Mike Burrows's Blog, page 28

The language of outcomes: 2. Framing obstacles

This is part 2 of a series looking at the language of outcomes and its lessons for leadership. If we’re keen to see collaboration, self-organisation, and innovation in our organisations, how should we conduct ourselves? What behaviours should we model?

Addressing the issues roughly in the order that they arise in our workshops, this post is one in a series to be released over the coming weeks:

Identifying the adaptive challenge
Framing obstacles (this post)
Generating outcomes (coming soon)
Organising outcomes
Between ends planning and means planning

As ever:

Subscribe to our mailing list, and whilst you won’t get every post as an email, you will get our monthly roundups and you won’t miss a thing, I promise!
Scroll to the end of this post for news of upcoming public workshops in which you can experience what I describe for yourself

Further to that last point, for Tampa and London (coming very soon), ping me for discount codes!

2. Identifying obstacles

Given all the talk of adaptive challenges and needs in the series opener, it seems that the language of outcomes is about more than just outcomes! Shorthand can be dangerous (more on that in a moment) and I should come clean: the “language of outcomes” is shorthand for “the language of outcome orientation: needs, obstacles, and outcomes”.

The logic that ties needs, obstacles, and outcomes together is fundamental – it explains why Agendashift exists and a little of how it works:

Most especially in the context of an adaptive challenge, the most legitimate basis for change isn’t a solution – untried in this particular context – but agreement on outcomes [1]
The most meaningful and motivating outcomes are those that involve meeting real needs
In due course, action will need to be addressed at removing, overcoming, or bypassing whatever obstacles stand in the way of meeting those needs and realising those outcomes. In the wholehearted organisation – the focus of our mission [2] – those obstacles are owned up to and addressed. But long before then, it only takes a moment to take a peek at what lies beyond them, thereby identifying yet more outcomes and continuing a generative process.

It’s “needs, obstacles, and outcomes” because that’s typically the order in which we identify them. It’s not “problems and solutions” because they’re both traps:

Solving problems and meeting needs aren’t the same thing – it’s way too easy to get sucked into solving problems without ever meeting a need
Similarly, as soon as implementing the solution becomes the driver, needs and outcomes fall by the wayside. In the context of an adaptive challenge, the implementation of a solution – a process framework being a prime example – becomes massive distraction to the organisation and a source of needless pain. Small wonder that most such solution-driven initiatives fail.

There’s no great magic to identifying obstacles. With the focus on an adaptive challenge, True North, ideal, or generative image [3], just ask:

What stops that?
What’s in the way of that?
What seems to be in the way of that?
What obstacles might be in the way of that? [4]

More sophisticated wordings might be easier to justify intellectually or look nicer on the workshop slides [5] (believe me, I’ve experimented with this a lot), but they can invite a level of abstraction and speculation that proves unhelpful only later. That’s a subtle problem, and it’s why experience has taken us in the direction of short and punchy. Happily though there’s an easy fix when we get it wrong: badly framed obstacles are easily reframed. Let’s see how.

The language of obstacles

In my first book (now more than 5 years old), I identified “lack of” language (the language of scarcity) as often betraying lazy thinking. Fast forwarding to Agendashift – in which we ask for obstacles at least once per workshop – here are some real examples of badly-framed obstacles:

“Lack of a knowledge management system” (I got this one in my very first workshop)
“Lack of the Agile mindset” (this one pops up quite frequently)
“Lack of people/money/resource” (if you’re a manager, you may have heard this one yourself)

Respectively, these “lack of” obstacles:

Prescribe a particular kind of solution, almost certainly excluding other options prematurely, and failing to identify a problem meanwhile
Use shorthand, that not only fail (again) to identify an actual problem, but that could easily be taken as judgemental, thereby excluding people
Identify only one side of an imbalance, implying one obvious but perhaps unavailable of kind of remedy whilst excluding others

The fix and this instalment’s leadership takeaway:

If you want see collaboration, self-organisation, and innovation, identify real issues, taking care to avoid language that needlessly excludes people or possibility

Guided by that principle and prompted by “How do you know that?”, those badly-framed obstacles might be replaced by these:

“People holding on to information” or “Information spreads too slowly”, preferring the latter, less judgemental form unless we have good reason to go with the former
One of any number of real obstacles:

“Working in functional silos/big batches/…”
“Waiting on external approvals/dependencies/…”
“Waiting too long for customer feedback”
“Glacial pace of improvement”
“Lack of experimentation” (yes, that’s a “lack of” but I might let this one pass)

“Teams overburdened, workload exceeding capacity”, or “Expectations running ahead of budget constraints”

Much better!

If we identify obstacles more than once (as we do in both the Discovery and Exploration sessions, for example), we repeat both the reframing exercise and the teaching point that goes with it. The “lack of” trap is so easy to fall into it’s well worth repeating – and it’s funnier the second time round!

Next: 3. Generating outcomes (coming soon)

Notes & references

[1] “Agree on outcomes” is Agendashift principle #2 – see agendashift.com/principles

[2] Our mission: Wholehearted (agendashift.com, CC-BY-SA licence)

[3] Visualising Agendashift: The why and how of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (June 2016)

[4] “What obstacles might in the way of X?” is the “cleanest” of those. And for pragmatic reasons too, definitely the right one to include on the cue card (below) for our Clean Language-inspired coaching game, 15-minute FOTO (agendashift.com, CC-BY-SA licence)

[image error]

[5] Workshop materials are available via the Agendashift partner programme, details at agendashift.com/about/become-a-partner. See also the Agendashift book, agendashift.com/books/agendashift.

Acknowledgements

I’m grateful for feedback on earlier drafts of this post from Teddy Zetterlund, Thorbjørn Sigberg, Richard Cornelius, and Kert Peterson.

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

Ping me for discount codes for Tampa and London!

See also our workshops and events pages. Tel Aviv (early June) to be added soon.

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
17-18-June, online – two 2-hour sessions on consecutive days:

Agendashift online: Learning the language of outcomes

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Published on January 21, 2020 06:41

The language of outcomes: 1. Identifying the adaptive challenge

Yes, I’m making good on a promise made in last week’s post, Making it official: Agendashift, the wholehearted engagement model, expanding on the language of outcomes and its lessons for leadership. For context, here’s the crucial bit of text in question:

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As both the destination and the fuel for our journeys of change and transformation, outcomes are absolutely fundamental to Agendashift. If there’s a basis for change more legitimate and motivating than authentic agreement on outcomes, we’d like to see it!

We have used that initial phrase – “the language of outcomes” – for much of the time that Agendashift has existed. However, our understanding of what it actually means continues to evolve. A couple of recent developments have brought it into sharper focus:

With community participation and the willing support of workshop participants, we’ve conducted some deliberate experiments with wording and framing in our existing workshop material, noting not just the immediate impact, but the impact on later exercises downstream – how people respond to the exercises and the quality of the work they produce
The design of two new workshops – Impact! (Tampa and London very soon) and Wholehearted:OKR (Oslo and London) – interesting as much for the material they exclude as for what they contain, challenging and perhaps redefining what should be regarded as core

Roughly in the sequence that they arise in our workshops, I’ve organised aspects of that sharper understanding under 5 headings:

Identifying the adaptive challenge (this post)
Framing obstacles (coming soon)
Generating outcomes
Organising outcomes
Between ends planning and means planning

Early drafts of this post with content for all 5 headings got rather long, so I’ll be releasing it as a series over the next few weeks. Subscribe to our mailing list, and whilst you won’t get every post as an email, you will get our monthly roundups and you won’t miss a thing, I promise! I’ll link to the later posts as they’re released.

As ever, scroll to the end of this post for news of upcoming public workshops in which you can experience what I describe. For Tampa and London (coming very soon), ping me for discount codes!

1. Identifying the adaptive challenge

You won’t find the term adaptive challenge in the Agendashift book [1] but a 2nd edition would certainly change that! Informally, the Organisation Development (OD) literature – see for example Bushe [2] – describes adaptive challenges as those for which it’s hard even to define what the problem is, require involvement from a wide range of stakeholders, tend to throw up new problems of their own, and so on. Most of us will have seen them: the kind of challenge which requires at least the level of sponsor commitment and financial backing of a high profile project, but for which linear project approaches soon reveal themselves to be spectacularly ill-suited.

Stakeholder agreement on the detail of the challenge may be hard to impossible to obtain, but broad-brush identification of shared objectives needn’t be. You can just ask; the trick is to ask in such a way that the shared destination is articulated without fixating prematurely on solutions (remember: a rollout project isn’t going to work here).

Agendashift’s time travelling kickoff / context-setting exercise Celebration-5W [3] does this laterally, asking for the Who, What, When, Where, and Why of a future celebration (of meeting the challenge spectacularly well), deliberately avoiding the How.

Another approach is to provide, harvest, or construct something that’s desirable enough to be worth pursuing even if it might never be fully attained – see for example Agendashift’s Lean-Agile-inspired True North statement [4]. Interestingly, the new workshops don’t use the provided True North. In its place, more time travel, with a series of outside-in strategy review questions [5] as described in chapter 5 of Right to Left [6]. Each question is designed to help identify an ideal (or “ideal best”) [7]; they begin with this one, the first of five:

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

That question is open to some serious unpacking (I sometimes joke that this question is a workshop in its own right), but again, you can just ask, taking care to ask in a perspective-shifting way that invites meaningful customer-relevant, and business-relevant outcomes as the answer. As it happens, that turns out to be good facilitation advice for Celebration-5W too. If what you’re celebrating won’t be meaningful to customers and other business stakeholders, think again. For a roomful of Agile coaches (a not untypical group in my case), do not, and I repeat, DO NOT celebrate your Agile transformation! Celebrate the first customer successfully served, the millionth registration, the billionth pound in turnover – real examples all – something externally visible and truly challenging in its own right that your transformation will enable or accelerate.

Shortly we’ll have a more definitive test for what makes a good answer, but first let’s distill some advice about asking questions:

Without prescribing what the answer should be, ask questions that invite answers meaningful to the most stakeholders, exploring those answers just enough to be sure that everyone involved knows both whose needs they’ll be meeting and how they’ll be able to confirm that they’re being met [8, 9]. If the How can be deferred, don’t ask for it!

This isn’t just workshop facilitation advice, but advice to coaches and leaders. And that is of course what this language of outcomes thing is all about. If we’re keen to see collaboration, self-organisation, and innovation (three hallmarks of the modern organisation that I bundle together like this frequently), how should leaders conduct ourselves? What behaviours should they model?

Next: 2. Framing obstacles (coming soon)

References

[1] Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation, Mike Burrows (New Generation Publishing, 2018)

[2] The Dynamics of Generative Change, Gervase Bushe (Independently published, 2019)

[3] Celebration-5W (agendashift.com, CC-BY-SA licence)

[4] True North (agendashift.com, CC-BY-SA licence)

[5] Outside-in Strategy Review (OI-SR) template (agendashift.com, CC-BY-SA licence)

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

[7] It’s mashup time: Adaptive challenges accomplished at their ideal best (December 2019)

[8] Better user stories start with authentic situations of need (October 2016)

[9] My handy, referenceable Definition of Done (May 2018) and agendashift.com/done, the latter CC-BY-SA

Acknowledgements

I’m grateful for feedback on earlier drafts of this post from Teddy Zetterlund, Thorbjørn Sigberg, Richard Cornelius, and Kert Peterson.

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

Ping me for discount codes for Tampa and London!

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
17-18-June, online – two 2-hour sessions on consecutive days:

Agendashift online: Learning the language of outcomes

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on January 16, 2020 02:54

Making it official: Agendashift, the wholehearted engagement model

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

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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 Agendashift – good 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 partner – and 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

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on January 06, 2020 07:50

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

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

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on December 16, 2019 08:35

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

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Published on December 09, 2019 03:43

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).

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Published on December 04, 2019 06:08

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

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 workshop, ready 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]

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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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 workshop, ready 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]