Mike Burrows's Blog, page 39
March 13, 2018
Enabling the supermini assessment
Another day, another enhancement deployed! Yesterday’s was about flexibility in reporting, encouraging experimentation in different debrief structures and incorporating the best ideas in the online tools for other facilitators to try. Today’s gives survey administrators additional control over the assessment template.
Let’s start with the motivation, shared in the #assessments Slack channel last week by partner Johan Nordin (lightly edited):
I have this feeling of a pattern emerging when revisiting my first conversations with managers and team leads even before we are ready to do anything at all together. I find a lack of shared visibility and understanding of what is going on AND people are feeling overwhelmed with work, stressed and in a state where they don’t seem to have time left for improvement work. Their ability to do anything sustainable and predictable is then very difficult from my experience. This pattern of “chaotic-state” is more common than not in my experience (maybe because that is my ideal customer).
I’ve been reviewing the assessment prompts and wonder about just asking for mini-assessment prompts for just the Balance and Transparency categories; my assumption/hypothesis is that if the scores are low AND they suffering from it AND they are willing to do something, the first thing they need to start with is to increase ability to see and understand what is going on (see workflow, enough clarity on current way of working) AND limit WIP to create enough room to start reflect and do small adjustments to their system.
So (finally)… how about a ‘super-mini-assessment’ with the only prompts from transparency and balance categories of the mini assessment?
The list of templates is already quite long (different combinations of theme, structure, length, and language) so instead we’ve allowed the chosen template’s categories to be selectable by the survey administrator. Not only is Johan’s initial need met, he could roll out the full template in stages: Transparency and Balance first, then maybe Collaboration and Customer Focus, with Flow and Leadership last. But not necessarily in that order – perhaps his clients will help to decide!
As described yesterday, you can try the mini assessment (18 prompts across all six categories) by participating in the 2017-18 global survey or by joining the free trial, the latter allowing you to survey small teams. Full partner status gets you a range of full-sized templates, all our workshop materials, and (under your control) a listing in our partner directory.
Upcoming workshops:
6 April, Raleigh, NC, USA – Mike Burrows, Kert Peterson
14-15 May, Munich, Germany – Mike Burrows, Mike Leber
22-23 May, Cardiff, UK – Mike Burrows
[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 evolution 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…
March 12, 2018
The Agendashift survey debrief: Alternate cuts
One very encouraging sign of health in the Agendashift community is the way things are beginning to happen without my personal involvement. It really is getting a life of its own! For example, our Slack has spawned a #bookclub channel for coordinating a weekly get-together, and partners have been meeting to share and experiment with different ways to debrief their Agendashift surveys.
In the latter case, some of that learning has been incorporated into our survey reporting tool, the ‘unbenchmarking’ report. Here are three demos, using an illustrative subset of data from the 2017-18 global survey (which is one way to try a mini assessment for yourself), and a new feature that makes it easier for facilitators to choose which report sections to share and in what order.
Demo 1: The classic report
First off, here’s what could be described as the ‘classic’ unbenchmarking report, with sections pretty much in the order described in chapter 2 of the book, plus two sections (Above profile and Below profile) that rely on some machine learning functionality that was beyond the scope of the book:
Agendashift global 2017-18 (EN) Unbenchmarking report, classic
Tip: Page through the several sections of the report using the PgUp and PgDn buttons (see the navigation control top right) or the corresponding buttons on your keyboard or presentation clicker.
Demo 2: The minimum viable debrief
If you’ve read the book, you’ll know that I encourage facilitators to move quickly over the early sections of the report, leaving plenty of time for the two sections that identify (respectively) areas of agreement and disagreement. Partner Olivier My takes that advice and turns the dial up to 11 with his ‘minimum viable’ debrief:
Agendashift global 2017-18 (EN) Unbenchmarking report, minimum viable
Here we’ve dispensed even with the cover page, going straight to the categories and prompts with the narrowest spread of scores, ie areas of agreement:
[image error]
Interestingly, we seem to be in agreement mainly on weaknesses! There’s a good chance that there are some quick wins here.
Now that we’re comfortable with the data, let’s go to the second page of Olivier’s report:
[image error]
Very different! The issue here isn’t obvious weakness, it’s inconsistency – whether that’s of actual behaviour and outcomes or of perception. Some typical questions for the facilitator to ask here:
“Who scored a 3 or 4 for this one and wouldn’t mind sharing their thinking?”
“Who can imagine why someone might score a 3 or a 4 here?” (a safer version of the previous question)
“Who has good examples of this working well?”
“Who’s different to that? Who had a 1 or a 2?”
“What might explain the 1’s and 2’s?” (again, the safer version of the previous question)
“What’s the impact when it’s not working well?”
Demo 3: The compact debrief
Steven Mackenzie uses a debrief structure very different to mine, narrowest and widest alternating with strongest and weakest:
Score distributions
Categories
Categories and prompts with the narrowest spread of scores
Strongest categories and prompts
Categories and prompts with the widest spread of scores
Weakest categories and prompts
(Full report beginning at the Contents page here)
It took me a while to get this but I’m keen now to try it for myself at my next available opportunity. Here’s how Steven explains it:
Categories as bar charts – Easy introduction to the spread of data
Categories as sliders – I explain the slider visualisation of the same data, helping people understand the slides to come
Areas of strongest agreement – I expect the group to recognize these behaviours, and be mentally comfortable to accept what follows
Highest scores – I will congratulate on some specifics here, offer them option to talk if they are passionate, but warn that we’re seeing variation in responses creeping in
Widest variation: I will ask for discussion here
Weakest scores: I will ask for discussion here
So there you go: community learning captured in the technology!
Experience it first hand
Of my upcoming public workshops, that “next available opportunity” is the 1-day workshop on April 6th in Raleigh:
6 April, Raleigh, NC, USA – Mike Burrows, Kert Peterson
14-15 May, Munich, Germany – Mike Burrows, Mike Leber
22-23 May, Cardiff, UK – Mike Burrows
The survey debrief is the catalyst for a generative process in which we generate the outcomes that represent action areas, themes, goals and ambitions for the organisation’s transformation. This is session 2 of a 4 or 5-session public workshop, and easily a workshop in its own right if you’re doing it privately with a client or your employer.
As already mentioned, you can try the mini assessment by participating in the 2017-18 global survey; there’s also a free trial, allowing you to survey small teams. Full partner status gets you a range of full-sized templates, all our workshop materials, and (under your control) a listing in our partner directory.
[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 evolution 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…
March 5, 2018
Going full circle on values
Back in 2014 I devised a simple paper-based or slide-based workshop exercise, the Kanban Values Exercise . The object of the exercise was to find correspondences between the nine values of my 2013 model for the Kanban Method and the principles and practices from which they were originally abstracted. Unfortunately, as the method and the values became more obviously aligned with successive revisions (a good thing), some of the fun went out of the exercise.
Time then for a new exercise. It’s based on the Full Circle exercise described at the back of the Agendashift book, the reflective exercise that we use to close our transformation strategy workshops. It isn’t Kanban-specific (Agendashift is framework-agnostic), but it does have two prerequisites that Kanban fulfils quite elegantly:
A subject, a point of reference in the form of a body of knowledge (a trivial requirement in the context of a training class, for example) or a cultural initiative of some sort (a transformation, say)
A set of values – words or phrases that imply some sense of both what we do and why we do it – that is relevant to the subject
It also needs sticky note, pens, and some space somewhere to gather them for the debrief.
Exercise: Full circle on values
On separate stickies, compose sentences that will become increasingly true in your organisation as:
The organisation progresses with , and
A specific value (chosen by the participant and identified on each sticky) is realised more fully
Sentences should conform to this style guide:
Inclusive – Start each sentence with “We” or “our” and make it a statement that you believe most of your colleagues could embrace
Present tense – not impossibly out of reach; perhaps there are pockets of this happening already
Non-prescriptive – avoid specifying practices or other means by which this outcome will be achieved, instead allow multiple approaches
Some examples, taken from the Agendashift delivery assessment:
“We identify dependencies between work items in good time and sequence them accordingly”
“Our vision and purpose are clear to us, our customers, and our stakeholders”
“We ensure that opportunities for improvement are recognised and systematically followed through”
To debrief this exercise, it might be enough just to read out the stickies as they’re brought together, take a moment to reflect on each one, and once they’re all there, take a photograph to share as a memento of the event.
For more depth:
Are each of the values on our original list sufficiently well represented here?
Do we see any conflicts, contradictions, or tensions – statements that sit uncomfortably with each other or with other values?
Are there any other values suggested here?
To bootstrap something much bigger, Agendashift-style:
How well are we currently doing at each of these statements?
Which statements would we choose to prioritise right now?
Addressing the prioritised statements together or one at a time:
If this were realised wonderfully, what would that be like?
What obstacles lie in the way of that?
Then (and see the 15-minute FOTO game):
What would you like to have happen? (with respect to an obstacle)
Then what happens? (with respect to an outcome)
The Agendashift Full Circle exercise is so named because you’ve effectively created your own values-based assessment, akin to ours. Explore far enough into ‘outcome space’ and you’ll begin to identify themes and values. Back to where you started perhaps, but you’ve made them your own!
Related:
Updated materials for ‘15-minute FOTO’
Introducing Kanban through its values
Takeaways from the first Advanced Agendashift workshop “Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation”
Upcoming workshops:
6 April, Raleigh, NC, USA – Mike Burrows, Kert Peterson
14-15 May, Munich, Germany – Mike Burrows, Mike Leber
22-23 May, Cardiff, UK – Mike Burrows
[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 evolution 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…
February 28, 2018
Agendashift roundup, February 2018
In this edition: Our first Advanced workshop, and trips to the US, Germany, and Poland; Scrum and Kanban revisited, revisited; 15-minute FOTO, updated; Top posts
Our first Advanced workshop, and trips to the US, Germany, and Poland
Earlier this month we held the first 2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop “Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation”. To say that it went well would be an understatement – see the write-up here.
Among the events in our calendar are two more of these 2-day workshops (Munich and Cardiff) and one 1-day Core workshop (Raleigh):
3rd April, Raleigh, NC, USA: AgileRTC meetup: Kanban from the Inside
5th April, Raleigh, NC, USA: TriAgile 2018
6th April, Raleigh, NC, USA: Core Agendashift: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change (Raleigh)
23-24 April, London, UK: London Lean Kanban Days 2018 (LLKD18)
14-15 May, Munich, Germany: Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and leading continuous transformation
17-18 May, Kraków, Poland: ACE! 2018
22-23 May, Cardiff, UK: Advanced Agendashift: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation (Cardiff)
23rd May, Cardiff, UK: South Wales Agile Group (evening meetup): “Inverting the pyramid”
You may have spotted (i) that I appear to have a free day in Raleigh on April 4th, and (ii) that there isn’t yet a Poland workshop in the calendar after ACE! 2018. If you have ideas for either of those, get in touch. Behind the scenes, we’re also working hard on opportunities for private workshops.
Scrum and Kanban revisited, revisited
The most popular blog post of 2017 revisited this month in webinar form:
Webinar: Scrum and Kanban revisited with Mike Burrows (youtube.com)
A big thank you to Mahesh and the team at Digité for hosting.
15-minute FOTO, updated
We have released some improvements to the cue card for our Creative Commons-licensed, Clean Language-inspired coaching game, 15-minute FOTO. Details here:
Updated materials for ‘15-minute FOTO’
Top posts
Incremental and iterative
Takeaways from the first Advanced Agendashift workshop “Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation”
Scrum and Kanban revisited (August 2017)
Updated materials for ‘15-minute FOTO’
True North, tweaked – and a couple more classic posts restored
If I could write my own job title…
[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 evolution 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…
February 22, 2018
Incremental and iterative
There seem to be two schools of thought on how best to explain iterative and incremental delivery. In the interests of clarity, the “incremental versus iterative” school, represented excellently by Alistair Cockburn, seeks to keep technical definitions separate as far as possible. The “incremental and iterative” school deliberately emphasises the intertwingliness of it all (in fairness both schools I’m not including people who blur the line unthinkingly).
Just for the purposes of this post I’m in the second school. Here’s a cute, mutually recursive definition that describes a healthy delivery process:
Incremental: new goals agreed and achieved with each short iteration, building on previous work
Iterative: seeking to be objectively better with each small increment, learning from previous work
If that’s healthy, what would unhealthy look like?
Incremental only: big backlog up front (BBUF?), backlog-driven development (the BDD acronym is already taken), no time for learning
Iterative only: constant tinkering, chasing metrics, busywork, no meaningful alignment on goals
Ugh – you really do need both! If you’re big on planning, break the big rocks down into smaller rocks, and make sure you leave enough gaps between them in every iteration for learning. If you’re big on flexibility (at the extreme, on-demand scheduling), don’t settle for ad-hoc; step back regularly from your individual work items and agree on which goals you’re (self-)organising around.
Related concepts: refinement and fidelity (see this by Karl Scotland). It’s smart to start with crude solutions that kinda work, then refine them incrementally and iteratively (both at the same time):
Incremental refinement: make refinements you had the good sense to defer
Iterative refinement: make refinements based on feedback
Credits: Thanks to everyone who commented on my crude, kinda-working prototype micro posts on Slack, Twitter, LinkedIn (and LinkedIn group), also privately on Facebook. In particular: Steven Mackenzie, Roy Marriott, Karl Scotland, Sean Blezard, Ray Edgar, Graham Berrisford, Rob Ferguson, David Daly, Becky Hartman, and Lowell Lindstrom.
Related:
How I read the Scrum Guide
Scrum and Kanban revisited
Upcoming workshops:
6 April, Raleigh, NC, USA – Mike Burrows, Kert Peterson
14-15 May, Munich, Germany – Mike Burrows, Mike Leber
22-23 May, Cardiff, UK – Mike Burrows
[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 evolution 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…
February 14, 2018
If I could write my own job title…
A mid-month update, and a more personal one than usual.
If I could write my own job title, it would be something like this:
Director of continuous transformation (part time)
Let’s break that down a bit:
Director: I’ve held a number of mid to senior roles, including Executive Director and global development manager at a top-tier investment bank, CTO for a late-stage startup (getting its core business systems in shape for a successful merger that saw my MD take over as CEO of the combined business), and interim delivery manager (as Valtech associate) of two of the UK government digital ‘exemplar’ projects
Continuous transformation: I know how hard it is to sustain a meaningful rate of change in organisations, and it’s typically not best achieved through the naïve (or (worse) application of mainly bottom-up or top-down approaches. It needs attention both to outcomes (with agreement, something we’ve learned how to facilitate), and to the myriad ways that feedback and accountabilities operate inside organisations and across their boundaries. Relative to these, practices – Lean, Agile, Lean-Agile, or otherwise – is the easy bit.
Part time: For family reasons which I won’t detail here but which I’ve always been happy to explain to anyone who needs to know, I’ve been out of the market for high-commitment roles for the past couple of years. Happily, that situation is vastly and wonderfully improved. Meanwhile, I’ve used my time at home to build up Agendashift as a product and a community, and that is definitely not about to stop. I’m also grateful for the opportunities to speak and run workshops around the world; and whilst I’m getting increasingly selective, I hope that these continue too.
Of course I’m also a consultant and facilitator, so if even “part time” sounds like too much, I’m available in smaller chunks, down to as low as 1-day or 2-day workshops – see the feedback from my last public one here – and I do travel outside the UK and Europe.
If we’ve not yet met, note that I’m doing a webinar tomorrow, Thursday Feb 15th, 07:30 AM PST / 15:30 UKT / 16:30 CET/ 21:00 IST, courtesy of my friends at Digité. It’s called “Scrum and Kanban revisited” after my most popular blog post of last year, and it should be similarly punchy. Do join us!
We’ve also added some new workshops to the calendar:
6 April, Raleigh, NC, USA – Mike Burrows, Kert Peterson
14-15 May, Munich, Germany – Mike Burrows, Mike Leber
22-23 May, Cardiff, UK – Mike Burrows
One way or another, I hope to see you 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 evolution 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…
February 13, 2018
True North, tweaked – and a couple more classic posts restored
At last week’s workshop there was a brief discussion on whether the last line of the Agendashift True North – the focus of one of my favourite workshop exercises – should make explicit reference not just to needs, but to “individual needs, corporate needs, societal needs” (or something similar). These have long been in my mind as a result of my several explorations into Servant Leadership – clearly I did not stop at the neutered, team-centric version typically taught in Agile circles.
Through our discussions in Slack and LinkedIn, the more it become clear that change was justified, but not the one I proposed. Here’s that line:
Needs anticipated, met at just at the right time
A conversation with Damian Crawford quickly convinced me to leave this line alone. As currently written, this line includes a range of needs that that hadn’t necessarily occurred to me, and we concluded that it would be unfortunate to exclude them. All it takes to dig deeper here is a simple question (thanks again Damian for asking this Clean-style):
What kind of needs anticipated?
A comment from Vincent van der Lubbe meanwhile reminded me that even whole organisations don’t live in a vacuum, and we turned to this line:
Individuals, teams, between teams, across the organisation
Very easily fixed:
Individuals, teams, between teams, across the organisation, and beyond
Scaling, anyone?
In full, from agendashift.com/true-north, where I’ve updated both the image and the text:
[image error]
Needs anticipated
That last line also attracted comment in relation to the phrase “Needs anticipated”. I dug out a relevant quote from Kanban from the Inside (published 2014) and it was nice to remind myself to find that I’ve been been banging the drum for needs and anticipation since 2013 if not earlier. Today I restored these two classic posts from positiveincline.com (explaining the sudden flurry if you’re an email subscriber!):
Anticipating needs ahead of time
Stand up meeting, thinking tool, leadership routine
Enjoy those blasts from the past!
Upcoming Agendashift workshops (see Events):
6 April, Raleigh, NC, USA – Mike Burrows, Kert Peterson
14-15 May, Munich, Germany – Mike Burrows, Mike Leber
22-23 May, Cardiff, UK – Mike Burrows
[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 evolution 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…
February 9, 2018
Takeaways from the first Advanced Agendashift workshop “Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation”
It’s fair to say that it went well:
Thank you again for the last 2 days, I have been raving about it to my manager today!
If I or any of our participants had any anxieties, they weren’t about our ability to fill two days (that was never in doubt), but that “Advanced” would mean “complicated” or “only for experts”. Thankfully, we can put those worries aside. The feedback demonstrates that Advanced here means “deep”, “inspiring”, “challenging”, “enabling meaningful discussion”, “causing new connections to be made”, “giving the confidence and determination to try these tomorrow”, and so on. All of these for a surprisingly diverse group of participants: some new to Lean and Agile, others experienced practitioners, some from industry, one there for his second Agendashift workshop!
The pictures below show the feedback stickies from the closing session (some really lovely messages there, thank you), followed by takeaways from the Discovery, Exploration, Mapping, and Elaboration sessions. Lots of love there for the models, the tools, their applicability, the discussions they provoked, and for Agendashift’s principled (but still very practical) stance that we summarise as outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation.
[image error]Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
In reference to some of the tools mentioned on the stickies, go to our resources page for 15-minute FOTO, Changeban, the Agendashift A3 template, etc. Visit Karl Scotland’s blog for his X-Matrix template. All of these are published under Creative Commons licenses and you are encouraged not just to use them but to adapt them to your needs and to share (with appropriate attribution).
Upcoming Agendashift workshops (see Events ):
6 April, Raleigh, NC, USA – Mike Burrows, Kert Peterson
14-15 May, Munich, Germany – Mike Burrows, Mike Leber
22-23 May, Cardiff, UK – Mike Burrows
[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 evolution 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…
February 5, 2018
Updated materials for ‘15-minute FOTO’
As promised in last week’s roundup, there are now updated versions of the cue card and facilitation deck for our Clean Language-inspired coaching game, 15-minute FOTO.
PDFs of both are available for anonymous download at the above link, where you’ll also find a video of a workshop session that includes the game (among other Agendashift-related things). It’s also covered in chapter 1 of the book.
If you’d like the original PPTX files, just ask. Also, the #cleanlanguage channel in the Agendashift Slack is a good place for questions, and shout if you need an invite.
Changes:
At the top of the card, we’ve given the coach a question to initiate each conversation
We have given subtle emphasis to “What would you like to have happen?” and “Then what happens?”, the two most important questions in the game
We’ve included the most up-to-date poster on the reverse (a download for this is also available and we’ll email registered users about that separately soon)
Enjoy!
Upcoming Agendashift workshops (see Events ):
6-7 February, Leeds
22-23 May, Cardiff
[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 evolution 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 31, 2018
Agendashift roundup, January 2018
In this edition: The latest on the book and related Agendashift resources; Director of Continuous Transformation; Workshops; Inverting the pyramid; Top posts
The latest on the book and related Agendashift resources
I’ve done a final revision on the Leanpub edition of the book in preparation for print publication in April. The most substantial changes are to the final chapter (more on this in “Inverting the pyramid” below), also:
A more digestible title: Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation
The poster (downloadable) has been updated with feedback from Agendashift partner Stev en Mackenzie
The cue cards (also downloadable) for our Clean Language-inspired coaching game 15-minute FOTO have been updated to ease the start of each conversation and to give greater emphasis to the most important questions
As per the announcement , the True North and principles are now Creative Commons. I’m finding it very handy to have memorable URLs for these and I’ve used the images in the book.
If you’re a registered user of any of these resources you’ll be contacted in the next few days with the download link for the new versions. If you don’t have them or you can’t wait that long, get in touch.
Director of Continuous Transformation
Over in the Agendashift Slack we’ve had some fun over the past few days discussing ideal job titles in the #coaching channel. As it happens, I have sufficient capacity now to declare for real that I’d love the title “Director of Continuous Transformation (part-time)”. If I could help bolster your leadership team or internal coaching team on a part-time basis, let’s talk. Will travel (within reason).
Workshops
It’s the Leeds Advanced workshop next week and there are a couple of places left if you’re quick. Workshops in the US and Germany (April and May) are yet to be listed – please contact (respectively) partners Kert Peterson or Mike Leber about those; after that it’s Cardiff in late May.
See also: Agendashift as leadership development
As ever, shout if you would like a public or private workshop somewhere near you, and there are more events listed in our events calendar.
Inverting the pyramid
Chapter 5 has gained a new figure:
[image error]The inverted pyramid, Agendashift-style
All is revealed in yesterday’s blog post Inverting the pyramid, start-with-what-you-do-now style. Also, I’ll be speaking on this topic at London Lean Kanban Days 2018 (23-24 April) – see you there!
Top posts
Inverting the pyramid post came too late in the month to make the shortlist. This month’s winner is 5 years old, a classic restored from my old blog:
Introducing Kanban through its values (January 2013!)
Two more Agendashift resources are now Creative Commons
Agendashift as leadership development
Reading Peter Block
Scrum and Kanban revisited (August)
[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 evolution 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…
