Mike Burrows's Blog, page 5

Meeting the context challenge

(Comments are closed on this post but it is shared on LinkedIn here)

One of the great challenges of organisation is ensuring that people have the context they need in order to make great decisions. The challenge is universal: were we to divide the organisation into thinkers and doers (a truly terrible idea but bear with me a moment), the thinkers need to know what’s really happening out there, and the doers need to know where the thinkers are headed (there’s a pun there surely). Without that essential context, and to quote my first attempt at some blurb for book 5:

Decisions made in good faith become bad decisions, taxing the organisation’s already limited capacities for communication and decision-making.

Furthermore:

With profound implications for every level of organisation, your organisation’s ability to adapt depends on leaders engaging with that key challenge

Let me offer four ways forward:

Optimise communicationDistribute authorityBuild a more trusting and trustworthy organisationOptimise attention and presence

That list is by no means exhaustive. In a very real way, any decent attempt at process or organisational improvement can be seen as an attempt to increase the organisation’s capacities for meaningful communication and decision-making – but I will suggest that you need all four of these. And if that’s not enough, I’ll mention three upcoming opportunities to discuss these ideas further.

1. Optimise communication

Even on its own, this is a big, big topic. It includes the content of communication, its language, its timing, its quantity, its structure, also the means, routes, and directions of transmission. Consideration of its sources and destinations brings in things like intelligence-gathering, sense-making, and strategising. That then leads to structural concerns: if everyone hearing every last bit of detail from every part and aspect of the organisation would result in overwhelm, who should concern themselves with what, and at what level of abstraction? Put like that, organisational structure might need to be less about functional capabilities and more about information.

2. Distribute authority

This then follows. Turn the Ship Around! author L. David Marquet puts it well: instead of moving the information to the authority, move the authority to the information. Localised decision-making concentrates communication; what comes out (if it needs to come out) is more distilled.

There is more than one way to understand Marquet’s principle. You can interpret it as one of leadership style – i.e. a willingness to delegate – or you might take it as an invitation to design a more optimal organisation structure and information architecture. Those interpretations are fine as far as they go, but things get much more interesting when you see it as a principle for adaptation. Follow through on it over time, and your decision-making capacity will distribute itself to meet your organisation’s business context according to where its informational and decision-making requirements are the most challenging. What you get is fit, and with that the sense that the organisation’s structure expresses something of its understanding of its business environment. In the jargon, it models it.

3. Build a more trusting and trustworthy organisation

The above notwithstanding, I’ve been through enough reorganisations to get more than a little cynical about reorganisations. I will resolve that paradox in book 5 with Organising without Reorganising, a whole chapter on techniques for “organising at human scale”. Here, the advice to build a more trusting and trustworthy organisation follows in a different way from the preceding.

The more that different organisational scopes trust each other, the less they try to manage each other, and the less information they need to exchange. The more confident we are that exceptional conditions will be raised to our attention, the less bandwidth we need to devote to monitoring. The less noise, the less wasteful drain on both of those critical capacities for communication and decision-making. So much opportunity there!

That may seem obvious enough, but preliminary results from Olivier Bertrand’s PhD research on our data suggest something intriguing: trust may need to precede trustworthiness. If I trust you, that increases your freedom to deliver, increasing your trustworthiness. If that sounds difficult, just reverse the roles! From whatever direction it comes, where you resent being over-managed, wouldn’t you rather be trusted?

4. Optimise attention and presence

Now for the bad news. If you thought that you could design the perfect organisation that made all these issues look after themselves, think again. The relationship between your organisation and its business context is an unequal one. There is no combination of formal structure and process that guarantees success; the numbers just don’t add up (it’s why Stafford Beer had to follow his famous book Brain of the Firm with The Heart of Enterprise, the latter to make that key admission). Bottom line, there is simply not enough communication and decision-making capacity to go round. Thankfully, the advice is not one of despair but of pragmatism. You can’t be everyone all at once, but at any given time, you can be somewhere, and you can make it count. Develop your instincts for what most needs your attention. Strive to be in the right place at the right time, even if that is only to be available and fully present to others. Calibrate your communication, focussing on intent and avoiding unnecessary prescription, creating space for competence and innovation. Nurture those same expectations in others, so that regardless of formal expectations and outside the normal routine, the right issues are engaged with at the right kind of level, the right conversations are had at the right times with the right people, and initiative can be rightfully celebrated, together with all of its accompanying learning.

You need all four

Don’t get me wrong: the formal stuff does matter. If organisation structures are getting in the way of doing the right thing, deal with that issue (which doesn’t necessarily mean dismantling them, rather that you take the issue seriously). If people are reluctant to make decisions on their own authority, you’ll need to deal with that issue too. If bad processes are consuming more decision-making capacity than they deserve, that’s typically a straightforward and highly rewarding issue to tackle. More tricky perhaps is a reluctance to let go, but nothing builds trust quite like delivery, and all of these measures help achieve that.

But don’t think that it will be enough. Your organisation needs attention and presence, yours and everyone else’s. Using those to the maximum is what organising is all about.

If you’d like to discuss these issues with me further, there are three opportunities coming up shortly:

18 February, Online, 16:00 GMT, 17:00 CET, 11am ET, Agile Strategy Meetup Group:
Meet Mike Burrows on strategy 24-27 February, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) 06 March, London, UK:
Kanban Edge 2025

That first event (which is free) focuses on strategy, where the context challenge is most acute, strategising being constrained in ways it may not recognise. That second one (which isn’t only for facilitators and trainers), explores deeply the deliberate avoidance of premature prescription by putting outcomes before solutions, to quote Agendashift principle #1. And it’s always a delight to be welcomed back into the Kanban community, where (as has been my assumed role for a long time) I try to complement its process perspective with an organisational one.

Also, if you know where to look – Agendashift Academy or the Agendashift Slack if you are a member of either – I am available for “office hours” on Zoom at 2pm UK time on Thursdays, except for the 27th when it clashes with TTT/F. Feel free to raise these topics or any other!

Related A first attempt at some blurb for book 5, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (linkedin.com) Help our research: an “Organisational DNA test” (May 2024) Four weeks until the February TTT/F

(Comments are closed on this post but it is shared on LinkedIn here)

Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy
“Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”

Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:

Foundation module: Leading with Outcomes: Foundation Inside-out Strategy: Part I: On the same page, with purpose Part II: Fit for maximum impact Adaptive Organisation: Part I: Business agility at every scale Part II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales Outside-in Strategy: Part I: Positioned for success Part II: A platform for performance

Individual subscriptions from ~~£24.50~~ £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on February 10, 2025 04:16

Agendashift roundup, January 2025

In what has been a relatively busy month for the blog, this roundup has updates in two main categories, Wholehearted (i.e. book 5 and related) and Leading with Outcomes (curriculum changes, TTT/F, etc).

Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

One appendix aside, book 5 is all but complete. I’m happy with the main content, it’s being received well by reviewers, and I’m at the stage of reaching out to publishers. That last part could be a long process though! Two related posts meanwhile. First:

The (Wholehearted) Adaptive Organisation Assessment, 2025 edition

We still welcome new submissions to the global survey by the way. That means 1) you don’t need to wait for the book to see how the assessment is worded, and 2) that you can contribute to the research. Also, there are other ways in which it can be used; check out that post for details.

And second:

Verbing the nouns of business agility

Thought-provoking, I hope! Like most posts on this blog, it is closed for comments, but it is discussed on LinkedIn here. Reactions welcome!

Two upcoming events are also Wholehearted-related – or at least my contributions to them will be:

18 February, Online, 16:00 GMT, 17:00 CET, 11am ET, Agile Strategy Meetup Group:
Meet Mike Burrows on strategy 06 March, London, UK:
Kanban Edge 2025 Leading with Outcomes

The next online Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator comes in late February and incorporates a number of recent improvements. They’re laid out here:

Four weeks until the February TTT/F

I won’t repeat it all here, but let me pull out this bit:

Not everyone joins TTT/F with the aim of becoming a Facilitator or Trainer. Some come for the challenge to existing ways of doing things that Leading with Outcomes brings. Some come for the conversation. Some come to hone their coaching skills, to add a strategy dimension to those, or, conversely perhaps, to bring a coaching dimension to their work as manager or consultant. Whatever your role, if you’re looking for participatory, outcome-oriented, and generative alternatives to managed change and the solution-driven rollout, you’ll be in the right place. Book now:

24-27 February, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) (tickettailor.com)

Upcoming

Mentioned already, but brought together in the usual format:

February

18 February, Online, 16:00 GMT, 17:00 CET, 11am ET, Agile Strategy Meetup Group:
Meet Mike Burrows on strategy 24-27 February, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

March

06 March, London, UK:
Kanban Edge 2025 Top posts

Similarly, three of this month’s top 5 most-read posts have been mentioned already. In positions 4 and 5 there are two popular classics, both of them Wholehearted-related:

The (Wholehearted) Adaptive Organisation Assessment, 2025 edition (January 2025) Four weeks until the February TTT/F (January 2025) Verbing the nouns of business agility (January 2025) Your organisation in 5 networks (November 2022) What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints) (October 2023)

Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy
“Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”

Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:

Foundation module: Leading with Outcomes: Foundation Inside-out Strategy: Part I: On the same page, with purpose Part II: Fit for maximum impact Adaptive Organisation: Part I: Business agility at every scale Part II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales Outside-in Strategy: Part I: Positioned for success Part II: A platform for performance

Individual subscriptions from ~~£24.50~~ £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on January 31, 2025 03:42

Verbing the nouns of business agility

Silke Noll, who is 1) the Agendashift community’s resident expert in all things intercultural, and 2) a member of book 5’s review team, said something interesting to me this weekend:

Western languages force a preoccupation with focal objects as opposed to context. English is a “subject-prominent” language. … For Westerners, it is the self who does the acting; for Easterners, it is something that is undertaken in concert with others or is a consequence of the self operating in the field of forces.

We went on to discuss book 5’s use of verbs in the present continuous tense, or “-ing” words, to you and me. I observed that the corresponding noun forms can be a trap. Organisations act as though it’s enough to have certain things – a strategy and an execution capability, for example. Having seen a former employer lose 50 billion dollars that way – a catastrophic loss from which it was fortunate to survive – I think I may be allowed a degree of scepticism.

So… how does this “verbing” thing work?

Execution or, if you prefer, delivery, becomes delivering, discovering, renewing – three verbs for the price of one or two nouns! It’s not enough just to deliver; you need to be discovering what you should be delivering, which includes but is not limited to discovering how well the things you deliver actually perform in the real world. And if you are going to be delivering new things, you’ll need new capabilities. I could have used “developing” for that, but because in relation to products and software it means something more specific, “renewing” it is.

Now that the value-creating work (sneaking an “ing” word into a noun phrase) of that delivering-discovering-renewing space is seen as something more present and continuous, yesterday’s strategy won’t do – at least not for long. It becomes adaptive strategising, and its job is to ensure that the organisation (or organisational scope – this model is beautifully fractal) never runs out of options in a game whose rules may be changing. Not just reactive, “responding to change”, but proactive, prospective, anticipatory, making things happen.

The team that strategises together stays together

For any organisational scope that is meaningful enough to its participants that they identify with it, some of that strategising will be devoted to maintaining and sometimes challenging and even changing that identity (on the change part, think of the pivot as an extreme example). “The team that strategises together stays together”, one might say. A self-governing scope that is serious about sticking around goes further: it manages the balances between thinking and doing, planning and executing, and so on, even the three-way balance between delivering, discovering, and renewing. Key to long-term sustainability is adjusting those balances as conditions change.

Balance is no less important in the delivering-discovering-renewing space. You might follow world-class practices in the value-creating work, but if multiple people are involved and you are not coordinating effectively, much of their effort will go to waste. Neither though do you want people serving best-of-breed coordination systems (tools, processes, etc) that don’t work for them. It’s much the same with organising, which is what connects the adaptive strategising space with the delivering-discovering-renewing space; it’s counterproductive to organise around goals and plans in ways incompatible with capability and capacity, or for that matter those coordination systems. In fact, between the value-creating work, coordinating, and organising there is a three-way balance to maintain, four if you include the customer. Small wonder that in a single endeavour there can be multiple, contradictory views on what actual progress is being made, how everything is performing, and what its most important issues might be (which is one reason why a clear customer focus can be transformative).

Between the two “spaces” I’ve mentioned – delivering-discovering-renewing and adaptive strategising – balance is mostly accounted for by self-governing (that’s its job), but that’s not quite the end of the story. The capacities of an organisation or scope for communication and decision-making are finite. To assume perfect information flow is to risk bad decision-making and further taxing those limited capacities. Whether strategy-related or delivery-related, decisions need context. It’s crucial to escape the routine for contextualising – think going to the gemba, managing by walking around, and sense-making conversations of various kinds. That’s central to mutual trust-building; this third space is responsible for ensuring that the other two understand each other so that the more trustworthy organisation can use its precious capacities effectively.

I could go on! In the relationships between and across different scales of organisation there are several strands: structuring (the work, the organisation, and by implication, its business environment), translating (between the different levels of abstraction that apply up and down the organisation), reconciling (between the strategies of related scopes), and more – connecting, participating, identifying.

Verb forms aside for a moment, the deeper magic here is a relational model. Things have relationships, they relate to each other. For better and for worse they constrain each other’s behaviours. Over time, they co-evolve, perhaps becoming structurally coupled to the point that they can’t be changed independently. More even than the things that they relate, relationships can be described as being in healthy and productive balance, departures from which likely indicate some kind of dysfunction. That’s powerful: if you’re at a loss to work out what’s wrong with something by looking at what’s inside, now you have several more perspectives and your range of potential solutions is greatly expanded. You might not even need a definitive diagnosis; mere possibility may be enough motivation for change.

But those “ing” words do matter. Think less about what you have and more about what is happening – what must be happening, because in this descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive) model, everything I have described really must be there. They might not be all working as well as they could, their relationships might not be entirely healthy and productive, but if enough people identify with an organisational scope strongly enough to care, all of those things will be there. Start noticing them and their relationships. Talk about them. See what happens!

Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (aka book 5) is due in the coming months, i.e. soonish. Watch this space!

Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy
“Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”

Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:

Foundation module: Leading with Outcomes: Foundation Inside-out Strategy: Part I: On the same page, with purpose Part II: Fit for maximum impact Adaptive Organisation: Part I: Business agility at every scale Part II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales Outside-in Strategy: Part I: Positioned for success Part II: A platform for performance

Individual subscriptions from ~~£24.50~~ £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on January 29, 2025 04:25

Four weeks until the February TTT/F

The next online Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer – the first since the one I did in person in India last December – begins on February 24th, spanning four consecutive afternoons UK time, beginning at 13:00 GMT, 14:00 CET, 8am ET, each session lasting no more than four hours.

It incorporates a number of recent improvements:

The Foundation module (session 1) is organised now into four sections (from three), making it easier to navigate – a benefit to trainer and participant alikeThe two parts of the Inside-out Strategy module (sessions 2 & 3) have been switched around – the easier assessment debrief session now coming before the Discovery session, and the latter ending on a high with the recently reincorporated X-MatrixUpdated material for session 4 also, which includes highlights of the Outside-in Strategy and Adaptive Organisation modules and some relatively new material on workshop design options

TTT/F comes with a year’s free membership of the Facilitator programme, upgradeable to Trainer, both of which include access to our signature assessment tools. It also includes access to the self-paced video-based versions of the Leading with Outcomes modules for your own study (and potentially for use in other ways, but talk to me first).

Not everyone joins TTT/F with the aim of becoming a Facilitator or Trainer. Some come for the challenge to existing ways of doing things that Leading with Outcomes brings. Some come for the conversation. Some come to hone their coaching skills, to add a strategy dimension to those, or, conversely perhaps, to bring a coaching dimension to their work as manager or consultant. Whatever your role, if you’re looking for participatory, outcome-oriented, and generative alternatives to managed change and the solution-driven rollout, you’ll be in the right place. Book now:

24-27 February, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) (tickettailor.com)

Again, that’s four weeks away. This week, it’s roundup day on Friday, and via a conversation on Slack, Silke Noll got me thinking about a blog post with the provisional title “Verbing the nouns of business agility”. There – I’m committed now! Watch out for that midweek, either this week or next.

Also in the calendar:

18 February, Online, 16:00 GMT, 17:00 CET, 11am ET, Agile Strategy Meetup Group:
Meet Mike Burrows on strategy 06 March, London, UK:
Kanban Edge 2025

Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy
“Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”

Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:

Foundation module: Leading with Outcomes: Foundation Inside-out Strategy: Part I: On the same page, with purpose Part II: Fit for maximum impact Adaptive Organisation: Part I: Business agility at every scale Part II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales Outside-in Strategy: Part I: Positioned for success Part II: A platform for performance

Individual subscriptions from ~~£24.50~~ £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on January 27, 2025 06:44

The (Wholehearted) Adaptive Organisation Assessment, 2025 edition

With grateful thanks to Olivier Bertrand, Marika Gartelius, Philippe Guenet, Ivaylo (Ivo) Gueorguiev, Andrew Kidd, and Craig Lucia, I’m pleased to confirm that the Adaptive Organisation Assessment has completed its recently-announced refresh. This assessment has multiple applications:

As the focus of an Adaptive Organisation Workshop or its shorter alternative, the trusty old Assessment Debrief Workshop As prework for the Leading in a Transforming Organisation training and the online Adaptive Organisation moduleAs input to Olivier’s PhD research As the basis of the end-of-chapter reflections in my forthcoming book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

As you may have guessed from my opening thanks to our review team, native English speakers were in the minority. That’s great! You may know from the Agendashift Delivery Assessment already that we take very seriously the accessibility of our assessments and seek to eliminate any language that gets in the way of engagement. That includes jargon and prescription; its goal is not to teach, preach, sell, or judge but to get people thinking and talking, not worrying about how it’s worded or what plans those facilitating it may have in store for them.

You can try it now (or revisit your previous input) at agendashift.com/assessments/wholehearted. Get in touch if you see a use for it at your organisation; as hinted at above, there are plenty of options we can discuss.

Quickly while we’re here…

For the most feeble of excuses (my 60th birthday), this week’s office hours moves from Thursday to Friday, 14:00 GMT, 15:00 CET, 9am ET as usual. If you’re an Agendashift Academy subscriber or supporter, you’ll find this week’s event in the Events calendar. Non-subscribers are welcome; you can find the Zoom link on Slack also.

Other upcoming events (the first one a new addition – thank you Morten Elvang for the invitation):

18 February, Online, 16:00 GMT, 17:00 CET, 11am ET, Agile Strategy Meetup Group:
Meet Mike Burrows on strategy 24-27 February, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) 06 March, London, UK:
Kanban Edge 2025

There is also the possibility of doing some or all of Leading in a Transforming Organisation in Malmö in November. I know that’s months away, but if that could be of interest, do please let me know.

Related Assessment template tidyup and an update on book 5 (November 2024) Help our research: an “Organisational DNA test” (May 2024)An invitation to a more thoughtful assessment (September 2023) Agendashift is not a maturity model (May 2018)

Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy
“Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”

Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:

Foundation module: Leading with Outcomes: Foundation Inside-out Strategy: Part I: On the same page, with purpose Part II: Fit for maximum impact Adaptive Organisation: Part I: Business agility at every scale Part II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales Outside-in Strategy: Part I: Positioned for success Part II: A platform for performance

Individual subscriptions from ~~£24.50~~ £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on January 21, 2025 03:40

Upcoming

Happy New Year! Kicking off 2025 with news of:

Office hours – weekly Zoom on Thursdays, beginning this weekAdaptive Organisation assessment – beginning Friday, taking the opportunity to review it before book 5 comes outThe next online Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) – February 24-27, UK afternoonsOffice hours

Getting things started right away, regular weekly “office hours” begin this week, Thursdays at 14:00 GMT, 15:00 CET, 9am ET. A quick update from me, then it’s over to you for informal Lean Coffee-style discussions on topics or questions in any way related to Leading with Outcomes. Not just outcome-orientation specifically, but leadership, organisation, strategy, Lean, Agile, systems, complexity, organisation development, and so on – really any topic relevant to the Agendashift and Leading with Outcomes communities.

If you’re an Agendashift Academy subscriber or supporter, you’ll find this week’s event in the Events calendar, and I’ll publish a new one early each week. I’ll post the Zoom link to Slack also.

There will be no meeting on February 27th as it clashes with Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator; more on that below.

Adaptive Organisation assessment

A small group of us drawn mainly from the book 5 review circles and the Leading with Outcomes trainer/facilitator community will be meeting on Friday afternoon UK time this week to review the wording and coverage of the Adaptive Organisation Assessment. The timing is important – book 5 is very close to completion and the assessment features prominently in it! It also plays a big role in the Adaptive Organisation Workshop, the Leading in a Transforming Organisation training and the online Leading with Outcomes modules Adaptive Organisation (I): Business agility at every scale and Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes, and scales. In other words, it’s up there now with the classic Agendashift Delivery Assessment importance-wise and I have no doubt that we can benefit from the experience of improving that one.

If you’re familiar with the Adaptive Organisation Assessment in particular already and would like to join us, shout.

Trainer-the-Trainer / Facilitator

In February, I’ll be holding not only the first TTT/F of the year, but the first online one since making some changes to the Foundation and Inside-out Strategy modules (we had a lot of fun with them in person in India last month). Also, signing up gives you a year’s free access to Facilitator (worth £479), which you can upgrade to Trainer at any time.

Academy subscribers will find their own booking page in the Academy’s Events calendar. Alternatively, you can sign up here:

24-27 February, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) (www.tickettailor.com)

Those sessions are as follows:

Monday 24th February – Leading with Outcomes: Foundation – a trainer’s eye view on the this core module of the Leading with Outcomes curriculum, introducing the IdOO (“I do”) pattern – Ideal, Obstacles, OutcomesTuesday 25th February – Inside-out Strategy (I): Fit for maximum impact* – building on the Leading with Outcomes Assessment Debrief Workshop, this session’s exercises include the first of two experiences of our Clean Language coaching game 15-minute FOTO, Option Relationship Mapping, and of course the assessment toolsWednesday 26th February – Inside-out Strategy (II): On the same page, with purpose* – featuring classic exercises including Celebration-5W, Obstacles Fast and Slow, and the second experience of 15-minute FOTOThursday 27th February – Beyond Inside-out – checking out the Adaptive Organisation and Inside-out Strategy modules, and looking behind the scenes at assessment and certificate administration

*Compared to previous runs of this training, the two Inside-out Strategy sessions are reversed, the assessment-related session coming first.

All sessions begin 13:00 GMT, 14:00 CET, 8am ET and finish by 17:00 GMT, 18:00 CET, 12noon ET.

Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy
“Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”

Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:

Foundation module: Leading with Outcomes: Foundation Inside-out Strategy: Part I: On the same page, with purpose Part II: Fit for maximum impact Adaptive Organisation: Part I: Business agility at every scale Part II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales Outside-in Strategy: Part I: Positioned for success Part II: A platform for performance

Individual subscriptions from ~~£24.50~~ £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on January 06, 2025 07:31

Agendashift roundup of the year 2024

I’m back now from an enjoyable and successful trip to India (which is why this is my first and only post of the month) and it’s that time again – the top 10 posts of the year, and another top 10 of still-popular classics.

Before we get to those, a reminder of what’s currently in the calendar:

24-27 February, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) 06 March, London, UK:
Kanban Edge 2025

Expect some additions to be announced in the new year.

Those two top 10 lists below. That’s it from me this year – have a great Christmas!

Agendashift roundup, November 2024

In this edition: In-person and online Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F); Content changes; Templates tidyup; Book 5 update; Upcoming; Top posts

In-person and online Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

Glad to repeat last year’s trip (thank you again to my friends at Innovation Roots for the invite), I leave for India early next week:

6-7 December, Bengaluru, India:
Kanban India 2024 8-9 December, Bengaluru, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

I have also added an online TTT/F to the calendar:

24-27 February, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

From purchase, TTT/F now gives you a year’s free Leading with Outcomes: Authorised Facilitator subscription which you can upgrade at any time to Authorised Trainer. That’s quite a saving! On top of that, participants of the Bengaluru training who are based in India get special pricing too.

Content changes

I should probably have done it years ago, but the latest TTT/F and its materials anticipate a couple of changes that I’ll make to the recorded materials in the new year also. First, in Leading with Outcomes v3.0, I’m switching around parts I & II of the Inside-out Strategy module. In workshop terms (the training modules expand on those), the assessment debrief workshop (chapter 2 of the Agendashift book) now comes ahead of the Discovery workshop (chapter 1). I love the Discovery workshop – in TTT/F’s predecessor, the Agendashift Deep Dive workshop, I could make it last a whole day – but if you’re new to the outcome-oriented style, working at a higher level of abstraction compared to the Assessment Debrief workshop is definitely harder work. I should have listened to Steven Mackenzie, who has always done it this way round…

The second change is to the Discovery workshop itself and the Inside-out Strategy module that builds on it. Their v3.0 materials now include Karl Scotland’s TASTE and TASTE-T (“tasty”) X-Matrix tools. With practice, you can use these standalone, but if you’re new to them, they’re much easier to engage with as the climax of a string of Agendashift exercises, such that they organise what has previously been generated. It’s a great addition and I would like to thank Karl for the tool and Philippe Guenet for developing the integration – you may remember that Philippe took over part of day 1 of Leading in a Transforming Organisation in London a few months ago. Credit for “tasty” goes I think to Chris Combe, who was a participant there.

Templates tidyup

Existing facilitators and trainers will know that I have recently tidied up the menu of assessment templates, which, translations included, is getting quite long. The most-used and recommended templates are now at the top the of list. For more info on that, read the announcement.

Book 5 update

The abovementioned announcement also includes an update on book 5, Wholehearted: Engaging with the Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. I can now go a little further: after the latest round of comment (thank you Simon Rohrer and Teddy Zetterlund) and revision, I find myself suddenly and unexpectedly a lot happier with it. One comment could easily change that, and there’s still a lot of reaching out and so on to be done before I get to the publication part, but writing-wise at least, it feels like I’m on the home stretch now.

Upcoming6-7 December, Bengaluru, India:
Kanban India 2024 8-9 December, Bengaluru, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) 24-27 February, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) 06 March, London, UK:
Kanban Edge 2025 Top posts

It seems my recent hiatus has made room for some old favourites!

Agendashift is not a maturity model (November 2018) My favourite Clean Language question (January 2018) Better user stories start with authentic situations of need (October 2016) Your organisation in 5 networks (November 2022) From classic Lean-Agile to Outcome-Oriented Enterprise Agility: The 10-year Journey (October 2024)

Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy
“Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”

Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:

Foundation module: Leading with Outcomes: Foundation Inside-out Strategy: Part I: On the same page, with purpose Part II: Fit for maximum impact Adaptive Organisation: Part I: Business agility at every scale Part II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales Outside-in Strategy: Part I: Positioned for success Part II: A platform for performance

Individual subscriptions from ~~£24.50~~ £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on November 29, 2024 06:32

Assessment template tidyup and an update on book 5

It has been quite a while since I’ve blogged about Agendashift’s suite of assessments, but I did a tidyup over the weekend, so here we are! One of those assessments is connected to book 5, so I’ll give an update on that too.

There are a lot of assessment tools out there, but we think ours are special. Many seek to teach, judge, or sell, and as I once said about maturity models, too often they say more about the vendor than the client. That makes them inauthentic, and not a great place therefore to start an honest conversation.

Our style guide (also the basis of a workshop exercise in which you write your own assessments prompts) gives a sense of where we’re coming from:

Inclusive

Sentences starting with “We” or “Our”Statements that most of your colleagues could embrace

(Simple) present tense:

Not impossibly out of reachThere may be signs of this happening already

Non-prescriptive:

Not specifying how this outcome will be achievedAllowing multiple realisations

That’s for background; none of that changes in my weekend update. I have simply renamed some of them and resequenced the menu.

If you are an Authorised Facilitator or Trainer, you have access to the full set. Filtered for English (EN) templates only, this is what the list looks like now:

If you are an Academy subscriber, you have access to the mini templates:

Aside: You can subscribe on a monthly basis and there’s a 1-week free trial, so it’s not a big commitment. And the video-based training module Inside-out Strategy (II): Fit for maximum impact to which you’ll have access gives a lot of insight into how we facilitate it. You could do the Foundation module first, leave part (I) of Inside-out Strategy until later (I’m in the process of switching them around anyway, so it’s not cheating), and you’d be well-prepared for your first small-scale test.

Back to the assessments, certain less-used templates have been demoted to the bottom of the list. Templates with language code “EN-old”, are retained only for the sake of old surveys. Language code “EN-simplified” has gone; that has been the preferred language for long enough, and I have merged it into EN. The old adaptability assessment from the 1st edition of the Agendashift book has also fallen into disuse; the idea was good at the time – re-use the delivery assessment, replacing “delivery” with “change” – but it is superseded by the stronger Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment.

On that last point, you can try the full-length version of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment by participating in our global survey, the data from which (anonymised, of course) is helping some really interesting PhD research. Below is the survey and some background on the research:

Survey: Adaptive Organisation Assessment Help our research: an “Organisational DNA test”

Further to that, watch out next year for book 5, Wholehearted: Engaging with the Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, which goes into the model that supports that assessment tool. Its first three chapters correspond to the model’s three “spaces”:

Delivering, Discovering, Renewing – the value-adding work of the organisation and the systems that support itAdaptive Strategising – guiding that work and bringing a sense of identityMutual Trust Building – opening up the preceding two spaces to each other, minimising the risk that their decision-making lacks adequate context

What if between those three spaces and between their constituent parts, their relationships were in healthy and productive balance? That’s the basis of Part I, Business Agility at Every Scale.

The first two chapters of Part II, Between Spaces, Scopes, and Scales, bring together some really practical organisational theory that you won’t find in one place elsewhere:

The Space Between – a window on the relationships between different levels of scaleOrganising without Reorganising – avoiding the big reorg, promoting self-organisation at scale

It finishes with:

What Lies Beneath – digging below the model’s mainly relational perspective to the level of constraints and affordances

I am very pleased with how it is turning out, but it’s not quite at the publication stage yet, and it will be a while before I announce timelines. Meanwhile though, if 1) you are experienced enough to guess from that overview that I’m in that tricky no man’s land between the systems and complexity worlds and 2) you find that thought more intriguing than horrifying, please get in touch!

Upcoming events6-7 December, Bengaluru, India:
Kanban India 2024 8-9 December, Bengaluru, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) *

*TTT/F and (where shown) LIKE events include free one-year membership of the Leading with Outcomes Authorised Facilitator programme, upgradeable to Authorised Trainer at any time. Both of those include access to the video-based Leading with Outcomes training and the full range of Agendashift assessment tools.

Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy
“Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”

Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:

Foundation module: Leading with Outcomes: Foundation Inside-out Strategy: Part I: On the same page, with purpose Part II: Fit for maximum impact Adaptive Organisation: Part I: Business agility at every scale Part II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales Outside-in Strategy: Part I: Positioned for success Part II: A platform for performance

Individual subscriptions from ~~£24.50~~ £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on November 18, 2024 04:06

Agendashift roundup, October 2024

Just a short one this month. “Real life intrudes”, as they say; our daughter just spent two weeks in the children’s hospital and was very unwell for longer than that, so it is just as well that I had done that clearing the decks exercise beforehand! Glad to report that’s she is better now than she has been for a while.