Mike Burrows's Blog, page 6

From classic Lean-Agile to Outcome-Oriented Enterprise Agility: The 10-year Journey

That’s the name of a webinar recorded last week in celebration (a couple of weeks late) of the 10th anniversary of the publication of my first book, Kanban from the Inside. The discussion ranged over all four books and the upcoming “book 5”. Many thanks to hosts Albena Georgieva and Nora Pavlova of Businessmap (formerly Kanbanize) and everyone who participated in the Q&A. Congrats also to Stuart Gibbons who won a copy of Organizing Conversations (his choice – he could have had any one of the four). Enjoy!

Related

A selection of posts on topics mentioned:

Introducing Kanban through its values (January 2013) Towards the wholehearted organisation, outside in (May 2018) ‘Right to Left’ works for Scrum too (July 2018)A taste of my own medicine: Why “Organizing Conversations” took two and a half years to write (June 2024) Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation (July 2024) It only took me ten years (September 2024)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.

Agendashift: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Trainer and Facilitator Programmes | Store

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.

Engage, Invite, Celebrate – it was there all along

In July, I posted Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation, which takes us from a Christopher Alexander quote that has inspired me for a number of years to Engage, Invite, Celebrate, a nice little leadership model:

Engaging on the right challenges – attending to all that makes the organisation unwhole, i.e. to what makes it in any way disconnected, incomplete, unbalanced, incoherent, or otherwise dysfunctional; attending also to what might lead to a sense of unwholeness in the future – opportunities missed, for exampleInviting people to participate – not only for their perspectives and ideas but for the integration (i.e. making whole) that happens when you bring people together Celebrating their initiative – amplifying the organisation’s capacity to innovate, not only in terms of enhanced products and services but in terms of the organisation’s own development also

It’s hardly an accident that things worked out this way, but I just noticed that I was only a hairsbreadth away from Engage, Invite, Celebrate years ago. Here, from the Agendashift 2nd edition (2021) are the three “jobs” that I suggested that an engagement model should do:

To structure and support the work of change agents like you – not just external facilitators, consultants, and coaches, but leaders, managers, and other employees whose remit or desire involves encouraging some strategic kind of change to come to lifeTo help the organisations concerned engage their staff meaningfully in change-related work, inviting the level of participation necessary, and sustaining the expectation of further success as outcomes are achieved and momentum is builtWith and through their staff, to help keep the different parts of these organisations engaged with each other, all of them enjoying the best chance to thrive even as they change at different speeds

Look again at that second job:

To help the organisations concerned engage their staff meaningfully in change-related work, inviting the level of participation necessary, and sustaining the expectation of further success as outcomes are achieved and momentum is built

So close! Since then, I’ve changed the focus of Engage and the tone of Invite, but that’s to be expected if I’m going from a change paradigm to a leadership model. I didn’t use the word Celebrate there, but arguably, that’s where the meaning has changed the least. “Further success” implies past success, and what do we do when we’re working Right to Left (2019), anticipating and working backwards from those key moments of impact and learning, reviewing our work most-complete first? We begin with what we’ve most recently achieved, celebrating it. It was there all along!

While we’re here, please note the time of today’s webinar, The 10-year Journey: From Classic Lean-Agile to Outcome-Oriented Enterprise Agility. It begins later than recent blog posts have suggested, at 17:00 BST, 18:00 CEST, 12noon EDT.

Related Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation (July 2024) ‘Right to Left’ works for Scrum too (July 2018) Towards the wholehearted organisation, outside in (May 2018)Upcoming events10 October, 17:00 BST, 18:00 CEST, 12noon EDT, webinar hosted by businessmap:
The 10-year Journey: From Classic Lean-Agile to Outcome-Oriented Enterprise Agility 6-7 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.

Agendashift: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Trainer and Facilitator Programmes | Store

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.

Agendashift roundup, September 2024

In this edition: Into the fourth quarter; Ten years and more; Top posts (and book 5 clues)

Into the fourth quarter

Earlier this month I posted Clearing the decks and several people were kind enough to reach out in response. As I said at the time, nothing bad was happening, but I did feel the need to create some wiggle room, which I’m now enjoying.

Cancelling the upcoming LIKE and TTT/F trainings does have implications for the Leading with Outcomes Authorised Facilitator and Trainer programmes. For the time being, it is no longer a prerequisite to take one of these trainings; you can subscribe to those programmes directly from the Agendashift Academy’s Store page now. In fairness to those who have attended one of those trainings previously and didn’t take up a discounted subscription at the time, ping me for a discount code and you can have the first year of Facilitator for free or the equivalent amount off Trainer. For attendees of the in-person TTT/F in India – last years’s and the upcoming one – the same applies, and there is India-specific pricing also. Again, ping me.

I’m still doing speaking engagements (both of the October events are free, by the way), and there will likely be some additions. After those changes, my calendar now looks like this:

October

8-9 October, Online:
Project to Product Summit 10 October, online, 17:00 BST, 18:00 CEST, 10am EDT:
The 10-year Journey: From Classic Lean-Agile to Outcome-Oriented Enterprise Agility

December

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

September saw a very nice milestone: it has been ten years since the publication of my first book, Kanban from the Inside (KFTI). There are of course some things I’d do differently were I to write it again (which I won’t!), but I remain very proud of it. Moreover, its approach of using some central perspective to integrate ideas from a diverse range of sources is one that I keep using. For KFTI that central perspective was that of a values model; later books developed an outcome-oriented perspective, and book 5 has a central, organising framework, the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation.

More about that anniversary here:

It only took me ten years

Thinking about this end of that ten-year period, I will add that although this year’s release Organizing Conversations took two and a half years to write – a long time for a comparatively short book – I don’t regret the delay that this commission brought to what will now be my fifth book. Not only does the delay mean that its ideas are that much better developed, there are some important distinctions brought out in Organizing Conversations that I wouldn’t have thought much about otherwise.

I do now have a complete first draft of book 5, but it won’t be published until next year – sorry! Meanwhile, let me recommend Organizing Conversations and also Right to Left, the latter available also as an audiobook narrated by yours truly. Of my four past books (see my new Amazon Author page for the UK, the US, and Germany), those are the two that together best describe where I will be coming from. And for more clues, see the posts below that I’ve marked with an asterisk, and join me at one of those abovementioned events!

Top posts (and book 5 clues) Clearing the decks (September) Your organisation in 5 networks (November 2022)* It only took me ten years (September) Better user stories start with authentic situations of need (October 2016) What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints) (October 2023)*

*Book 5 clues! These likewise, and they all look set to appear in the top 10 for the year:

From Flow to Business Agility  (January) Agile’s Great Rebalancing: My next book’s take on the Agile manifesto  (April) Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation  (July) Help our research: an “Organisational DNA test” (May)

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.

Agendashift: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Trainer and Facilitator Programmes | Store

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.

It only took me ten years

Let me quickly mention that last week’s post, Clearing the decks, prompted some subscribers to get in touch. Thank you, I was touched! Sincerely, all is well here – I’m just glad of some extra headspace and flexibility. If I can be nerdy about it, it’s always good to open up options – to improve one’s capacity for independent action, one might say

Anyway… It’s ten years to the month since the publication of my first book, Kanban from the Inside, which I believe can fairly be described as a Lean-Agile classic. Since then, I’ve published two editions of Agendashift, then Right to Left in both written and audiobook form, and Organizing Conversations came out just a few weeks ago. That last one prompted me finally to ask Amazon to sort out my Amazon Author page so I have everything properly in one place at last! Here it is for the UK, the US, and Germany (three of the four books are available in translation).

In celebration of that 10-year milestone, I’m doing a webinar with my friends at Businessmap (formerly Kanbanize) the week after next:

10 October, online, 17:00 BST, 18:00 CEST, 10am EDT:
The 10-year Journey: From Classic Lean-Agile to Outcome-Oriented Enterprise Agility

In the past few days, I reached another milestone, the first complete draft of book 5, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. There’s still a long way to go on that (it won’t be published this year), but we have plenty to talk about. Join us! Bring your questions!

From my Amazon Author page – which only took me 10 years to get set upRelated: It’s 10 years since the post that changed my career (January 2023) What I really think about Kanban (April 2022) “Organizing Conversations” is now out (May 2024) A taste of my own medicine: Why “Organizing Conversations” took two and a half years to write (June 2024) It’s out! Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (August 2019)

Agendashift: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Trainer and Facilitator Programmes | Store

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.

Clearing the decks

For reasons I can’t yet go into (don’t worry, nothing bad), I find myself needing to clear the decks for the next few weeks. In particular, the in-person training in Southampton in October and the online TTT/F in November need to go.

That would seem to create a problem for those looking to gain access to the assessment tools and the Leading with Outcomes workshop and training materials, so here’s the deal. For the time being:

If you want to subscribe to the Facilitator programme, you can – the link is here That subscription is upgradeable to the Trainer programme, but you’ll need to complete the self-paced training first (it’s included in Facilitator, or you can subscribe to just that part on a monthly or yearly basis and upgrade when you’re ready)Past attendees of Leading in a Transforming Organisation or TTT/F can get their first year of Facilitator free – ping me for a discount codeThat applies also to December’s TTT/F in India. Effectively your first year of Facilitator – already significantly discounted for India – is included in the cost of your training, and you can put that discount towards Trainer, where India-specific pricing applies also

I haven’t yet updated the Store page; that remains the place to go for further information on these programmes.

Coming up very soon

This section looks a little different from the usual events calendar, not only because of the above news, but because I’m mentioning some events put on by friends of ours.

Most urgently, my friend Russ Lewis tells me that in conjunction with BAI UK, the Open University hosts the Business Agility Conference UK 2024: Leading through Complexity at their Milton Keynes campus on September 25th, i.e. next week. Two pre-conference workshops are available on the 24th, one led by Dave Snowden (Cynefin) the other by Simon Dodds (Health Care Systems Engineering). The purchase of one of these workshop places includes complementary admission to the OU conference track. If you wish to make a block booking (5 or more places), I can put you in touch with the organisers.

Slightly less urgently but still soon, I’m a featured speaker at the Project to Product Summit, a free online conference that will take place on October 8-9 (I’m speaking on the 8th). It’s the first of its kind I think and it looks to be an interesting event.

Overlapping with that, my friends Karl Scotland and Jim Benson are teaming up on October 9th for Make Strategy Visible – The X Matrix and Obeya. I can’t be there, but some of this stuff is already being integrated into Leading with Outcomes (more on that in due course), and I look forward to hearing all about it. Interesting that all three of us were in our different ways Kanban pioneers, and look where it took us!

Karl and Jim’s training is being held in person in Brighton. Stay over just one night, and the next day it’s Lean Agile Brighton, on the 10th. I spoke at the inaugural event in 2018 while I was writing Right to Left (see Right to Left: a transcript of my Lean Agile Brighton talk) and it was a lot of fun.

Having cleared the decks for November, that takes us to December. I have literally lost count of how many times I have visited India, and I keep coming back:

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

Can’t wait! There’s the possibility of doing TTT/F in Pune also, and if you’re thinking of joining me for that in either location, don’t forget the deals mentioned earlier.

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.

Agendashift: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Trainer and Facilitator Programmes | Store

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.

Agendashift roundup, August 2024

In this edition: Book 5 update; Heads up on some forthcoming changes; The Great Consolidation: What it means and how it went; Top posts

Book 5 update

For the uninitiated, book 5 is Wholehearted: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, which I hope to publish early next year. It’s “book 5” to distinguish from “book 4” – a very different book – and their development overlapped. Again, if you missed it, book 4 is Organizing Conversations: Preparing Groups to Take On Adaptive Challenges and it’s available both in print and on Kindle.

Last month, I was pushed to the limit on completing chapter 4 as planned because I was also updating the preceding chapters to take into account the great response to this blog post:

Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation (July)

It being the holidays (our disability-adapted accommodation on a farm in the Peak District was perfect for us, by the way), I didn’t make a firm commitment on when I would finish chapter 5 (“Organising without reorganising”, previously advertised as “Organising at human scale”). Nevertheless, there’s a decent chance that I’ll get it out to my review team today. That leaves just chapter 6 (“What Lies Beneath”) and, um, everything else. These things take time…

As mentioned last month, the blog post most relevant to chapter 5 is this one:

Your organisation in 5 networks (November 2022)

From networks we go to Adaptive Space (Michael Arena), Teaming (Amy Edmonsdon), Dynamic reteaming (Heidi Helfand) and more. And here’s a blog post for that final chapter, chapter 6:

What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints) (October 2023) Heads up on some forthcoming changes

in the next 10 days or so, watch out for an update on not just the calendar below but some exciting changes not only to content but also access to the assessment tools and other Agendashift / Leading with Outcomes resources. If the delay to the online TTT/F is a problem for you meanwhile, drop me a line and we’ll see what we can work out.

Meanwhile:

8-9 October, Online:
Project to Product Summit 22-24 October, Barclays Eagle Labs, Southampton, UK:
Leading for Innovation in the Knowledge Economy (Southampton) (formerly Leading in a Transforming Organisation)*11-14 November, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) *6-7 December, Bengaluru, India:
Kanban India 2024 8-9 December, Bengaluru, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) *

*Offers:

TTT/F and LIKE events include free one-year membership of the Leading with Outcomes Authorised Facilitator programme, upgradeable to Authorised Trainer at any time.If you’ve attended a TTT/F before, you can re-attend the online one for free. I can’t make the same offer for in-person training, but for the Southampton one at least, there are generous discounts for past attendees of either kind of training.There are generous discounts also for employees in the public, educational, and non-profit sectors, etc. Ping me for coupon codes!The Great Consolidation: What it means and how it went

What it means: the Agendashift Academy is off the Kajabi platform and running completely on Circle, which has hosted most of our self-paced training content for some time now. I had a DNS-related glitch when rehearsing the move a couple of weeks prior to the main event, but everything went smoothly on the day. Old community.agendashift.com links redirect automatically to academy.agendashift.com, so there’s no great need to update your bookmarks.

For the last few months we have been using the Circle’s inbuilt subscription system, and if you have an older subscription, you can almost certainly save some money by switching. Get in touch if that might be you. And if you’re not already a subscriber, what are you waiting for? Check out (pun intended) the Store page now!

Top posts Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation (July) From Flow to Business Agility (January) Agile’s Great Rebalancing: My next book’s take on the Agile manifesto (April) 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.

Agendashift: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Trainer and Facilitator Programmes | Store

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.

Further to last week’s roundup

Further to last week’s roundup, two announcements:

Advance warning of service disruption tomorrow (Tuesday, August 6th)Foundation 3.0 releaseAdvance warning of service disruption tomorrow

As I mentioned in the roundup, I intend to complete the consolidation of the Agendashift Academy’s two learning platforms onto the newer this week. Fingers crossed it will all be done tomorrow, but it will involve some downtime.

The gist of what’s happening:

The newer platform, which today lives at community.agendashift.com, will take over the domain of the old one, academy.agendashift.comLinks and bookmarks will automatically redirect, as will certain vanity URLsAffected internal and external links that I control will get updated over time, minimising redirects and hopefully improving search engine performance

None of that is difficult, but because domain mappings take time to propagate around the world, some disruption is inevitable. I’ll begin tomorrow morning (UK time) and post another update when it’s done.

Foundation 3.0 release

Remember last month’s big post, Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation? I mentioned in the roundup that it was triggered by some fruitful conversations in Berlin and London in June and that it is prompting changes to all my active projects. One of those is the Leading with Outcomes material, and today, as part of that, I’ll be releasing to authorised trainers a slicker, flatter, and more wholehearted version 3.0 of the deck and workbook for Leading with Outcomes: Foundation.

The Foundation module is the first item on the agenda for both Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation. There are two of the former and one of the latter in the calendar, so you can experience it for yourself soon:

30 September to 03 October, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) 22-24 October, Barclays Eagle Labs, Southampton, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation (Southampton) 8-9 December, Bengaluru, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

If you’ve attended a TTT/F before, you can re-attend the online one for free. I can’t make the same offer for in-person training, but for the Southampton one at least, there are generous discounts for past attendees of either kind of training. Likewise for employees in the public, educational, and non-profit sectors, etc. Ping me for coupon codes!

In time for TTT/F and Leading in a Transforming Organisation I will also be updating the Inside-out Strategy and Adaptive Organisation modules, respectively. Announcements on those will follow over the coming weeks.

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.

Agendashift: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Trainer and Facilitator Programmes | Store

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.

Agendashift roundup, July 2024

In this edition: Engage, Invite, Celebrate! Summer reading and writing; Autumn programme; The Great Consolidation

Engage, Invite, Celebrate!

When it’s your job to “create the conditions” for an adaptive, innovative, and resilient organisation, where do you start? What’s your agenda? That was the focus of this month’s big blog post and much of this month’s roundup will link back to it, so let’s start there:

Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation

The rest of this month’s most-read posts are all referenced by that:

From Flow to Business Agility (October 2023) Agile’s Great Rebalancing: My next book’s take on the Agile manifesto (April 2024) Towards the wholehearted organisation, outside in (May 2018) What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints) (October 2023) Help our research: an “Organisational DNA test” (May 2024)

The Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings in Berlin and (especially) London last month really helped to crystallise something. It is prompting some changes in all my active projects, in particular the Leading with Outcomes training material, the writing of my next book, and the Agendashift home, Wholehearted, and (per the image below) Framework pages. Updates on some of those below, and watch this space – there’s something happening here!

Summer reading and writing

Book 4, Organizing Conversations: Preparing Groups to Take On Adaptive Challenges is of course recently out. If you haven’t yet read it, it’s short enough that you can easily add it to your summer book pile. It doesn’t have many Amazon reviews yet but at least they’re all five stars! Do please add yours!

Meanwhile this month on book 5, Wholehearted: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, I have written the fourth of six chapters, The Space Between. I’m fascinated by what happens between different levels of organisation – between teams and their team-of-teams, for example – and find this space frustratingly under-explored in the literature. I can’t help thinking that many scale-related problems and, more generally, a lack of organisational agility both relate to that neglect. And process-centric approaches are ill-equipped to fix them!

As for “Engage, Invite, Celebrate”, that new chapter and, as of last week, the preceding three chapters all finish with a reflection with that title and that structure. It means that the reflective thread that already runs through the book is more explicitly anchored in the kind leadership described in my post. Definitely a change for the better.

Chapter 5 will be called Organizing at Human Scale. For an insight into where it begins, check out this post:

Your organisation in 5 networks (October 2022)

The language has changed a bit in the two years since that was written, but the idea stands. Then from networks of people we go to flexible webs of organisational scopes. Teaming (Edmondson), Dynamic Reteaming (Helfand), and Team Topologies (Skelton & Pais) are a selection of my references. I will enjoy dipping back into those over the summer holiday period.

Autumn programme

I mentioned that there will be changes to the Leading with Outcomes training material, and my autumn schedule makes those quite urgent. Including two conferences, here’s what my calendar looks like:

30 September to 03 October, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) 8-9 October, Online:
Project to Product Summit 22-24 October, Barclays Eagle Labs, Southampton, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation (Southampton) 6-7 December, Bengaluru, India:
Kanban India 2024 8-9 December, Bengaluru, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

If you’ve attended a TTT/F previously, you might like to re-attend the online one for free. I can’t make the same offer for in-person training, but for the Southampton one at least, there are generous discounts not only for repeat attendees but for past TTT/F attendees also. Likewise for employees in the public sector, educational sector, non-profits, etc.

The Great Consolidation

Just a heads up: I intend to complete the consolidation of the Agendashift Academy’s two learning platforms onto the newer one next week. It will involve some downtime, tentatively scheduled for Tuesday next week. I’ll post updates while it’s happening.

That’s it for July – have a great August! We’ve found some suitably accessible accommodation equipped with the hoists & stuff our daughter needs so we’ll be taking some time away together for the first time in a long while. Can’t wait.

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.

Agendashift: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Trainer and Facilitator Programmes | Store

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.

Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation

[respond to this post to LinkedIn]

You may remember that a little over six years ago I published Towards the wholehearted organisation, outside in, a blog post inspired by this quote:

I won’t retell all of the history of what followed, but wholehearted went on to become a key piece in both Agendashift and Leading with Outcomes. It lent its name to Agendashift’s mission statement, and in Leading with Outcomes it features in both the Foundation and Adaptive Organisation training modules. In short, it has legs! However, the way we introduce wholehearted as a model for leadership has evolved over the years, and it’s about time I shared a little of where we have got to with it.

From the Alexander quote, we picked out three words: unwhole, whole, and wholehearted. Then we asked a question: In relation to those, what expectations or responsibilities might a wholehearted organisation place on its leaders? Alternatively: By what behaviours do we recognise the leaders among us? We need leaders to be:

Engaging on the right challenges – attending to all that makes the organisation unwhole, i.e. to what makes it in any way disconnected, incomplete, unbalanced, incoherent, or otherwise dysfunctional; attending also to what might lead to a sense of unwholeness in the future – opportunities missed, for exampleInviting people to participate – not only for their perspectives and ideas but for the integration (i.e. making whole) that happens when you bring people together Celebrating their initiative – amplifying the organisation’s capacity to innovate, not only in terms of enhanced products and services but in terms of the organisation’s own development also

Taking those first at face value, what word is better than ‘leader’ to describe people who demonstrate a commitment to engage, invite, and celebrate? Conversely, what would we think of a leader who isn’t engaging on the right issues? What would we think of a leader who is slow to invite people into the process? And what would we say of an organisation that has little progress to celebrate, or of a leader who keeps missing the opportunity?

We must recognise that organisations aren’t perfect, so what stops leaders from leading more wholeheartedly, i.e. in the ways suggested? Moreover, what stops you (or leaders around you) from leading like that? Could it be that the conversation your organisation needs is the one that 1) identifies those obstacles and 2) explores what might be made possible if ways can be found around or through them?

The Foundation module of Leading with Outcomes starts with just such a conversation. Now, under the headings of Engage, Invite, and Celebrate, let’s explore how those ideas have developed.

Engage

What are the right challenges that leaders should be engaging on? Going back to the idea of unwholeness, there’s what is making the organisation unwhole now, and there’s what the organisation may come to regret if the opportunity isn’t grasped now. Bringing those together as “areas of opportunity” (actually the name of one of our exercises), Leading with Outcomes offers three main perspectives from which they can be identified:

Inside-out Strategy – an approach to strategy that begins with the internal experience of the organisation or some smaller scope thereof and its delivery capabilities, moving on to the possible consequences internal and external of developing themOutside-in Strategy – complementary to the first perspective, this begins with customers, users, and other actors in the outside environment, considering those relationships, and works inwards to the implications for the organisation, its product, its underlying platform of technology, know-how, and so on, and its teamsAdaptive Organisation – deeply integrating the preceding into the life of an organisation in a fundamentally relational, generative, and fundamentally complexity-aware way

As my friend and collaborator Philippe Guenet observed at the London training a couple of weeks ago, Leading with Outcomes is unusual in how “three dimensional” it is, and he meant that not only about the three perspectives above. He appreciates the way we avoid letting the flow metaphor dominate to the exclusion of strategy and structure. Along with leadership, we see those not as things to roll out or to accept meekly as givens, but as aspects of organisation that interact in dynamic and complex ways with each other and the delivery flow, such that each can be seen as both products of and constraints on the others.

Accordingly, a three-dimensional set of “right challenges” to engage on might look something like the following:

Impediments to flow (it should not be taken from the preceding paragraphs that I believe flow and its impediments to be unimportant, only that other perspectives are vital too)Obstacles that lie in the way of the organisation being where it wants to be and who it wants to be – in healthy and productive relationships with its customers, users, suppliers, and so on, and well positioned with respect to its competitorsConstraints of structure, policy, and habit that impact negatively on the organisation’s ability to deploy its decision-making, communication, and innovation capacities where they are most needed, and for those to self-organise as needed

If you were ever at a loss to know what it means for leaders to be “creating the conditions” for an adaptive, innovative, and resilient organisation, we have here the basis of a leadership agenda. By keeping focus on these things (the process never stops), more of the “right challenges” will be engaged with at every level of organisation, for as long or short a time as might be needed. 

Each type of challenge applies at every level of organisation, and at each level, no leader can hope to adequately address all of those by themselves. Even to frame the key challenges may be a task best done with other people, so let’s move on to the invitation to participate.

Invite

The idea that you can expect to succeed in a complex challenge with a rollout-based approach belongs in the 1990’s. If by the time you’re inviting people into the process you’re already talking about predetermined solutions, you’ve left it far too late. Even to be inviting solution ideas is too late if you’ve missed the opportunity to explore the “challenge space” together.

Important aspects of the challenge space include 1) the obstacles that people bump up against every day, and 2) the possibilities they can envisage if only those obstacles could be dealt with in some way. If they are given the opportunity to identify and articulate those in their own words, you (together) not only obtain the raw material for a coherent strategy that is grounded in reality and contains its own measures of success, you greatly increase the strategy’s “surface area”. In it, more people at more levels of organisation will find more that they can engage with and contribute to.

To be clear, and recalling that to integrate is to make whole, what I am describing is the integration through participation of the development and pursuit of strategy. Two of Leading with Outcomes’ three main patterns fit here:

The IdOO (“I do”) pattern – Ideal, Obstacles, OutcomesThe 3M pattern – Meaning, Measure, Method

These patterns are the main focus of the Foundation module of Leading with Outcomes and much of the Agendashift1 and Organizing Conversations2 books. They translate coaching conversations to two different scales: everyday leadership routines and the structures of set-piece strategy events – workshops, training, and the like. In the latter, participants practice the former so that the experience “rubs off” to benefit of the everyday working experience.

In its typical usage, the 3M pattern incorporates the IdOO pattern (I’ve highlighted the words “ideal”, “obstacles”, and outcomes” below), so I’ll expand here just on 3M:

Meaning: for some focal challenge or outcome, what does this look like in the ideal and for whom (broadening and energising a conversation beyond the obvious), and what is the significance of the obstacles that impede the pursuit of that ideal?Measure: not only in terms of metrics, by what observable outcomes will we know that we are being successful – behaviours and other indications that obstacles have been overcome and that people are making meaningful progress, the contexts within which they operate changed in some beneficial wayMethod: generating multiple and diverse solution ideas, and for the most interesting of those, framing them as hypotheses

These generative conversations need not take long – from moments to at most minutes. Why organisations instead commit so quickly to singular, monolithic, and oversized solutions seems a mystery! Perhaps it is partly human nature (a general overconfidence in planning) and partly a vestige of the 1990s change management and project management models that business schools and senior leaders have done far too little to challenge.

Likewise, and stepping back to deeper conversations on strategy, it would seem highly sensible to invest just a few minutes or hours to avoid overcommitting to what might turn out to be many months of execution, but again, old habits die hard. There is cause for hope in modern notions of complexity and emergence, but if we are leaving leaders to interpret these rather abstract concepts in their organisational contexts and to join the dots themselves, this seems a very big ask.

Let us move on then to celebration, which hides a serious message about learning. Without the means to support it – indeed for the organisation to expect it – an innovation process is very hard to sustain.

Celebrate

The third of Leading with Outcomes’ three main patterns is Right to Left (not uncoincidentally the title of another of my books3). It refers to working backwards from two key moments, moments of impact and learning otherwise known as done and really done:

done : someone’s need was met really done : we’ve accounted for the learning

As a coordination mechanism, the practice of reviewing work closest to completion first creates the foundations for flow. If work items are sufficiently granular, opportunities to celebrate getting them to meaningful states of done and really done should be frequent. Meaningfulness and alignment to purpose are enhanced greatly if “closest to completion” refers (as it should) to the work that is closest to making a customer impact. Add a delivery process that asks the right questions at the right time and in which everyone knows the boundaries of time and organisational scope within which the accounting will be done, a container for learning is formed.

To maximise the conditions for learning, leaders make multiple contributions. They represent and thereby reinforce those boundaries; some of them span boundaries helpfully also. They care that the right questions are asked at the right time, and not only when they themselves are the ones doing the asking. They care that at every stage of the delivery process, people have the customer and organisational context they need to make good decisions and deliver great work.

I could have added to that list, but that last responsibility says a lot about the distribution of decision-making capacity in the organisation. The need to make decisions and to find and create effective solutions does not fall only on leaders. It is characteristic of knowledge work that this is happening everywhere; the challenge for leaders is to help the combined effort keep its coherence and its senses of direction and purpose. Fortunately, they need not – and indeed cannot – do this on their own. Yes, they need to engage on the right challenges, but also they should be confident (or else working to build the confidence) that others around them are doing the same. Inviting more people into the process should be an early second step if it is not already part of the first. And let the celebrations begin! The sooner and more frequently those come, the faster the organisation delivers, learns, and adapts.

Engage, Invite, Celebrate: The call to action

Where will you start? Where is your greatest opportunity? Is it to engage on the right issues, to invite people into an integrated strategy process, or is it to celebrate their initiative, their successes, and their (everyone’s) learning? Or is it to help others around you to do the same? The choice really is yours, but you may find it helpful to work backwards – Right to Left if you like. Nothing builds trust like celebrating success. As you get better at it and learn to share the load, you create capacity. That capacity can be directed at identifying, framing, and prioritising your challenges. By the time you can anticipate celebrating your successes you will be well on your way.

Coming soonish: Wholehearted, the book

My fifth book, Wholehearted: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation will expand on many of the themes of this post. The Wholehearted of the title is of course a reference to the Engage, Invite, Celebrate model and the Christopher Alexander quote that inspired it. Its main focus is a deep dive into the kinds of challenges that leaders need to be engaged on, in particular to the dysfunctions that arise out of imbalances in the relationships between different aspects of the organisation. Healthy and productive relationships – for example between the work and how it is coordinated, or between delivery work and developmental work – are absolutely crucial to the effective deployment of the organisation’s decision-making capacity (and vice versa).

The book’s central model is the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a complexity-friendly retelling of the Viable System Model, faithful to the structure of Stafford Beer’s classic model but taking a very different approach to its application. Gone is the top-down analysis; in its place is a participatory, “everywhere all at once” approach. Going out of its way to avoid privileging any singular perspective, the goal is not to document an agreed view of the current or future state of the organisation but to identify through dialogue its challenges, underlying constraints, and possible interventions. By continuing to intervene on those constraints, the organisation works on becoming a better version of itself with a healthier and more productive relationship with its environment.

I use “constraints” here very much in the way understood in complexity science. Not just people and teams but other identifiable aspects of organisation affect each other’s behaviour not only by design but by their mere proximity. Too many and too interconnected for anyone to fully understand, let alone manage, these myriad relationships give rise to complexity, and do much to explain the poor track record of traditional approaches to organisational change. The approach here is to go with the grain of natural social processes, making it easier for desirable and ultimately rewarding interactions first to happen, and then to be repeated until they are normalised.

Yes (I’ve been told this more than once), to attempt to bring the systems and complexity worlds together like this is ambitious. It works though! The key I think is not to approach it as a problem of modelling or execution but as the kind of strategy challenge in which its development and pursuit must proceed hand-in-hand through dialogue. Organisations don’t just do stuff, they are experienced, and every experience is different. Through dialogue, and with effective frameworks for making sense of those diverse experiences, common themes emerge, and new stories are told. And so a process of generative change begins, one in which solutions emerge where they are needed.

I am not yet giving a timeframe for publication. Part I, Business Agility at Every Scale, is reviewing well, but work on Part II, Between Spaces, Scopes, and Scales, has only just begun. And majoring on the dialogic (i.e. dialogue-based) and generative aspects of organisation development (OD) I have alluded to, Organizing Conversations has only been out for a few weeks!

1 Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2nd edition 2021)
2 Organizing Conversations: Preparing Groups to Take on Adaptive Challenges (May 2024)
3 Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020)

[respond to this post to LinkedIn]

Related postsTowards the wholehearted organisation, outside in (May 2018)From Flow to Business Agility (January 2024)Agile’s Great Rebalancing: My next book’s take on the Agile manifesto (April 2024)Help our research: an “Organisational DNA test” (May 2024)What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints) (October 2023)

And in relation to the recently-published Organizing Conversations:

“Organizing Conversations” is now out (May) – with a short video interview with Gervase BusheA taste of my own medicine: Why “Organizing Conversations” took two and a half years to write (June)Organizing Conversations with Mike Burrows – Agile Uprising Podcast interview with Jay Hrcsko, with some mention of book 5 alsoLearn more

The abovementioned patterns – IdOO, 3M, and Right to Left – are introduced in the online self-paced training module Leading with Outcomes: Foundation, available on a subscription basis or delivered privately by an authorised trainer as a 1-day in-person or online class.

After Foundation come the Leading with Outcomes modules listed below. Although may you prefer to bring Adaptive Organisation forward or even to begin with Outside-in Strategy, the default sequence is as follows:

Inside-out Strategy:Part I: On the same page, with purposePart II: Fit for maximum impactAdaptive Organisation:Part I: Business agility at every scalePart II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success (soon to split into two parts also)

As with the Foundation module, all are available privately in both classroom training and online forms, also as shorter facilitated workshops. Publicly as well as privately, Leading in a Transforming Organisation combines Foundation and Adaptive Organisation into a 3-day class, the next of which takes place in October. That and both online and in-person versions of Train-the-Trainer/Facilitator (TTT/F) are included in our calendar below:

30 September to 03 October, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)22-24 October, Barclays Eagle Labs, Southampton, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation (Southampton)8-9 December, Bengaluru, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

Agendashift: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Trainer and Facilitator Programmes | Store

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.

[respond to this post to LinkedIn]

Agendashift roundup, June 2024

In this edition: Organising Conversations; Leading in a Transforming Organisation and TTT/F; Conferences; Olivier’s phylogenetic study; Top posts

Organizing Conversations

Organizing Conversations, my fourth book, has been out for four weeks now. If you missed the original announcement, it includes a short video interview I did with series editor Gervase Bushe:

“Organizing Conversations” is now out

More recently:

A taste of my own medicine: Why “Organizing Conversations” took two and a half years to write

And a longer interview for the Agile Uprising podcast (thank you Jay!):

Organizing Conversations with Mike Burrows

On that last one I couldn’t resist mentioning book 5, but more on that in the months to come. Meanwhile, your Amazon ratings and reviews on book 4 would be most gratefully received!

Leading in a Transforming Organisation and TTT/F

Two weeks after doing it in Berlin (thank you Markus Hipelli), this week I was in London for Leading in a Transforming Organisation, my last public training until after an extended summer break. Across the two sessions, here’s how participants summarised it:

A human-centred way of understanding organisations, teams of teams, and teamsChallenges you to look at organisations and their dysfunctions in a new and refreshing wayThe only “3D” training on modern organisation and operating models out there!Addressing the real issues within the orgGreat approach to ensuring meaningful change in your companyGeneralised approach to collaborative org design and coachingBrain food!

See also this longer feedback from Chris Combe on LinkedIn.

The “3D” term above isn’t mine but I was very pleased to see it. Most of what we do in Leading in a Transforming Organisation is orthogonal and complementary to team-centric and process-centric approaches, taking you into different organisational dimensions. When it comes to strategy, organisation, and certain crucial aspects of leadership, most Agile training barely scratches the surface.

The next one will be in Southampton in October:

22-24 October, Barclays Eagle Labs, Southampton, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation (Southampton)

Before that, there will be an online TTT/F, and I’m planning some significant updates to the material before then (past participants can re-attend for free, and there’s a 60% discount for part attendees of Leading in a Transforming Organisation also):

30 September to 03 October, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

Note the four consecutive afternoons there – I’m experimenting with not splitting it over two weeks.

Likely rounding off the year training-wise, in December I’ll be doing another in-person one in Bangalore:

8-9 December, Bengaluru, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) (innovationroots.com)Conferences

That trip to Bangalore coincides with Kanban India, and with a brand new talk I’m very glad to be keynoting there again! You can register for that here:

6-7 December, Bengaluru, India
Kanban India 2024

The autumn conference season kicks off for me in early October:

October 8-9, online:
Project to Product Summit 2024 Olivier’s phylogenetic study

The number of Adaptive Organisation assessments submitted for Olivier Bertrand’s PhD research exceeds 50, but twice that many would be great! To participate, visit Survey: Phylogenetic research study: Adaptive Organisation Assessment. Be assured that no personally identifying information will be shared without permission, and any subsequent communication will be on an opt-in basis. You can read the original announcement here: Help our research: an “Organisational DNA test”.

If you’ve done one already and would like to submit another for a different organisation, either register with a different email or ping me and and I’ll invite you to an alternative survey.

Top posts “Organizing Conversations” is out on Kindle (May) A taste of my own medicine: Why “Organizing Conversations” took two and a half years to write (June) My favourite Clean Language question (January 2019) Agile’s Great Rebalancing: My next book’s take on the Agile manifesto (April) From Flow to Business Agility (January)

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:

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

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. Our next TTT/F training takes place in May (online).

Agendashift: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Trainer and Facilitator Programmes | Store

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.