Mike Burrows's Blog, page 31

June 24, 2019

Visualising Agendashift: The why and how of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation

First, what doesn’t work (or at least it fails more often than it succeeds), transformation (Agile or otherwise) as project:

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Using a shallow and dysfunctional version of a model that was already tired 20 years ago [1], linear plan meets adaptive challenge in a complex environment. Seriously? I’m not sure which is the saddest thing – that its failure modes are so painfully familiar, or that they’re so avoidable:

Instead of obsessing over how to overcome resistance, stop provoking it! Instead of imposing change, make it a process that is open in a big way to meaningful participation and creative collaboration.
Wrong solutions aren’t a problem if your experiments are:

small enough to fail quickly, cheaply, and safely
framed to generate learning about real needs, succeed or fail

Instead of being driven by solutions – with energy wasted on the consequences of commitments made in the past – organise around outcomes, getting quickly to the point where you can confirm that they are already beginning to be realised
Instead of a depressing sequence of failed change projects – each of which on its own would risk fatigue – normalise a continuous style of change, baking it into everyday ways of working

None of this is hard. Despite its record of failure though, that linear model has familiarity on its side, not to mention generations of managers being taught that this how things are done “properly”. Thankfully, credible alternatives do exist however (see [2] for a selection), and here’s Agendashift (this is the Agendashift blog after all).

Agendashift’s defining characteristic is that it is outcome-oriented. Just about every part of it deals with outcomes: identifying them, articulating them, organising them, working out how they might be achieved, and on on. In this post I endeavour to visualise that process.

I will describe Agendashift in 10 steps. That might sound worryingly linear, but there’s some structure to it:

Steps 1-4 are happening frequently, at different levels of detail, and to varying degrees of formality – in fact those are just some of the ways in which Agendashift scales (the topic of a forthcoming post). Together, these steps represent a coaching pattern (or routine, or kata if you like). It’s not just for practitioners – we teach it to participants too, introducing a more outcome-oriented kind of conversation into organisations that may have become over-reliant on solution-driven conversations.
Steps 5-9 are about managing options, a continuous process punctuated from time to time by more intense periods of activity.
Step 10 could just as easily be numbered step 0 – it’s about the organisational infrastructure necessary to sustain the transformation process.

Steps 1-4: A coaching pattern that anyone can practice

Step 1: Bring the challenge close to home

The pattern starts with some kind of generative image, the organisation development (OD) community’s term for “ideas, phrases, objects, pictures, manifestos, stories, or new words” that are both compelling in themselves and are capable of generating a diverse range of positive responses [3, 4].

Agendashift provides a number of these starting points:

The Agendashift True North [5]
The prompts of one of the Agendashift assessments; the Agendashift delivery assessment has 43 of these, a few of which are prioritised by people individually or in small groups
Potentially, any of the outcomes generated through this process overall (we make this explicit in the Full Circle exercise, presented in the book [6] as an epilogue)

Sometimes these generative images may seem out of reach, but nevertheless, reflecting on them is typically a positive experience, sometimes even cathartic. The invitation is simple:

“What’s that like? How is it different to what you have now?”
“What’s happening when this is working at its best for you?”
“X months down the line, what will you be celebrating?”

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Step 2: Identify obstacles

Again, a simple question:

“What obstacles are in the way?”

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Step 3 (optional): Clarify

Deep diagnosis at this stage tends not to be productive. Sometimes however it can be helpful to clarify a little, when obstacles seem vague and/or overgeneralised, or when they seem to prescribe a solution already:

“What kind of X?” (the X here referring to an obstacle)
“What’s happening when X?” (ditto, this question being helpful for finding the real obstacles that motivate prematurely-specified solutions)

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Step 4: Outcomes, more outcomes, and yet more outcomes

From our generative image, a generative process, one capable of producing lots of output! It starts with a classic coaching question:

“What would you like to have happen?” (for an obstacle)

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Moving deeper into “outcome space”:

“And when X, then what happens?” (the X here identifying an outcome noted previously)

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Clarifying, exploring locally, or preparing to take conversation in different direction:

“What kind of X?”
“What is happening when X?”

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See [7] for more of these Clean Language questions (with a video) and [8] for an brief introduction to how they work. What we have here is a highly repeatable coaching pattern adaptable to a wide range of contexts. And as we practice it we’re teaching change agents of every kind how to speak the language of outcomes.

Steps 5-9: Managing options

These steps are about managing the bigger picture (sometimes quite literally):

Step 5: Organise (Map)

Here are two possible visual organisations of the generated outcomes: the Options Orientation Map (aka Reverse Wardley [9,10]) and something akin to a User Story Map, with outcomes prioritised in columns:

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Step 6: Prioritise, just in time

When by design, everything is changing, it’s better to give yourself options than to decide and specify everything up front:

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Step 7: Choose the right kind of approach

Outcomes don’t just vary by size or difficulty, they differ fundamentally:

Outcomes that need the minimum of ceremony, because everyone can easily agree what needs to be done
Outcomes that can be delegated to someone with the necessary expertise
Outcomes for which multiple ways forward can be identified, yet (paradoxically perhaps) it’s clear that the journey will involve twists and turns that are hard to predict
Outcomes for which it’s hard to see beyond symptomatic fixes

If you’re thinking Cynefin at this point, well spotted! See [9, 10] again.

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Step 8: Generate options

Where you want innovation, create the opportunity to generate multiple options for the outcome or outcomes currently under the spotlight, and as diverse as you can make them. If you have a framework in mind and it has good options for your current challenges, include them! (We’re framework-agnostic, not anti-framework!)

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Step 9: Frame hypotheses, develop experiments

Not every outcome is best approached this way (see step 7), but where uncertainty is high, frame your chosen option as a hypothesis, then develop it as an experiment [11]:

Keeping the show on the road

Step 10: Rinse and repeat

So often said, and so often ignored! Whenever you hear “change cycle” or “improvement cycle”, it’s important to ask about the mechanisms in your organisation design (structure, process, leadership behaviours, etc) that will sustain the process. That’s a question we know to ask, and we have some helpful patterns to suggest when the current organisation design is lacking.

Among other things, we’re looking for at least three levels of feedback loop:

The day-to-day meetings whose purpose is to help people make informed choices about what to do, where to collaborate, and when to seek help
Operational review meetings that:

Step far enough back from the day-to-day to scrutinise progress (or lack thereof) in terms of both speed and direction
Create expectations of continuous and impactful experimentation
Cause learnings to be aired and spread

Strategic review meetings that reconfirm key objectives (calibrating the level of ambition appropriately), and ensure the right levels of commitment relative to other goals

One way to visualise the strategic calibration part is as an “aspiration gap”, the area in red below between the outcomes being worked towards and the overall challenge that seeded this process.

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Sometimes the aspiration gap is so big it isn’t even recognised – not seeing the wood for the trees, so to speak. With too little ambition and too little focus to the options under consideration, both energy and alignment are lacking. Continuous improvement initiatives are prone to this; their failure modes may be different from those of the linear change project but failure here is still uncomfortably common.

Conversely, when the strategy gap is small, there may be too much ambition for an overly specific objective, leaving few options available outside a prescribed path. You’re into linear planning territory again, and we know how that goes!

This is why those three feedback loops are so necessary. Almost by definition, continuous transformation needs daily conversations. For it to be sustained, it also needs a tangible sense of progress and periodic reorientation and recalibration.

“Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation” – the strapline to the Agendashift book – summarises the process pretty well. If there’s anything hard about it, it is simply that it’s a departure from that familiar but tired old linear model, the one that we all know doesn’t really work. So dare to try something new!

References

[1] What kind of Organisational Development (OD)? (And a book recommendation)

[2] Engagement: more than a two-way street

[3] Notes on Dialogic Organizational Development (medium.com)

[4] Gervase Bushe: Generative Images (youtube.com)

[5] Resources: True North

[6] Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation

[7] 15-minute FOTO

[8] My favourite Clean Language question

[9] Stringing it together with Reverse Wardley

[10] Takeaways from Boston and Berlin

[11] The Agendashift A3 template

Upcoming Agendashift workshops

(Online, Stockholm, Athens, London, Istanbul, Berlin)

26-27 June, Online – two 2h sessions on consecutive days:

Learning the language of outcomes (two 2h online sessions)
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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Published on June 24, 2019 07:06

June 11, 2019

At last! Featureban 3.0 and Changeban 1.2

As long promised, there is now an official 3.0 version of Featureban that incorporates the best of Changeban, making it easier to facilitate and more fun to play. Changeban itself has a new version 1.2 after some weeks in beta.

For the uninitiated, Featureban is (and I quote) our simple, fun, and highly customisable kanban simulation game. Since its creation in 2014 it has been used by trainers and coaches in Lean, Agile and Kanban-related events the world over. Changeban was derived from Featureban and retains many similarities, which is how improvements to Changeban have ultimately benefited Featureban too.

Which to use?

Featureban if you’re teaching Kanban in a development context and/or want to teach Kanban metrics
Changeban for most other purposes

I don’t go out of my way to advertise Kanban training. No big drama there but I have other priorities now and there’s no shortage of people who can do it. However, being the author of a recommended book has its privileges and I do get asked from time to time! In accordance with my “experience before explanation” mantra I always start any training with Featureban. I get to use Changeban rather more often these days – it’s a fixture at Advanced Agendashift workshops (see public workshop listings at the end of this announcement).

Key changes:

For Changeban, version 1.0 represented the completion of a transition from the use of coins as the source of variation to the use of cards instead (more on those in a moment). Featureban 3.0 does the same, with a transitional (coins or cards) version 2.3 and a classic 2.2 version (coins only) still available for old times’ sake in the Dropbox.
Affecting Featureban only, its biggest source of confusion has been eliminated. There is now no mention of pairing and gone are the well-intentioned but non-obvious restrictions that went with that; instead players may “help someone” (anyone!) if they’re out of other options. There is a small price to pay and it’s the reason for my hesitation to address the frustration: the flow efficiency calculation in the spreadsheet is now merely an estimate.
Changes to the slides to make both games quicker and easier to introduce. Changeban has improved in this regard even since the recent video ! Thank you (once again) to Steven Mackenzie for the nudge and for your own experiments.
For practical reasons, it was a mistake on my part to distribute Featureban by sharing links to individual files. There’s now a single combined Dropbox folder with all the files (original sources, PDFs, and translations) for both games. Once you’re subscribed, you’ll always have access to the latest.

Cards:

Coins are not only less ubiquitous than once they were (it’s amazing how times change), they’re fiddly to handle, and they lack the replayability of cards. Trust me, once you’ve made the switch, you won’t want to go back!

Regular playing cards work well enough but I prefer to use these printed cards with the colour-specific rules on them:

These 65mm square cards were done by Moo (advertised as square business cards). We’re very happy with the results from testing but will continue to experiment with other formats. One small niggle here: the accept/reject rule shown here at the bottom of each card applies only to Changeban; this is made clearer in the most recent sources.

Open!

Featureban was one of my earliest experiments in Creative Commons licensing, and never a moment’s regret! Both games are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

Check out blog posts tagged open for more on our commitments in this area.

Subscribe! Collaborate!

Go to either Featureban or Changeban and request your combined Dropbox invite there. It’s not essential that you subscribe to the two individually – the folder is the same but feel free if you want to signal your interest in both.

And if you haven’t already, I would strongly recommend joining the #featureban and #changeban channels in the Agendashift Slack.

Upcoming Agendashift workshops

(Online, Stockholm, Athens, London, Istanbul, Berlin)

26-27 June, Online – two 2h sessions on consecutive days:

Learning the language of outcomes (two 2h online sessions)
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
23 October, 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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Published on June 11, 2019 07:02

June 5, 2019

Five public Agendashift workshops this autumn: Stockholm, Athens, London, Istanbul, Berlin

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Very pleased to confirm this autumn programme of public 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
23 October, 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

As well as to partners Kjell Tore, Nikos, and Leanovate (my repeat hosts in Berlin), I’m grateful to the organisers of these conferences, without whom two of these workshops wouldn’t be happening:

19-20 September, Athens, Greece:

Agile Summit Greece
24 October, Istanbul, Turkey:

Agile Turkey Summit

Can’t wait that long? Can’t travel? Check out these online workshops:

26-27 June, Online – two 2h sessions on consecutive days:

Learning the language of outcomes (two 2h online sessions)
16-17 July, Online – two 2h sessions on consecutive days:

Learning the language of outcomes (two 2h online sessions)

Leading change in the 21st century? You need a 21st century engagement model:

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Published on June 05, 2019 09:20

May 31, 2019

Agendashift roundup, May 2019

In this edition: Martin, this one’s for you; Two kinds of organisation development (OD); Featureban and Changeban; Upcoming workshops – Stockholm, Berlin, and online; Top posts

Martin, this one’s for you

This month the Lean-Agile community mourned the sudden and tragic loss of Martin Burns, a friend to many. My tribute, with links to several others – all of which well worth reading – is here:

Martin, this one’s for you

Right to Left

Everything crossed, Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile comes out next month (sorry, I can’t give an exact date yet). Watch out for a Q&A with Ben Linders on InfoQ soon, always a pleasure!

Two kinds of organisation development (OD)

“So many books, so little time” (Pliny the Younger or Frank Zappa – take your pick). I began the month with a book I wish I had known about soon enough to reference in Agendashift, Bushe & Marshak’s Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change. In a highly encouraging way it had a profound effect on me and continues to do so; read my initial thoughts and then some practical follow-through in these two posts:

What kind of Organisational Development (OD)? (And a book recommendation)
Takeaways from Boston and Berlin

Featureban and Changeban

For months I’ve been promising a big update to Featureban, a Kanban simulation game that is used around the world and remains one of my most popular downloads. Not only do I now have a 3.0 beta version that I’ll be playing next week and releasing soon, we’ve tested some improvements too in Changeban (see below a photo from Berlin last week) that benefit both games. So watch out for an announcement, both here on the blog and in your inbox if you’re a registered user of either game.

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Meanwhile, we have at last a video for Changeban (thank you Steven Mackenzie for producing it), announcement here:

A video for Changeban (and related: what’s in store for Featureban)

Upcoming workshops – Stockholm, Berlin, and online

26-27 June, Online – two 2h sessions on consecutive days:

Learning the language of outcomes (two 2h online sessions)
16-17 July, Online – two 2h sessions on consecutive days:

Learning the language of outcomes (two 2h online sessions)
9-10 September, Stockholm, Sweden:

2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
13-14 November, Berlin, Germany:

2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation

Watch this space for autumn dates in Greece, Turkey, London, and the Benelux region.

May 29, 2019

Takeaways from Boston and Berlin

Within days of each other, two 2-day Advanced Agendashift workshops in very different settings and the opportunity therefore for both experimentation and fast feedback. In no particular order:

I was in Boston not just for the workshop but for the Open Leadership Symposium, and my biggest takeaway was that Agendashift and OpenSpace Agility (OSA) seem to be made for each other. The question is when we get try it! There seem to be multiple ways to do it: Agendashift as OSA’s Assessment phase, Agendashift as the way to generate an “in our own words” challenge for the first OpenSpace, Agendashift to formalise some of what happens between OpenSpaces, and so on.
If you want constructive feedback, go to Germany! As a regular visitor (see below for the next Berlin workshop) I knew this one already; last week’s group didn’t fail me and I’m grateful to them for helping to identify both a facilitation risk and an easy mitigation. Long story short: participants should be given more help to avoid generating overly abstract obstacles, guided to start with more everyday frustrations, misalignments, and missed opportunities instead. Abstract concepts are a difficult starting point, and we can still trust 15-minute FOTO to reach them as a destination instead.
In both workshops, we kept referring back to a new slide I added to the introduction. This summarises the diagnostic and dialogic approaches to organisation development outlined in my recent post What kind of Organisational Development (OD)? ). Deliberately emphasising the dialogic side, the question “Are there things here that we could take back to the wider organisation?” seems to be a good one for facilitators to ask. Taking this further, it’s not hard to imagine an ‘expanded’, ‘bootstrapped’, or multi-level Agendashift that replaces or augments its provided content (mainly the True North and the assessment prompts) with user-generated content.

In both workshops, that awareness of the opportunity for wider dialogue remained with us in day 2. As described in Stringing it together with Reverse Wardley, the second day now opens with this ‘string’ of interconnected mapping exercises:

The Cynefin 4 Points Contextualisation exercise, or ‘4 Points’ for short (it’s strongly advised not to mention Cynefin or its jargon until the end)
‘Option Orientation Mapping’, which is Karl Scotland’s proposed name for what I have been calling ‘Reverse Wardley’
Story Mapping (not an accurate name; ‘Pathway Mapping’ might be better)

From Berlin, here’s a very nice 4 Points example:

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Marked with asterisks around the top left corner are outcomes that are likely suited to an iterative and hypothesis-based approach. Let’s now also visualise what the book calls ‘thematic outcomes’, around which plans might be organised or consultation exercises conducted. These are to be found towards the top (and often towards the left) of the Option Orientation (aka Reverse Wardley) Map, which is very quick to build if you have done 4 Points first:

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Zooming in, note the exclamation marks (the words used aren’t as important as the fact they’re seen by the group as important):

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Identifying these themes makes it much easier to let go of the provided story map headings (the larger orange stickies, based on the Reverse STATIK model) and consider replacing them with user-generated structure (positioned above those):

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The Boston example kept more of its original structure, but an interesting touch was to add themes from Discovery too, potentially a useful technique:

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(And no, I don’t see “RIMBAP” catching on in the way STATIK did!)

So… lots to feed back into the standard materials over the summer (for use not just by me but available to all partners), plenty of food for thought too, and a new Slack channel #future-developments in which ideas can be aired. All in all, those weeks of travel were very fruitful.

Upcoming workshops

26-27 June, Online – two 2h sessions on consecutive days:

Learning the language of outcomes (two 2h online sessions)
16-17 July, Online – two 2h sessions on consecutive days:

Learning the language of outcomes (two 2h online sessions)
13-14 November, Berlin, Germany:

2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation

Watch this space for autumn dates in Greece, Turkey, London, the Benelux region and Scandinavia.

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Published on May 29, 2019 09:31

May 27, 2019

Martin, this one’s for you

A week ago we were trying process the impossible – the news that friend, colleague, encourager, and debating partner Martin Burns had suddenly passed away. Starting with one from Martin’s wife Lucy, here are some touching tributes:

Lucy Burns
Dave Snowden
Chris Matts
Chris McDermott
Chris Corriere
Gordon McMahon
Sal Freudenberg

In the light of the above it’s easy to explain my small tribute, which is to dedicate my forthcoming book Right to Left to his memory. Lucy has given her permission, and I’ve had confirmation that the dedication and a postscript can be accommodated at this late stage (it is already with the typesetter).

I have described Martin as “encourager and debating partner”. And it’s not just me – two very strong themes can be drawn from the tributes:

Martin the optimist – always ready to think the best of people, “people positive”, to borrow a phrase from Aaron Dignan’s recent book
Martin the principled – prepared to make a public stand for difficult causes in the face of opposition from people he continued to respect

Those weren’t two different Martins; rather he demonstrated that you could be both things at the same time. To take a notable and relevant example from his recent professional life, he supported SAFe because of what he believed it could do for people in the right context, and not to imply that it should be imposed on people (and oh how I wish that more people could separate those two concerns).

Martin was already named in the acknowledgements as a contributor to Right to Left. This was not just for his SAFe knowledge (key to a chapter on scaling, a potentially controversial chapter and one I really wanted to get right), but for confirming to me that the tension between the left-to-right (backlog-driven and implementation-focussed) and right-to-left (needs-based and outcome-oriented) perspectives manifests itself in SAFe just as it does for Scrum. Moreover, I knew him as an Agendashift supporter, an enthusiastic participant at the first ever Advanced workshop, and a valued advocate for it in his client engagements. To say that his name deserved inclusion would be an understatement.

People like Martin don’t come along every day, and it is good therefore to say thank you when they do. Martin, this one’s for you.

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Published on May 27, 2019 03:32

May 13, 2019

Needs-based, outcome-oriented, continuous, open

It’s the week of the Open Leadership Symposium (I landed in Boston yesterday). To celebrate, a quick refresh of the Agendshift home and about pages, both starting with an updated banner:

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The ‘open’ is new. A short explanation (the about page has more):

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That’s all! See you tomorrow/Wednesday at the symposium? I’ll expand further on themes of Open, Engagement Models, and Organisation Development – see last week’s post for a taste of that last one. Or Thursday/Friday at the masterclass – still time to book a place?

Upcoming workshops – Boston and Berlin

16-17 May 2019, Boston, MA, USA:

Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
22-23 May 2019, Berlin, Germany:

Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation

Watch this space for Greece, Turkey, London, the Benelux region and Scandinavia in the autumn.

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Published on May 13, 2019 11:34

May 9, 2019

What kind of Organisational Development (OD)? (And a book recommendation)

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Mind slightly blown, I discover that organisation development (OD) divides into two schools of thought. Or more accurately, that a crucial aspect of organisation development may have been hiding in plain sight for decades. The two ‘schools’ (if for the moment I can refer to them that way) are diagnostic OD and dialogic OD. They are not in fact mutually exclusive – it’s this that allowed one to hide with the other – but for the purposes of explanation let me begin by describing two ends of an OD spectrum.

Diagnostic OD

At the “extreme diagnostic” end of the spectrum, the OD practitioner (here very much playing the role of the expert consultant) thinks and works like this:

According to the practitioner and in all likelihood the sponsor (the latter chooses the former after all), your organisation is best understood by some dominant metaphor: as a machine, an organism, an ecosystem, or a system of autonomous agents (the ‘agents’ being ‘people’ and groups thereof)
Accordingly, the task is to diagnose a problem and to prescribe (and perhaps implement) a fix, a cure, a conservation measure, or some reprogramming

Only a short distance beyond that extreme lies dysfunction:

Ivory tower diagnosis – lacking in empathy and respect, characterised by dismissiveness and judgementalism – or fake diagnosis whose main purpose is to establish the absence of some fashionable solution (see also snake oil merchants) and perhaps induce an inauthentic sense of urgency (burning platforms and the like)
Inviting failure by approaching adaptive challenges as though they are mere technical problems, fixable through linear, step-by-step processes (hey, 20th century change management frameworks, I’m looking at you)

Drawing a safe distance back from that precipitous edge, we have whole systems approaches, in which the diagnosis part and increasingly the implementation part involve meaningful levels of staff participation. As much facilitator as consultant, the practitioner consciously dials down their judgemental side and dials up their curious and conversational sides instead.

What if this begins to describe what successful OD has looked like all along? Would an alternative to the diagnostic model be helpful? Enter dialogic OD.

Dialogic OD

Again for the sake of explanation, let’s put those organisational metaphors to one side and start with something more philosophical:

The organisation is socially constructed and the creator of meaning – brought to life, sustaining itself, and continuing to evolve through its discourse, both with itself and with the outside world
Change is an ongoing (ever-present) process that is never entirely under anyone’s control; the practitioner’s job is to spark and facilitate new conversations, uncover fresh expressions of meaning, and help set loose new kinds of dialogue

The idea that culture is the product of a process that no-one fully controls is an important one. No wonder that change management is hard! I first saw it spelt out that way by Edgar H. Schein [1], and referenced it in Agendashift [2]. Schein is without doubt one on the greats of OD and it seems to me a little ironic that he is so strongly identified with the diagnostic model. In fairness to him, social constructionism [3] is younger than OD; moreover he contributes a superb foreword to Bushe & Marshak’s Dialogic Organization Development [4] – an excellent book that might easily have escaped my notice without his endorsement.

Before reading Bushe & Marhak’s book and as I began to read Schein’s foreword, I couldn’t help imagining for myself what diagnostic and dialogic OD might mean. Quite naturally I wondered what Agendashift would look like in the light of those two imagined models. I jumped to the conclusion that Agendashift had elements of both: diagnostic wherever it is concerned with the present (in particular the assessment and anything concerned with current obstacles), and dialogic wherever it is concerned with the future (which it does most of the rest of the time).

My instincts weren’t completely wrong, but nevertheless as I read the book I was surprised just how strongly the dialogic model resonated with me. It turns out that Agendashift is much further along the spectrum towards fully dialogic than I anticipated. Some of the more obvious parallels:

Even Agendashift’s more diagnostic tools are there not to measure or judge but to stimulate conversations whose destinations – outcomes – the facilitator can’t even guess at (certainly I don’t try). As the Solutions Focus [5] guys will tell you, the point of scaling – which they mean in the sense of giving something a numeric score – isn’t the number, but they way that it encourages you to think.
Agendashift makes extensive use of generative images, things – typically terms or phrases – that help to conjure up a diverse range of naturally-aligned responses. Our de-jargonised Lean-Agile True North statement (below) is Agendashift’s most obvious example (quite a chunky one by normal standards), but even the prompts of the assessment tool are used in that way.
And of course there’s the Clean Language, mainly via our 15-minute FOTO coaching game [6], though its influence runs deeper. It’s not just that the game gives participants the opportunity to ‘model’ the organisation’s obstacles and outcomes – conversations that probably haven’t happened before – it also creates the experience of a new kind of conversation.

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With the benefit of a few days of reflection, I am over that initial surprise. Agendashift was designed as a positive response to the prescriptive approaches to Agile adoption that at their worst seem to actively embrace all the diagnostic dysfunctions I identified above. Instead of prescriptive and linear, generative. And what do we generate? Outcomes around which people can self-organise, and ideas for action and experimentation that will point the organisation in the direction of those outcomes – hence outcome-oriented change – and all of it done in a coherent way that helps to develop Lean, Agile, and Lean-Agile sensibilities rather than work against them.

That said, I am not yet over my enjoyment of this book. In fact, I’m still wondering if Agendashift could and should move even further towards the dialogic end of the spectrum. Even in the Agendashift book there are hints of what might be possible – helping organisations create their own True North statements or their own non-prescriptive assessment tools, for example. And without creating any new tools, we practitioners should perhaps be keeping a closer watch for powerful new generative images amongst the many outcomes generated by participants, using their “thematic outcomes” (a phrase that is already part of the Agendashift lexicon) not just for organising plans but as seeds for wider dialogue.

I’m even challenged (in a good way) by two alternative visions of the workshop (a large part of my work). Is an Agendashift workshop:

A planning event (diagnostic), or
A “container for disruption” (dialogic)?

Yes!

One thing is for sure: if ever there’s a 2nd edition of Agendashift, Bushe & Marshak’s Dialogic Organization Development will certainly be among its key references. I’ll be adding it to our recommended reading list [7] very soon.

References

[1] Organizational Culture and Leadership, Edgar H. Schein (5th edition, 2016, Wiley)

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

[3] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism

[4] Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change, Gervase R. Bushe & Robert J. Marshak (2015, Berrett-Koehler Publishers)

[5] The Solutions Focus: Making Coaching and Change SIMPLE , Mark McKergow and Paul Z. Jackson (2011, Nicholas Brealey International)

[6] 15-minute FOTO: agendashift.com/15-minute-foto

[7] Recommended reading: agendashift.com/recommended-reading

Acknowledgements

Thank you Mike Haber and Parag Gogate for feedback on earlier drafts of this post.

Watch this space for Greece, Turkey, London, the Benelux region and Scandinavia in the autumn.

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Published on May 09, 2019 05:49

May 2, 2019

A video for Changeban (and related: what’s in store for Featureban)

Changeban is our Lean Startup-flavoured Kanban simulation game. It is based on our classic game Featureban, with easier mechanics, a Lean Startup-inspired board design, and some different learning objectives. Both games are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (Yay! Open!).

As promised a couple of days ago in the April roundup, the Changeban page now includes a video of a game session recorded at last month’s London workshop. I’m grateful to Agendashift partner Steven Mackenzie for its production. You’ll find it and loads more information at agendashift.com/changeban.

Questions? Channel #changeban in the Agendashift Slack; request access here.

In store for Featureban

At around the 37:05 mark you will notice this exchange:

Dragan: Can a work item – a sticky – move more than one step in a round?

Mike: Yes they can. I know where that question is coming from – if you’ve played Featureban, the rules discourage the cards from moving more than one column per round (per day). The reason for that is technical, and it’s annoying, and it makes the rules unnecessarily complicated. The language is changed in Changeban so that it’s just that if you can’t do anything for yourself, you help somebody.

The Featureban rules in question are those that mention pairing. Instead of helping someone (anyone!) as Changeban allows, you’re allowed to pair up only with someone who can’t otherwise move. These rather frustrating rules generate more questions than the rest put together! The technical issue I mention in the video is that disallowing cards from moving more than one column in a day happens to make the calculation of flow efficiency in the metrics iteration very easy. I’m convinced now that the complication and restrictiveness is an unnecessarily high price to pay.

Admittedly I’ve been saying this for a while (I also had a book to finish!), but soon(ish) I will publish a Featureban 3.0 beta version that ditches the pairing rules in favour of Changeban’s much kinder “help someone” rules. While I’m at it, I’ll complete the transition from coins to playing cards as the source of variation.

Upcoming workshops – Boston, Berlin, Oslo, and Stockholm

16-17 May 2019, Boston, MA, USA:

Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
22-23 May 2019, Berlin, Germany:

Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
3-4 June 2019, Stockholm, Sweden:

Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
6-7 June 2019, Oslo, Norway:

Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation

Watch this space for Greece, Turkey, London, and the Benelux region in the autumn.

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Published on May 02, 2019 04:21

April 30, 2019

Agendashift roundup, April 2019

In this edition: Right to Left; London workshop; Open Leadership Symposium (Boston) & online workshops; Top posts; Upcoming workshops – Boston, Berlin, Oslo, and Stockholm

Right to Left

I’m thrilled to announce that the completed manuscript for Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile is now with the publishers. Fingers crossed it will be available for preorder early-mid June and for purchase by the end of that month. This one was 11 months in the making, and work started immediately after Agendashift; I have to say that it feels a little weird not to have a big writing project on the go any more!

As you can see from the updated cover image below, Right to Left has a foreword by John Buck, the co-author of two of the books I reference:

With Sharon Villines, We the People: Consenting to a Deeper Democracy: A Handbook for Understanding and Implementing Sociocratic Principles and Practices (2nd ed, 2019)
With Jutta Eckstein, Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space & Sociocracy: Survive & Thrive on Disruption (2019)

John describes my book as “emerging on his [ie my] focus on the needs of actual and aspiring leaders”, who should “be prepared to have some of their favourite mental models delightfully upended”. Thank you John! I predict that this “updending” will be experienced by more than a few practitioners too

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Published on April 30, 2019 04:12

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