Mike Burrows's Blog, page 28

January 6, 2020

Making it official: Agendashift, the wholehearted engagement model

The short version: New year, new branding. It has substance. And a special offer!


[image error]


I’ve mentioned wholehearted here a few times. The response to it has been amazing – I’ve even had people citing it as clinching their decision to become Agendashift partners. And today we’re making it official, rebranding Agendashift as the wholehearted engagement model.


Time then to sharpen up the website! I have taken the opportunity to give it a substantial overhaul, most visibly here:



Our mission: Wholehearted – our branding, positioning, and elevator pitch in one
About Agendashiftgood for the engagement model part if that concept is new to you
The Agendashift home page – giving more visibility to the above and (while we’re at it) to the Agendashift Assessments , which are still going strong, very much something to be proud of but lacking in visibility of late

In fact, little has gone untouched. If you have a moment, check these out too:



Become an Agendashift partnerand with it a help page that was previously empty, Partner programme preparation
Workshops

The substance

Our mission: Helping organisations grow in wholeheartedness – to become less at war with themselves, their obstacles, imbalances, and contradictions identified and owned, value and meaning created through authentic engagement.


Expanding just a little:


[image error]


Source: Our mission: Wholehearted (agendashift.com/wholehearted), CC-BY-SA licence.


The wholehearted page expands further, describing where we’re coming from, what sets us apart, the challenge that motivates us, and so on. Here, let say a bit more about how wholehearted works, what it isn’t, and three of its less obvious inspirations.


Wholehearted (or wholeheartedness) works because it is three things at once:



It’s a metaphor that resonates quickly and is capable of inspiring at a human level
It describes something worth striving for regardless of whether it can ever be attained in full
It’s something that can be experienced immediately, and in practical terms

That hint of paradox doesn’t hurt either! And if you’re wondering about the experience part, read on right to the end, where I’ll repeat an offer made last month.


What it’s not:



Another Agile reboot – I have more respect for Agile than that
Another Agile process framework – there are plenty of those already, and beyond the travesty of imposition (Agile’s shame) there are other serious issues with that approach that I’ll come to
A manifesto (whether Agile’s “this over that” style or otherwise) – there are more than enough of those too; wholehearted is our mission statement, and the internal work of clarifying that to ourselves, partners, and clients was more important than the wider response (though naturally I’m grateful for the validation)

As acknowledged here previously [1] and as documented on the Wholehearted page, the initial inspiration for the wholehearted metaphor is due to the acclaimed architect and father of the patterns movement Christopher Alexander; in Right to Left [2] I reproduce with permission a quote from his classic book The Timeless Way of Building [3]. Applying Alexander’s metaphor in an organisational context, I channel three further inspirations that might not be obvious and aren’t called out explicitly: viable system model, servant leadership, and social constructionism.


Viable system model

The more mainstream Agile becomes, the more credit seems to be given to delivery process at the expense of critical things like strategy and organisation development. Time and time again, what gets copied (out of its original context) is the surface detail; what gets missed is less easily reproduced but vastly more critical to lasting success.


That’s a familiar enough complaint. Suffering from very similar problems, the Lean community woke up some years ago to what might have become a fatal flaw and went about redefining and reinventing itself. The Agile community seems to recognise the problem, but it takes a long time to turn the supertanker around and its momentum is still very much the other way. If I’m honest, I’m not convinced that the turnaround has even started.


Lest I be accused of merely whining, we offer something very practical:


Strategy, development, and delivery integrated – made whole – through participation


Those few words describe much of my work of the last few years; I phrased it that way thanks to the consultant’s secret weapon, Viable System Model (VSM) [4]. VSM is the model developed by Stafford Beer, an early pioneer of management cybernetics, and it identifies the elements required for an organisation to be viable and how they relate to each other.


In wholehearted I’ve picked out only three of those elements (you’ll find more in Right to Left), but it’s a decent start! Students of VSM will recognise also that participation is a possible approach to solving the problem of requisite variety, which roughly translates into the organisation being able to recognise and cope with the range of 1) what’s thrown at it and 2) what happens within it, the two being related.


Servant Leadership

Organisations won’t last long if they’re not meeting needs. Today that sounds like a truism, but writing in the 1970’s, long before a decades-long shift in employment patterns played out, Greenleaf [5] grasped and articulated some profound implications for leadership. I’m a firm believer both in good leadership and in starting with needs [6], so what better model than this one!


A small caveat: I have come to understand not only that leadership development and organisation development are inextricably linked, but that the latter is often the more promising entry point. Jumping straight to my bottom line, I have zero appetite for cultural change initiatives when they’re divorced from the organisation’s practical and strategic realities. In Agendashift-speak (with credit to Daniel Mezick and Mark Sheffield for the wonderfully punny inviting leadership [7]):


The language of outcomes inviting leadership at every level


I could also cite mission command, Marquet’s leader-leader model, etc here too – see the last chapter of Right to Left for how I tie these together.


Social constructionism

Social constructionism [8], is the philosophical concept that underpins dialogic organisation development, on which Agendashift leans heavily (though not exclusively) [9]. It’s the recognition that people and their social interactions give reality and meaning to organisations (to its credit, there’s more than a hint of that in the Agile manifesto). Without them, the organisation is nothing and meaningless, and it’s another reason why a process-centric view of organisations is so hopelessly inadequate.


Much less sterile (and related to the language of outcomes):


New conversations and new kinds of conversations – renewing the organisation’s discourse and thereby the organisation itself


You know something has changed when the language has changed; the converse can be true not just at the level of terminology or sentiment, but fundamentally.


Watch out for a follow-up post very soon (it’s already drafted) on the language of outcomes and its lessons for leadership.


References

[1] Towards the wholehearted organisation, outside in (May 2018)

[2] Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile, Mike Burrows (New Generation Publishing, 2019)

[3] The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander, (OUP USA, 1980)

[4] Viable system model (en.wikipedia.org), and I would strongly recommend one of Right to Left‘s references, The Fractal Organization: Creating Sustainable Organizations with the Viable System Model, Patrick Hoverstadt, (John Wiley & Sons, 2008)

[5] Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness, Robert K. Greenleaf, (Paulist Press, 25th Anniversary edition, 2002)

[6] Agendashift model overview“Start with needs” is principle #1

[7] Inviting Leadership: Invitation-Based Change™ in the New World of Work, Daniel Mezick and Mark Sheffield (Freestanding Press, 2018)

[7] Social constructionism (en.wikipedia.com)

[8] What kind of Organisational Development (OD)? (And a book recommendation) (May 2019), the book in question being Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change, Gervase R. Bushe & Robert J. Marshak (2015, Berrett-Koehler Publishers)


Acknowledgements

My thanks to Agendashift partners Steven Mackenzie, Dragan Jojic, Karl Scotland, Teddy Zetterlund, and Kjell Tore Guttormsen for their part in the many iterations that wholehearted went through. To Daniel Mezick, Jutta Eckstein, Heidi Araya and partner Angie Main for their feedback and encouragement. Finally to Mark Sheffield for his careful review not just of this post but to the linked resources.


Special offer

20% off for any private (company-internal) Wholehearted:OKR workshop held in January, and 10% off for any booked by the end of that month for delivery at some agreed later date. Perfect for kicking off not just the new year but a new decade!


Or attend a public workshop:


Workshops upcoming in 2020 – Tampa, London (*2), Gurugram, Malmö, Oslo (*2), Tel Aviv

See also our workshops and events pages. Tel Aviv (early June) to be added soon. All workshops (not just Wholehearted:OKR) have been updated to reference wholehearted.



4th February, Tampa, FL, USA:

Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services
14th February, London, UK

Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services
2-3 March, Gurugram, India

2-day Advanced Agendashift: Coaching & leading continuous transformation
11-12 March, Malmö, Sweden – Julia Wester & myself:

Advanced Agendashift: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
30-31 March, Oslo, Norway – Kjell Tore Guttormsen, Halldor Kvale-Skattebo, & myself:

Wholehearted: Bringing OKR to life with Agendashift
22-23 April, London, UK – Karl Scotland, Steven Mackenzie, & myself:

Wholehearted: Bringing OKR to life with Agendashift
8-9 June, Oslo, Norway:

2-day Advanced Agendashift: Coaching & leading continuous transformation  


Agendashift: The wholehearted engagement model

Links: Home | About | Our mission: Wholehearted | Become an Agendashift partner | Assessments | Books | Resources | Events | Contact | MikeSubscribe

Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts

Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter

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Published on January 06, 2020 07:50

December 23, 2019

Agendashift roundup, December 2019

In this end-of-year edition: New or updated in 2019; Workshops upcoming in 2020; Top 5 posts for December so far; Top 10 posts for the year


New or updated in 2019

Announced this very productive year:



Option Relationship Mapping – full credit to Karl Scotland and Liz Keogh for my favourite innovation of the year, the mapping exercise temporarily known as Reverse Wardley Mapping (February)
A new template for Celebration-5W – by Mike Haber (March)
Featureban 3.0 and Changeban 1.2 (June)
Agendashift in 12 icons (August)
Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (August)

Related: Right to Left in five 5-minute videos (September) – with links to book-related podcast interviews – and 2 for the price of 1: Agile Book Club review and interview (October)


Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services (November)
Version 7 of 15-minute FOTO (November)
Wholehearted:OKR (December)

[image error]


Here’s to a similarly productive 2020! With a couple of surprises up my sleeve, I have a feeling it might be

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Published on December 23, 2019 05:35

December 16, 2019

Wholehearted:OKR

If you knew where to look, the clues were already there: the Impact! workshop was only the first addition to a growing new family of workshops. I am thrilled now to announce Wholehearted:OKR, not only the Agendashiftiest of OKR workshops and the OKRiest of Agendashift workshops, the most wholehearted too! Of all our workshops, Wholehearted:OKR delivers the most complete realisation of our wholehearted mission, demonstrating how to create opportunities for:



Authentic engagement on issues that matter
Meaningful participation across strategy, development, and delivery
Anticipating and meeting needs
Leadership around outcomes (each inviting the other)

Wholehearted:OKR is 2-day strategy workshop that uses the Agendashift Outside-in Strategy Review (OI-SR) as described in chapter 5 of Right to Left both to understand and to introduce Objectives and Key Results (OKR). Get the benefits of OKR, avoid its dysfunctions, and begin to see your organisation differently.


It’s 100% ready to roll, and I can honestly say that I’ve rarely been so pleased with the version 1 of anything. Huge credit therefore to partners Karl Scotland, Steven Mackenzie, and guest contributor Mike Haber who joined me in London for the design meeting, and to Kjell Tore Guttormsen and Teddy Zetterlund for their pioneering work with two of Wholehearted:OKR’s forerunners, the generic OI-SR and the Impact! workshop.


Kjell Tore will be a co-facilitator with me at the workshop’s public debut in Oslo; it’s likely that Karl, Steven, and Mike will join me in London. Book your place now:



30-31 March, Oslo, Norway – Kjell Tore Guttormsen , Halldor Kvale-Skattebo , & myself:

Wholehearted: Bringing OKR to life with Agendashift
22-23 April, London, UK – Karl Scotland , Steven Mackenzie , & myself:

Wholehearted: Bringing OKR to life with Agendashift

Both of the new workshops are designed for both public and private use. If you’re interested in holding a Wholehearted:OKR workshop privately, let me repeat an offer already made to some of my clients: 20% off for any workshop held in January, and 10% off for any booked by the end of that month for delivery at some agreed later date. Perfect for kicking off not just the new year but a new decade!


[image error]


Amid the excitement around Wholehearted:OKR it’s easy to forget that we haven’t even reached the public debuts for the Impact! workshop yet. Not long to go though – these take place 10 days apart in February, in Tampa, FL and London, UK:



4th February, Tampa, FL, USA:

Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services
14th February, London, UK

Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services

Related

We’re wholehearted – are you?
It’s mashup time: Adaptive challenges accomplished at their ideal best
Announcing a brand new (but tested) workshop: Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services
Helpfully subversive about frameworks (September)
There will be caveats: Warming cautiously to OKR (September)


Upcoming workshops – Tampa, London, Gurugram, Malmö, Oslo (*2)

(See also our workshops and events pages)



11-12 December, Online – two 2h sessions on consecutive days:

Learning the language of outcomes (two 2h online sessions)
4th February, Tampa, FL, USA:

Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services
14th February, London, UK

Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services
2-3 March, Gurugram, India

2-day Advanced Agendashift: Coaching & leading continuous transformation
11-12 March, Malmö, Sweden – Julia Wester & myself:

Advanced Agendashift: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
30-31 March, Oslo, Norway – Kjell Tore Guttormsen, Halldor Kvale-Skattebo, & myself:

Wholehearted: Bringing OKR to life with Agendashift
22-23 April, London, UK – Karl Scotland, Steven Mackenzie, & myself:

Wholehearted: Bringing OKR to life with Agendashift
8-9 June, Oslo, Norway:

2-day Advanced Agendashift: Coaching & leading continuous transformation


Agendashift: From the exciting intersection of Lean-Agile, Strategy, and Organisation Development, an engagement model fit for the 21st century

Links: SubscribeHome | Partners | Books |Resources | Events | Contact | Mike

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Published on December 16, 2019 08:35

December 9, 2019

We’re wholehearted – are you?

Is it too much to ask? Organisations in which people engage on the issues that matter, actively participate in anticipating and meeting needs, and through agreement on outcomes create fertile conditions for organisation and leadership development?


Definitely not too much to ask, but let’s face it, most organisations aren’t there yet. Helping them is our wholehearted mission:


[image error]


There’s more at the wholehearted page (agendashift.com), where you’ll find a paragraph on each of these:



Our mission
Where we’re coming from
What sets us apart
The challenge that motivates us

And some background, reference, etc:



Mission, not manifesto
Inspiration
Wholeheartedness, strategy, feedback opportunities, and participation
Servant Leadership

We’re wholehearted – are you?


My thanks to Agendashift partners Steven Mackenzie, Dragan Jojic, Karl Scotland, Teddy Zetterlund, and Kjell Tore Guttormsen for their feedback on the many iterations that wholehearted went through!



Upcoming workshops – Tampa, London, Gurugram, Malmö, Oslo, and online

11-12 December, Online – two 2h sessions on consecutive days:

Learning the language of outcomes (two 2h online sessions)
4th February, Tampa, FL, USA :

Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services
14th February, London, UK

Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services
2-3 March, Gurugram, India

2-day Advanced Agendashift: Coaching & leading continuous transformation
11-12 March, Malmö, Sweden – Julia Wester & myself:

Advanced Agendashift: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
8-9 June, Oslo, Norway:

2-day Advanced Agendashift: Coaching & leading continuous transformation


Agendashift: From the exciting intersection of Lean-Agile, Strategy, and Organisation Development, an engagement model fit for the 21st century

Links: SubscribeHome | Partners | Books |Resources | Events | Contact | Mike

Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts

Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter

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Published on December 09, 2019 03:43

December 4, 2019

It’s mashup time: Adaptive challenges accomplished at their ideal best

A quick one, based on work already informally announced and more that’s in progress:


Already shared on Slack, LinkedIn and elsewhere, but for the record:


Released a v3 of our outside-in strategy template – just a 1 word change, replacing “Objectives” (confusing in an OKR context) with “Ideal”, channeling Ackoff if you like


[image error] OI-SR template (agendashift.com)

And while I’m channeling Ackoff, a mashup:


[image error]


Watch this space for news of Wholehearted:OKR, the new 2-day workshop from which this slide comes.


The Celebration-5W here is the Who, What, Where, When & Why of the (future) celebration, the context-setting exercise with which I kick off nearly all of my workshops. CC-BY-SA. This additional slide creates the early opportunity for some references:


[1] adaptive challenge: Heifetz, via Bushe & Marshak (Dialogic Organization Development, The Dynamics of Generative Change, etc) – organisation development here embracing complexity.


[2] ideal: I’m sneaking in an early opportunity to mention Ackoff’s concept of idealized design, setting the tone before the newly-modified Outside-in Strategy Review (OI-SR) tool is introduced. See Re-Creating the Corporation: A Design of Organizations for the 21st Century (1999), a classic and highly recommended.


[3] When you’re ___ at your best, ___?: Dee Berridge & Caitlin Walker, via Caitlin’s book book, From Contempt to Curiosity: Creating the Conditions for Groups to Collaborate Using Clean Language and Systemic Modelling (2014), which I reference and warmly recommend in both Agendashift and Right to Left. Clean Language is introduced in the session following, via the 15-minute FOTO exercise (also CC-BY-SA).



Agendashift: From the exciting intersection of Lean-Agile, Strategy, and Organisation Development, an engagement model fit for the 21st century

Links: SubscribeHome | Partners | Books |Resources | Events | Contact | Mike

Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts

Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter


 


 

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Published on December 04, 2019 06:08

November 29, 2019

Agendashift roundup, November 2019

In this edition: More new stuff; Tampa, London, Gurugram, Copenhagen, Malmö, and Oslo; Top posts


More new stuff!

November saw a couple of key announcements, and they’re related:



Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services
Announcing v7 of 15-minute FOTO

Impact! is a new 1-day workshop, a member of a growing family of outside-in strategy review workshops as outlined in chapter 5 of Right to Left. You can think of this one as covering the “outside” part of “outside in”, a way to get started in strategy not by focussing on existing capabilities (these come later in the full review) but on positioning with respect to customer needs.


Meanwhile, the latest update to our Clean Language-inspired coaching game 15-minute FOTO adds an introductory ‘Lite’ mode, which takes not just obstacles as input but an initial shortlist of outcomes too. For the Impact! workshop, the outcomes in question are product (or service) goals.


And there is more in the pipeline – read the next section carefully for clues

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Published on November 29, 2019 04:54

November 13, 2019

Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services

So here it is, the Who, What, Where, When, and Why of a new Agendashift workshop: Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services.


Who

Well… you of course! In one or more of the following roles:



As the sponsor of a strategy workshop for your product line or service (or perhaps your team, department, division, or whole organisation, but there’s more on this workshop’s scope, intent, and alternatives further down this post)
As a participant, anyone with a stake in the strategy for your product or service
As a practitioner, attending a public workshopready to practice, to learn, and be challenged
As an Agendashift partner , authorised to facilitate of what looks set to be the easiest of our workshops to run

What

From the blurb (there’s more there):


Impact! is a 1-day Agendashift workshop focussed on products and services. It is suitable for product teams, service delivery teams, managers, and expert practitioners. It covers:



Capturing business context
Hypotheses and experiments
Alternative/complementary expressions of user need
Thinking strategically about outcomes
Managing your portfolio of experiments – optimising and organising for learning
Experiment design with A3
And briefly, some implications for organisation design

Many of the concepts covered in the Impact! workshop are introduced in Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile, chapters 5 and 6. Reading the book is not a prerequisite, but if you enjoyed the book, you’ll love the workshop – and vice versa!


Coming as it does from the Agendashift stable, you can be sure that our needs-based and outcome-oriented philosophy shines through. The tools you’ll experience, among them Celebration-5W, 15-minute FOTO, Changeban, and Experiment A3 – all open source – aren’t about imposing cookie-cutter solutions on people but creating opportunities for them to participate in a collaborative exploration of the landscape of obstacles and outcomes, within which your key opportunities lie.


When & Where

We’re already doing Impact! workshops privately, and interest from other partners (Stockholm-based partner Teddy Zetterlund for example has two in the pipeline) has enabled us to iterate rapidly, refining the content and improving the overall experience. If you’d like to host one, get in touch, or check out the partner directory and find a partner near you.


The first two public outings of the Impact! workshop will be in February, in the US and the UK:



4th February, Tampa, FL, USA – the day before the first Open Leadership Symposium of 2020  (your ticket is part of a 1, 2, or 3-day bundle – you choose the bundle when you select your ticket and then the workshop on checkout)
14th February, London, UK

It’s no accident that we’re launching at an Open Leadership Network event. As I’ve been saying in the run-up to Berlin (November 19th with masterclasses either side; ping me for a chunky discount):


For the kind of engagement that sparks not just effort but collaboration, self organisation, and innovation, ‘generative’ beats ‘prescriptive’ hands down. Conversely, if you want to destroy those things, try imposition.


And the good news: It’s really not that hard! Sadly under-recognised by mainstream Agile but there are some great engagement models out there. Agendashift is mine I’m but proud to part of an #openleadership network that gathers multiple and complementary approaches together.


LinkedIn and Twitter


Why

For a year or more there have been two families of Agendashift workshop:



Transformation strategy workshops Core , Applied , and Advanced , Core and Advanced being suitable for public training workshops, Applied for internal use, focussed on the host/client organisation
Outside-in strategy review workshops, for which the material exists for use by partners but in a form suitable only for internal use

The first family is very much as described in Agendashift, the second in Right to Left chapter 5, “Outside in” – for a number of readers its most impactful chapter. See also Oslo-based partner Kjell Tore Guttormsen describe his positive experience facilitating it prior to Right to Left‘s publication.


We have now a very encouraging answer to questions posed in Agendashift: if we replaced or even removed the Lean-Agile content from Agendashift – the True North and the assessments in particular – would what’s left still be valuable? Can we do other things with the various tools? Yes to both! Very much so!


Partly to address the suitability of the outside-in strategy review workshop for public use (and also because its joint theme interests us greatly), I’ll be meeting partners Karl Scotland and Steven Mackenzie and guest contributor Mike Haber in London soon to plan a 2-day Wholehearted:OKR workshop. Meanwhile and very fortuitously, the opportunity to do a private 1-day workshop for a group of product consultants gave me the ideal head start, and the Impact! workshop is the result.


From time to time, transformation strategy workshops go in the direction of product strategy instead of their usual focus on ways of working. Similarly, I’ve already seen the new workshop go in the direction of business strategy, which is more the domain of the generic outside-in review. That’s the power of the generative approach at work and I don’t mind it at all, but still it’s good to be able to offer these choices explicitly at the time the workshop is organised. An easier sell, certainly!


Related posts

There will be caveats: Warming cautiously to OKR (September)
Visualising Agendashift: The why and how of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation  (June)
What kind of Organisational Development (OD)? (And a book recommendation)  (May)
Agendashift’s many extension points (2018)
An outside-in strategy review, Agendashift style (2018)
Engagement: more than a two-way street (2018)


Upcoming workshops – Berlin, Oslo, Malmö, and online

New dates for USA and UK coming soon!



13-14 November, Berlin, Germany:

2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
9-10 December, Oslo, Norway:

2-day Advanced Agendashift: Coaching & leading continuous transformation
11-12 December, Online – two 2h sessions on consecutive days:

Learning the language of outcomes (two 2h online sessions)
4th February, Tampa, FL, USA :

Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services
14th February, London, UK

Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services
11-12 March, Malmö, Sweden – Julia Wester & myself:

Advanced Agendashift: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
8-9 June, Oslo, Norway:

2-day Advanced Agendashift: Coaching & leading continuous transformation

[image error]



From the exciting intersection of Lean-Agile, Strategy, and Organisation Development, an engagement model fit for the 21st century!

Links: SubscribeHome | Partners | Books |Resources | Events | Contact | Mike

Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts

Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter

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Published on November 13, 2019 09:11

Announcing a brand new (but tested) workshop: Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services

So here it is, the Who, What, Where, When, and Why of a new Agendashift workshop: Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services.


Who

Well… you of course! In one or more of the following roles:



As the sponsor of a strategy workshop for your product line or service (or perhaps your team, department, division, or whole organisation, but there’s more on this workshop’s scope, intent, and alternatives further down this post)
As a participant, anyone with a stake in the strategy for your product or service
As a practitioner, attending a public workshopready to practice, to learn, and be challenged
As an Agendashift partner , authorised to facilitate of what looks set to be the easiest of our workshops to run

What

From the blurb (there’s more there):


Impact! is a 1-day Agendashift workshop focussed on products and services. It is suitable for product teams, service delivery teams, managers, and expert practitioners. It covers:



Capturing business context
Hypotheses and experiments
Alternative/complementary expressions of user need
Thinking strategically about outcomes
Managing your portfolio of experiments – optimising and organising for learning
Experiment design with A3
And briefly, some implications for organisation design

Many of the concepts covered in the Impact! workshop are introduced in Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile, chapters 5 and 6. Reading the book is not a prerequisite, but if you enjoyed the book, you’ll love the workshop – and vice versa!


Coming as it does from the Agendashift stable, you can be sure that our needs-based and outcome-oriented philosophy shines through. The tools you’ll experience, among them Celebration-5W, 15-minute FOTO, Changeban, and Experiment A3 – all open source – aren’t about imposing cookie-cutter solutions on people but creating opportunities for them to participate in a collaborative exploration of the landscape of obstacles and outcomes, within which your key opportunities lie.


When & Where

We’re already doing Impact! workshops privately, and interest from other partners (Stockholm-based partner Teddy Zetterlund for example has two in the pipeline) has enabled us to iterate rapidly, refining the content and improving the overall experience. If you’d like to host one, get in touch, or check out the partner directory and find a partner near you.


The first two public outings of the Impact! workshop will be in February, in the US and the UK:



4th February, Tampa, FL, USA – the day before the first Open Leadership Symposium of 2020  (your ticket is part of a 1, 2, or 3-day bundle – you choose the bundle when you select your ticket and then the workshop on checkout)
14th February, London, UK

It’s no accident that we’re launching at an Open Leadership Network event. As I’ve been saying in the run-up to Berlin (November 19th with masterclasses either side; ping me for a chunky discount):


For the kind of engagement that sparks not just effort but collaboration, self organisation, and innovation, ‘generative’ beats ‘prescriptive’ hands down. Conversely, if you want to destroy those things, try imposition.


And the good news: It’s really not that hard! Sadly under-recognised by mainstream Agile but there are some great engagement models out there. Agendashift is mine I’m but proud to part of an #openleadership network that gathers multiple and complementary approaches together.


LinkedIn and Twitter


Why

For a year or more there have been two families of Agendashift workshop:



Transformation strategy workshops Core , Applied , and Advanced , Core and Advanced being suitable for public training workshops, Applied for internal use, focussed on the host/client organisation
Outside-in strategy review workshops, for which the material exists for use by partners but in a form suitable only for internal use

The first family is very much as described in Agendashift, the second in Right to Left chapter 5, “Outside in” – for a number of readers its most impactful chapter. See also Oslo-based partner Kjell Tore Guttormsen describe his positive experience facilitating it prior to Right to Left‘s publication.


We have now a very encouraging answer to questions posed in Agendashift: if we replaced or even removed the Lean-Agile content from Agendashift – the True North and the assessments in particular – would what’s left still be valuable? Can we do other things with the various tools? Yes to both! Very much so!


Partly to address the suitability of the outside-in strategy review workshop for public use (and also because its joint theme interests us greatly), I’ll be meeting partners Karl Scotland and Steven Mackenzie and guest contributor Mike Haber in London soon to plan a 2-day Wholehearted:OKR workshop. Meanwhile and very fortuitously, the opportunity to do a private 1-day workshop for a group of product consultants gave me the ideal head start, and the Impact! workshop is the result.


From time to time, transformation strategy workshops go in the direction of product strategy instead of their usual focus on ways of working. Similarly, I’ve already seen the new workshop go in the direction of business strategy, which is more the domain of the generic outside-in review. That’s the power of the generative approach at work and I don’t mind it at all, but still it’s good to be able to offer these choices explicitly at the time the workshop is organised. An easier sell, certainly!


Related posts

There will be caveats: Warming cautiously to OKR (September)
Visualising Agendashift: The why and how of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation  (June)
What kind of Organisational Development (OD)? (And a book recommendation)  (May)
Agendashift’s many extension points (2018)
An outside-in strategy review, Agendashift style (2018)
Engagement: more than a two-way street (2018)


Upcoming workshops – Berlin, Oslo, Malmö, and online

New dates for USA and UK coming soon!



13-14 November, Berlin, Germany:

2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
9-10 December, Oslo, Norway:

2-day Advanced Agendashift: Coaching & leading continuous transformation
11-12 December, Online – two 2h sessions on consecutive days:

Learning the language of outcomes (two 2h online sessions)
4th February, Tampa, FL, USA :

Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services
14th February, London, UK

Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services
11-12 March, Malmö, Sweden – Julia Wester & myself:

Advanced Agendashift: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
8-9 June, Oslo, Norway:

2-day Advanced Agendashift: Coaching & leading continuous transformation

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From the exciting intersection of Lean-Agile, Strategy, and Organisation Development, an engagement model fit for the 21st century!

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Published on November 13, 2019 09:11

November 6, 2019

Announcing v7 of 15-minute FOTO

15-minute FOTO is our Clean Language-inspired coaching game, and version 7 of the facilitation deck is out of beta. On top of the usual minor improvements – fewer slides, better wording, that kind of thing – the big new thing is a new ‘Lite’ edition.


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To understand why we’ve wanted to make changes, consider what each participant is doing when they play the game for the first time:



Familiarising themselves with the Clean Language questions (from the cue card if it’s an in-room workshop, from the screen if it’s online)
Taking turns in the role of client, coach, scribe, or observer, participating in or supporting what can be an intense 1-on-1 coaching conversation
Worrying about the game’s objective, which to generate and capture outcomes

That’s a lot! Instead of doing this all at once, the Lite edition starts with a familiarisation exercise, turns the conversation into one for the table group as a whole, and the objective matters only after everyone has had a chance to get comfortable with it all.


If, as happens in many of our workshops, you plan to do 15-minute FOTO twice, you can start with the Lite edition and do the classic edition the second time round.


Spoiler alert

Another motivation for this new version is that it enables new strings of exercises for new workshops. I’ll be announcing the first of those very soon, perhaps as early as tomorrow.


Get the materials

Just ask here:



15-minute FOTO

You’ll find a helpful Youtube video there also.


When you subscribe, you’ll be sent a link to the 15-minute FOTO Dropbox folder and you can download materials (cue card and the deck) from there. Add that folder to your own Dropbox and you’ll get all updates automatically.


Get a taste online

There are two opportunities coming soon to experience 15-minute FOTO online:



One of my two sessions at the Clean Language community’s online OpenSpace event   Metaphorum 2019  on November 22nd will be on 15-minute FOTO, focussing mainly on the Lite version
Comprising two 2h sessions on December 11th and 12th, my next online workshop Learning the language of outcomes  will feature both editions

By the December 11th if not November 22nd, there will be a version 8 that explicitly supports online use (the classic edition already does). Consider that announced

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Published on November 06, 2019 06:33

October 31, 2019

Agendashift roundup, October 2019

In this edition: Berlin; Working at the intersection / a monster post on SAFe; Right to Left; Changeban, Featureban, and 15-minute FOTO; Upcoming workshops – Berlin, Oslo, Malmö, and online; Top posts


Berlin

I have a free day in Berlin today, arriving a day early to avoid travelling on what threatened to be Brexit day before a private workshop tomorrow. That workshop is actually the first of three November engagements in Berlin, with a 2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop and (through happy coincidence) the Open Leadership Symposium:



13-14 November, Berlin, Germany:

2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
18-20 December, Berlin, Germany:

The Open Leadership Symposium: Berlin 2019

I keep saying it and I will say it again:



The Berlin workshop consistently delivers – not just a full house and a great experience, but a reliable source of great feedback and new ideas. Thank you Leanovate not just for hosting but for participating
The inaugural Open Leadership Symposium in Boston last May was a key coming together of multiple communities and it launched a new one. I have high expectations of the Berlin event, which takes place on the 19th with a selection of masterclasses on the 18th & 20th. If you’re thinking of coming to the main event, ping me for a chunky discount code (big enough to make a real difference, so don’t miss out!).

Working at the intersection / a monster post on SAFe

This was just a quick picture posted to LinkedIn and Twitter, but it has struck a chord with many people and it has already established itself as a way to introduce both myself and the communities I participate in. You’ll see some of the language reflected on the Agendashift site, the partner programme page most especially.


Who/where we are on one slide: People working at the intersection of Lean-Agile, Strategy, and Organisation Development – bringing balance & perspective, focus on needs & outcomes, helping each other up their game in new areas


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That picture is a good scene-setter to a post that within 36 hours was my most-read post of the year:



What I really think about SAFe

Also doing well is a Kanban-related post:



From Reverse STATIK to a ‘Pathway’ for continuous transformation

And I can only apologise for this related tweet

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Published on October 31, 2019 01:02