Mike Burrows's Blog, page 7

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

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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)

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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.

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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.

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

My fourth book, Organizing Conversations: Preparing Groups to Take on Adaptive Challenges is now out, and it’s time to spill the beans on why a relatively short book took me so long. It wasn’t because I was working on book five at the time (hard as it was, I resisted that urge), but because my first conception of it was quite different to how it turned out.

My initial attempt was essentially a condensed version of the 2021 Agendashift 2nd edition. Series editor Gervase Bushe wasn’t satisfied with that, and to be honest, I shouldn’t have been either. What’s the point? Gervase insisted repeatedly that I had to be more up-front with my theory of action – i.e. the Why not only of the approach described in the book but that of each step in the process it describes and of the tools and techniques it employs. To do that justice, we re-framed and restructured it more than once, and I ended up adding a whole new chapter. To achieve that within the word count budget (30,000 words), swathes of less interesting material were cut. A couple of times I came close to giving up, but it is a much, much better book now.

I should have seen it coming! Here’s the beginning of an email conversation that I reproduce in the book’s introduction almost verbatim:

Gervase: I’d like to get a statement of your theory of action for creating generative conversations. Complete this sentence: In order to design events that produce generative conversations among a group of people you have to…

Mike: In order to design events that produce generative conversations among a group of people you have to sustain their motivation to ask and answer questions not previously considered in their context, and to which the answers may be both many and potentially surprising (including to the event’s designer, who neither mediates in every conversation nor prescribes their conclusions). The strength of that motivation comes from a combination of purpose, context, trust in the process on the day, and confidence (or at least hope) for what will follow.

Gervase: Interesting. Now, to sustain their motivation to ask and answer questions not previously considered in their context, you have to…

That conversation was how the book was born, and in the end I properly embraced the process. The irony is how slow I was to see that I was getting a taste of my own medicine! As well as the title of my third book, Right to Left is one of Agendashift’s and Leading with Outcomes’ core patterns. It means “working backwards from key moments of impact and learning”, where done is “someone’s need was met”, and really done is “we’ve accounted for the learning”. That learning is maximised by the way the work is framed and discussed, right from the beginning and all the way through the delivery process. In short, making explicit the theory of action of both the work and how it will be carried out is very much part of the approach.

In a similar vein, coincident with the book’s publication I’ve been fortunate to have done multiple runs of facilitation and training in quick succession. Between a private Adaptive Organisation workshop, two runs of Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F), and two runs of Leading in a Transforming Organisation, by the end of next week I will have done Foundation four times and different forms of the Adaptive Organisation material three times in the space of just a few weeks. What an opportunity for experimentation! Accordingly, next week’s training in London (see below) won’t just incorporate the usual round of small improvements I make before and after every training, it has been reworked quite substantially. Not just streamlining and mistake-proofing it, but repeatedly reinforcing the sense of where we are headed and why. Less “trust the process before we deconstruct it”, more a sense of engaging purposefully together.

Of course there’s always an element of risk when you make changes, but somehow I doubt that I will come to regret these. And let me say that just as I am grateful to Gervase for helping to make Organizing Conversations what it eventually became, I’m grateful also to Markus Hippeli, my host earlier this month in Berlin, whose thoughts prompted the latest rework. Markus, I shall let you know how we get on

Related:

“Organizing Conversations” is now out – includes a short video interviewJune 25-27: Leading in a Transforming Organisation (London) – just a couple of places left, 15% discount applied to that link, ping me if you think may be eligible for a bigger one. Non-agilists very welcome, you won’t be alone!

Agendashift roundup, May 2024

In this edition: Organising Conversations; Olivier’s PhD research; Leading in a Transforming Organisation; Featureban on Kanban Zone; Top posts

Organizing Conversations

As announced on Wednesday (linkedin.com), I’m thrilled to announce that my fourth book, Organizing Conversations: Preparing Groups to Take on Adaptive Challenges is now out – first on Kindle and now in print too.

This book was a commission for the Bushe-Barshak Insitute’s BMI Series in Dialogic Organization Development. Watch a short conversation with series editor Gervase Bushe recorded earlier this week:

Read the announcement in full here, and here are the links for the Kindle edition on amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, and amazon.de.

Olivier’s PhD research

Without wishing to take anything away from book 4, Olivier Bertrand’s PhD research into phylogenetic approaches to understanding organisational evolution is making use of Agendashift’s Adaptive Organisation assessment. This is the assessment tool that powers the 1-day Adaptive Organisation workshop and days two and three of Leading in a Transforming Organisation. In due course, it will feature in book 5, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation also.

You can help! By participating in the survey – thereby getting an early sight of the full version of the assessment tool – you’ll provide valuable input to Olivier’s research, which will, in turn, feed into the book. Exciting stuff!

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 a more detailed announcement here: Help our research: an “Organisational DNA test”.

Leading in a Transforming Organisation

All three events in the calendar currently are for Leading in a Transforming Organisation – Berlin, London, and Southampton (June, June, and October, respectively):

4-6 June, Berlin, Germany:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation (Berlin) – SOLD OUT 25-27 June, London, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation (London) 22-24 October, Barclays Eagle Labs, Southampton, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation (Southampton)

Berlin is sold out, but Silke Noll has organised something informal over food for Monday evening. If you can make it, you can sign up here. For London and Southampton, I won’t reiterate all the usual reasons for discount codes, but ping me if you think you might qualify.

Notable by their absence are Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and the monthly webinars and experience/practice sessions. I’ll add an autumn TTT/F to the calendar soonish, and I’ll think about the rest when I have a bit more headroom. June in particular will be very busy.

Featureban on Kanban Zone

One of the best ways to introduce Kanban is by running a simulation using Featureban. It’s a much more effective way to learn by doing.

So said Kanban Zone founder Dimitri Ponomareff recently in a follow-up to the the online session I ran with Allan Kelly a few weeks ago. Read his announcement: Featureban is now available inside Kanban Zone! (linkedin.com).

Allan is running another session himself. Use coupon code Agendashift20 for an 20% saving here: Featureban public online game.

As ever, you can request the original Creative Commons materials here. When I get a moment I will replace the broken video there with this one.

Top posts Help our research: an “Organisational DNA test” (May) “Organizing Conversations” is out on Kindle (May) Agile’s Great Rebalancing: My next book’s take on the Agile manifesto (April) From Flow to Business Agility (January) My favourite Clean Language question (January 2019)

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.

“Organizing Conversations” is now out

I’m thrilled to announce that my fourth book, Organizing Conversations: Preparing Groups to Take on Adaptive Challenges is out on Kindle. Fingers crossed, the print version will be out in time for Friday’s monthly roundup. [Update: it was ]

This shortish book (at a little over 100 pages and a shade under 30,000 words, half the length of my other books) was a commission for the Bushe-Marshak Institute’s BMI Series in Dialogic Organization Development and represents something of an endorsement by the OD community for Agendashift and Leading with Outcomes. Despite the length constraint (or was it because of it?) it took me nearly two and half years to complete, but it was worth it. More than ever before I was challenged to clarify the thinking behind the practice in a way that deepened existing commitments to participatory and generative change. Neither do I regret the delay to book 5, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, but that’s for another day. Except to say that organising (a verb, and with British spelling) will be central to Wholehearted, the star of the show today is Organizing Conversations.

In OD terms, what this book does is to bridge two kinds of dialogue, inquiry and generative conversations, the latter referring to conversations in which people generate ideas on which they are motivated to act. In Leading with Outcomes terms, they correspond to the left and right sides of the picture that appears on the front cover. Inside those are Ideal, Outcomes, Outcomes – the IdOO (“I do”) pattern – and Meaning, Measure, Method, two outcome-oriented conversation patterns. Bridging them are Organise the Strategy (mapping, mostly) and Right to Left (the pattern, also the title of one of my previous books).

It might be described as combining the spirit of dialogic and generative OD with some Lean-Agile rigour, and that is what I believe prompted Gervase Bushe and Bob Marshak to invite me to write it. I started out writing a condensed version of an Agendashift 3rd edition, but with Gervase’s editorial input it ended up being much better than that, and for that I am grateful.

Watch a short conversation with Gervase recorded yesterday evening:

You can buy the Kindle version today – here are links for amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, and amazon.de – and watch this space for the print version.

Upcoming events

Webinars and experience/practise sessions are taking a break now until the autumn. I will add the next Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator to the calendar shortly.

June

25-27 June, London, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation *

October

22-24 October, Southampton, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation *

*For TTT/F and Leading in a Transforming Organisation, ping me for coupon codes if any of the following apply:

Employees in public sector, education, and non-profit organisations get 40% off, as do authorised trainers and facilitatorsThere are subscription-specific discounts for Agendashift Academy subscribersMembers of the old partner programme get 30% offPast participants of Leading in a Transforming Organisation can re-attend with 60% off (75% if you work for a public sector, education, or non-profit organisation)Past TTT/F participants can re-attend online for free

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
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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.

“Organizing Conversations” is out on Kindle

I’m thrilled to announce that my fourth book, Organizing Conversations: Preparing Groups to Take on Adaptive Challenges is out on Kindle. Fingers crossed, the print version will be out in time for Friday’s monthly roundup.

This shortish book (at a little over 100 pages and a shade under 30,000 words, half the length of my other books) was a commission for the Bushe-Marshak Institute’s BMI Series in Dialogic Organization Development and represents something of an endorsement by the OD community for Agendashift and Leading with Outcomes. Despite the length constraint (or was it because of it?) it took me nearly two and half years to complete, but it was worth it. More than ever before I was challenged to clarify the thinking behind the practice in a way that deepened existing commitments to participatory and generative change. Neither do I regret the delay to book 5, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, but that’s for another day. Except to say that organising (a verb, and with British spelling) will be central to Wholehearted, the star of the show today is Organizing Conversations.

In OD terms, what this book does is to bridge two kinds of dialogue, inquiry and generative conversations, the latter referring to conversations in which people generate ideas on which they are motivated to act. In Leading with Outcomes terms, they correspond to the left and right sides of the picture that appears on the front cover. Inside those are Ideal, Outcomes, Outcomes – the IdOO (“I do”) pattern – and Meaning, Measure, Method, two outcome-oriented conversation patterns. Bridging them are Organise the Strategy (mapping, mostly) and Right to Left (the pattern, also the title of one of my previous books).

It might be described as combining the spirit of dialogic and generative OD with some Lean-Agile rigour, and that is what I believe prompted Gervase Bushe and Bob Marshak to invite me to write it. I started out writing a condensed version of an Agendashift 3rd edition, but with Gervase’s editorial input it ended up being much better than that, and for that I am grateful.

Watch a short conversation with Gervase recorded yesterday evening:

You can buy the Kindle version today – here are links for amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, and amazon.de – and watch this space for the print version.

Upcoming events

Webinars and experience/practise sessions are taking a break now until the autumn.

June

4-6 June, Berlin, Germany
Leading in a Transforming Organisation (Berlin) *25-27 June, London, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation *

October

22-24 October, Southampton, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation *

*For TTT/F and Leading in a Transforming Organisation, ping me for coupon codes if any of the following apply:

Employees in public sector, education, and non-profit organisations get 40% off, as do authorised trainers and facilitatorsThere are subscription-specific discounts for Agendashift Academy subscribersMembers of the old partner programme get 30% offPast participants of Leading in a Transforming Organisation can re-attend with 60% off (75% if you work for a public sector, education, or non-profit organisation)Past TTT/F participants can re-attend online for free

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
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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.

Help our research: an “Organisational DNA test”

I spoke a few months ago with Olivier Bertrand and a couple of his colleagues who were looking into using phylogenetic techniques to analyse the results of organisational assessments. It seemed that Agendashift’s assessments were ideal for the purpose, and when we met for a second time, the team’s analysis of data captured via the classic Agendashift Delivery Assessment looked very, very promising (I exaggerate not – it was very exciting).

The timing could not be better. I’m now working hard on book 5, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, and Olivier has been accepted as a PhD researcher at Université Paris-Saclay to conduct study in the field of Organisational Phylogenetics (PhylOrg). Together, we would like to focus on the new book’s assessment tool (also the assessment tool of the Adaptive Organisation workshop and the Leading in a Transforming Organisation Training). And we need your input!

As explained in Olivier’s two blog posts (here and here), we propose to analyse the population of organisations the way a biologist would analyse organisms, using phylogenetic analysis. Just as biologists look at the evolutionary history of species, we aim to map the evolutionary journey of organisations, uncovering the key traits that determine their success or failure, and the order in which they appear. Our hope is that we can map an evolutionary tree of organisations, identifying both ancestral traits and more derived innovative adaptations that drive organisational resilience and agility. To do this, we need a lot of data – input ideally on a few hundred organisations.

By filling in our survey, you will be contributing to a deeper understanding of organisational dynamics and helping us uncover patterns and trends that shape the evolutionary trajectory of organisations. Of course, once the results are in, and digested by Olivier’s algorithms, we will share the results with the community.

In accordance with our longstanding privacy policies, the research team will receive no identifying information. A new metadata page does however ask for basic information on country, industry, etc, and gives you the option (on an entirely opt-in basis) to be kept in contact with this work.

To join, follow the link below. Feel free to share this post – not so much with close colleagues, but with those you know in other organisations. Thank you! This could make a difference!

Survey: Phylogenetic research study: Adaptive Organisation Assessment Upcoming events

Webinars and experience/practise sessions are taking a break now until the autumn.

May

14 May to 22 February, online, Tuesday & Wednesday afternoons (UK time):
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) *

June

4-6 June, Berlin, Germany
Leading in a Transforming Organisation (Berlin) *25-27 June, London, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation *

October

22-24 October, Southampton, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation *

*For TTT/F and Leading in a Transforming Organisation, ping me for coupon codes if any of the following apply:

Employees in public sector, education, and non-profit organisations get 40% off, as do authorised trainers and facilitatorsThere are subscription-specific discounts for Agendashift Academy subscribersMembers of the old partner programme get 30% offPast participants of Leading in a Transforming Organisation can re-attend with 60% off (75% if you work for a public sector, education, or non-profit organisation)Past TTT/F participants can re-attend online for free

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.

The May TTT/F begins in a week’s time

A quick reminder that the May Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator begins in a week’s time. It’s not too late to book your place:

14-22 May, online, Tuesday & Wednesday afternoons (UK time):
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

It covers:

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation – patterns for strategy conversations in the language of needs, obstacles, and outcomesThe Discovery and assessment-related parts of the Inside-out Strategy workshops and training – classic Agendashift with a leadership development twist, featuring favourite exercises including Celebration-5W, Obstacles Fast and Slow, 15-minute FOTO, and Option Relationship MappingIn overview, of the remainder of the Leading with Outcomes curriculum

TTT/F is one of two routes into becoming an authorised Leading with Outcomes facilitator or trainer (subscriptions required), through which you can get access to the full range of Agendashift assessments, materials for all of the Leading with Outcomes workshops, and for trainers, training materials also.

Past participants can re-attend for free, a popular perk. Alternatively, if you have attended a past Leading in a Transforming Organisation event or are signed up to one of the upcoming events (see below), you can get 60% off. And for all of our paid events and subscriptions, there is a 40% discount for employees of public sector, healthcare, and non-profit organisations. Ping me for coupon codes if any of these apply.

Together with a modest amount of additional self-study, the second route is via Leading in a Transforming Organisation:

4-6 June, Berlin, Germany:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation (Berlin) – SOLD OUT25-27 June, London, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation (London) 8-10 October, Barclays Eagle Labs, Southampton, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation (Southampton)

Most people attend Leading in a Transforming Organisation for its own sake rather than as a TTT/F alternative, but the option is there. Again, ping me for coupon codes if any of the usual discount reasons apply, including past participation at either kind of event.

And sorry, yes, Berlin really is sold out! But check these out:

The day before, my friend Silke Noll is in Berlin leading Intercultural awareness training – your start into intercultural agility (Silke will be joining us for Leading in a Transforming Organisation also)There is always the online self-paced option: Leading with Outcomes

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 Part I: Business agility at every scale Part 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.

Agendashift roundup, April 2024

In this edition: Books in progress: 2; Two new videos; Upcoming: online, Berlin (SOLD OUT), London, and Southampton; Top posts

Books in progress: 2

I’m putting the final touches on Organising Conversations: Patterns of Dialog for the Transforming Organization and have a decent first draft of the first part (of two) of Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. Needless to say, they’re keeping me busy!

With that workload in mind and the summer approaching, I’m pausing the monthly webinars and experience/practise sessions until the autumn.

Encouragingly, an excerpt from Wholehearted is by a big margin the most-read blog post of the month (shared on LinkedIn here):

Agile’s Great Rebalancing: My next book’s take on the Agile manifesto

Hot on the heels of January’s From Flow to Business Agility it looks set to feature high up in the top 10 for 2024. Like that post, organised on LinkedIn there was some community review of the post prior to publication, and the feedback has benefited the Wholehearted manuscript also. Thank you again Chris Combe, Sarah Whiteley, Kert D. Peterson, CST, AKT, Elle Anderson, FRSA, FBCS, Karen Beck, Daniel Walters, Ricardo Alvarez, Simon JAILLAIS, and Matthew White.

Two new videos

In the last (until the autumn) of our monthly webinars, we were joined this month by Karl Scotland. Here’s the recording of his excellent session, also the PDF of his slides, links, etc:

Karl Scotland: Agendashift – Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation

Related to the still-to-be-written Part II of Wholehearted and with a fun Q&A session (always a good sign) here’s the latest version of one of my ever-evolving keynotes:

Between spaces, scopes, and scales: What the scaling frameworks don’t tell you Upcoming: online, Berlin (SOLD OUT), London, and Southampton

Yes, Berlin has sold out, but there’s still the online TTT/F and then Leading in a Transforming Organisation (London) at the end of June and another in Southampton in October:

14-22 May, online, Tuesday & Wednesday afternoons (UK time):
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) 4-6 June, Berlin, Germany:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation (Berlin) – SOLD OUT25-27 June, London, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation (London) 8-10 October, Barclays Eagle Labs, Southampton, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation (Southampton)

Past (or booked) attendees of TTT/F can re-attend for free and/or attend Leading in a Transforming Organisation for less than half price. There are big discounts in the opposite direction also – ping me for coupon codes. Also significant discounts for government, healthcare, education (a number of university staff have attended in recent months), non-profits, etc. As was the case in Manchester last year, I know that London for one will have participants from outside of technology, which always makes for a more interesting experience.

If you really can’t get to any of those, don’t forget the online self-paced option: Leading with Outcomes.

Top posts Agile’s Great Rebalancing: My next book’s take on the Agile manifesto (April) From Flow to Business Agility (January) My favourite Clean Language question (January 2019) What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints) (October) Venue confirmed for Leading in a Transforming Organisation (London) (April)

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 Part I: Business agility at every scale Part 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.

Agile’s Great Rebalancing: My next book’s take on the Agile manifesto

Some context: Measured in chapters (not time, alas) I’ve reached the halfway mark in the writing of my fifth book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, completing the first three of six chapters and with those, part I (Business agility at every scale) of two parts. I’ve adapted the article below from a passage in Chapter 1 in which we’re exploring a space I call Delivery-Discovery-Renewal (Figure 1). That space encompasses the productive activity of a team or other organisational scope at any scale of organisation – everything that’s done in the “here and now”, as opposed to, say, planning or retrospecting.

Figure 1. The Delivery-Discovery-Renewal Space

The Delivery-Discovery-Renewal Space comprises the following:

The value-creating work – delivery-related work (obviously), discovery-related work (making sure that we will be delivering the right things, scouting for new opportunities), and renewal-related work (working on the organisation itself, building and improving the capabilities needed)How that work is coordinated – understood very broadly as all the constraints on that work that have any kind of coordinating effectHow that work is organised – organising around commitments and managing towards goals, another set of constraints on the work

…and their relationships:

Mutual relationships between systems 1, 2, and 3 above, i.e. between the value-creating work, how its is coordinated, and how it is organised – how they constrain each other, how they inform each other, the effects they have on each other, and so onThe relationship with the external environment – for the purposes of this article, relationships with customers and users most especially Relationships inside system 1 above (the value-creating work) – collaborations, process-defined interactions, structures, and so on

You may recognise there a good chunk of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM), and with the mention of constraints, hints of something complexity-related also. The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation model and the forthcoming book cover three such spaces (Delivery-Discovery-Renewal, Adaptive Strategising, and Mutual Trust Building), the relationships between them, relationships internal to them, and the much-neglected relationships between different scales of organisation.

It is very much a relational model, i.e. not a process model but complementary to those, providing them with some sorely-needed theory, particularly on matters of scale. It is easy to engage with, it provides a fresh perspective on familiar things, it translates straightforwardly to a complexity-based perspective, and it can be the basis of a participatory strategy process – all very different from the more analytical ways in which such models are typically used.

In the lightly-adapted excerpt below, we are mid-chapter. You might find it worth giving the above introduction a second read therefore (I’ll refer to Figure 1 more than once). Somewhat in the vein of my January post From Flow to Business Agility (by a huge margin my most-read post of the year so far), we are exploring a key question for the Delivery-Discovery-Renewal space and for the other two spaces:

How might we increase our decision-making capacity?

The Great Rebalancing

One important way to increase decision-making capacity in this Delivery-Discovery-Renewal space is to move away from people serving the process and toward the process serving those who do the work. Some clear signs of success:

Routine work can be done with negligible overheadCoordination problems – contention, overburdening, starvation, and the rest – are seen not as facts of life that people must simply endure, but as symptoms of something systemic that can and should be addressedIn non-routine situations, appropriate courses of action are made no harder than necessary by, for example, bureaucracy or overly restrictive policiesThose doing the work have appropriate control over their working environments, and that agency is seen as a potential source of innovation

Each of those reflects some change in the balance between the elements I identified in the introduction to this article, most especially between the value-creating work and how it is coordinated (systems 1 and 2 respectively in Figure 1 above). Taken together, they remind me of the Agile manifesto [1] and, in particular, the first and most famous of its four “this over that” declarations: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. The remaining three declarations can be understood in a similar way, i.e. as representing a sometimes radical rebalancing of relationships inside the Delivery-Discovery-Renewal space.

“Working software over comprehensive documentation”: If we’re staying strictly within the Delivery-Discovery-Renewal space and focusing on the work rather than the thinking behind it, this declaration impacts mostly the balance between upstream and downstream activities. This idea has consequences in many spheres outside of technology development and the book will develop it further. Here though, let’s understand it in manifesto terms.

The 1990s, the context in which Agile arose, saw the peak of the linear project model. Technology projects proceeded in a sequence of phases (see Figure 2 below for an example), and because activities were separated in time, those upstream-downstream relationships barely existed. And at such a cost! As projects moved from one documentation-heavy phase to the next, the emphasis was on demonstrating that the latest work conformed to expectations set in preceding stages, not on establishing whether those expectations were based on accurate assumptions. When those assumptions were about the behaviours of users and people-based systems, they would often prove unsafe, but by the time they were invalidated it was already too late.

Figure 2. A linear project model

The remedy: upstream and downstream activities no longer in separate phases but tightly integrated in an iterative or continuous process. With people from different disciplines working closely together, feedback could come in days or less, not the weeks, months, or longer that it took previously. In support of those collaborations, documentation would become much more granular, produced no earlier or later than needed (i.e. just in time), taking perhaps the minimalistic form of user stories [2] or job stories [3], describing not whole projects but very thin slices of functionality – specific usages of individual features. Given an appropriate sequencing of these small but still individually useful deliverables, an incomplete but still meaningfully useful product could emerge quickly. With more time, and perhaps over an indefinite period (funded not as a project but as a product line), it could evolve into something fitting.

The genuine documentation needs of developers, customers, and end-users never completely went away, and there remains the responsibility of the Delivery-Discovery-Renewal space towards its future self. Pity the poor person who, a year from now, has to understand the design decision you made today or debug the code that you’re writing. Perhaps you owe it to them to leave at least some clues, not to mention that this poor person might turn out to be you! Working in the here and now, when the creation of those usually very small pieces of documentation is an integral part of the development process, a more maintainable system results. There remains a need, however, to keep that effort proportionate to its value, an issue outside the “here and now” and the province of the Adaptive Strategising space.

“Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”: The obvious rebalancing here is away from an adversarial relationship that makes change difficult and increasingly costly as it is delayed, and towards a partnership relationship in which risks and benefits are shared equitably and managed cooperatively. The benefits in terms of decision-making capacity alone are enormous, and I have first-hand experience of it working wonderfully in surprising settings.

Before the launch of the UK’s Government Digital Service in 2011, who would have thought that working on a government project as part of a mixed team of staff and consultants could be a truly special experience? As the interim delivery manager on two of GDS’s ‘exemplar’ projects, I experienced exactly that. There were two customer relationships there: the supplier/government relationship and the government/citizen relationship. By far the more important relationship there was the second, and the abiding principle was “Start with needs: user needs not government needs”. That was more than a slogan. We lived by it, and projects that couldn’t demonstrate it would find themselves in trouble.

Of course, beyond the neglect of user needs there are other ways in which the customer relationship can become dysfunctional. The rapid growth of the attention economy, the asymmetries involved in the handling of personal data, and the rise of AI have combined to create a new issue: the technology/user relationship becoming exploitative to the extent of causing real harm. Unlike the Agile revolution, I don’t see the technology industry solving this issue itself; it has become a matter for governments.

One cause of these problems is that the customer and the user are often not the same person. A sponsor paying for a system they will never use isn’t as troubling as an advertiser paying for access to data the user regards as private, but their product teams ignore the user at their peril. Users have untapped expertise, and how they interact with the product has a lot to teach the product team. Even the bad guys know that they need to make their products usable! Again: software cannot be said to be “working” if it fails to meet user needs, and if that needs to be expressed contractually, so be it. Better still, get users as close to the team as you can manage, even part of the team where that’s possible.

“Responding to change over following a plan”: This is the last of the Agile manifesto’s four “this over that” declarations. For the most part this one belongs with the Adaptive Strategising space, but – spoiler alert – the relationship between that space and Delivery-Discovery-Renewal works through what the two spaces share, the scope’s ability to organise (labelled 3 in Figure 1 above). In the “here and now” of this chapter, the relevant capacity-sapping dysfunction is over-commitment.

Overcommitment is closely related to overburdening and one may contribute to the other, but they should not be confused. Overburdening, a coordination dysfunction (system 2 in Figure 1), leaves a team, activity, process, or other organisational scope in an unhealthy and poorly performing condition because it is trying to work on too many things at once. This multi-tasking incurs costs in context switching, quality issues, delays, and frustration. Compounding all of that, additional work in the form of rework. Overcommitment, a dysfunction in organising (system 3 in Figure 1), means that new commitments can’t be made without breaking commitments previously made. Whether that’s the result of taking on too much work, working to a planning horizon that’s too long, working in chunks too large, or working to plans that leave insufficient room for manoeuvre, that’s a different but similarly serious problem. The scope’s capacity for independent action – John Boyd’s definition of viability – is compromised.

Taking those last three “this over that” declarations together, an Agile process matches its commitments to the short length of time it takes to generate useful information. Progress is made hypothesis by hypothesis, goal by goal. Out of an Agile process, products aren’t built fully formed to a design fixed in advance; they emerge.

When I use ‘Agile’ capitalised like that, I’m describing things that can be traced back to the Agile manifesto. In that sense, the forthcoming book is an Agile book per se; its roots are elsewhere. You can see in the above discussion, however, both what’s at stake and what’s possible. This is not to say that all is rosy in the Agile world: my previous books all address the issue of the Agile industry imposing process and practice on people, to the extent that “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” can seem cruelly ironic at times. Nevertheless, I make the bold suggestion that Agile has been more successful – unreasonably successful – than perhaps its own community realises.

Consider the effect of this Great Rebalancing (or if you prefer, a great shift in organisational constraints) not only on the decision-making and communication capacities of the teams involved but also on those around it. Capacity that previously was consumed by the need to manage teams from the outside has been relieved of much of that burden. Capacity thus freed can be applied to more interesting things. That improves the experience of leadership, increases the quality of leadership, and greatly increases the chances that self-organised innovation will occur not only within teams but at larger scales too. That is what the book will be about: identifying and dealing with dysfunctions at every scale, enabling other great rebalancings, and unleashing thereby other kinds of “unreasonable effectiveness”.

Ping me if interested in tracking progress on the book; some have early access to the manuscript already, and with a view to getting multiple perspectives on it I will be setting up multiple review circles in the coming weeks covering tech, healthcare, education (i.e. universities), faith communities and other voluntary or not-for-profit organisations, and the systems and complexity communities.

See also Leading in a Transforming Organisation in Berlin, London, and Southampton in the list below of upcoming events. Highly relevant! Days 2 and 3 have much the same structure as the book. Likewise, under the heading of Leading with Outcomes, the self-paced Adaptive Organisation parts I & II further down the page below.

[1] More properly the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (2001), agilemanifesto.org

[2] See my favourite Agile book: Jeff Patton and Peter Economy, User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product (2014, O’Reilly Media)

[3] Another book that I recommend frequently: If interested in job stories and the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework, start here: Bob Moesta & Greg Engle, Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress (2020, Lioncrest Publishing)

Upcoming events

Recent changes:

Leading in a Transforming Organisation (London) is brought forward a week to 25-27 JuneAdded Leading in Transforming Organisation (Southampton), October 8-10Webinars and experience/practise sessions taking a break now until the autumn

May

14 May to 22 February, online, Tuesday & Wednesday afternoons (UK time):
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) *

June

4-6 June, Berlin, Germany
Leading in a Transforming Organisation (Berlin) *25-27 June, London, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation *

October

8-10 October, Southampton, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation *

*For TTT/F and Leading in a Transforming Organisation, ping me for coupon codes if any of the following apply:

Employees in public sector, education, and non-profit organisations get 40% off, as do authorised trainers and facilitatorsThere are subscription-specific discounts for Agendashift Academy subscribersMembers of the old partner programme get 30% offPast participants of Leading in a Transforming Organisation can re-attend with 60% off (75% if you work for a public sector, education, or non-profit organisation)Past TTT/F participants can re-attend online for free

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 Part I: Business agility at every scale Part 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).

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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.