK afternoon):

Agendashift Online: Learning the language of outcomes

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Published on April 07, 2020 08:10

April 6, 2020

Doing Agendashift online (4 of n): Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes (IdOO)

The time to take a close look at 1) your strategy and 2) your ways of working is now. You need to do those together – integrated, wholeheartedly, no half measures. The place to do it is online. We’re here to help you.

This is #4 in a series of unspecified length, covering ways you can do Agendashifty things online (we have plenty of practice). And here, we really get to the heart of things.

Followers of this blog will know that 15-minute FOTO is our Clean Language-inspired coaching game, one of the highlights of any Agendashift workshop. You might even have guessed that this would be the 15-minute FOTO installment. You’re not wrong exactly, but first let’s see it in context.

Here it is in the Discovery session of the classic Core, Applied, or Deep Dive workshop, chapter 1 of the Agendashift book:

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Same workshops, same book, but session/chapter 2, Exploration:

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And now the Wholehearted:OKR workshop, different book (Right to Left), and the session Outside-in review (I):

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And session Outside-in review (II):

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Even if 1) the slides didn’t give the game away already and 2) I told you that there are two different flavours of 15-minute FOTO here and that sometimes we use a different tool entirely, you’d have no trouble recognising that there’s a pattern here.

I’m calling that pattern IdOO:

[image error]

Doing IdOO online

See the past installment 2. Celebration-5W to understand how we facilitate online at least one of the ways we can can establish some business context ahead of any reflection.

See 3. The assessments for how participants prioritise the assessment prompts on which they will reflect. For Discovery, it’s even simpler: just share the Agendashift True North (see the Resources section below).

Then (and you’ll find these questions in the True North deck):

When this is working at its ideal best for you, what’s that like?
And when that’s happening, what new stories could you tell?

Those questions work really well 1-2-4-All style as described in the assessments installment – individual silent reflections followed by pairwise, table group, and debrief conversations (a good test of your breakout room skills if you’re using Zoom).

That’s IdOO’s Ideal reflection part done. Easy!

To identify Obstacles:

What stops that? What gets in the way?

Again, that’s straightforward enough. And again, 1-2-4-All works really well, except that this time those obstacles will need to be captured somehow when the conversation gets to table group level. Google Docs works great, but you’ll want to get documents set up and distributed ahead of time.

To generate Outcomes, you could just ask these questions with respect to the obstacles just captured:

What would you like to have happen? (or your favourite equivalent)
Then what happens? (asked a few times perhaps)

Even online, that’s temptingly easy. That would however be a huge opportunity missed. Instead of you asking the questions, how about your participants coach each other? That’s what 15-minute FOTO does, and both editions of the game (Lite and Classic) have versions specifically tailored for online use.

In some ways the online version is more efficient, with everyone joining in to help with the scribe’s task of capturing outcomes, clients as well as coaches able to refer to the notes (these roles rotate by the way). Especially if you’re facilitating it for the first time, don’t be afraid to join in – the Lite edition in particular includes a familiarisation phase.

Next time (not Monday, it being Easter) we’ll look at different ways those generated outcomes can be organised online.

Resources

All of these are open source (CC-BY-SA):

Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes (IdOO)
Celebration-5W
True North
15-minute FOTO

Become a partner for both the integrated workshop materials and the ability to administer the assessments described in the previous installment.

And the two books:

Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2018)
Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019)

Upcoming online workshops

22-23 April – two 2-hour sessions on consecutive days (UK morning):

Agendashift Online: Learning the language of outcomes
18-19 May – Kjell Tore Guttormsen & myself, two full days, Europe-friendly time

Wholehearted:OKR: Bringing OKR to life with Agendashift
17-18-June, online – two 2-hour sessions on consecutive days (UK afternoon):

Agendashift Online: Learning the language of outcomes

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Published on April 06, 2020 07:22

March 31, 2020

Agendashift roundup, March 2020

In this edition: New blog series: Doing Agendashift online; Site updates; Upcoming workshops (online of course); Top posts

New blog series: Doing Agendashift online

The recent series The language of outcomes is followed by a new one: Doing Agendashift online. There have been three installments so far:

Doing Agendashift online
Celebration-5W
The assessments

The timing of this series is of course no accident. We do a lot online already; this was given extra urgency by the COVID-19 situation. There’ll be at least three more of these posts in the coming weeks; so far they’ve come out every Monday and I’ll do my best to keep to that pattern.

On a personal note, I’m glad to report that I’m out of solitary, no longer holed up in the studio (my office by day, self-contained accommodation when needed, actually quite comfortable). However, as we have what the UK authorities refer to as a “shielded” family member, our household will remain in complete physical isolation for weeks, if not longer. “Online” is very much the new normal for us and for many others like us. We’re ok, but if you know others in a similar situation, please do your best to help – it’s going to be a long haul.

Site updates

The time to take a close look at 1) your strategy and 2) your ways of working is now. You need to do those together – integrated, wholeheartedly, no half measures. The place to do it is online. We’re here to help you.

Work on the Agendashift site never really stops, but over the past few weeks the change has been particularly rapid. Most visibly:

Agendashift Home
About Agendashift

The basic idea is to delineate more clearly – and in this order – what kind of thing Agendashift is, its ethos, and what it has offer. For those that want to dig deeper into the detail: where we’re coming from, what we reference, key structures, ideas, tools and techniques, and so on.

As well some major rework to existing content, new pages have been added too (some of those still a work in progress). One of those at least will get mentioned in the next blog installment, so don’t worry if it doesn’t jump out at you straight away!

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Upcoming workshops (online of course)

22-23 April – two 2-hour sessions on consecutive days (UK morning):

Agendashift Online: Learning the language of outcomes
18-19 May – Kjell Tore Guttormsen & myself, two full days, Europe-friendly time

Wholehearted:OKR: Bringing OKR to life with Agendashift
17-18-June, online – two 2-hour sessions on consecutive days (UK afternoon):

Agendashift Online: Learning the language of outcomes

Top posts

Doing Agendashift online (1 of n)
The workshop formerly known as Advanced
Doing Agendashift online (2 of n): Celebration-5W
The language of outcomes: 1. Identifying the adaptive challenge
The language of outcomes: 5. Between ends and means

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Published on March 31, 2020 06:05

March 30, 2020

Doing Agendashift online (3 of n): The assessments

The time to take a close look at 1) your strategy and 2) your ways of working is now. You need to do those together – integrated, wholeheartedly, no half measures. The place to do it is online. We’re here to help you.

This is #3 in a series of unspecified length, covering ways you can do Agendashifty things online (we have plenty of practice).

Here we look at Agendashift’s assessments, which have been online since the beginning. If ever you’ve been surveyed by email and Excel, you’ll know why we do it online; if you’re still doing it like it’s 1999, shame on you!

You can easily adapt the advice given here if you want to use the assessment for coaching purposes. Considerations for online workshops:

How & when to send out the survey
Delivering the survey debrief
Facilitating the followups

That last consideration is a big enough topic that it will spill over into the next installment. Here we’ll cover things specific to the assessment itself.

1. How & when to send out the survey

I’ve not written about the assessment tool as much as I could and should – quite apart from its specific role in the workshop of helping people to identify areas of opportunity, it does a great job of setting the tone for the workshop or coaching engagement. And it’s a door-opener!

In its wording, we’ve taken great care to avoid prescription. People don’t respond well to anything that feels like coercion, and dialling back on the jargon means that it works in a wide range of contexts (some of our best experiences have been outside of technology teams) and opens up the broadest range of possibilities.

Some partners have reported good results from capturing survey input through a facilitated group exercise. Personally, I don’t do that, for fear 1) of sucking the energy from the room and 2) of depriving ourselves of the widest range of responses. That said, conducting the survey via a series of private one-to-one conversations does work really well.

Doing it one-to-one when you’re physically in the same room, handy tip #1 is to open the survey’s sharing link in a private browser window (an ‘Incognito’ window in Chrome). You slide your laptop over to your counterpart, they sign themselves up, and you take notes as they provide “as little or as much commentary as they like” as they complete their assessment. Online, just share the link – via Zoom’s chat feature, say – and have them complete their assessment whilst sharing their screen. Easy!

Tip #2: If you’re surveying a lot of people, and only some of them are through these one-to-one conversations, ‘tag’ the sharing link for each population group so that you can slice and dice the results afterwards. We find that leadership teams (for example) tend to score the assessment more strictly (lower, in other words), making them a good baseline for comparison with other groups.

For those larger populations, here’s a typical email invitation:

At the link below is the prework for . Before you begin, decide on a scope – your team or something bigger – and stick to it; trust me that any differences in scope or scale will be not be an obstacle when we review the full survey results together.

If any of the prompts strike you as particularly important for discussion, please ‘star’ them when you get to the review page at the end. We ask that you limit yourself to a maximum of 6 stars, eg 3, 2, 1 for your top 3 priorities or 1 star each across 6; the tool will warn you if you go over this limit.

Please do your best to complete by to give us time to print the handouts with the survey results. Thank you!

I like to send this out a week in advance. Of course for online workshops we won’t be relying on the printed handouts referred to in the last paragraph so the timing is slightly less constrained, but still you want to allow enough time both for responses and for a polite nudge or two if you’re not seeing the expected response rate.

2. Delivering the survey debrief

This part hardly changes. The debrief is already done via a browser-based report designed for projection, so just share your screen and you’re away. It’s a single page app that responds to your keyboard, mouse, or presentation clicker. The report starts high level – the aim being to get everyone comfortable and recognising their own data – and finishes on the prompts with the widest range of scores, where you’ll have the interesting discussions.

Tip #3: Remember the “brief” in “debrief”. Better too fast than too slow; participants will have plenty of opportunity to interact with the content afterwards.

Tip #4: Remember that it’s not your job to provide a diagnosis but to facilitate a conversation. Calibrate any commentary carefully. Agreement on outcomes is the most powerful for enabler for strategic change that we know; it’s why Agendashift exists, and the assessment and the followups are designed with that in mind. Don’t undermine it!

3. Facilitating the followups

Group work starts with prioritising the assessment prompts, each table group choosing a shortlist of prompts for further discussion, prompts that help to identify areas of opportunity. 5 prompts per table group works well.

I like to facilitate this 1-2-4-All style:

1: On their own, silently, participants choose their top 3
2: In pairs (or threes, as necessary) , a conversation to arrive at a joint top 4
4: In table groups, agreement on a combined top 5
All: A quick whole group debrief

Each of those steps suitably timeboxed.

Tip #5: if you’re using breakout rooms in Zoom (a great feature), remember that anything you’re sharing on-screen will disappear when participants move to their pairs, threes, or table groups. Clear instructions and the availability of all necessary resources are both essential. To that end, each page of the debrief (the one below, for example, or the pages designed for printing) has a shareable URL.

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What happens next isn’t specific to the assessment and I’ll save for next week’s installment what turns out to be a key pattern and well worth covering on its own. So watch this space!

Two things to leave you with meanwhile:

1. Ways to access the assessment:

The Agendashift global survey , with a mini (18-prompt) version of the assessment
The free trial – also the mini version, surveys limited to up to 10 people
Through the partner programme, access to the full range of templates (including the main 42-prompt assessment), size restrictions removed:

Engage one of our partners to administer a survey on your behalf; most would also be delighted to do the surrounding facilitation
Become a partner yourself – access not just the assessment tool but all our materials too

2. Upcoming opportunities to experience Agendashift online:

22-23 April – two 2-hour sessions on consecutive days (UK morning):

Agendashift Online: Learning the language of outcomes
18-19 May – Kjell Tore Guttormsen & myself, two full days, Europe-friendly time

Wholehearted:OKR: Bringing OKR to life with Agendashift
17-18-June, online – two 2-hour sessions on consecutive days (UK afternoon):

Agendashift Online: Learning the language of outcomes

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Published on March 30, 2020 07:00

March 23, 2020

Doing Agendashift online (2 of n): Celebration-5W

#2 in a series of unspecified length, covering ways you can do Agendashifty things online. Here we look at Celebration-5W, the exercise I’ve used at or near the beginning of nearly every workshop I have conducted in recent years, and (accordingly) the exercise that opens chapter 1 of the Agendashift book. It’s open source (CC-BY-SA license), one of several resources you can access here.

From the Celebration-5W page:

Celebration-5W is the first of Agendashift’s Discovery exercises. We have now made it available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license; not only can you view the deck here (embedded from Slideshare), you can request the original source .pptx files for incorporation with your own material or adaptation to your needs.

Celebration-5W is a time travel exercise, typically focussed on a celebration several months into the future. It is typically used at the start of a workshop, retrospective, or chartering exercise to create some shared business context. Everything else we go on to discuss should in some way help us to achieve the things we identify here.

You can see it in action 6 minutes into the video on the 15-minute FOTO page.

Celebration-5W is easy to facilitate online. Just as with doing it in person, there are two main considerations. The technology may have some influence on your choices:

Is this a whole room exercise, or do we work in small groups (table groups in person, breakout rooms online)?
Fancy template, or “Put your paper in portrait mode, the five headings down the page”?

Doing this in person with 6 or more people, I have a strong preference for working in table groups, debriefing each group one a a time afterwards if there aren’t too many of those, a small number of groups volunteering otherwise. This way, you learn a lot from the alignment (or otherwise) of outputs. That said, some facilitators report good experiences doing this as a whole room exercise, so take your pick. Online, your level of comfort with managing breakout rooms will no doubt be a factor (and I’ll mention some gotchas next time), perhaps favouring the whole room experience.

Working in person, I have used Mike Haber’s template ever since he contributed it. Doing it in person isn’t an option right now, but for when that opportunity returns it’s easy enough to draw by hand, and the Celebration-5W Dropbox includes pptx and pdf files you can print (I print them on A3 paper).

Online, a couple choices:

Replicate Mike’s template in your favourite online whiteboarding tool (eg Miro )
In Google Docs (or equivalent), the 5W headings – Who, What, Where, When, and Why – down the page (or pages or docs plural, for multiple groups)

I like Miro, but given that this is usually the kickoff exercise, I stick with the option familiar to the most people, Google Docs. In fact, in the Agendashift Online workshop (see below), Zoom and Google Docs is all the technology needed for the entirety of the first two-hour session.

All pretty straightforward, so give it a try! Including how access the Dropbox, there’s more on Celebration-5W here.

I leave you with some upcoming opportunities to experience it online:

[image error]

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Published on March 23, 2020 05:02

March 16, 2020

Doing Agendashift online (series start)

The time to take a close look at 1) your strategy and 2) your ways of working is now. You need to do those together – integrated, wholeheartedly, no half measures. The place to do it is online. We’re here to help you.

This the first of what is likely to be several posts given extra urgency by the COVID-19 situation. On that specifically, there’s a quick personal update here on my precautionary self-isolation (if you’re connected with me on Facebook).

Inevitably, online is going to be a big theme for the next few months, and over the coming weeks I’ll describe some practical tips for doing various Agendashifty things online, and with it a few of the concepts, some of which we’re finding new and better ways to explain.

The series so far (I’ll keep this updated):

Doing Agendashift online (this post)
Celebration-5W
The assessments
Doing Agendashift online (4 of n): Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes (IdOO)

And also:

Three months in

As it happens, we know enough already to do the whole thing online. And it’s just as well: we’ve withdrawn the two upcoming 2-day Wholehearted:OKR workshops that were to be held in Oslo and London, replacing them with one online:

18-19 May, online – Kjell Tore Guttormsen & myself:

Wholehearted:OKR: Bringing OKR to life with Agendashift

Meanwhile, there’s the existing Agendashift Online workshop, which comprises two 2-hour sessions conducted over Zoom (and with the help of certain other collaboration tools) on consecutive days, covering the first two modules of the classic 4 or 5-module transformation strategy workshop. As of today, there are now two in the calendar, the first in the morning, UK time (good for morning people and much of APAC), and the second the late afternoon (evening people and the US).

22-23 April, online – two 2-hour sessions on consecutive days (UK morning):

Agendashift online: Learning the language of outcomes
17-18-June, online – two 2-hour sessions on consecutive days (UK afternoon):

Agendashift online: Learning the language of outcomes

I’ve reduced prices too. With the usual £50 discount on the Agendashift partner programme available to all workshop participants, it almost pays for itself, especially if you’re in there quick enough to grab an early bird ticket. So join us!

PS I’ve been in copywriting mode, rewriting the workshop descriptions for the April and June events. Even if you don’t currently plan to attend, your feedback would be very welcome – substantial portions of that text are destined to appear elsewhere…

Next: Doing Agendashift online (2 of n): Celebration-5W

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Published on March 16, 2020 08:19

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