Mike Burrows's Blog, page 31

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

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

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.

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.

We are champions and enablers of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation. Building from agreement on outcomes, Agendashift facilitates rapid, experiment-based emergence of process, practice, and organisation. Instead of Lean and Agile by imposition – contradictory and ultimately self-defeating – we help you keep your business vision and transformation strategy aligned with and energised by a culture of meaningful participation. More…

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Published on May 29, 2019 09:31

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

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.

We are champions and enablers of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation. Building from agreement on outcomes, Agendashift facilitates rapid, experiment-based emergence of process, practice, and organisation. Instead of Lean and Agile by imposition – contradictory and ultimately self-defeating – we help you keep your business vision and transformation strategy aligned with and energised by a culture of meaningful participation. More…

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Published on May 13, 2019 11:34

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.

[image error]

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.

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

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

We are champions and enablers of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation. Building from agreement on outcomes, Agendashift facilitates rapid, experiment-based emergence of process, practice, and organisation. Instead of Lean and Agile by imposition – contradictory and ultimately self-defeating – we help you keep your business vision and transformation strategy aligned with and energised by a culture of meaningful participation. More…

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Published on May 09, 2019 05:49

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.

We are champions and enablers of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation. Building from agreement on outcomes, Agendashift facilitates rapid, experiment-based emergence of process, practice, and organisation. Instead of Lean and Agile by imposition – contradictory and ultimately self-defeating – we help you keep your business vision and transformation strategy aligned with and energised by a culture of meaningful participation. More…

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Published on May 02, 2019 04:21

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

More ‘Open’, and my first online workshops

I’m getting ready for a busy couple of weeks mid May:

Boston, May 14th & 15th: the Open Leadership Symposium in Boston
Boston, May 16th & 17th, the post-conference masterclass – a 2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop
Berlin, 22rd & 24th, Advanced Agendashift: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation

Partly in preparation and partly as housekeeping, I’ve updated the workshop page Advanced Agendashift: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation as follows:

Very much in the Open spirit of the Boston symposium, it now has a Creative Commons 4.0 CC-BY-SA license. That’s not quite the big deal that it might sound since the Overview pages that describe all Agendashift-based workshops have long had one, but it’s good to get that sorted.
Its structure now tallies with recent improvements. Day 1 is Learning the language of outcomes . Day 2 is Organising for impact , and it reflects the “rejigging” described in last week’s Notes from the April 2019 Advanced Agendashift workshop, London . I’ve updated the abovementioned Overview pages also.

As a spinoff from Boston (there’ll be discounts for attendees), from June I’ll be offering an online workshop, also titled Learning the language of outcomes. Presented as two 2-hour sessions on consecutive days it will be a great way to get up to speed quickly with outcome-orientation and Clean Language, getting some real practice in applying the latter to the former. At a minimum we’ll cover:

Celebration-5W
True North
15-minute FOTO
Plan on a page (so simple it doesn’t have a URL of its own but the 15-minute FOTO Dropbox does include a template)
Assessment/survey debrief
15-minute FOTO (trust me, it’s worth doing twice)

Officially, we launch these at the Symposium, but for a sneak preview (and early bird prices):

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)

In person or online, I hope to see you soon!

Upcoming workshops – Boston, Berlin, Oslo, and Stockholm

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

Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation

(Advanced, 2-day workshop)
22-23 May 2019, Berlin, Germany:

Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation

(Advanced, 2-day workshop)
3-4 June 2019, Stockholm, Sweden:

Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation

(Advanced, 2-day workshop, Mike Burrows and Kjell Tore Guttormsen )
6-7 June 2019, Oslo, Norway:

Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
(Advanced, 2-day workshop, Mike Burrows and Kjell Tore Guttormsen

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

[image error]

We are champions and enablers of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation. Building from agreement on outcomes, Agendashift facilitates rapid, experiment-based emergence of process, practice, and organisation. Instead of Lean and Agile by imposition – contradictory and ultimately self-defeating – we help you keep your business vision and transformation strategy aligned with and energised by a culture of meaningful participation. More…

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Published on April 16, 2019 09:13

Notes from the April 2019 Advanced Agendashift workshop, London

Fantastic 2-day Workshop by @asplake on @agendashift so much information, tools and most of all: coherence in applying tools and methods.

So intense that I will have quite some time to digest it all before trying to apply it to my work. pic.twitter.com/Ynp9HOfylO

— Jens-Chr. Fischer (@jcfischer) April 5, 2019

Thursday and Friday last week was the 2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop in London. The quick version of my takeaways (all confirmed by the retro stickies):

Mike Haber’s Celebration-5W template is a keeper
The beta version of the 15-minute FOTO cue card passes muster
My “Rule of Three” seems to resonate
Some rejigging
Excitement around “wholehearted”

Also, details of the next four of these workshops – Boston, Berlin, Oslo, and Stockholm.

Mike Haber’s Celebration-5W template is a keeper

Announced only a couple of weeks ago, I would definitely recommend using Mike Haber’s template – it makes the exercise easier for everyone involved, and the output vastly more presentable. I’ve updated the Celebration-5W page to make it more prominent.

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The beta version of the 15-minute FOTO cue card passes muster

Also announced recently but previously untested, a beta version of the 15-minute FOTO cue card is now made official:

No-one missed the old “Is there a relationship between X and Y?” question (a question that comes with health warnings) and according to the retro sticky, the new question “Where does X come from?” rocks!

My “Rule of Three” seems to resonate

I mentioned my “Rule of Three” in answer to an important question about who should be invited to internal workshops. I had already written it up for my forthcoming book Right to Left but I was encouraged to put together a page for it with an easy-to-remember url, agendashift.com/rule-of-three.

After a few iterations on the text (helped by feedback in the #right-to-left channel in Slack), here’s the key quote:

Clicking on the image or the link above you’ll find a condensed, bullet point version, and some notes that hint at what’s to come in the book.

Some rejigging

Consolidating experiments described in Stringing it together with Reverse Wardley, The Cynefin Four Points exercise moves from day 1 to day 2, the launchpad for Mapping rather than the conclusion to Exploration. It allowed me to run “my slowest ever Discovery” on day 1, and nobody minded one bit.

Update: The name “Reverse Wardley” is (as we say in the UK) “a bit Marmite”, meaning that some loved it and others hated it. Is it “way too geeky”? This was already suspected, but I still don’t have a better alternative.

Excitement around “wholehearted”

Remember Towards the wholehearted organisation, outside in (May 2018)? For the evening of day 1, Steven Mackenzie (one of Right to Left‘s reviewers) suggested we held a “Lean Curry” around the topic. Here he is with his heart-shaped picture:

Post workshop day 1 Lean Curry – @busywait introducing #wholehearted, inspired by Christopher Alexander (of patterns fame) via an #agendashift blog post https://t.co/vOXU3omPWm #Right2LeftGuide #lean #agile pic.twitter.com/hwcAyogzFS

— Mike Burrows (@asplake) April 4, 2019

Before Right to Left is even published, perhaps a spinoff! Definitely one to watch.

Upcoming workshops – Boston, Berlin, Oslo, and Stockholm

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

Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation

(Advanced, 2-day workshop)
22-23 May 2019, Berlin, Germany:

Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation

(Advanced, 2-day workshop)
3-4 June 2019, Stockholm, Sweden:

Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation

(Advanced, 2-day workshop, Mike Burrows and Kjell Tore Guttormsen )
6-7 June 2019, Oslo, Norway:

Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation

(Advanced, 2-day workshop, Mike Burrows and Kjell Tore Guttormsen

We are champions and enablers of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation. Building from agreement on outcomes, Agendashift facilitates rapid, experiment-based emergence of process, practice, and organisation. Instead of Lean and Agile by imposition – contradictory and ultimately self-defeating – we help you keep your business vision and transformation strategy aligned with and energised by a culture of meaningful participation. More…

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Published on April 08, 2019 04:16