Mike Burrows's Blog, page 35

Engagement: more than a two-way street

September 14th, 2018 is the second anniversary of Agendashift’s public launch. I’m marking the occasion with a post that describes a key motivation and gives some clues about where we’re headed. And while we’re here, if you haven’t recently checked our programme of upcoming workshops, there are four listed at the bottom. Enjoy!

We all know what employee disengagement looks like, how it saps energy and creativity, and not just in the unengaged. I won’t go into all the causes and symptoms here, but briefly, if you take away people’s agency – their perceived ability to make choices for themselves – a stress response is provoked, and not the kind of stress that you would want to find in an organisation that hopes to see people working at their best [1].

Just as anywhere else, disengagement is a very bad sign in the context of [Lean-]Agile transformation. It’s a sign that the change agents (managers, consultants, coaches, etc) don’t know what they’re doing! If people are disengaging because there’s the perception that they have no say in how things are going to work inside their teams, it strongly suggests that they have been denied the opportunity to participate meaningfully in the transformation process. This represents an inexcusable failure to engage on the part of the change agents responsible. It would seem that engagement is a two-way street (actually it’s more four-way intersection than two-way street, but we’ll come to that).

In short, 20th century-style rollout projects and managed change programmes run the risk of destroying engagement. Not only do the ends not justify the means, the means don’t work if the goal is an engaged and creative workforce. That it keeps happening is “an absolute travesty”, as Martin Fowler (an Agile Manifesto signatory) recently put it [2].

So ‘Big Agile’ bad, ‘Small Agile’ good? Not so fast. Agilists lamenting a lack of Agility in the organisation is not engagement. Tweeting false dichotomies about management vs leadership is not likely to engage many managers. Praying for viral adoption is not much of a growth strategy. And don’t get me started on the passive aggression (“We’re so Agile, we only let our stakeholders talk to us in the Sprint review” [3]).

A plague on both their houses then? No! The arguments between the two sides keep missing the crucial point that success depends on engagement. It’s a phony war, fought on the wrong battleground, few shots landed. The apparently less exciting good news: the more that they do engage, the less obviously top-down or bottom-up they become and the more that they have in common. Funny that.

It should now be clear why engagement models [4] such as Agendashift [5], OpenSpace Agility (OSA) [6], Systemic Modelling [7], BOSSA nova [8], and TASTE [9] are so necessary. Non-prescriptive by design, they work happily with frameworks big or small, branded or home-brewed, and with each other. In their various and complementary ways, they bring people together from multiple levels of the organisation, help the organisation collectively to reveal to itself what needs to change, and come to agreement on what needs to change.

But we can go further. In a transformation of any reasonable size, it is inevitable that different parts of the organisation will move forward at different speeds, and this will keep on throwing up new challenges. If we want the ‘new’ to survive and then thrive, then its surrounding organisation must too. If the new is to grow, then the old must adapt. Both have needs, those needs will evolve over time, and attending to them is key to the viability [10] of not just the transformation, but the organisation itself.

What’s needed then is another kind of engagement: not person-to-person but system-to-system. It raises questions like these:

How does strategy work going forward? How will ‘old’ and ‘new’ participate in the processes of strategy development and deployment?
On the day-to-day stuff of delivery, how will old and new coordinate with each other effectively?
How might this play out over time, and what implications will that have for the easily-forgotten, slower-changing, but still critical parts of the organisation? (For example, what role do HR and Finance play in the staffing, skilling, and funding of a very different-looking organisation?)
How will we know that it’s working? How will we know to intervene when it is not?
How will we know that we’re winning? Then what?

These questions could easily be re-framed so that Agendashift-style tools can be used to explore this evolving landscape. For example:

What obstacles will prevent ‘old’ and ‘new’ participating in the processes of strategy development and deployment as we move forward?

(Then from obstacles to outcomes (FOTO) [11] – you know the drill)

Whether we’re talking about Agile process frameworks or engagement models, I don’t honestly think it’s sensible to expect off-the-shelf products to have answers to these questions. What’s important is that they’re asked and answered, then re-asked and re-answered as the transformation progresses. Instead of glossing over them, how about embracing them? Does this not invite management from both sides of any old/new divide to become more engaged, to take more responsibility for the process, and for new kinds of leadership to develop as a result?

[image error]No shortage of opportunities for both kinds of engagement [12]I believe this represents a massive opportunity for the engagement models. It’s not that we didn’t already kinda know this, but we’re going to make it more explicit, both because it’s important in its own right and because it further exposes the bankruptcy of approaches based on imposition and other negligent forms of non-engagement. A concerted effort is gathering a head of steam here in Agendashift-land [13], and we collaborate with our friends in our peer communities too. No lack of choice there!

Notes & references

[1] I credit the phrase “working at your best” to Caitlin Walker’s From Contempt to Curiosity: Creating the Conditions for Groups to Collaborate Using Clean Language and Systemic Modelling, Caitlin Walker (2014, Clean Publishing). You can see its influence in the Agendashift True North (agendashift.com/true-north).

[2] The State of Agile Software in 2018 (martinfowler.com). Key quote:

The Agile Industrial Complex imposing methods on people is an absolute travesty

[3] A sensible enough short-term policy designed to protect the newly-forming team becomes dogma, to the long-term detriment of all.

[4] Engagement model: For Daniel Mezick’s quick introduction to the concept, see Engagement (openspaceagility.com). Key quotes:

Engagement Model (noun) : Any pattern, or set of patterns, reducible to practice, which results in more employee engagement, during the implementation of an organizational-change initiative.

If you cannot name your Engagement Model, you don’t have one.

[5] Agendashift: agendashift.com, and of course the book, with communities on Slack and LinkedIn. Twitter: @agendashift

[6] OpenSpace Agility: openspaceagility.com, with communities on Facebook and LinkedIn.

[7] Systemic Modelling: See Clean For Teams: An Introduction to Systemic Modelling (cleanlearning.co.uk) and Caitlin Walker’s book above [1].

[8] BOSSA nova: See the website and the book by Jutta Eckstein and John Buck. Twitter: @AgileBossaNova

[9] TASTE: Karl Scotland’s take on Lean strategy deployment, with the X-Matrix as a key artefact. See the blog posts TASTE Impacts, Outcomes and Outputs and TASTE Success with an X-Matrix Template. Karl is also a leading collaborator on Agendashift; the upcoming Brighton workshop (see Upcoming Agendashift workshops below) includes both.

[10] My choice of the word ‘viability’ is deliberate. Its conventional meaning works fine, but I’m also alluding to Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM). Rather than the somewhat impenetrable Wikipedia page I would wholeheartedly recommend Patrick Hoverstadt’s excellent book The Fractal Organisation.

[11] 15-minute FOTO (agendashift.com/15-minute-foto), our Clean Language-inspired coaching game, Creative Commons licensed, available now in several translations.

[12] Figure based on Agendashift chapter 5 and my keynote Inverting the pyramid.

[13] Channels #right-to-left and #systhink-complexity in the Agendashift Slack. Note the title of the pivotal fourth chapter of Right to Left (due 2019). Twitter: @RightToLeft3

Acknowledgements: I’m grateful to Allan Kelly, Daniel Mezick, Philippe Guenet*, Karl Scotland*, Mike Haber, Thorbjørn Sigberg*, Andrea Chiou*, and Jutta Eckstein for their feedback on earlier drafts of this post. Asterisks indicate Agendashift partners.

Upcoming Agendashift workshops (UK, IT, DE)

9-11 October, Brighton, UK: Agendashift + X-Matrix Masterclass ( Mike Burrows , Karl Scotland )
9 November, Brescia, Italy: Pre-conference workshop: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change ( Mike Burrows )
21-22 November, Berlin, Germany:  2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation  ( Mike Burrows ) – see note 3
03 December, Munich, Germany:  Core Agendashift: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change  ( Julia Wester )


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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…

A small departure from the book

Slightly technical, but if you’re interested in what we know to be a remarkably effective combination of Clean Language, Cynefin, and Story Mapping as practiced in most Agendashift workshops, read on…

Use of Clean Language to generate fragments for 4-corners contextualization is just magic. @snowded – I think you'd like it. Thanks @asplake for superb @agendashift training. Highly recommended!

Agendashift roundup, August 2018

In this edition: Another podcast interview; The Agile travesty; Right to Left; Translations; Public workshops (UK*2, IT, DE*2); Speaking (UK*2, IT); Top posts

Another podcast interview

Last month I was interviewed by Vasco Duarte for the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast. For reasons that now escape me this missed the July roundup, so I lead with it this time:

BONUS: Mike Burrows on Agendashift, the outcome-oriented change approach

Thank you Vasco, it was fun!

The Agile travesty

This quote from Martin Fowler’s The State of Agile Software in 2018 keynote has drawn quite a bit of attention over the past few days:

[image error]

Of course the Agendashift community not only stands against imposition, we offer positive alternatives (or in other words, we’re neither grandstanding nor whining). Authentic engagement on outcomes isn’t that hard, certainly not beyond the capability of anyone who can reasonably claim to be an effective change agent or sponsor. If you’re not sure how, let us show you!

Right to Left

Monthly status check: 17,014 words, three chapters (of six) completed.

I’ve updated the landing page to list the chapters:

Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile

The eagle-eyed may spot a subtle title change: there’s no “Lean-Agile” in the book’s title now – given its intended audience it seemed just that bit too jargony.

As promised, two of last months tweets…

You can't deliver a task. #agile

— Mike Burrows (@asplake) July 16, 2018

Sooner or later, Continuous Delivery will depend on Continuous Discovery. Better make it sooner. #agile #agendashift #RightToLeft

— Mike Burrows (@asplake) July 25, 2018

…have become blog posts:

You can’t deliver a task
Continuous Delivery demands Continuous Discovery

The next chapter to be written, 4. Viable scaling, is one I really must get right. Scaling is a controversial topic, but hardly one I can ignore while covering the Lean-Agile landscape. Via Agendashift and a new mystery ingredient I believe I can address the controversy constructively while still remaining fair to all sides. Of course I might just end up offending everyone – we’ll see!

For question or the latest updates, go to Slack channel #right-to-left. See also some research-related conversations in channel #systhink-complexity.

Translations

As announced this month here and here, The cue card for 15-minute FOTO has recently been translated into German, Swedish, and Italian. Thank you Johan Nordin, Alex Pukinskis and Massimo Sarti.

Meanwhile, Agendashift surveys are now multilingual. Short version: survey participants can now switch languages from the default specified by the survey’s administrator.

Public workshops (UK*2, IT, DE*2)

14 September, Chesterfield, UK: Agendashift Studio (SOLD OUT) ( Mike Burrows ) – see note 1
9-11 October, Brighton, UK: Agendashift + X-Matrix Masterclass ( Mike Burrows , Karl Scotland )
9 November, Brescia, Italy: Pre-conference workshop: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change ( Mike Burrows ) – see note 2
21-22 November, Berlin, Germany:  2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation  ( Mike Burrows ) – see note 3
03 December, Munich, Germany:  Core Agendashift: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change  ( Julia Wester )

Notes:

Slack channel #agendashift-studio if interested in attending another cozy and low-cost workshop for 3-4 participants in my studio office in Chesterfield (close to the Peak District National Park; lunch is at a local farm shop). Delighted to report that two of September’s participants are attendees of pasts workshop, returning for more!
The Brescia workshop now has a booking page (it wasn’t ready for last month’s roundup)
The Berlin workshop doesn’t yet have a booking page; watch the LinkedIn group or #events in Slack for updates, or drop me a line

Speaking (UK*2, IT)

12 October, Brighton, UK: Lean Agile Brighton 2018 ( Mike Burrows , Karl Scotland , Jose Casal )
22 October, Manchester, UK: SCiO Open Meeting – Autumn 2018, Manchester (All Welcome)  ( Mike Burrows )
10th November, Brescia, Italy: Italian Agile Day 2018 ( Mike Burrows )

Top posts

Recent:

You can’t deliver a task
Continuous Delivery demands Continuous Discovery
FOTO in 15-minuti
And in Swedish…
#RightToLeft works for Scrum too  (July)

Still going strong:

Introducing Kanban through its values  (Jan 2013)
Featureban 2.0 (June 2016)
My handy, referenceable Definition of Done (May)


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Links: Home | About | Partners | Resources | Contact | Mike

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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…

 

And in Swedish…

The cue card for 15-minute FOTO, our Clean Language-inspired coaching game is now available in Swedish, thanks to Agendashift partner Johan Nordin. Tack så mycket!

[image error]

Downloads, a video, and other information about the game may be found at www.agendashift.com/15-minute-foto.

See also FOTO in 15-minuti, announcing Italian and German translations.

Public workshops (US, UK, IT, DE)

24th August, Seattle, WA, USA:  Core Agendashift: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change  ( Julia Wester )
14th September, Chesterfield, UK: Agendashift Studio – one place available! See below for details
9th-11th October, Brighton, UK:  Agendashift + X-Matrix Masterclass  ( Mike Burrows , Karl Scotland )
9th November, Brescia, Italy:  Pre-conference workshop: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change  ( Mike Burrows )
3rd December, Munich, Germany:  Core Agendashift: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change  ( Julia Wester )

A place has just become available for the September 14th Agendashift Studio – first come first served! By definition, it’s a cozy and informal Agendashift workshop for up to 4 participants held in my detached studio office in Chesterfield, convenient for the Peak District National Park; lunch at a local farm shop. £195 + VAT. £25 discount to past attendees &/or Agendashift partners; 40% off for public sector, educational & non-profit employees. Make yourself known the #agendashift-studio channel in Slack if interested in attending at another time.

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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…

Continuous Delivery demands Continuous Discovery

This is the second of an informal series of posts suggested in the July roundup,  expanding on tweets that have sprung to mind while writing (or thinking about writing) my third book, working title Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile. In case you missed first one: You can’t deliver a task.

Tweet #2:

Sooner or later, Continuous Delivery will depend on Continuous Discovery. Better make it sooner. #agile #agendashift #RightToLeft

— Mike Burrows (@asplake) July 25, 2018

Do you recognise this pattern?

We get somewhat good at building stuff
Later,  we get somewhat good at testing it
Later still, we get good at deployment, so good in fact that we can do it at will
As work starts to flow, deficiencies in development and testing become more apparent, and they get dealt with
All of a sudden, the real bottleneck turns out to be outside of development – a lack of high quality ideas in the pipeline and/or frustrating delays in getting decisions made
Now what???

There is something almost inevitable in this sequence – in fact anyone familiar with the Theory of Constraints (TOC) will expect it! If you’re unfamiliar with TOC, it’s the model behind Eli Goldratt’s classic business novel The Goal, and much more recently the DevOps novel The Phoenix Project; TOC teaches that once you’ve addressed enough of your internal constraints, your key constraint will be found outside.

Although there’s a lot to be celebrated in that progression, no team wants to get to the “Now what???” stage. Your choices:

Hope that it never happens (or not care, because teams are there to be disbanded)
Plan to deal with it when it does happen
Make Discovery (or “upstream” or whatever else you call it) a first class activity in your process

Option 3 implies some proactivity, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be difficult. Instead of dismantling that capability as your latest initiative gets off the ground, keep it going, even if at a reduced level. Instead of accepting requirements at face value, make sure that someone is taking the time to understand their authentic situations of need. Instead of fire-and-forget delivery, validate that needs are being met, expecting to feed some new learning back into the process. Simple changes, but as documented in my first book, the effect can be profound, even humbling!

You can of course go further. One of the most important moves made by the UK Government Digital Service (GDS) was to insist that every new service had a credible plan to sustain user research and ongoing service evolution – not just at the beginning but indefinitely into the future. “Start with needs” wasn’t just a slogan, it was a strategy, and a successful one! If government could do this in times of austerity, what excuse does your organisation have?

Public workshops (US, UK, IT, DE)

24th August, Seattle, WA, USA:  Core Agendashift: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change  ( Julia Wester )
14th September, Chesterfield, UK: Agendashift Studio – SOLD OUT – see below
9th-11th October, Brighton, UK:  Agendashift + X-Matrix Masterclass  ( Mike Burrows , Karl Scotland )
9th November, Brescia, Italy:  Pre-conference workshop: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change  ( Mike Burrows )
3rd December, Munich, Germany:  Core Agendashift: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change  ( Julia Wester )

Make yourself known the #agendashift-studio channel in Slack if interested in attending another cozy 1-day or 2-day workshop for 3-4 participants in my studio office in Chesterfield, Derbyshire (minutes away from the Peak District National Park).

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Links: Home | About | Partners | Resources | Contact | Mike

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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…

Agendashift surveys are now multilingual

Another quick one, and also language-related…

A number of Agendashift surveys have been multinational, but not multilingual. Or at least, not easily: for the Agendashift global survey for example, I set up separate surveys for each supported language, and then linked to them individually from the landing page. Clunky to put it mildly, and not something I would want to do again.

Go there now and instead you’ll see this message:

The default language for this survey is English (EN). After signing in to your assessment, you can switch to French (FR), German (DE), Italian (IT), Dutch (NL), Russian (RU), Spanish (ES), Swedish (SV), or Hebrew (HE) if you prefer.

This new feature applies to all surveys. Not sure whether to distribute a survey in German or Russian (to take an actual example from a multinational team)? Just choose a default, and let the user switch as needed.

See also the following (all on www.agendashift.com):

Assessments
Free trial  (with some restrictions)
Partner programme  (unrestricted access)
The Agendashift book , chapter 2 in particular


Public workshops (US, UK, IT, DE)

24th August, Seattle, WA, USA:  Core Agendashift: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change  ( Julia Wester )
9th-11th October, Brighton, UK:  Agendashift + X-Matrix Masterclass  ( Mike Burrows , Karl Scotland )
9th November, Brescia, Italy:  Pre-conference workshop: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change  ( Mike Burrows )
3rd December, Munich, Germany:  Core Agendashift: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change  ( Julia Wester )


[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…

FOTO in 15-minuti

Quick one: Massimo Sarti has kindly translated the 15-minute FOTO cue card into Italian. Thanks to Alex Pukinskis, we have it in German also. If you’d like either one of these, just go to the 15-minute FOTO page, request the materials as usual, and mention which one you’d like.

Massimo’s translation is particularly timely: since July’s roundup we now have a booking page up for the Core Agendashift workshop Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change in Brescia, Italy on November 9th, ahead of Italian Agile Day 2018 on the 10th. We both hope to see you there!

[image error]

15-minute FOTO is our Clean Language-inspired coaching game, an essential and memorable component of every Agendashift workshop. We have released it under a Creative Commons with-attribution licence to enable its wider use and to encourage adaptations.

FOTO stands for “From Obstacles to Outcomes”, and you have 15 minutes to generate as many as you can, using only the questions on the cue card. An example of “generative over prescriptive” if you like.

Public workshops (US, UK, IT, DE)

24th August, Seattle, WA, USA:  Core Agendashift: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change  ( Julia Wester )
9th-11th October, Brighton, UK:  Agendashift + X-Matrix Masterclass  ( Mike Burrows , Karl Scotland )
9th November, Brescia, Italy:  Pre-conference workshop: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change  ( Mike Burrows )
3rd December, Munich, Germany:  Core Agendashift: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change  ( Julia Wester )


[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…

You can’t deliver a task

As suggested in the July roundup, this is the first of a few posts expanding on tweets that have sprung to mind while writing (or thinking about writing) my third book, working title Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile.

You can't deliver a task. #agile

— Mike Burrows (@asplake) July 16, 2018

Years ago, in my past life as a manager (which I still re-enter from time to time as an interim), I learned that there was little value in me tracking tasks. What mattered to me was the deliverable. Interestingly, I noticed that when I visibly stopped taking an interest in tasks, most of my team members followed suit. I said “It’s completely fine by me to tasks on the board if that’s what works for you, but I’m not going to ask about them”, and soon the task stickies disappeared.

As a team, we made rare exceptions for features that failed our “2 day rule”, which is to say features that at a very rough guess would require more than a couple of days worth of development. Experience taught us that these were disproportionately risky, so it seemed justified to insist on some kind of plan. Of course what actually happened was that most of these big features got sliced into smaller features, and then everyone’s happy to go back to feature-level tracking.

Stop tracking tasks, and no longer does the tracking system drive the developer to work in a way that doesn’t seem natural. A bit over here, a bit over there, then back to the first bit… if the tests say it’s fine, it’s fine! Two people with different skills working together on the same feature? Go for it! And at a stroke it eliminates the anti-pattern of “tasks for quality” – ie separate tasks for unit tests, refactoring, and the like (in the global department I ran more than a decade ago, these tasks disappeared when I asked why these things weren’t happening as the code was being written; I guess my predecessor didn’t see things in quite the same way).

And then there’s the whole question of when a task can be said to be “done”. How do you that some low-level piece of work is really done if the feature as a whole isn’t yet working? Somehow I think that this may have come up before….

[image error] Our handy, referenceable, Definition of Done

Public workshops (US, UK, IT, DE)

24th August, Seattle, WA, USA:  Core Agendashift: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change  ( Julia Wester )
9th-11th October, Brighton, UK:  Agendashift + X-Matrix Masterclass  ( Mike Burrows , Karl Scotland )
9th November, Brescia, Italy:  Pre-conference workshop: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change  ( Mike Burrows ) Note: the booking page is now up
3rd December, Munich, Germany:  Core Agendashift: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change  ( Julia Wester )


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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…

Agendashift roundup, July 2018

In this edition: Strategy workshop and Agendashift Studio; Right to Left; Public workshops (US, UK, IT, DE); Top posts

Strategy workshop and Agendashift Studio

On consecutive days early this month (before things began to slow down for the summer) I led a private strategy workshop done Agendashift-style and then a small “Agendashift Studio” workshop held in my studio office in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, just outside the Peak District National Park.

For obvious reasons I can’t go into a lot of detail about the private workshop but it did result in a blog post:

An outside-in strategy review, Agendashift style

There’ll be at least a chapter’s worth of this in the new book (more on that in a moment), covering the use of this kind of outside-in structure for strategy and operations reviews in the kind of depth that wasn’t possible in the Agendashift book.

The Agendashift Studio workshop was a lot of fun. Here’s some great feedback:

Use of Clean Language to generate fragments for 4-corners contextualization is just magic. @snowded – I think you'd like it. Thanks @asplake for superb @agendashift training. Highly recommended!

#RightToLeft is #Agendashift (outcome-orientation) for delivery

Going by chapter counts, Agendashift [1] is 80% outcome-oriented change and 20% continuous transformation. It describes an approach to Lean-Agile transformation that  rejects imposition, replacing it with meaningful agreement on outcomes, bringing together organisational ambitions and the needs of everyone who will help bring those ambitions to reality.

Can we do for delivery what Agendashift does for change? Of course we can, The only surprise it that it’s so necessary!

It has always been well understood in Lean circles that to make proper sense of a delivery process, you must start with how the thing that is being delivered creates value in the eyes of the customer, and work backwards from there. Somehow, that lesson gets forgotten in Agile circles; either Agile is all about teams (a view I can find some respect for, even if I don’t fully buy it), or we’re fed the ironically process-centric lie that teams start with backlogs and create value from there.

[image error] Our handy, referenceable, Definition of Done

#RightToLeft is about recovering a focus on customer outcomes for Lean-Agile delivery [2], and maintaining that perspective as we work backwards through the delivery process, understanding it better, managing it better, and finding ways to do it better.

It’s a simple but surprisingly radical change of perspective. With it, it’s surprisingly easy to see that there are two Scrums [3], the mechanistic, backlog-first left-to-right version and the ‘iterated goal-seeking’ right-to-left version. It turns out that there are two versions of SAFe too; expect to see more on that soon (and not just from me). I haven’t yet established whether there are left-to-right and right-to-left versions of the other leading scaling frameworks; it would be nice to identify some that are predominantly right-to-left, but we’ll see (if you can help or just want to stay in touch with this work, join us in the #right-to-left channel in the Agendashift Slack [4]).

The Right to Left book [5] will come out next summer. Meanwhile, Agendashift has plenty to offer. For example, how do you explain survey results [6] like these?

[image error]

When I see results like these (which I do a lot), it’s all I can do to resist sarcastic lines like “Great to see all that leadership put to such good use!”. There’s some good(ish) news –transparency, balance, and collaboration are doing somewhat ok, relatively speaking (even if the numbers aren’t great in absolute terms and they’re not having the impact on flow that we would hope for), but just look at customer focus! Fortunately, I see a great appetite for doing something about this, paying more attention to needs, embracing validation, and so on.

I’ve said a few times now that I would be happy to see the rest of my career (I’m 53) being devoted to outcomes. When I first started saying it, I didn’t have #RightToLeft in mind, but that’s 100% ok. Perhaps one day we’ll be describing #Agendashift as #RightToLeft for change!

[1] Agendashift (www.agendashift.com)

[2] Understanding Lean-Agile, right to left (blog.agendashift.com)

[3] #RightToLeft works for Scrum too (blog.agendashift.com)

[4] Agendashift on Slack (www.agendashift.com)

[5] Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean-Agile (www.agendashift.com)

[6] Agendashift Assessments, also chapter 2 of the book (www.agendashift.com)

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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…