Mike Burrows's Blog, page 30
August 29, 2019
Agendashift roundup, Right to Left edition
In this edition: Right to Left; Gearing up for the autumn; Top posts
Right to Left
The title says it all:
It’s out! Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile
Specifically, it’s out in print and Kindle; epub format is on its way (I’ve seen it, so now it’s just a question of distribution). I get asked about doing it as an audiobook, and whilst I’m certainly considering it and wrote it with that possibility in mind, the answer for now is not to wait for it.
Launching in mid August might not have been the smartest thing to do – it was an act of impatience, having failed to launch in June as first hoped. That said, the feedback so far has been great – a common theme being that people are already buying multiple copies! As per my original concept for the book, it’s “a book you’ll give your manager and hope they’ll give to theirs”. So be like Paul (below) and buy three – you’ll need your own copy of course! And I’ll keep saying it: do please leave a bookstore review – you’ve no idea how much they help.
With Mathias Tölken I’ve recorded a series of short videos that hopefully I’ll be able to include in a series of follow-up posts to this one:
A week since publication, Right to Left in five tweets .
Meanwhile, three longer podcast interviews in quick succession! Here:
Agile on the Edge with Maurice (Mo) Hagar: Mike Burrows: Right to Left
A Geek Leader with John Rouda: AGL 117: From Right to Left with Mike Burrows
Agile Atelier with Rahul Bhattacharya: Episode 12: The right terminologies for Agile with Mike Burrows
Last but definitely not least, for this InfoQ article I am interviewed by Ben Linders:
Q&A on the Book Right to Left: The Digital Leader’s Guide to Lean and Agile
Gearing up for the autumn
Not that I’m wishing for summer to be over, but on top of all the Right to Left excitement I have been getting ready for a busy season of public Agendashift workshops. Benefiting all supported workshop formats is this visual language for explaining how the various exercises fit together:
Agendashift in 12 icons
Thank you Steven Mackenzie, Mike Haber, and Teddy Zetterlund for your help on this one.
The workshops themselves kick off soon but there are still places. Early bird for London expires very soon, August 31st. Details on Stockholm, Athens, London, Istanbul, Berlin, and online workshops:
9-10 September, Stockholm, Sweden (myself and Kjell Tore Guttormsen ):
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
17-18 September, Athens, Greece (myself and Nikos Batsios ):
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
3-4 October, London, UK:
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
15-16 October, online, two 2-hour sessions, mornings UK time:
Agendashift online: Learning the language of outcomes
26th October (changed from the 23rd), Istanbul, Turkey:
1-day Core Agendashift workshop: Facilitating outcome-oriented change
13-14 November, Berlin, Germany:
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
5-6 December, online, two 2-hour sessions, afternoons UK time:
Agendashift online: Learning the language of outcomes
Top posts
It’s out! Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile
Agendashift in 12 icons
Visualising Agendashift: The why and how of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (June)
A week since publication, Right to Left in five tweets
A question among the good luck emails
Leading change in the 21st century? You need a 21st century engagement model:
Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Subscribe| Home | Partners | Books |Resources | Events | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
August 22, 2019
A week since publication, Right to Left in five tweets
Six if you count the introductory tweet; it’s pinned to my personal Twitter profile (@asplake) and you can easily view the thread from there. You are very welcome to share any/all of them (and/or this post)! And apologies for the odd typo; I can’t go back and fix them.
Starting next month I’ll expand on each of the five in separate posts, with – fingers crossed – a short video interview for each. I’ll maintain this post as an index to the series, so watch this space!
In 5 tweets, The gist of Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile
—
agendashift.com/right-to-left… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Mike Burrows (@asplake) August 19, 2019
@Right2LeftGuide 1/5. Success in digital means integrating delivery, development, and strategy – continuously ident… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
—
Mike Burrows (@asplake) August 19, 2019
@Right2LeftGuide 2/5. In Lean-Agile we celebrate #Lean & #Agile both separately and together. To Lean's "strategic… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
—
Mike Burrows (@asplake) August 19, 2019
@Right2LeftGuide 3/5. There's good in frameworks, but blindly rolling out a process framework is more a recipe for… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
—
Mike Burrows (@asplake) August 19, 2019
@Right2LeftGuide @agendashift 4/5. #Agile isn't dead, but it is facing the wrong way. Starting "from the left" with… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
—
Mike Burrows (@asplake) August 19, 2019
@Right2LeftGuide @agendashift 5/5. #Leadership isn't dead either. The need to clearly & strategically identify, art… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
—
Mike Burrows (@asplake) August 19, 2019
As for the book itself, you’ll find it here:
Amazon UK (amazon.co.uk) and Amazon US (amazon.com)
Waterstones (waterstones.com)
Barnes & Noble (barnesandnoble.com)
Or search “Right to Left Mike Burrows” at your favourite online bookstore
Ignore estimated shipping dates for the print edition – they’re ludicrously (and perhaps even mischievously) pessimistic. This being the 21st century, it is printed on demand and it ships quickly.
And when you’ve read it, do please leave an online review – I can’t stress enough how much it helps. Thank you!
Autumn workshops
– Stockholm, Athens, London, Istanbul, Berlin, and online
9-10 September, Stockholm, Sweden (myself and Kjell Tore Guttormsen ):
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
17-18 September, Athens, Greece (myself and Nikos Batsios ):
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
3-4 October, London, UK:
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
15-16 October, online, two 2-hour sessions, mornings UK time:
Agendashift online: Learning the language of outcomes
26th October (changed from the 23rd), Istanbul, Turkey:
1-day Core Agendashift workshop: Facilitating outcome-oriented change
13-14 November, Berlin, Germany:
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
5-6 December, online, two 2-hour sessions, afternoons UK time:
Agendashift online: Learning the language of outcomes
Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | Partners | Books |Resources | Events | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
August 15, 2019
It’s out! Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile
Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile is released out today in both print and Kindle editions, with other e-book formats to follow. Find it here:
Amazon UK (amazon.co.uk) and Amazon US (amazon.com), disregarding Amazon’s incorrect estimated shipping dates
Waterstones (waterstones.com)
Barnes & Noble (barnesandnoble.com)
Or search “Right to Left Mike Burrows” at your favourite online bookstore
And when you’ve read it, do please leave a review – it really helps.
Whoop – I was lucky enough to read Mike’s new book as it formed. It somehow manages to be a crisp, articulate read with depth and reflection. Mike has written an essential read for anyone interested in people-centric, pragmatic, outcome-based change. I’m very happy to recommend this and excited for Mike!
Angie Main (linkedin.com), Change & Organisational Development Lead, UK
A third book, and so soon after the last one! Why this one, and why should I read it?
Most people reading this announcement ve rcould easily describe themselves a digital leader of some kind, whether that’s understood in some corporate sense or perhaps as a practitioner of Agile, a movement whose co-evolution with the rise of digital technology is no accident. Whichever way you respond to the term, this book is for you.
Both audiences – and yes, there’s a challenge there – deserve a book that does all of these things:
Speaks with empathy and from experience to anyone who is called to digital leadership or might have it thrust upon them
Speaks respectfully, insightfully, and at times firmly to Lean, Agile, and its other key sources and communities – avoiding lazy dogma and tribalism, and not excusing failures and excesses either
Represents a clear departure from 20th century thinking, not falling into the trap of trying to explain Agile and Lean-Agile in the terms of past models
To give a sense of what makes this book different, let me present two representative elements: the Right to Left metaphor, and my kind of Agile. In place of a glossary, a selection of short and characteristic extracts such as the two below are collected in Appendix B, My kind of…
Right to Left:
A whole-process focus on needs and outcomes … Putting outcomes before process, ends before means, vision before detail, “why” before “what”, “what” before “how”, and so on. It can also mean considering outputs before inputs, but give me outcomes over outputs, every time.
Simultaneously visualising this and echoing Agile’s manifesto, what if Agile meant putting the things on the right (needs met, outcomes realised) ahead of everything to their left (process, tools, practices, and so on)? Happily, an explicitly outcome-oriented Agile is straightforward enough to describe, and it makes me wonder why it is not done more often. Perhaps Right to Left will change that!
Agile (short version):
People collaborating over the rapid evolution of working software that is already beginning to meet needs
Whether or not you get the references, if you get that definition, you will love this book. If you don’t get it, you need to read it.
Across chapters 1-4, Right to Left is both the metaphor by which the fundamentals are (re-)introduced and the fresh perspective from which the Lean-Agile landscape is surveyed. The last two chapters, 5. Outside in and 6. Upside down, take complementary perspectives on issues of organisation, change, governance, strategy, and leadership, drawing on Viable System Model (VSM), Servant Leadership, Sociocracy (aka Dynamic Governance), and of course Agendashift for inspiration. In case you’re wondering why I reference models from outside the Lean-Agile mainstream, let it be said for now that process frameworks, the Agile practitioner’s stock-in-trade, will never be enough. For a more considered treatment of frameworks than that, you’ll have to read the book!
Readers of my previous books will have some sense of Right to Left‘s humane and optimistic philosophy already. My first, Kanban from the Inside (2014), was organised around values and it’s only a short step from values to outcomes. Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2018) describes a 21st century approach to change; for reasons of focus it leaves behind a Right to Left-shaped hole that I knew would be exciting to fill. If you’ve read neither of those, start instead with my latest and see where your interest takes you – I give full credit to my sources and provide an extensive recommended reading list.
For further book-related news and conversation, follow us on Twitter, join the #right-to-left channel in the Agendashift Slack, and check out blog posts tagged right-to-left. Via the Right to Left page on agendashift.com you can send book-related questions direct to my email inbox (or simply wish me luck!) and subscribe to the mailing list.
Enjoy!
Mike
August 15th 2019: Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile is released today in both print and Kindle editions, with other e-book formats to follow. Find it here:
Amazon UK (amazon.co.uk) and Amazon US (amazon.com)
Waterstones (waterstones.com)
Barnes & Noble (barnesandnoble.com)
Or search “Right to Left Mike Burrows” at your favourite online bookstore
Agendashift founder Mike Burrows is known to the Agile and Lean-Agile communities as the author of Kanban from the Inside (2014) and Agendashift (2018), the creator of the Featureban and Changeban simulation games, a keynote speaker at conferences around the world, and as a consultant, coach, and trainer. His new book Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile is published August 15th 2019.
Right to Left‘s foreword is by John Buck, Director at GovernanceAlive LLC (MD, USA), co-author with Sharon Villenes of We the people: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy (2nd Ed. 2019) and co-author with Jutta Eckstein of Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy: Survive & Thrive on Disruption (2018).
Paperback: 176 pages
Publisher: New Generation Publishing (15 Aug. 2019)
ISBN-10: 1789555310
ISBN-13: 978-1789555318
August 8, 2019
A question among the good luck emails
There’s a contact button on the landing page for Right to Left, and through it I got this question which I have permission to reproduce:
Keep up the good work, and btw how do you use the Kanban Method these days, after your current progression?
My reply (verbatim):
In Right to Left you’ll see Kanban as just one of a set of complementary patterns in the Lean-Agile space (none of them more important than the others), and a more general approach to organisation development and the leadership that goes with that.
In my own work, Kanban is still in the mix but I’m very definitely needs & outcomes first, not solutions/framework first. STATIK tries to do a bit of that* but it does rather presuppose the answer! I prefer Reverse STATIK anyway, and my very occasional Kanban training uses that. The principles and practices are abstracted in the values, and they live on through the Agendashift delivery assessment (a conversation-starter, not a checklist of practices).
*To be fair, it does this quite valiantly and self-consistently compared with peer frameworks, but my comment stands.
And a PS, sent moments later:
One thing to add: this is not to diminish anyone’s work on Kanban (my own included) or any other framework. Testing boundaries is learning. But it’s also healthy to draw back a bit and broaden one’s horizons from time to time. And integration is also learning.
Some links to help with decoding the above (I knew my correspondent to be familiar with most of them):
Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean And Agile (August 15th, a week from today!)
Kanban from the Inside (2014, my first book, based around the nine values of my model for Kanban, my own case study, a good description of STATIK, and references to other frameworks and bodies of knowledge)
Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2018, my second, making what I do these days more easily transferable to others)
STATIK, Kanban’s hidden gem (2014, the acronym coined)
Introducing the pathway edition (2016, Agendashift support for Reverse STATIK)
Introducing Kanban through its values (2013, the career-changing blog post)
Resources: Agendashift Assessments
Autumn workshops
– Stockholm, Athens, London, Istanbul, Berlin, and online
9-10 September, Stockholm, Sweden (myself and Kjell Tore Guttormsen ):
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
17-18 September, Athens, Greece (myself and Nikos Batsios ):
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
3-4 October, London, UK:
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
15-16 October, online, two 2-hours sessions, mornings UK time:
Agendashift online: Learning the language of outcomes
26th October (changed from the 23rd), Istanbul, Turkey:
1-day Core Agendashift workshop: Facilitating outcome-oriented change
13-14 November, Berlin, Germany:
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
5-6 December, online, two 2-hours sessions, afternoons UK time:
Agendashift online: Learning the language of outcomes
Leading change in the 21st century? You need a 21st century engagement model:
Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | Partners | Books |Resources | Events | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
August 5, 2019
Agendashift in 12 icons
Ten days until the big one – Right to Left comes out on the 15th – but still time to squeeze in something Agendashift-related…
Count carefully! Agendashift in 12 icons:
[image error] [image error] [image error] [image error]
They have a new section on the Agendashift home page and a dedicated page at agendashift.com/icons, both with links to related resources.
To see them in a bit more context, check out these workshop-related pages:
The updated generic description of the Advanced Agendashift workshop
The booking page for the London workshop (3-4 October) * uses all of them
Showing just the first two rows – strings, if you like – the booking pages for two new online workshops, 15-16 October and 5-6 December, morning and afternoon UK time respectively for maximum timezone coverage, two 2-hour sessions each
Other opportunities to experience all of this for yourself this autumn: Stockholm (9-10 September), Athens (17-18 September), Istanbul (26th October), and Berlin (13-14 November).
*The early bird discount for the London workshop expires at the end of this month so grab it while you can!
Credits:
Idea: this was one of several ideas discussed at the last Berlin workshop (writeup here , though this particular idea isn’t mentioned)
Produced in collaboration with Steven Mackenzie with the encouragement of Mike Haber , whose Celebration-5W template design is reflected in its icon
I appreciate also Teddy Zetterlund ‘s input on naming of items in the third and fourth rows – I’m pleased how options emerges more clearly as a theme, with Mapping (the fourth row) bringing about the shift in perspective
Inspiration: Liberating Structures (www.liberatingstructures.com) and The Noun Project (thenounproject.com)
And as you’d expect, Creative Commons. See the icons page for details.
Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | Partners | Books |Resources | Events | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
July 30, 2019
Agendashift roundup, July 2019
It’s the summer, so I’ll keep this short. In this edition: Right to Left comes out August 15th; Updates to open source (Creative Commons) resources; Autumn workshops – Stockholm, Athens, London, Istanbul, Berlin, and online; Top posts
Right to Left comes out August 15th
This being my third time you’d think I’d know better by now, but getting a book out takes longer than expected! Anyway, I’m thrilled to announce that Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile comes out on August 15th.
The print edition is actually available for preorder on Amazon now, the Kindle edition soon. Naturally I’ll have more to say around launch date. Keep an eye out for interviews & stuff too.
Updates to open source (Creative Commons) resources
Some updates not quite big enough for separate announcements:
15-minute FOTO has has some slides specific to online and in-room use
Aleksei Pimenov has translated both Featureban 3.0 and Changeban into Russian
into
Massimo Sarti has translated Featureban 3.0 into Italian (having previously contributed a translation of an older version of Changeban)
Very minor tweaks to the Celebration-5W deck
Slack channels #cleanlanguage, #featureban, #changeban, and #workshops respectively. More resources here.
Autumn workshops
– Stockholm, Athens, London, Istanbul, Berlin, and online
9-10 September, Stockholm, Sweden (myself and Kjell Tore Guttormsen ):
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
17-18 September, Athens, Greece (myself and Nikos Batsios ):
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
3-4 October, London, UK:
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
26th October (changed from the 23rd), Istanbul, Turkey:
1-day Core Agendashift workshop: Facilitating outcome-oriented change
13-14 November, Berlin, Germany:
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
I’ll be adding a couple of online workshops also, likely the during the week of October 14th (two consecutive UK afternoons, two hours each) and the first week of December (UK mornings). If you have preference for days, let me know soon.
Top posts
Visualising Agendashift: The why and how of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (June)
What scales up should scale down (July)
How Agendashift scales (July)
At last! Featureban 3.0 and Changeban 1.2 (June)
What kind of Organisational Development (OD)? (And a book recommendation) (May)
Most recently this month:
Making assessments more visible
Leading change in the 21st century? You need a 21st century engagement model:
Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | Partners | Books |Resources | Events | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
July 23, 2019
Making assessments more visible
Summer means programming, still a passion 
July 10, 2019
What scales up should scale down
This is turning into a series! You may wish to read these first:
Visualising Agendashift: The why and how of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (in just days the third most popular post this year)
How Agendashift scales
Here’s a super-quick variation on Agendashift’s Discovery and Exploration sessions. First I’ll describe it, and then explain how it differs from the by-the-book version.
10-minute Discovery
Let me quickly explain how we kick this off – I’m asking the same of everyone I’m meeting today:
First, just a little about yourself – your role, what you’re responsible for, and so on.
Then, for a multi-month timescale of your choosing, tell me what outstanding success would look like – describing something truly celebration-worthy if you can
Finally, what obstacles are in the way of that?And do you mind if I take notes?
I ask all of the above in one go, and give the interviewee the space to answer, lightly guided as necessary. 10 minutes max!
50-minute (or less) Exploration
Now we go to the assessment, which typically (although not always) has been completed by my interviewee in advance. We begin with a quick review of their overall and per-category score distributions (some reassuring noises may be required here; these low scores are very common):
[image error]
With this alternative view it may be easier to infer some kind of narrative:
[image error]
Collaboration and transparency at the top – evidence perhaps of some Agile working
Seeing flow and balance scoring close together would come as no surprise to any student of Lean or Kanban
To the trained eye of our machine learning model, the score for leadership looks surprisingly low relative to everything else (hence the amber colouring)
I tell them that sadly, a low score for customer focus is very common (something that 20 years of Agile has failed to fix)
We spend no more than a few minutes on the category-level summaries. We skim or skip over most of the report (more on these parts later) and land here on the ‘starred’ items. Out of the 43 prompts of the full assessment, these have been prioritised for further discussion:
[image error]
For each of those prompts in turn, these questions are asked (one at a time this time):
What would it be like if this was working at its best for you?
What obstacles are in the way of that?
What would you like to have happen?
Then what happens?
etc
In well under an hour in most cases, the meeting is concluded. I write up my notes and include them in a thank you email. Done!
What just happened? What’s different?
Let’s compare that to a more typical Discovery/Exploration, done workshop style. First, Discovery:
Celebration-5W – normally done in table groups and taking (say) 40 minutes to introduce, do, and debrief – is condensed into a question (in fact one part of a multi-part question): “Then, for a multi-month timescale of your choosing, tell me what outstanding success would look like – something truly celebration-worthy”
We skip True North and jump straight to obstacles, still expecting that many of the obstacles heard will relate to ways of working and other organisational issues
No 15-minute FOTO (with participants ‘coaching’ each other, generating outcomes); if there’s any outcome generation at all, it is cursory at best
No time spent organising outcomes (no ‘Plan on a page’); if they’re generated at all they just get recorded in my notes
Then Exploration:
At best, we skim over most of the debrief slides: strengths, weaknesses, areas of high and low consensus
No group-wise prioritisation of prompts or their respective obstacles
Again, no 15-minute FOTO ; it’s me asking the questions (and I’m free to use a wider palette of questions with perhaps some cleanish freestyling)
Again, no time spent organising outcomes (no Mapping); they just get recorded in my notes
The big difference though isn’t the stripped-down meeting design. It’s that instead of working with several people together workshop-wise, I’m spending an hour or so at a time with a succession of people on a one-to-one basis. Instead of acting as facilitator, I’m the roving consultant (albeit a “clean” one). And instead of participants collaborating with each other, they’re my interviewees.
Naturally, there’s a tradeoff. Less time is required from participants, and for many, that’s welcome. Unfortunately, it also means little (if any) time spent facilitating agreement on outcomes (principle #2). If I’m able to report back to my sponsors a coherent picture thanks to the similarity of interview results, this omission might be fixable. That’s a big if though; what seems the most efficient might not be the most effective in the end!
Upcoming public Agendashift workshops
– online, Stockholm, Athens, London, Istanbul, Berlin
16-17 July, Online – two 2h sessions on consecutive days:
Learning the language of outcomes (two 2h online sessions)
9-10 September, Stockholm, Sweden (myself and Kjell Tore Guttormsen ):
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
17-18 September, Athens, Greece (myself and Nikos Batsios ):
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
3-4 October, London, UK:
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
26th October (changed from the 23rd), Istanbul, Turkey:
1-day Core Agendashift workshop: Facilitating outcome-oriented change
13-14 November, Berlin, Germany:
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
Leading change in the 21st century? You need a 21st century engagement model:
Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | Partners | Books |Resources | Events | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
July 3, 2019
How Agendashift scales
Last week’s post Visualising Agendashift: The why and how of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation is already in the top 3 for 2019. Clearly it resonates! I will build on that post now by enumerating some the ways in which Agendashift scales – not by becoming bigger, heavier, more layered, or more bureaucratic, but by fitting its context.
The bottom line: Agendashift scales because it is scale-free (not an oxymoron, but using the technical term), evidenced by a fractal quality inside it, similar patterns occurring naturally at different scales.
First, there are some initial high level decisions to be made about scale:
The initial organisational scope of the exercise (we find that it is well worth making this explicit)
Who is invited to participate in workshops (and how that invitation should be given)
Who is invited to participate in the pre-workshop assessment (at a minimum, this is the workshop participants for whom it is set as prework, but it is often widened)
Any specific organisational themes that should mentioned in either invitation
Often, the exercise is centred on a leadership team of some kind, making the above decisions quite easy to make. However, I do make two recommendations:
At least three levels of seniority should participate – not to make a virtue of hierarchy but allowing it to be bypassed for the sake of interesting and authentic conversations
It’s good to get wide coverage in the assessment; potentially the whole business function and beyond, or some representative sample thereof
There are more choices about workshop design that we could make here, but usually they’re better left until later exercises and we’ll put them to one side for a moment.
In the workshop itself, scale is everywhere:
In the warm-up exercise Celebration-5W , different table groups might generate anything from an internal technical achievement for a small team to things like “One billion pounds in turnover” or “Our millionth registration” (both of these are actual examples). I recall one team coming up with a new product idea!
After True North (in Discovery) and the assessment debrief (in Exploration), obstacles can range from everyday niggles to fundamental misalignments and dysfunctions.
For any given obstacle, the outcomes generated in 15-minute FOTO can range from short-term quick wins beyond even long-term goals through to enduring values. Surprisingly often, the entire range is covered in the course of a conversation that lasts only a few minutes.
The Mapping exercises expose different kinds of structure in the naturally coherent (by construction) but still fragmentary output of the preceding exercises.
In Elaboration, we bring focus where the range of options is high, looking up for the big payoff and down for opportunities for rapid learning and early value.
In Operation, we raise awareness of the connection between everyday choices and bigger-picture organisation design
Discovery and Exploration both feature our Clean Language-inspired coaching game 15-minute FOTO. At first glance it might seem redundant but the repetition of the same tool in different settings demonstrates the utility, repeatability, and scale-independence and of the pattern (for that is what it is). Regardless of scale, you can:
Reflect on the promise of the challenge in question
Identify and (briefly) clarify the obstacles currently in the way of a successful conclusion to that challenge
Rapidly explore the landscape of outcomes to be found when those obstacles are overcome, bypassed, or ignored
[image error]That might sound obvious, but for people used to the experience of conversations that start with solutions already decided, it’s both liberating and highly illuminating.
The workshop designer seeds this process with challenges that have some compelling promise, made all the more compelling by their avoidance of prescription. The off-the-shelf workshop design provides these in the form of the True North and the assessment prompts. These have been tested and refined through repeated use and I would recommend sticking to them initially (advice that may evolve as we gain more customisation experience). However, subsequent events may make use of harvested content, with the potential to make any broader ‘scale out’ excitingly fractal.
There’s a balance to be struck between focussing on new kinds of conversation (clean, outcome-oriented), and on new conversations (the follow-through on specific, newly-articulated outcomes). There’s win on both sides so perhaps I worry too much about whether I get the balance right, but why not have it both ways? Those new kinds of conversations re-seeded by those harvested outcomes. Now we’re talking!
___________
While we’re here, check out these opportunities to experience this for yourself in a public setting (for private settings reach out to me or your friendly neighbourhood partner). One of them is less than two weeks away:
16-17 July, Online – two 2h sessions on consecutive days:
Learning the language of outcomes (two 2h online sessions)
9-10 September, Stockholm, Sweden (myself and Kjell Tore Guttormsen ):
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
17-18 September, Athens, Greece (myself and Nikos Batsios ):
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
3-4 October, London, UK:
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
26th October (changed from the 23rd), Istanbul, Turkey:
1-day Core Agendashift workshop: Facilitating outcome-oriented change
13-14 November, Berlin, Germany:
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
Leading change in the 21st century? You need a 21st century engagement model:
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June 28, 2019
Agendashift roundup, June 2019
In this edition: Visualising Agendashift; Online workshops; Featureban & Changeban; Right to Left (and Wholehearted); Upcoming workshops; Top posts
Visualising Agendashift
I’m rather chuffed that after only three days, Tuesday’s post is already the most read this month. I think it’s my best explanation of Agendashift yet! It is certainly the most visual, being based on the slides for a talk I gave at the Agile in Covent Garden meetup in London last week.
Read it here:
Visualising Agendashift: The why and how of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation
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Online workshops
One way to experience for yourself what’s described in that post is to participate in a public workshop. I’ve already announced an autumn programme of immersive, in-room workshops (see Upcoming workshops below) but what’s new is the chance to do it online*. Furthermore, we’re partnering with the Open Leadership Network** to offer this as certified training for the first time.
The first of these was held this week; the next one will be in just over two weeks’ time and there are places still available:
16-17 July, Online – two 2h sessions on consecutive days:
Learning the language of outcomes (two 2h online sessions)
*Some partners are doing Agendashift online with their clients already and we of course compare notes. This week I’ve done a quick debrief of my experience to the #workshops channel in Slack.
**It was the Open Leadership Network that brought me to Boston last month. For a reminder of why I think this new expression of Open is significant, read my pre-Boston post Why the Open Leadership Symposium is a big deal.
Featureban & Changeban
The other big news for June was the long-promised release of Featureban 3.0 and alongside it some updates to Changeban. They now live under a shared Dropbox folder so that subscribers always have access to the latest versions. All completely free of course – along with many of our other resources, they’re published under a Creative Commons license. Read the announcement here:
At last! Featureban 3.0 and Changeban 1.2
Right to Left (and Wholehearted)
Frustratingly, what should have been the biggest news of all for June will happen instead in July. My third book Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile has taken a bit longer to go to print than anticipated, but it’s nearly there now.
Agendashift partner, collaborator, and book reviewer extraordinaire Steven Mackenzie has been running meanwhile with the idea of the wholehearted organisation, something you may remember that I blogged about during the writing of the book. Naturally, I’m very glad to have sparked something! Here’s Steven:
Is your organisation at war with itself? (linkedin.com)
When Right to Left comes out you’ll find the referenced passage in chapter 5 (of 6).
Upcoming workshops
(Online, Stockholm, Athens, London, Istanbul, Berlin)
16-17 July, Online – two 2h sessions on consecutive days:
Learning the language of outcomes (two 2h online sessions)
9-10 September, Stockholm, Sweden (myself and Kjell Tore Guttormsen ):
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
17-18 September, Athens, Greece (myself and Nikos Batsios ):
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
3-4 October, London, UK:
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
26th October (changed from the 23rd), Istanbul, Turkey:
1-day Core Agendashift workshop: Facilitating outcome-oriented change
13-14 November, Berlin, Germany:
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
I must also mention the conferences whose support makes two of these workshops possible:
19-20 September, Athens, Greece:
Agile Summit Greece
24 October, Istanbul, Turkey:
Agile Turkey Summit
For the Istanbul conference I have a discount code for 10% off the Super Early Bird price (so be quick I guess!); ping me if interested.
Top posts
Visualising Agendashift: The why and how of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation
At last! Featureban 3.0 and Changeban 1.2
Martin, this one’s for you
Stringing it together with Reverse Wardley (February)
What kind of Organisational Development (OD)? (And a book recommendation)
Leading change in the 21st century? You need a 21st century engagement model:
Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | Partners | Books |Resources | Events | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
