Mike Burrows's Blog, page 33
January 31, 2019
Agendashift roundup, January 2019
A shorter and less structured roundup this month – there are a number of additions and changes to the events calendar in the pipeline and I’ll begin to announce these separately in the coming weeks. Watch out for details of 2-day Advanced workshops in the UK, the Netherlands, in Germany, Scandinavia, Greece, and the US. The last of those will be announced as a masterclass linked to an exciting new event, The Open Leadership Symposium, which takes place in Boston in May.
Right to Left
Before things get crazy again I have a quietish February in prospect and there’s every chance that I’ll have a decent draft of Right to Left done by the end of the month. I’ve been aiming for early summer for publication; dare I say late spring now? We’ll see!
To whet your appetite, the first few paragraphs of the introduction now appear on the Right to Left landing page. If you’d like to read the whole introduction, drop me a line or visit channel #right-to-left in Slack.
Changeban and Featureban
My recent trip to India plus a private workshop back in the UK has given me three more opportunities to run Changeban sessions, two of them for 50+ people at a time. Based on the experience of those larger sessions (both of which were recorded; fingers crossed we’ll be able to share at least one of them) I’ve switched around some of the introductory slides – in the ‘endgame’ part, if you’re familiar with it. If you’ve signed up to the Changeban Dropbox, look for a version 1.1 deck. Nothing fundamental, it just flows better.
I’ve still not had the chance to test Featureban with Changeban-style rules and it seems likely that others will beat me to it. When that does finally happen (and I’ll be grateful), watch out for Featureban 3.0. Until then it remains at version 2.3.
Questions? #changeban and #featureban in Slack.
Top posts
My favourite Clean Language question
A Grand Unification Theory for Lean-Agile?
How the Leader-Leader model turns Commander’s Intent upside down (June)
Right to Left: a transcript of my Lean Agile Brighton talk (October)
My kind of Agile (November)
[image error]Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | About | Partners | Resources | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
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…
January 18, 2019
My favourite Clean Language question
We describe our coaching game 15-minute FOTO [1] as “Clean Language-inspired”, and as shown on the cue card (below) it makes use of a small subset of the Clean Language questions, a subset particularly suited to exploring or modelling (ie building a model of) a landscape of obstacles and (especially) outcomes.
The objective of the game and its function in Agendashift is to generate a good number of outcomes that can then be organised in various interesting ways. Through subsequent exercises we facilitate agreement on outcomes, thereby helping to co-create the basis for organisational change. Those goals aren’t quite the same as those of Clean Language, and through my favourite Clean Language question I hope to say a bit about the latter.
Here’s the 15-minute FOTO cue card, an essential piece of equipment for the game. Notice that the X‘s (and in one question a Y), placeholders which the coach replaces with the client’s own words (coach and client are roles in the game; participants take turns in different roles):
Given the game’s objectives, the two most important questions on the card are these:
“What would you like to have happen?”, which tends to “flip” obstacles into outcomes, moving from the negative to the positive, quickly identifying the outcome that might be found hiding behind the obstacle (figuratively speaking).
“And when X, then what happens?”, which when the X is an outcome, generates another, and sometimes several. Asked a few times, a surprisingly long chain of outcomes can be generated with the minimum of prompting from the coach.
However, my favourite question on the card is a different one, namely “What kind of X?”. Functionally, it’s a clarifying question, one we use in preference to questions such as “What do you mean by X?”, and “Can you be more specific?”. In the aspiring Lean-Agile context typical of an Agendashift workshop, examples might include:
“What kind of Agile?” (instead of “What do you mean by Agile?”)
“What kind of collaboration?” (instead of “Can you be more specific about the kind of collaboration you’re talking about?”)
(Aside: see [2] for my answer to the first of those)
Let me further illustrate the “What kind of X?” (WKO) question with an everyday scenario that I frequently find helpful as an example. You have just told me that you’ll be on holiday next week. How do I respond?
Some possible responses politely close the conversation before it gets started: “That’s nice!”, “I hope you have a lovely time!”, and so on.
I might show some interest with a question: “Where are you going?”. Unfortunately, this well-intentioned question is not entirely without risk. Suppose your answer is “I’m not going anywhere, I’m staying at home”. Awkward! Have I embarrassed you?
To be clear, “Where are you going?” isn’t a terrible question. It is at least an open question, a question to which might be given a wide range of possible answers. This is in contrast with binary questions that expect mainly yes/no answers or leading questions which are mostly about the questioner’s own agenda (in the Agendashift book [3] I describe the latter as not genuine).
The possible flaw in the question “Where are you going?” is that it makes an assumption that might not be valid in this context, the assumption that you’re going somewhere. “What kind of holiday?” removes that assumption – in fact it is about as stripped of assumption as a question can get. As a result, it is much more likely to lead to an interesting answer, one that I can’t easily predict.
This is what Clean Language is all about. It’s not about the killer question, a trick that like the world’s funniest joke soon gets old. It’s about putting the coach’s assumptions to one side, because what’s in the mind of the client is far more valuable. As well as heightening curiosity it improves listening, because we can’t fill in those X‘s if we’re not paying attention. And although there is some skill in choosing the question (a skill that we begin to develop by playing the game), it’s not about leading the client on the strength of the coach’s domain knowledge – there’s a time and place for that, but not yet. Instead, it’s about facilitating a process, one that helps navigate what may be complex issues, often helping the client arrive at some real insights.
15-minute FOTO is carefully framed as a game: it works within clear constraints and with clear goals. It’s not therapy, and never pretends to be. But for some it has been the gateway to the Clean Language body of knowledge with its generous community and has kindled interest in a deeper kind of coaching. And that’s wonderful!
References
[1] 15-minute FOTO
[2] My kind of Agile
[3] Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation; Clean Language is introduced with 15-minute FOTO in chapters 1 and 2. See also its recommended reading page, in particular (these Clean Language-related books):
The Five Minute Coach: Improve Performance Rapidly
Lynne Cooper & Mariette Castellino (2012, Crown House Publishing)
Clean Language: Revealing Metaphors and Opening Minds
Wendy Sullivan & Judy Rees (2008, Crown House Publishing)
From Contempt to Curiosity: Creating the Conditions for Groups to Collaborate Using Clean Language and Systemic Modelling
Caitlin Walker (2014, Clean Publishing)
Acknowledgements: I’m grateful to Johan Nordin, Steve Williams, and Mike Haber for feedback on earlier drafts of this post.
Subscribe here for monthly roundups and very occasional mid-month announcements
Upcoming public Agendashift workshops (India, US*2, UK, Netherlands, Germany):
20 Jan 2019, Mumbai, India:
Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change with Agendashift
(Core, 1-day workshop, Mike Burrows )
01 March 2019, Tampa, FL, USA:
Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change with Agendashift
(Core, 1-day workshop, Julia Wester )
20 March 2019, London, England,
Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change with Agendashift
(Core, 1-day workshop, Mike Burrows ; booking page coming soon – register interest here )
29 March 2019, Seattle, WA, USA:
Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change with Agendashift
(Core, 1-day workshop, Julia Wester )
4-5 Apr 2019, Utrecht, Netherlands:
Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation with Agendashift
Advanced, 2-day workshop (booking page coming soon; Mike Burrows – register interest here )
22-23 May 2018, Berlin, Germany:
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
(Advanced, 2-day workshop, Mike Burrows )
Also: Channel #agendashift-studio in the Agendashift Slack if interested in a cozy workshop with me at Agendashift HQ (Derbyshire, England).
[image error]Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | About | Partners | Resources | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
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…
January 10, 2019
A Grand Unification Theory for Lean-Agile?
The job of chapter 3 of the forthcoming book Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile is to introduce a number of important Agile, Lean-Agile, and associated frameworks. I have taken care to describe them not as alternative solutions that must be chosen between, but as patterns to be combined in interesting ways. That’s not a new idea, but what does seem remarkable is how helpful a right-to-left perspective is in explaining how they work together and complement each other. When I say right-to-left, we’re talking not just collaborative, continuous, pull-based, and so on (concepts conventionally associated with Lean-Agile) but something very explicitly outcome-oriented.
Almost verbatim from the manuscript:
Scrum (and Scrum-based scaling frameworks, if that’s your bag): continuously iterating on and self-organising around goals (short term outcomes) in the pursuit of longer term outcomes – product vision, the team’s mission, broader organisational objectives, and so on
Kanban, making progress on outcomes visible, concentrating effort on the ones that matter most, fostering a focus on completion
XP and DevOps, right across development and production, providing the infrastructure of process, practice, and technology necessary to accelerate feedback on the delivery of outcomes
Service Design Thinking (along with user research, user experience and so on), continuously discovering which outcomes are important
Lean Startup, pursuing business viability through continuous deliberate experimentation, managing for impact (outcomes again), finding and continuously refining a business model that enables customer outcomes to be sustained
Here it really is outcomes that holds everything together, not (as you might expect) flow, collaboration, or some other shared value or technical principle. This way, we avoid saying “if you dig deep enough, they’re the same” (which I hear from time to time and strongly reject, believing that it does each framework’s creators and communities a huge disservice).
Neither are we saying “don’t use frameworks”, if (and it’s quite a big if) this means that you must always start from first principles. A sensible way to start is again outcome-oriented and has a measured and pragmatic attitude towards frameworks (quoting this time from chapter 4, Viable scaling):
Identify needs – looking at what kind of organisation you’re trying to be and at what you’re trying to achieve – and the obstacles that currently prevent those needs from being met
Agree on outcomes, not just goals plucked out of the air, but the kind of outcomes that might be achieved when these obstacles are removed, overcome, or bypassed
On a just-in-time basis, prioritise outcomes and generate a range of options to realise them, using your favourite frameworks as sources of ideas (not excluding other sources, but valuing coherence nevertheless)
In manageably small chunks of change and through a combination of direct action and experimentation (choosing between those approaches on a case-by-case basis according to the level of uncertainty and risk involved), begin to treat change as real work: tracking it, validating its impact, and reflecting on it just as we would for product work
In a nutshell, I’ve described Agendashift, which is of course a right-to-left approach to change and transformation. Other engagement models exist – see OpenSpace Agility (OSA) for another excellent, well-documented, and highly complementary example. Whichever approach you choose, take care to choose one that models Lean and Agile values, lest the dissonance proves too great and you fatally undermine your work, a very real risk. To sow disengagement would be a truly bad outcome!
Related:
My kind of Agile
‘Right to Left’ works for Scrum too
‘Right to Left’ is Agendashift for delivery
Engagement: more than a two-way street
Subscribe here for monthly roundups and very occasional mid-month announcements
Upcoming public Agendashift workshops (India*2, US*2, UK, Netherlands):
16-17 Jan 2019, Gurugram, India:
Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation with Agendashift
(Advanced, 2-day workshop, Mike Burrows )
20 Jan 2019, Mumbai, India:
Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change with Agendashift
(Core, 1-day workshop, Mike Burrows )
01 March 2019, Tampa, FL, USA:
Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change with Agendashift
(Core, 1-day workshop, Julia Wester )
20 March 2019, London, England,
Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change with Agendashift
(Core, 1-day workshop, Mike Burrows ; booking page coming soon – register interest here )
29 March 2019, Seattle, WA, USA:
Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change with Agendashift
(Core, 1-day workshop, Julia Wester )
4-5 Apr 2019, Utrecht, Netherlands,
Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation with Agendashift
Advanced, 2-day workshop (booking page coming soon; Mike Burrows – register interest here )
Also: Channel #agendashift-studio in the Agendashift Slack if interested in a cozy workshop with me at Agendashift HQ (Derbyshire, England).
[image error]Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | About | Partners | Resources | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
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…
January 7, 2019
Let’s get 2019 off to a flying start
Yes, it’s that time of year again! Here are just a few of the ways that we – whether that’s me (Mike) or one of our amazing partners – can help get your organisation off to a great start:
A 1-day workshop, Core Agendashift: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change : basic familiarisation with the Agendashift tools and an initial introduction to outcome-orientation. As described in the first four chapters of the book, Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation .
A 1-day workshop, Applied Agendashift: Co-Creating Your Transformation Strategy : the same material as the Core workshop, but focussed on your organisation specifically.
A 2-day workshop, Advanced Agendashift: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation : a much deeper experience, covering all five chapters of the book and plenty more.
An Outside-in strategy review or Service delivery review, Agendashift-style: alluded to in chapter 5 of the Agendashift book and described in detail in the forthcoming Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile.
Something smaller: a quick Changeban , Celebration-5W , or 15-minute FOTO session, for example.
If we can help you in any of these ways or if you’d like to be able to offer them yourself, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Subscribe here for monthly roundups and very occasional mid-month announcements
Upcoming public Agendashift workshops (India*2, US*2, UK, Netherlands):
16-17 Jan 2019, Gurugram, India:
Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation with Agendashift
(Advanced, 2-day workshop, Mike Burrows )
20 Jan 2019, Mumbai, India:
Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change with Agendashift
(Core, 1-day workshop, Mike Burrows )
01 March 2019, Tampa, FL, USA:
Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change with Agendashift
(Core, 1-day workshop, Julia Wester )
20 March 2019, London, England,
Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change with Agendashift
(Core, 1-day workshop, Mike Burrows ; booking page coming soon – register interest here )
29 March 2019, Seattle, WA, USA:
Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change with Agendashift
(Core, 1-day workshop, Julia Wester )
4-5 Apr 2019, Utrecht, Netherlands,
Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation with Agendashift
Advanced, 2-day workshop (booking page coming soon; Mike Burrows – register interest here )
Also: Channel #agendashift-studio in the Agendashift Slack if interested in a cozy workshop with me at Agendashift HQ (Derbyshire, England).
[image error]Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | About | Partners | Resources | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
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…
December 27, 2018
The Agendashift blog’s top posts of 2018
It’s hard to predict how any given post will perform, but I’m pretty happy with how these have come out, not least because they seem to bode well for my 2019 book, Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile. Two lists, starting with posts published in 2018:
My handy, referenceable Definition of Done (May)
‘Right to Left’ works for Scrum too (July)
Right to Left: a transcript of my Lean Agile Brighton talk (October)
Engagement: more than a two-way street (September)
Understanding Lean-Agile, right to left (May)
Changeban has reached version 1.0 (November)
How the Leader-Leader model turns Commander’s Intent upside down (March)
A small departure from the book (September)
You can’t deliver a task (August)
My kind of Agile (November)
And some perennial favourites published pre 2018:
Introducing Kanban through its values (January 2013)
Featureban 2.0 (June 2016)
Better user stories start with authentic situations of need (October 2016)
Scrum and Kanban revisited (August 2017)
STATIK, Kanban’s hidden gem (March 2014)
Subscribe here for monthly roundups and very occasional mid-month announcements
Upcoming public Agendashift workshops (India*2, UK, Netherlands):
16-17 Jan 2019, Gurugram, India:
Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation with Agendashift
(Advanced, 2-day workshop)
20 Jan 2019, Mumbai, India:
Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change with Agendashift
(Core, 1-day workshop)
20 March 2019, London, England,
Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change with Agendashift
(Core, 1-day workshop; booking page coming soon – register interest here )
4-5 Apr 2019, Utrecht, Netherlands,
Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation with Agendashift
Advanced, 2-day workshop (booking page coming soon – register interest here )
Also: Channel #agendashift-studio in the Agendashift Slack if interested in a cozy workshop at Agendashift HQ (Derbyshire, England).
[image error]Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | About | Partners | Resources | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
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…
December 21, 2018
Agendashift roundup, December 2018
In this pre-Christmas edition: India; Being Human; Right to Left (with a plea for help); Celebration-5W; Top posts
But first, let me thank you for your support through 2018 and wish you a peaceful and prosperous 2019. If you are taking a break for Christmas, have a good one! I will keep this short 
December 11, 2018
Open sourcing our Discovery exercise, Celebration-5W
Here’s how chapter 1 of the Agendashift book opens:
Picture the scene: It’s some months from now, and you’re celebrating! Isn’t it wonderful to see everyone together like this? And you deserve it: over this period, you, your teams, and your entire organisation have achieved far more than anyone would have thought possible. You dared to aim high, and still you smashed it!
What makes this celebration so special? We’re going to explore that via some time travel and the classic journalistic questions of Who, What, When, Where, and Why, otherwise known as the five W’s.
Most Agendashift workshops kick off with this simple time-travelling and context-setting exercise – the first of four Discovery exercises – and now we’ve open-sourced it. Head over to the Celebration-5W page for more information, including a preview of the slides, a video, download information, and related tools and exercises.
The small print:
Celebration-5W is copyright © 2018-2018 Agendashift (a trading name of Positive Incline Ltd). Celebration-5W by Mike Burrows of Positive Incline Ltd is 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/.
We warmly encourage customisations, adaptations, translations, etc to be made and shared. It seems however that not everyone gets how Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (aka CC-BY-SA) is meant to work, so I’ve added a guidance slide to the deck.
If you have questions, drop me a line or (better) go to channel #workshops in the Agendashift Slack. There are several people there who have facilitated this exercise before. I have used it dozens of times.
Enjoy Celebration-5W!
Subscribe here for monthly roundups and very occasional mid-month announcements
Upcoming public Agendashift workshops (India*2, UK, Netherlands):
16-17 Jan 2019, Gurugram, India:
Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation with Agendashift
(Advanced, 2-day workshop)
20 Jan 2019, Mumbai, India:
Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change with Agendashift
(Core, 1-day workshop)
20 March 2019, London, England,
Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change with Agendashift
(Core, 1-day workshop; booking page coming soon – register interest here)
4-5 Apr 2019, Utrecht, Netherlands,
Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation with Agendashift
Advanced, 2-day workshop (booking page coming soon – register interest here )
[image error]Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | About | Partners | Resources | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
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…
December 3, 2018
Rejection, insight, and learning
Two questions:
When did you last reject an idea as a result of deliberate testing?
What did you learn in the process?
And a followup question:
How does your process encourage that kind of rejection and learning to happen?
If your process doesn’t ask the right questions at the right time, you can be pretty sure you’re either building stuff no-one needs, or mandating changes that will fail to deliver the benefits you expect. But if you program in the time to reflect on your rejected ideas (however sporadically they’re currently happening), the rest might just follow.
Here’s how at the end of the Changeban [1, 2] game we model that reflection and introduce two key concepts: the hypothesis and double-loop learning [2] (notice the two levels of learning identified by the red callouts):
[image error]
In theory, if you have an organisational design that encourages double-loop learning, the rest of your process will soon catch up. In my experience however, it’s rare to see it outside of those organisations that haven’t already chosen to pursue a hypothesis-driven, outcome-oriented, ‘right-to-left’ kind of delivery process.
For example, heavily ‘projectised’ organisations typically learn painfully slowly. This is only partly explained by the fact that they do everything in large batches that take a very long time to process. There are deeper issues:
Once the scope of a project has been decided, the mere thought that there might be more needs to discover and respond to is often actively discouraged. If discovery happens at all, it is done by people outside the delivery team in preparation for future projects, greatly limiting the opportunity to integrate new learning into current work.
Similarly, when the ironically-named ‘lessons learned’ meeting finally arrives, it is already too late for the project in question to test any proposed process changes, and it’s unlikely that other projects will be ready to do much with the insights generated either.
Not that Agile has this stuff completely sorted either:
Backlog-driven Agile projects (four words that will never gladden my heart) remain susceptible to the scope problem, and typically they don’t make a habit of framing individual pieces of work in ways designed to invite challenge
Even where the delivery process is a good generator of insights, team-centric Agile tends to limit the organisational scope of any learning
In Right to Left [4] (due summer 2019) I will describe a style of delivery organisation that has i) managed to let go of that old left-to-right kind of thinking, and ii) explicitly created not just opportunities for organisational learning to happen but the clear expectation that it will will be happening all of the time, a natural part of the process, and ‘real work’.
Fortunately, there are enough real-world examples of right-to-left thinking out there that I know that it is no idealistic fantasy. Neither is it a doomed attempt to shoehorn diverse experiences into a single and over-complicated delivery framework or to extrapolate from the experiences of just a few. Rather, the right-to-left concept represents a concentrated essence of Lean, Agile, and Lean-Agile working at their best, a helpful metaphor, and a unifying theme, one that allows me to celebrate a wide range of models, tools, and examples. Each of those is unique and special, but a commitment to learning connects all of them.
In the meantime, don’t forget Agendashift [5, 6]! This is no stopgap, but rather an approach to change and transformation through which that same right-to-left philosophy runs very deep. If you’re in the business of change in what could broadly be described as the Lean-Agile space and are hungry for alternatives to 20th century change management, the book and the tools it describes could be just what you’re looking for.
[1] Changeban (www.agendashift.com)
[2] Changeban has reached version 1.0 (blog.agendashift,com)
[3] Double-loop learning (en.wikipedia.org)
[4] Right to Left (www.agendashift.com)
[5] Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (www.agendashift.com)
[6] Agendashift (www.agendashift.com)
Subscribe here for monthly roundups and very occasional mid-month announcements
Upcoming public Agendashift workshops (India*2, Netherlands):
16-17 Jan 2019, Gurugram, India:
Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation with Agendashift
(Advanced, 2-day workshop)
20 Jan 2019, Mumbai, India:
Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change with Agendashift
(Core, 1-day workshop)
4-5 Apr, Utrecht, Netherlands,
Advanced, 2-day workshop (booking page coming soon)
[image error]Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | About | Partners | Resources | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
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…
November 30, 2018
Agendashift roundup, November 2018
In this edition: Changeban 1.0; Right to Left; Life in Agendashift land; Podcast interview; Top posts
Changeban 1.0
As per recent roundups, I’m in the process of updating some of Agendashift’s Creative Commons-licensed assets (and also considering releasing one or two more, but that’s another story). Of those, the fastest mover is Changeban, fast-moving in the sense both that it has been through some rapid evolution in recent weeks (one upside of a heavy travel schedule is the number of opportunities to test it) and that it has been a very popular download. Here’s the announcement on Changeban 1.0:
Changeban has reached version 1.0
[image error]
Right to Left
Monthly status check: 29,604 words and I have at last completed a draft of the potentially controversial (but to me common sense) chapter 4, Viable scaling, something I admit I had been putting off. There’s also a rough chapter 5, Outside in, leaving only chapter 6 unstarted. If the intro counts as quarter of a chapter, it’s 80% complete (apart from the remaining 99% of course) and I should be able to keep it to around 40,000 words.
Lifted verbatim from chapter 2:
My kind of Agile
Life in Agendashift land
Quite apart from the writing (no hardship at all), things have been pretty busy in recent weeks. A pre-Brexit tour took me to three different EU countries in three weeks, with a public 1-day workshop in Brescia, Italy, a 2-day workshop in Berlin, Germany, and a private workshop in Dublin, Ireland, a followup to one a few weeks previously. Julia Wester has the last big public workshop of 2018 next week in Munich, Germany (details here).
Already in the calendar for January are two workshops and two conferences in India, details here. We’re pencilling a 2-day workshop in Utrecht, Netherlands for early April (watch this space) and I intend to announce both 1-day and 2-day workshops in London. There’s a decent pipeline of private workshops developing too.
Lastly, at the time of writing there is one place free at the Agendashift Studio on Friday December 7th. By definition, this is at my studio office in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, with lunch at a local farm shop. You might like to stay in the area and visit the Peak District national park over the weekend (I feel very lucky to have it on my doorstep). £195, with 40% off for government/education sector employees. There’s no booking page, just drop me an email or ping me on Slack, the sooner the better.
Top posts
Changeban has reached version 1.0
Agendashift is not a maturity model
My kind of Agile
Right to Left: a transcript of my Lean Agile Brighton talk (October)
Agendashift’s many extension points
Engagement: more than a two-way street (September)
How the Leader-Leader model turns Commander’s Intent upside down (June)
‘Right to Left’ works for Scrum too (July)
[image error]Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
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Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
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…
November 26, 2018
Changeban has reached version 1.0
After several iterations (including runs at multiple workshops just this month) I’m delighted to announce that our Lean Startup-flavoured Kanban simulation game Changeban has reached version 1.0. As with its older sibling Featureban, it is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
[image error] Some crazy, off-the-board WIP happening there…
In recent weeks we have:
Removed all mention of coins (the source of variation in Changeban’s older sibling, Featureban ), coming down firmly on the side of using playing cards.
Clarified instructions, with fewer slides and fewer words
Amplified certain concepts, most notably rejection (the positive, celebration-worthy decision to deem an experiment as failed), pull, and double-loop learning
I created Featureban in 2014 and it has been very good to me. In that time it has seen multiple adaptations and translations (thank you!) and has been used the world over. This year, I’ve played Changeban enough times to know that it’s a worthy successor, and it’s my preferred choice unless I have a particular need for Featureban’s metrics coverage (enough justification to use both with some clients, on separate visits). Changeban doesn’t just teach mechanics, it teaches a learning process, and because it feels less tied to a development process it removes a potential obstacle for some non-techies. In short: if you like Featureban, I think you’ll love Changeban.
Attendees of my 2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop in Gurugram (below) will definitely get to play it, and attendees of 1-day Core workshops (Julia’s in Munich or mine in Mumbai) might also. In Core workshops it would be at the expense of other things, but that’s a trade that participants are often happy to make.
Want to know more? Head over to the Changeban page – it’s all there!
Registered users will be emailed download instructions in the next few hours. Agendashift partners will find it under the Commons folder in the partner Dropbox.
Upcoming public Agendashift workshops (Germany, India * 2):
03 December, Munich, Germany, Julia Wester (Core, 1 day):
Core Agendashift: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change
16-17 Jan 2019, Gurugram, Mike Burrows (Advanced, 2 days):
Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation with Agendashift
20 Jan 2019, Mumbai, Mike Burrows (Core, 1 day):
Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change with Agendashift
[image error]Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | About | Partners | Resources | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
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…
