Mike Burrows's Blog, page 40
January 30, 2018
Inverting the pyramid, start-with-what-you-do-now style
The theory:
[image error]
That’s right, the entire organisation supporting its customer-facing staff, the CEO at the bottom of the inverted pyramid. Intriguing!
Here’s my version, which you’ll find in chapter 5 of the latest revision of the Agendashift book (the last announced Leanpub revision before we go to print):
[image error]The inverted pyramid, Agendashift-style
Key differences:
Instead of the CEO and senior managers we have processes. No need to promote power hierarchies!
It’s opinionated: each process begins with Discovery and ends with Validation. It’s both humbling and powerful – transformative, even – to acknowledge both that we don’t know everything, not least the eventual impact of our work.
Review meetings of various unspecified kinds – service delivery reviews, capability reviews, strategy reviews, and risk reviews, even standup meetings and planning meetings
Mutual accountabilities, horizontally and vertically
The lack of specificity in point 3 is deliberate: in Agile terms, we’re scaling, but we’re inviting a start with what you do now approach rather than insisting on a particular process framework. So how, exactly?
Here are three ways for you to look at your existing review meetings, three dimensions in which most such meetings can be improved:
How might they be more outside-in (customer before organisation, platform, product, team, etc)? Who best represents each agenda item? In what order? Sharing what metrics (and implying what values)? What contradictions are we likely to find between these different perspectives, and are we prepared to deal with them?
How might they be more right-to-left (recently-completed work first, then working backwards)? Do participants feel mutually accountable for an end-to-end process that focusses on outcomes and finishes with validation? What keeps those outcomes connected to authentic needs, and how are needs discovered and prioritised? What keeps workloads at appropriate levels?
Horizontally and vertically, do your meetings together cover the organisation (or at least the part thereof that is the focus of your interest)? Horizontally, does each contributing part feel sufficiently connected, with overlapping participation across meetings? Vertically, is the organisation adequately represented so that delivery work, capability-related work, and mission can be kept in alignment?
The trick is to recognise that you don’t have to turn everything upside-down in one giant upheaval – the reorientation can start locally, and at any level. Locally doesn’t mean “timidly” though – in fact the way these strategies encourage accountability horizontally and vertically across organisational boundaries makes them both silo-busting and bubble-busting. Scary perhaps, but if you want to influence the rest of the organisation, then maybe you must be prepared to be influenced back…
More on this in my talk at London Lean Kanban Days 2018 (23-24 April) – see you there!
Upcoming Agendashift workshops (see Events ):
6-7 February, Leeds
22-23 May, Cardiff
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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 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 18, 2018
Will anything change after the meeting?
In order of importance:
You understand the needs of others differently
You made a personal decision
You agreed something with other participants
You know how you will hold each other mutually accountable for what happens next
And who is responsible for those – you or your facilitator? Yes!
Related:
Two more Agendashift resources are now Creative Commons
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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 17, 2018
Reading Peter Block
Results are achieved when members of a system collectively choose to move in a certain direction. It is this act of choice that is critical. … No change – no matter how wise and needed – will help if there is not a widespread and deep sense that each individual exercising choice and working together must make this work.
~ Peter Block, Flawless Consulting, 3rd edition
That’s from Flawless Consulting – I’m nearing the end of the audiobook. Not for nothing do we have “Agree on outcomes” as principle #2!
Lasting impressions:
The power of authenticity – impressed that he makes it such a practical issue without in any way risking cynicism. I was reminded of Schein and I make this connection explicit in the Advanced workshop
His regard for “whole system” and positive, asset/strength/gift-based approaches (as opposed to the more traditional “3rd party” consulting model).
You get the sense that he has been on a bit of a journey on that second one. I’m planning a longer blog post on the issues there in the context of Lean-Agile transformation.
Upcoming 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 11, 2018
Two more Agendashift resources are now Creative Commons
[Updated Jan 12th with the two images below]
I found myself wanting to be able to reference the Agendashift principles and True North via memorable URLs, so here they are:
agendashift.com/principles
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agendashift.com/true-north
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In the process, they have joined a growing list of Agendashift-related resources available under a Creative Commons with-attribution licence, to enable their wider use and to encourage adaptations. To make this encouragement more visible, if you go to our Resources page you’ll notice that several of the items listed there are now marked with the CC-BY-SA logo:
Use them, adapt them, translate them. And pass them on!
Related:
Agendashift in 5 principles
A True North for Lean-Agile?
Upcoming workshops (see Events ):
6-7 February, Leeds (early bird expires Tuesday, January 16th)
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 9, 2018
Agendashift as leadership development
Not everyone who attends our 1-day practitioner (now “Core“) workshops has been a coach or consultant. A significant proportion have held positions of responsibility within organisations of all kinds, technology-centric or otherwise. For workshops held privately, that can mean everyone in the room!
We’re now able to take this to another level, offering an Advanced Agendashift workshop that not only gives participants the opportunity to practice some important transformation-related skills, it goes on to help them explore, reflect on, and grow their understanding of the (overlapping) roles of coach and leader. It is Lean-Agile leadership development of a much deeper kind than you’ll get from studying a process framework or attending a bootcamp. My goal is to get it onto the leadership development curriculum of at least one major organisation this year. Yours (or your client’s) perhaps?
Readers of this blog will recognise the 5-part structure below. Everything shown here in italics is specific to the Advanced workshop; the remainder is Core (so no, you needn’t have attended a Core workshop previously):
Discovery: Describing where we would like to get to
Exploring organisational context, objectives, obstacles, and outcomes
Plan on a page
Culture, values, and Systems Thinking
Exploration: Prospecting for opportunities
Mission, purpose, and identity
Organisational self-awareness and empathy
Debriefing your Agendashift delivery assessment
Generating outcomes
Exploring different approaches
Understanding and supporting the learning process
Mapping: Building a visual transformation plan
Transformation mapping
Strategy model reconciliations
Other mapping tools
Elaboration: Framing actions, testing our thinking
Changeban: a Lean Startup flavoured variant of Featureban, our popular simulation game
Creating options, framing hypotheses, developing experiments
Cross-checking your experiment design
Authenticity: stories, requirements, and needs
Operation: Change as real work
Operating continuous transformation
Organising for alignment, follow-through, and mutual accountability
The Agendashift adaptability assessment and followups
We now have two UK dates in the calendar:
6-7 February, Leeds (early bird expires on January 16th, a week from today)
22-23 May, Cardiff
Over the next few weeks we’ll be adding locations in Europe and further afield. Wherever you are, I’m particularly keen to explore opportunities to hold these workshops internally, on my own or with partners.
Partners have already reviewed the new material over video, and some will no doubt be planning to use all or part of it with their clients. The way it is built around the Core material means that even those who don’t expect to use it anytime soon have additional resources to fall back on should the need or opportunity arise.
[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 2, 2018
About that New Year strategy workshop…
Happy New Year! In lieu of the December roundup some seasonal updates: strategy workshops; website changes; top blog posts of 2017.
Strategy workshops
It’s the New Year: fresh starts, new beginnings, strategy workshops! We have three transformation strategy workshops to choose from:
Core Agendashift: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change – the 1-day introduction to outcome-oriented change, a practitioner-focused version of the Applied workshop. Hold this one in-house if you have consultants, coaches, and others with change responsibility (managers included) on your staff.
Applied Agendashift: Co-Creating Your Transformation Strategy – the same Core material, but focused on your organisation and its transformation. We’ve had all kinds of participants – new joiners sat next to C-suite leaders, for example. Usually an intense 1-day workshop, but it can be shortened or done in smaller chunks over a period as part of a longer engagement. For obvious reasons, this one is only ever run privately.
Advanced Agendashift: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation – We’re very excited about this one, running our first public 2-day workshop early next month. “Transformation strategy as leadership development” is a good way to think about this one.
Get in touch with us or one of our partners if you’d like to explore these further, or if you’d like to become a partner yourself so that you can offer them to your clients.
There are currently three public workshops in the calendar with more to be added soon:
Advanced Agendashift, 6-7 February, Leeds, UK
Core Agendashift, 6 April, Raleigh, NC, USA (also a partner day on the 4th)
Advanced Agendashift, 24-25 May, Cardiff, UK
In lieu of the December roundup, a couple of seasonal updates: website changes and top blog posts of 2017.
Website changes
We used the break to give the website a lick of paint. As well as making the place generally more inviting, we have:
Made room on a simplified home page for our first wave of corporate partner s – companies who have multiple individual practitioner partners or who have generated Agendashift-related business for other partners
Consolidated multiple pages onto single pages for workshops and assessments
[image error] https://www.agendashift.com
Top blog posts of 2017
Spread nicely over the year:
Scrum and Kanban revisited (August)
Lean-Agile transformation as Lean-Agile process (January)
We’ve open-sourced ‘15-minute FOTO’ (October)
How I read the Scrum Guide (November)
Why Agile needs some 21st century Lean thinking (March)
Featureban 2.0 (June)
A True North for Lean-Agile? (May)
Free preview: Read the introduction and first chapter of the forthcoming Agendashift book (February)
Agendashift in 5 principles (July)
Agile and Lean are just toolkits, right? (October)
[image error]Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | About | Partners | Resources | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
Workshops (see Events): Advanced Agenadashift, 6-7 February, Leeds, UK ; Core Agendashift, 6 April, Raleigh, NC, USA ; Advanced Agendashift, 24-25 May, Cardiff, UK
We are champions and enablers of outcome-oriented change. By building agreement on outcomes we facilitate rapid, experiment-based evolution of process, practice, and organisation. Instead of the contradictory and self-defeating imposition of Lean and Agile practices, Agendashift helps you keep your vision and strategy aligned with and energised by a participatory culture of co‑creation and continuous transformation. More…
December 15, 2017
Poster updates
Today I’ve been busy updating the website, the book, and our workshop materials with a new version of the poster:
[image error] Because every framework needs a poster…
Changes from the original version:
Fewer words, bigger font
Removed the line that went between 2. Exploration and 4. Elaboration (it raised more questions than it answered)
Specific mention of “Aspirations” as an output captured from 1. Discovery, improving the setup to the brief reference to X-Matrix I make in the Mapping chapter of the book (see also the Lean-Agile Strategy Days workshops I do with Karl Scotland from time to time)
No more “values-based” – we no longer use this as a description of Agendashift (dropped in favour of “outcome-oriented”) and the names of the two assessment tools have been shortened
You can click the image to request a PDF version. Enjoy!
[image error]Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | About | Partners | Resources | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
Workshops (see Events): 6-7 February, Leeds, UK:
Advanced Agendashift: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
We are champions and enablers of outcome-oriented change. By building agreement on outcomes we facilitate rapid, experiment-based evolution of process, practice, and organisation. Instead of the contradictory and self-defeating imposition of Lean and Agile practices, Agendashift helps you keep your vision and strategy aligned with and energised by a participatory culture of co‑creation and continuous transformation. More…
December 11, 2017
New Agendashift workshops for 2018
If you’ve been to the Agendashift home page recently you’ll have noticed that the two workshops have become three:
The Agendashift Workshop: Co-Creating Your Transformation Strategy
The focus of the Agendashift workshop is the host organisation and its ways of working. As its name suggests, its output is a coherent strategy for transformation, co-created by its participants. It is delivered either as an intensive 1-day event or as a series of smaller events as part of a broader engagement.
Core Agendashift: Facilitating Outcome-Oriented Change
This 1-day workshop provides familiarisation with the Agendashift transformation strategy tools and materials and an initial introduction to outcome orientation. Its typical audience includes coaches, consultants, and managers.
Advanced Agendashift: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
From 2018 onwards we are proud to offer this new 2-day workshop. Expanding on the core workshop, it is aimed at coaches, consultants, and managers wishing to:
Develop their coaching and leadership skills in the areas of enquiry, facilitation, strategy deployment, and change management
Broaden and deepen their appreciation of the Lean-Agile landscape and related bodies of knowledge
The drivers for these changes:
There’s “intensive”, and then there’s “too much”! For some time there has been more material available than we could possibly give in a day. That’s true even for me (let alone partners using my material) and there’s more material to come. The new range allows the two 1-day workshops to be refocused and the 2-day workshop to offer more depth than is currently possible.
Greater clarity around our stance of outcome orientation (in which the catalyst for change is agreement on collaboratively-identified outcomes rather than prescription or imposition) and our goal of continuous transformation (change sustained on an ongoing basis thanks to it being treated as real work, expected by all concerned, and supported structurally).
A desire to address leadership development and organisational development needs more explicitly.
As tradition dictates, the new 2-day workshop gets its first outing in Leeds:
Advanced Agendashift: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
6-7 February 2018, Leeds, UK
Super Early Bird for the Leeds workshop expires December 31st and Early Bird on January 16th, so get in there quickly! We’re not quite ready to announce the venue but be assured that it will be within easy reach of the station.
After that, I’m in the US for TriAgile 2018 and a 1-day Core workshop around the conference, and in Germany for a 2-day Advanced workshop, dates to be announced.
There are more events in the pipeline, but do please get in touch if:
You’d like to see public workshops take place in other locations. Only rarely will I do a workshop outside of the UK without the offer of help on the ground, and even at home I’m happy to work with others.
You’d like to see more outcome orientation and continuous transformation in your own workplace. Help us help you make it a reality!
[image error]Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | About | Partners | Resources | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
Workshops (see Events): 6-7 February, Leeds, UK:
Advanced Agendashift: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
We are champions and enablers of outcome-oriented change. By building agreement on outcomes we facilitate rapid, experiment-based evolution of process, practice, and organisation. Instead of the contradictory and self-defeating imposition of Lean and Agile practices, Agendashift helps you keep your vision and strategy aligned with and energised by a participatory culture of co‑creation and continuous transformation. More…
December 7, 2017
Interviewed for Lean Business Agility
Quick one! While I was in Paris last week for Lean Kanban France 2017 I was interviewed on video by Klaus Leopold for the Lean Business Agility podcast. See it here:
Lean Business Agility E022: Managing Change in the 21st Century
Enjoy!
[image error]Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | About | Partners | Resources | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
Workshops (see Events): Look out for our new 2-day Advanced workshop Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation, dates for UK and Germany to be announced shortly
December 5, 2017
Just in, this awesome client endorsement
Matt Turner – a member of our partner programme – was in touch this week with this awesome client endorsement from Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council (SMBC to its friends). Reproduced with the permission of all concerned:
With the guidance of Agendashift partner Matt Turner, we have employed a number of the Agendashift resources to help understand how our ongoing Digital Transformation work is advancing, from the perspective of the teams delivering the work. We have used the online assessment as an indicator of progress and maturity, enabling us to “temperature check” delivery capability at team level and aggregated across the whole of IT. The outputs have influenced changes in team practice, goal setting and stakeholder support & involvement. We have used Agendashift workshop exercises to explore individual and team perspectives before we begin complex pieces of work in order to gain a level of coherence and cohesion in groups before embarking on what would otherwise be risk-laden activities.
Phil Welch, Head of IT, Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council
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A little bit of context: The SMBC Digital by Design Programme has already won the 2017 Granicus Digital Achievement Awards, and have also been named as finalists in the LDC Digital Council of the year awards under the following categories; Business Transformation, Driving Efficiency through Technology, and the coveted Digital Council of the Year.
There’s plenty to be pleased about here, in particular the importance given to the perspective of the teams and the “coherence and cohesion” (their words) that follows when you start with agreement on outcomes instead of the more usual prescription of solutions. Of course we’ve known this for some time, but it’s gratifying indeed to see such a public demonstration of Agendashift’s transferability and broad applicability. And well done Matt!
About Matt Turner
In his own words: “I have been practicing Kanban since 2010, working predominantly with IT Service Management and Operations teams. Over recent years this has extended through other professional and business service teams within Higher Education and Local Government for whom Agendashift has proven extremely helpful.”
About Agendashift
We are champions and enablers of outcome-oriented change. By building agreement on outcomes we facilitate rapid, experiment-based evolution of process, practice, and organisation. Agendashift avoids the self‑defeating prescription of Lean and Agile techniques in isolation; instead we help you keep your vision and strategy aligned with a culture of co‑creation and continuous transformation. More…
[image error]Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | About | Partners | Resources | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter
Workshops (see Events): Look out for our new 2-day Advanced workshop Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation, dates for UK and Germany to be announced shortly
