Mike Burrows's Blog, page 9

Agendashift roundup of the year 2023

Whether you have followed Agendashift and Leading with Outcomes over the years or have only just found us, thank you for your interest and support. As we approach the Christmas and New Year break, let me wish you a time of peace and renewal.

In this end-of-year edition: December looking forward; Top 10 posts of the year; Upcoming events (most of them free)

December looking forward

The usual monthly list of the top 5 most-read posts would overlap quite a bit with the year’s top 10, so instead I’ll point out just one recent post:

Confirming some changes to Leading with Outcomes (December)

As for the rest of the month, I have my fourth book to finish, and only then (though my head feels fit to burst) my fifth to start. Two very different books, their provisional titles:

Organizing Conversations: From inquiry to generative conversations – for the BMI series in dialogic organisation development, hence the American spellingWholehearted: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

It would be quite something to get both books published in 2024, ten years since my first. Wish me luck! In relation to that second one, I have in the past couple of days updated the Everywhere all at once white paper to include a brief section on the recent What Lies Beneath stuff. You can request your copy here.

Of course 2024 won’t only be spent writing. Two modules of Leading with Outcomes still live on the old learning management system. Once their videos are re-recorded, I can consolidate everything onto the new platform. I’m looking forward also to doing more in-person training and workshops. I intend to put on the 3-day Leading in a Transforming Organisation publicly at least twice in the UK, hope to do it at least once in mainland Europe, and further afield as opportunities arise. Opportunities to do the private 1-day Adaptive Organisation workshop are materialising too; introductory pricing remains available for bookings taken in the next few weeks.

Confirming some changes to Leading with Outcomes

Last week’s Leading with Outcomes trainer/facilitator Zoom [1] confirmed some changes. The first two relate to two of our favourite exercises:

The exercise Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle has been renamed Obstacles Fast and Slow (yes, both names are indeed references to books). As time passes, the more we have learned to appreciate this exercise, and the latest slideware reflects its importance.The workshop and training decks now explicitly support 15-minute FOTO’s cheat mode .

In both cases, watch out for releases in the coming weeks of standalone versions of these tools. In relation to Obstacles Fast and Slow, the March edition of our monthly webinar series will be devoted to it, with the goal of replacing the old Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle video and related material.

The rest of this post relates to the agenda of February’s Leading with Outcomes Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F), which comes in four half-day sessions – Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons UK time, beginning on Tuesday, February 6th, finishing Wednesday 14th.

The old TTT/F agenda:

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation, chapters 1 & 2 (of 3) – introducing and applying the IdOO (“I do”) pattern, Ideal, Obstacles, OutcomesThe Leading with Outcomes Discovery Workshop – a high-level application of the IdOO pattern, covering the classic exercises Celebration-5W, True North, Obstacles Fast and Slow, 15-minute FOTO, and Plan on a PageThe Leading with Outcomes Assessment Debrief Workshop – the assessment, survey debrief, and Areas of Opportunity, then for a second time Obstacles Fast and Slow and 15-minute FOTO (both of those well worth the repeat), and finishing at Option Relationship Mapping, leaving the ideation part to session 4Beyond inside-out strategy – Leading with Outcomes: Foundation chapter 3, which covers the ideation part of the Assessment Debrief workshop left over from the previous session, followed by overviews of the Outside-in and Adaptive Organisation parts of the Leading with Outcomes curriculum and their related workshop offerings

That structure has worked well enough, but session 4 can feel a bit of mixed bag. The new agenda brings forward some of that content, achieved by seeing sessions 2 and 3 less exclusively in terms of inside-out strategy and more as representing two families of workshops:

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation, chapters 1 & 2 (of 3) – as beforeDiscovery-level workshops – not only the classic Leading with Outcomes Discovery Workshop and variations thereof, but the Outside-in Strategy Review (OI-SR), understood here as building on Discovery’s basic structureAssessment-based workshops – the generic survey debrief and other workshops, some of which incorporate additional training content, for example a Reverse STATIK workshop [2] and the Adaptive Organisation Workshop [3]Moving into action – completing (as before) Leading with Outcomes: Foundation chapter 3, then delving deeper into Adaptive Organisation, possibly including (this is under development) a look at narrative enquiry

Discovery workshops can now be seen as choosing from the following:

Assessment-based workshops similarly:

Details vary, but the IdOO and Meaning, Measure, Method patterns are shared, the former pattern bracketed by establishing context and organising the strategy. The new TTT/F structure should build the confidence not only to make use of these workshop designs, but to innovate new ones.

Not that TTT/F is only about workshops – doing this under the Leading with Outcomes banner means a strong emphasis on leadership development, for which the Foundation training module sets the tone very effectively. Furthermore, I’ll be re-recording the Inside-out and Outside-in training modules in the new year, and to the extent possible within the time available, sessions 2 & 3 will use those latest materials.

You can book your place at the February TTT/F here. Ping me for coupon codes if any of the following apply:

Past TTT/F participants can join again for free (quite a popular option)Leading in a Transforming participants get 60% offEmployees in public sector, education, and non-profit organisations get 40% offMembers of the old partner programme get 30% offLast but not least, Agendashift Academy subscribers get subscription-specific discounts also

For an overview of Leading with Outcomes in general and the Trainer / Facilitator programmes specifically, the store page is a good place to start.

Notes

[1] I haven’t published the recording and notes but they’re available on request. Intended audience: trainers, facilitators, members of the old partner programme, participants in a past TTT/F or Leading in a Transforming Organisation, or anyone curious about any of these

[2] The Reverse STATIK workshop is how I like to introduce Kanban. It is not officially part of Leading with Outcomes but that might change. The point here is that much of it can be recreated from parts already available to Leading with Outcomes trainers and facilitators.

[3] About the new 1-day Adaptive Organisation workshop, introductory pricing remains available if you’d like to book one for your organisation. In-person very strongly preferred, which means UK and European destinations easily reachable from Manchester unless a longer trip can be made worthwhile. That’s less of an issue for the 3-day Leading in a Transforming Organisation – I have done that as far away as Australia, albeit with a conference keynote and a family visit also!

Upcoming events

January:

11 January, online, 15:00 GMT, 16:00 CET, 10am ET:
Free webinar/AMA: How do we keep bringing outcomes in the foreground? 25 January, online, 15:00 GMT, 16:00 CET, 10am ET:
Experience/practice session: Adaptive Organisation assessment

February:

6-14 February, online, Tuesday & Wednesday afternoons (UK time):
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) 15 February, online, 15:00 GMT, 16:00 CET, 10am ET:
Free webinar/AMA: Where to start? Where next? 22 February, online, 15:00 GMT, 16:00 CET, 10am ET:
Experience/practice session: Agendashift Delivery Assessment (mini edition)

March:

07 March, online, 15:00 GMT, 16:00 CET, 10am ET:
Free webinar/AMA: Obstacles Fast and Slow

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 four modules in the recommended order:

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation Adaptive Organisation, two parts: Part I: Business agility at every scale Part II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 per month, business subscriptions from £269 per month, with discounts available on both kinds of plan for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. Our next TTT/F trainings take place in February (online).

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

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on December 16, 2023 06:27

About tomorrow’s free webinar/AMA session

Our monthly webinar/AMA series “The questions that drive us” returns tomorrow to question #1:

What if we put agreement on outcomes before solutions?

Essentially, this is principle #1 framed as a question. Framing it that way makes it even less prescriptive than it would be otherwise and more likely to spark innovation. Moreover, asking it can be an act of leadership. Given the premature rush to solutions typical in most organisations and assuming at least some level of safety, that act of leadership will be available frequently to many.

I got back from India only yesterday afternoon, and while it is fresh in my mind, I thought it would be good to debrief Friday’s conference workshop and certain aspects of Sunday & Monday’s Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F). My plan is to visualise* the designs of multiple workshops to make more visible some of their inbuilt configuration options, and to highlight recent and planned improvements to the materials. In the spotlight will be some old favourites:

Celebration-5W , our trusty context-capturing workshop kickoff exercise Agendashift True North and some alternatives Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle 15-minute FOTO , our Clean Language-inspired coaching game Plan on a Page …and more

See Upcoming events below for the registration links for tomorrow’s event and others, most of them free. Tomorrow’s begins at 15:00 GMT, 16:00 CET, 10am ET, and will finish as usual with an AMA (Ask Mike Anything) session. Notice also that we have the next of our free experience/practice sessions a week later.

*That visualisation is still under construction, but the Picturing Foundation picture is working very well, so I leave you with that for now

Upcoming events

December:

07 December, online, 15:00 GMT, 16:00 CST, 10am ET:
Free webinar/AMA: What if we put agreement on outcomes before solutions? 14 December, online, 15:00 GMT, 16:00 CET, 10am ET:
Free experience/practice session: The Outside-in strategy readiness assessment

January:

11 January, online, 15:00 GMT, 16:00 CET, 10am ET:
Free webinar/AMA: How do we keep bringing outcomes in the foreground? 25 January, online, 15:00 GMT, 16:00 CET, 10am ET:
Experience/practice session: Adaptive Organisation assessment

February:

6-14 February, online, Tuesday & Wednesday afternoons (UK time):
Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

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 four modules in the recommended order:

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation Adaptive Organisation, two parts: Part I: Business agility at every scale Part II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 per month, business subscriptions from £269 per month, with discounts available on both kinds of plan for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. Our next TTT/F trainings take place in December (Bengaluru, India) and February (online).

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

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on December 06, 2023 04:58

Agendashift roundup, November 2023

In this edition: Adaptive Organisation; 15-minute FOTO; New podcast interview; More free sessions; Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F); Top posts

Adaptive Organisation

There is plenty to report here! Let’s begin with its online, self-paced version. Now that I’ve finished hand-editing the captions on all of its videos, Adaptive Organisation (II) is out of beta. That’s both parts now:

Adaptive Organisation (I): Business agility at every scale Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes, and scales

Both parts lean on Leading with Outcomes: Foundation, and we recommend that you take that first.

Also online, the latest version of my keynote:

Between spaces, scopes, and scales: What the scaling frameworks don’t tell you

With regard to the in-person experience, the Leading in a Transforming Organisation training (Foundation and Adaptive Organisation combined) goes from strength to strength. Thought’s on this month’s training in Manchester:

Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Takeaways from Manchester

Also some tweaks to this post from October:

What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints)

Each of these events generates a further flurry of activity. Trainers now have access to post-Manchester decks and handouts for Adaptive Organisation parts I & II. For Facilitators, an update to the Adaptive Organisation workshop will follow as soon as I have synced the handout with the deck – not a huge task but I begin my travels to India shortly.

I’m looking to do at least two more of these in the UK next year, and maybe a couple of in mainland Europe also. If you have thoughts on bringing it to your city, get in touch! Similarly for the 1-day workshop (only privately for the time being, introductory pricing between now and the end of January).

Adaptive Organisation, the two-part module: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

15-minute FOTO

A couple of updates to our Clean Language-based coaching game 15-minute FOTO:

Gaël Mareau has kindly contributed a French language cue card – merci beaucoup Gaël!During my trip to India I’ll be testing a number of usability improvements (none of them major, but they add up), so expect a new release in the next couple of weeksNew podcast interview

While in Australia last month I was interviewed for Kanban Lab by Orod Semsarzadeh and Soma Mazumder. You can listen to Exploring Kanban from Right to Left: A Thoughtful Conversation with Mike Burrows here:

Apple Podcast Spotify Castbox YouTube

More interviews, talks, etc on our media page.

More free sessions23 November, online, 15:00GMT, 16:00CET, 10am ET:
Free experience/practice session: The Agendashift Delivery assessment 07 December, online, 15:00 GMT, 16:00 CST, 10am ET:
Free webinar/AMA: What if we put agreement on outcomes before solutions? 14 December, online, 15:00 GMT, 16:00 CET, 10am ET:
Free experience/practice session: The Outside-in strategy readiness assessment 11 January, online, 15:00 GMT, 16:00 CET, 10am ET:
Free webinar/AMA: How do we keep bringing outcomes in the foreground? 25 January, online, 15:00 GMT, 16:00 CET, 10am ET:
Experience/practice session: Adaptive Organisation assessment Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

Unusually, the next TTT/F is in person, and it begins this coming Sunday:

3-4 December, Bengaluru, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

Thank you Prachi, Noopur, and the Kanban India 2023 team – the conference begins on Friday.

The February TTT/F is now confirmed:

6-14 February, online, Tuesday & Wednesday afternoons (UK time):
Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) Top posts 15-minute FOTO’s cheat mode (October) What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints) (October, recently updated) Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Takeaways from Manchester (November) A small update to the Constraints Club exercise (November) 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 four modules in the recommended order:

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation Adaptive Organisation, two parts: Part I: Business agility at every scale Part II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 per month, business subscriptions from £269 per month, with discounts available on both kinds of plan for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. Our next TTT/F trainings take place in December (Bengaluru, India) and February (online).

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

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on November 30, 2023 02:13

Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Takeaways from Manchester

What was it? How did it go? What next? Where next?

What was it?

A three-day, in-person training, Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, which brings together roughly half of the Leading with Outcomes curriculum:

Day 1: Leading with Outcomes: Foundation – exploring what it means to lead in a transforming organisation, learning how to develop and pursue strategy in the language of outcomes and with high participationDay 2: Adaptive Organisation (I): Business agility at every scale – developing bottom-up a truly “every scale” model, the Deliberately Adaptive OrganisationDay 3: Adaptive Organisation (I): Between spaces, scopes, scales – attending to “between scales” issues barely dealt with in the frameworks or the literature

The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation is my 21st century take on a 20th century model, Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model. Fittingly, a fractal model of organisation meets a fractal model of engagement, the former approached in a relational and constraints-based way, the latter replacing the engineering approach more typically employed. These two aspects combine to make something accessible, complexity-friendly, and practical.

For an added bonus, Leading in a Transforming Organisation has by design enough experiential content that with some additional online learning it can serve also as an alternative to Leading with Outcomes Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F). At least a couple of participants attended with that purpose in mind.

How did it go?

A small sample of the overwhelmingly positive feedback:

Relevant to anyone with leadership responsibilitiesA helpful journey through the neglected responsibilities of leadership – with helpful tools to attend to those responsibilitiesA full learning experience – relevant, effective, great to share with othersBuilding on a journey throughout, in a practical, visual wayCan clearly see how this would apply to our organisationThis is the Leading with Outcomes masterclass

There were things I would change – in fact on day 3 we tested an impromptu change to how we finished each “chapter”, a change that I have since made to the materials for day 2 also. Quicker, more impactful, and more clearly setting off the two “interludes”, those being the opportunities to practice classic Agendashift exercises such as Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle, 15-minute FOTO, and various ways to (per the second slide above) “Organise the strategy”.

I was pleased that after some post-London rework, certain themes came out much more strongly:

The value in a bottom-up understanding of organising – not that it doesn’t also work top down, but a bottom-up understanding is essential if you want to go with the grain of emergence and self-organisation or to promote those at non-trivial scalesThe question of How might we increase our decision-making capacity? came up repeatedly. Important again for reasons (i) of self-organisation (ref McCulloch), (ii) because the time will come when you don’t have enough of it, and (iii) because it reframes in an interesting and positive way concepts such as reducing waste (Lean) and minimising cognitive load (Team Topologies)The importance of context – not only in the senses (i) that it is folly to impose solutions from foreign contexts unquestioningly, or (ii) that context affects relationships, but (iii) in the sense that our delivery work and our strategic decision making will both suffer for lack of it – almost inevitably if we rest more than we should on formal structure, agreed process, and established communication paths

As anticipated in previous posts, Agile coaches were very much in the minority. Our hosts were the University of Manchester (a big thank you to Andrea Place for organising), several of the participants were members of staff with leadership and/or leadership development responsibility, and on day 1 we were joined by a senior leader from another university. It was fascinating to see the models, tools, and exercises applied not to a technology organisation but to a highly respected institution that celebrates its bicentenary next year. I find it very hard to believe that a process-based approach – process meant here in the Agile or Lean sense, not the OD sense – would have been anything like as successful.

What next? Where next?

With the event still fresh in my mind I updated the materials over the weekend. There are corresponding changes to be made to the shorter Adaptive Organisation Workshop, and they include changes to the What Lies Beneath string of exercises, whose blog post I have updated for reference already.

I won’t be re-recording the two-part online Adaptive Organisation module just yet (see Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy below for links). The existing version is still quite new, none of my most recent improvements invalidate in any way what’s there, and it’s more urgent that I re-record the much older Inside-out and Outside-in modules. Not only will it be good to realign those with the newer material, it will let me retire the old learning management system and thereby improve the Academy’s onboarding experience.

I’m hoping to run the three-day in-person event at least twice publicly in the UK next year. Very likely in London, and having taken it north to Manchester, I’m also looking at doing it somewhere between Bournemouth and Brighton on the south coast. Mainland Europe would be good too – Germany and/or Scandinavia seeming the most likely destinations. If you are interested in any of these options or any other (public or private), and especially if you can help get a group together (it doesn’t have to be large), let me know.

I intend to do the abovementioned 1-day Adaptive Organisation workshop in person a few times before I offer it online, in both cases only privately. Accordingly, introductory pricing (with further discounts for public sector, non-profit, etc) remains available until the end of January, possibly for delivery at a later date if you get your order in soon enough. Unless a longer trip can be made worthwhile, I’m looking to do it in the UK or in European destinations easily reachable from Manchester or East Midlands airports. If you’re suitably located and your organisation could use an organisational strategy exercise soon, there’s an opportunity here not to be missed.

Upcoming events

November:

23 November, online, 15:00GMT, 16:00CET, 10am ET:
Experience/practice session: The Agendashift Delivery assessment

December:

1-2 December, Bengaluru, India:
Kanban India 2023 3-4 December, Bengaluru, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) 07 December, online, 15:00 GMT, 16:00 CST, 10am ET:
Free webinar/AMA: What if we put agreement on outcomes before solutions? 14 December, online, 15:00 GMT, 16:00 CET, 10am ET:
Free experience/practice session: The Outside-in strategy readiness assessment

I have pencilled in the afternoons (UK time) of the February 6th, 7th, 13th, and 14th (Tuesdays and Wednesdays) for the next online TTT/F. Booking page to follow; you will find some relevant links meanwhile on the Store page.

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 four modules in the recommended order:

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation Adaptive Organisation, two parts: Part I: Business agility at every scale Part II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 per month, business subscriptions from £269 per month, with discounts available on both kinds of plan for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. Our next TTT/F trainings take place in December (Bengaluru, India) and February (online).

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

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on November 20, 2023 05:46

A small update to the Constraints Club exercise

With a week to go to the Manchester training, let me mention a recent (post-Melbourne) update to the Constraints Club exercise. As you may recall, this forms part of the string of exercises described in some detail in the blog post What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints), which I have updated too.

For full context, read that post. Here though is the relevant slide, to which I have added the question “Out of what does that emerge?”:

About the Manchester training (see Upcoming events below), this is probably my last opportunity to mention the following:

1-day, 2-day and 3-day tickets available. Use BLOG20 for 20% off, and ping me if another discount might apply. There will be NHS and university staff attending – they and other public/educational/non-profit employees get at least 40% off.It is not its primary purpose, but I should mention that as described on the event page and below, it offers a path to Authorised Leading with Outcomes Facilitator and Trainer also.Upcoming events

November:

09 November, online meetup, 11:30GMT, 12:30CST, 06.30am ET:
Between spaces, scopes, and scales: What the scaling frameworks don’t tell you 09 November, online, 15:00GMT, 16:00CST, 10am ET:
Free webinar/AMA: Where to start? Where next? 14-16 November, Manchester, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation 23 November, online, 15:00GMT, 16:00CET, 10am ET:
Experience/practice session: The Agendashift Delivery assessment

December:

1-2 December, Bengaluru, India:
Kanban India 2023 3-4 December, Bengaluru, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

I have pencilled in the afternoons (UK time) of the February 6th, 7th, 13th, and 14th (Tuesdays and Wednesdays) for the next online TTT/F. Booking page to follow; you will find some relevant links meanwhile on the Store page.

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 four modules in the recommended order:

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation Adaptive Organisation, two parts: Part I: Business agility at every scale Part II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 per month, business subscriptions from £269 per month, with discounts available on both kinds of plan for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. Our next TTT/F trainings take place in December (Bengaluru, India) and February (online).

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

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on November 07, 2023 02:16

Agendashift roundup, October 2023

In this edition: From Melbourne to Manchester; Adaptive Organisation workshops; Adaptive Organisation online; More free sessions; Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and alternatives; Top posts

From Melbourne to Manchester

It was a privilege to open the inaugural Kanban Australia – congratulations to Daniel Ploeg and the team there for putting on such a great event! The Leading in a Transforming Organisation training/workshop held the preceding week wasn’t as well attended as we might have liked, but it was highly productive nevertheless. Two blog posts describe some of what came out of it:

15-minute FOTO’s cheat mode What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints)

My eldest son moved to Sydney last year, so if anyone wants me back in Australia, count me in Between training and conference we enjoyed the weekend together in Melbourne, and I joined him in Sydney afterwards.

Back in the UK, my youngest son lives in Manchester, and by pure coincidence that happens to be the location of the next Leading in a Transforming Organisation, which begins in two weeks on November 14th. Our hosts are the University of Manchester (thank you Andrea), and we have already the most diverse group of attendees signed up I have yet managed to assemble. There is still time to grab a place:

14-16 November, Manchester, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

1-day, 2-day and 3-day tickets available. Use BLOG20 for 20% off, and ping me if another discount might apply. There will be NHS and university staff attending – they and other public/educational/non-profit employees get 40% off.

It is not its primary purpose, but I should mention that as described on the event page and below, it offers a path to Authorised Leading with Outcomes Facilitator and Trainer also.

Adaptive Organisation workshops

This new 1-day workshop takes the two-part Adaptive Organisation training module (two days of training when done in person, three days when taken with Foundation) and dials down the training dimension to make it all about the conversations your organisation needs to have with itself. Read more in the recent announcement:

Announcing a new Adaptive Organisation workshop (and more)

For myself, I am offering this workshop only privately, initially with introductory pricing. The materials are available already to authorised Facilitators and Trainers, and if the latter want to experiment with offering it publicly, I won’t stand in their way.

Adaptive Organisation online

Quick updates on the online version of the two-part Adaptive Organisation module:

Adaptive Organisation (I): Business agility at every scale (version 2.0 beta) – all videos available, captions almost done (most are there, the last few expected today or tomorrow), workbook available in MS-Word format, Google Docs to follow Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes, and scales (version 2.1 beta) – all videos available, workbook available soon, captions not started

There is still some work to be done, but were you to start Foundation now, there’s a good chance that the beta tags will gone by the time you get to the above. Don’t wait for part 1 to get re-recorded as version 2.1 or later – that won’t happen until after the Inside-out and Outside-in strategy modules are re-recorded and I can retire the old learning management system, early 2024.

While we’re here, my Adaptive Organisation-related keynote gets an online airing on the 9th, courtesy Blackmetric’s BA community (thank you Adrian Reed):

09 November, online meetup, 11:30 GMT, 12:30 CST, 06.30am ET:
Between spaces, scopes, and scales: What the scaling frameworks don’t tell you

A busy day, as you’ll see in a moment!

More free sessions

The first free experience/practice session took place last week. A lot to fit in the hour but we did it, just! The next of those and the existing webinar/AMA sessions, one of each per month:

09 November, online, 15:00GMT, 16:00CST, 10am ET:
Free webinar/AMA: Where to start? Where next? 23 November, online, 15:00GMT, 16:00CET, 10am ET:
Free experience/practice session: The Agendashift Delivery assessment 07 December, online, 15:00 GMT, 16:00 CST, 10am ET:
Free webinar/AMA: What if we put agreement on outcomes before solutions? 14 December, online, 15:00 GMT, 16:00 CET, 10am ET:
Free experience/practice session: The Outside-in strategy readiness assessment Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and alternatives

Unusually, the next TTT/F is in person:

1-2 December, Bengaluru, India:
Kanban India 2023

That is thanks to another conference (thank you Prachi, Noopur, and team):

3-4 December, Bengaluru, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

Really glad to be revisiting India – I’ve been several times, thoroughly enjoyed it every time, and after Australia, it will be only my second trip abroad since covid!

I have pencilled in the next online TTT/F for February:

6-14 February, online, Tuesday & Wednesday afternoons (UK time):
Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) – to be confirmed

I’ll announce that separately when the booking page is up.

Together with some extra online study and an onboarding call, your alternative to TTT/F is the in-person Leading in a Transforming Organisation. If you would like me to hold one of those somewhere near you in 2024, please get in touch. I’m thinking a couple in the UK (London and perhaps the south coast) and in mainland Europe too (Germany and/or Sweden perhaps). I’m open to travelling further (ie North America and Asia) if numbers or other opportunities make the longer trip worthwhile.

Top posts What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints) 15-minute FOTO’s cheat mode My favourite Clean Language question (January 2019) Announcing a new Adaptive Organisation workshop (and more) On values, meaningfulness, and change – parallels with Bateson and Mead (May 2022)

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 four modules in the recommended order:

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation Adaptive Organisation, two parts: Part I: Business agility at every scale Part II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 per month, business subscriptions from £269 per month, with discounts available on both kinds of plan for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. Our next TTT/F trainings take place in December (Bengaluru, India) and February (online).

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

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on October 31, 2023 04:04

Announcing a new Adaptive Organisation workshop (and more)

Announcing:

The immediate availability of the Leading with Outcomes Adaptive Organisation workshop

And closely related to that:

Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes and scales, v2.1 betaUpdates on Leading in a Transforming Organisation, ManchesterNew experience/practice sessions begin next week1. Announcing the immediate availability of the Leading with Outcomes Adaptive Organisation Workshop

This new 1-day workshop takes the two-part Adaptive Organisation training module (two days of training when done in person, three days when taken with Foundation) and dials down the training dimension to make it all about the conversations your organisation needs to have with itself.

It follows much the same structure as the training:

IntroductionDelivery-Discovery-Renewal – value-creating work and how it is coordinated and organisedAdaptive Strategising – keeping us in the game, strategising and self-governing Mutual Trust Building – addressing the formal organisation’s deficit in information and decision-making capacityBetween and Across Scales – examining the relationships between scales of organisationOrganising at Human Scale – promoting adaptation, innovation, and learning at all scalesWhat Lies Beneath – dealing with organisational constraints

Points 1-5 above each correspond to a section of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment, and we’ll be working with that, making this a thorough health-check for your organisation. Per this recent blog post, the final part of the workshop takes it all forward into action, via some very interesting new tools for identifying and visualising organisational constraints.

The material has already been made available to authorised Leading with Outcomes facilitators and trainers. For myself, I am pleased to offer it in the form of a private, 1-day, in-person workshop. I charge a fixed rate for anywhere in mainland UK, and I make things as easy as I can for European destinations easily reachable from Manchester or East Midlands airport also. Outside those parameters – further afield, online, or spread over multiple days – let’s see what we can work out.

2. Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes and scales, v2.1 beta

I have already mentioned the two-part Adaptive Organisation training module on which the new workshop is based. This second announcement relates to its presentation in the form of online, video-based, self-paced training at the Agendashift Academy. Following on from Adaptive Organisation (I): Business agility at every scale (v2.0 beta), I have released the first chapter of Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes and scales (v2.1 beta). Still to come: two more chapters and an “interlude” (one of two windows into the in-person Leading in a Transforming Organisation). The beta tag will disappear when I’ve released all the videos and done their captions (still in progress for part I) and student workbook. Part I will at some point be re-recorded at version 2.1 or later but there is no great rush to do so – the two parts remain compatible.

Part I develops the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a model to describe any organisational scope at any scale (or many/all such scopes all at once!). Part II pays attention to issues of scale:

Relationships between scopes at different scales – between team and team-of-teams for exampleThe difficulty with which organisations adapt as scale increasesIdentifying and managing organisational constraints

3. Updates on Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Manchester, 14-16 November

This will be my most diverse group yet at a public training. Thanks to staff from the NHS and two universities (three if you count former staff), it’s quite possible that consultants, coaches, and trainers won’t be in the majority. An experience to savour I think!

New this time: with some additional study, this event allows prospective trainers (not only facilitators) to bypass Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F); further information about that on the event page.

The material (shared with Adaptive Organisation parts I & II) can be considered well-tested now, even a joy to teach! Between London, Melbourne, and my preparations for Manchester, each of the two parts fits comfortably in a day, and they take things more consistently in an emergence and complexity-friendly way, which is to say bottom-up. Not that it was ever top-down, but making it more consistent has definitely added to its impact.

While still in Melbourne I wrote up two changes:

15-minute FOTO’s cheat mode What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints)

And the Manchester event itself:

14-16 November, Manchester, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (20% discount with coupon code BLOG20 has been applied to this link – ping me if you believe other discounts may apply)4. New experience/practice sessions begin next week

Next week, the first of what will become a monthly fixture:

26 October, online, 15:00BST, 16:00CEST, 10am EDT:
Experience/practice session: Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment

A different assessment tool each month, and we’re starting with the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment (mini edition), a version of the one used in all the Adaptive Organisation workshop and training products mentioned in this post. A great way to get a firsthand impression of what it’s all about!

Upcoming events

With me (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise indicated:

October:

26 October, online, 15:00BST, 16:00CEST, 10am EDT:
Experience/practice session: Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment

November:

09 November, online, 15:00GMT, 16:00CST, 10am ET:
Free webinar/AMA: Where to start? Where next? 09 November, online meetup, 11:30GMT, 12:30CST, 06.30am ET:
Between spaces, scopes, and scales: What the scaling frameworks don’t tell you 14-16 November, Manchester, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation 23 November, online, 15:00GMT, 16:00CET, 10am ET:
Experience/practice session: The Agendashift Delivery assessment

December:

1-2 December, Bengaluru, India:
Kanban India 2023 3-4 December, Bengaluru, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

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 four modules in the recommended order:

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation Adaptive Organisation , two parts:Part I: Business agility at every scalePart II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 per month, business subscriptions from £269 per month, with discounts available on both kinds of plan for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. Our next TTT/F trainings take place in September (online) and December (Bengaluru, India).

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

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

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Published on October 19, 2023 23:36

What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints)

This is a writeup of What Lies Beneath, a new string of exercises that now forms the final session of the Leading with Outcomes module Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes, and scales, and by extension, the 3-day in-person training Leading in a Transforming Organisation. I tested it in that latter form in Melbourne, Australia last week and will be bringing it back to the UK soon (Manchester, November 14-16).

In right to left style, I will describe it backwards:

Premise, goals, next stepsVisualisation: Estuarine FrameworkInquiry: Constraints ClubEstablishing context: Assessment

I will summarise the process from start to finish at the end of this post.

Premise, goals, next steps

In a complex adaptive system (CAS), lasting change is achieved in two ways:

By shocking the system into finding a new configuration from which regression is unlikelyBy changing the constraints under which the system operates

The first has some obvious drawbacks. How can you be sure how the system will respond? Not to rule out that option entirely but coherently with goals of adaptability (more on that later), we’ll be taking the second route. Broadly, we identify constraints that are open to change and prioritise some of those for further work, doing that in such a way that participants are well motivated to find and then act on potential solutions. That “moving into action” aspect – ideation, hypotheses, experiments, and feedback – is a mature part of Agendashift / Leading with Outcomes, and it won’t be developed further here.

Visualisation: Estuarine Framework

Feeding that “moving into action” aspect is this visual organisation of constraints – constraints having been identified in a generative process to be described shortly:

This is Dave Snowden’s Estuarine Framework, which comprises an Energy/Time “affordance grid” overlaid with boundaries between four groups of constraints:

Those we accept as givenThose we can’t manage on our own but might engage on with othersThose we can manageThose volatile or flimsy enough that we need do little more than monitor them

The significance of the colours will be explained later, in the Inquiry section.

The Estuarine Framework is the visualisation part of Dave Snowden’s Estuarine Mapping [1]. I have been guilty of confusing the two names, but to disambiguate them: Mapping here is the overall process, and Dave uses Framework consistently with something familiar to most readers of this blog, his Cynefin Framework.

Energy here refers to the amount of energy (or quantities convertible to energy) required to make a constraint no longer applicable; Time similarly. Our inquiry process (which differs from Dave’s) captures them in the form of “true and fair statements”; here we are organising them according to the energy and time required to make those statements no longer true.

Consistent with other mapping techniques in the Agendashift / Leading with Outcome repertoire we build the visualisation in stages. This is not necessarily how Dave does it, but it will feel familiar to many:

Order roughly by “difficulty” – the concepts of energy and time not yet introducedBeginning with extreme examples – most and least energy requirement – arrange vertically by energy requirement, using all the available spaceDecide where the 0 of the energy axis sits (some constraints may have enough pent-up energy that their net energy requirement is negative)Keeping vertical positions fixed, organise horizontally by time requirement, again beginning with extreme examples so as to use all the available spaceMake adjustments where an energy/time tradeoff may existRegarding constraints as affordances (ie things we can interact with in order to effect change), prioritise some for action, marking them visually in some way

In Melbourne, we built our visualisation horizontally on a tabletop, convenient in some ways but not at all conducive to photography. A photo of our work in Melbourne is available on request but it is so awful I do not include it here! That niggle aside, the feedback (linkedin.com) was enthusiastic, most notably:

“Energised by the E/T mapping exercise”

Inquiry: Constraints Club

The first rule of Constraints Club is not to mention constraints

Constraint can be a difficult word, often interpreted as something negative. But without the tendency of constraints to contain or connect, complex systems would not cohere. Although the preceding training / workshop material does deal explicitly with constraints, with that difficulty in mind we are experimenting here with identifying constraints without mentioning the term – a successful experiment, as it turns out.

In place of Estuarine Mapping’s constraint typology, a generative process:

Focus on where there is most agreement on the need for change How are things now? Answer with a short sentence, a true and fair observationNo blaming, theorising, or selling a solutionIf you struggle to write something that most people would easily agree with, scope it down – two or more independent sentences, as few as possible What makes it that way? What keeps it that way? Answer as above, keeping answers in a separate list (or different colour)Drilling down or expanding, rinse & repeat from 3, 2, or 1

For two aspects of that process, I’m grateful to Mushon Zer-Aviv, who is also doing some Estuarine-adjacent experimentation. The first is the idea of answering with short sentences that are (in my words) “true and fair observations”. The second is the drilling down aspect, which Mushon does with multiple mapping exercises. “No blaming, theorising, or selling a solution” references the Agendashift / Leading with Outcomes exercise Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle [2] that participants will by this time be familiar with; Mushon deals with those issues in his own way.

The idea (if not the wording) of scoping things down in cases of disagreement is Dave’s.

Mainly with visualisation in mind, answers to questions 2 and 3 are kept separate – in separate lists on paper or by using differently coloured stickies. This explains the two-tone colouring in the visualisation slide in the preceding section.

Establishing context: Assessment

The string of exercises we call What Lies Beneath begins with a twist or two on the long-established Agendashift Assessment Debrief. The first twist is that we’re debriefing the assessment as a whole not at the beginning of the event, but towards its end. We have however been interacting with it section by section for some time, developing all the while a model of organisation that is both relational and constraint-based, the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation [3]. This is an innovative “re-presentation” of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM), making it more accessible and (in the modern sense) complexity-friendly.

In contrast with typical systems practice, at no point do we seek to establish system boundaries. Instead, we take a “start where you are, everywhere all at once” approach, and this is reflected in the invitation to the assessment [4]. Participants each bring their perspectives on all the organisational scopes with which they individually identify, likely at multiple scales of organisation, ranging from sub-team to whole organisation and sometimes (as was the case last week) beyond.

The full Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment template has 35 prompts in the following 5 sections:

Delivery, Discovery, RenewalAdaptive StrategisingMutual Trust BuildingBetween Spaces, Scopes, and ScalesOrganising at Human Scale

A free, 12-prompt mini template is available at [5].

Each participant scores each prompt on a four-point scale, then “stars” (ie multi-votes) prompts they would prioritise for further development. Participants may also compose their own prompts, for which purpose a style guide is provided.

The typical survey debrief proceeds as follows:

Score distributions overallAreas of closest agreementStrongestWeakestMost starred (ie most votes)

The second twist is to return at the end of the debrief to step 2, Areas of closest agreement, reviewing prompts that have the strongest consensus on scores. In the first pass, we have used this page of the debrief report to build confidence in the results, spending little time on what seems uncontroversial. Second time through though, we are wondering whether something interesting might be going on. Given the range of scopes and scales considered, might this level of consensus be seen as remarkable? What might explain that? The Constraints Club exercise isn’t limited to areas of high consensus on scores (rather on the strength of desire for change), but the thought certainly carries across.

Summary: What Lies Beneath

To finish, a summary of the process, this time forwards:

Assessment DebriefUnconventionally, this finishes with revisiting areas of closest agreement, ie strongest consensus on scoresAfter the debrief, prioritise prompts that identify areas in which there is the strongest desire for changeConstraints ClubInitially to those prioritised prompts, in answer to the questions “How are things now?” and “What makes it that way? What keeps it that way?”, generate constraints in two lists (or colours)Drill down and/or expand until a suitable number have been generatedEstuarine FrameworkArrange by energy and timeDraw boundariesMoving Into ActionPrioritise constraintsIdeation, experimentation, feedback, etcAcknowledgements

I wish to express my thanks to the following:

Dave Snowden, for the Estuarine FrameworkMushon Zer-Aviv, as mentioned in the Constraints Club sectionParticipants at the Melbourne Leading in a Transforming Organisation, October 2023, where the What Lies Beneath string was first testedReferences

[1] Dave Snowden, Estuarine Framework (cynefin.io)
[2] Mike Burrows Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle (agendashift.com)
[3] Mike Burrows, Everywhere all at once: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (docs.gogle.com)
[4] Mike Burrows, An invitation to a more thoughtful assessment, September 2023, (blog.agendashift.com)
[5] Global survey: Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, mini edition (agendashift.com)

Related events

More events below; these are particularly relevant:

26 October, online, 15:00BST, 16:00CEST, 10am EDT:
Free experience/practice session: Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment 09 November, online meetup, 11:30GMT, 12:30CST, 06.30am ET:
Between spaces, scopes, and scales: What the scaling frameworks don’t tell you 14-16 November, Manchester, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (20% discount with coupon code BLOG20 has been applied to this link)Upcoming events

With me (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise indicated:

October:

17 October, online, 15:00BST, 16:00CEST, 10am EDT:
Free webinar/AMA: How do we keep outcomes in the foreground? 26 October, online, 15:00BST, 16:00CEST, 10am EDT:
Experience/practice session: Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment

November:

09 November, online, 15:00GMT, 16:00CST, 10am ET:
Free webinar/AMA: Where to start? Where next? 09 November, online meetup, 11:30GMT, 12:30CST, 06.30am ET:
Between spaces, scopes, and scales: What the scaling frameworks don’t tell you 14-16 November, Manchester, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation 23 November, online, 15:00GMT, 16:00CET, 10am ET:
Experience/practice session: The Agendashift Delivery assessment

December:

1-2 December, Bengaluru, India:
Kanban India 2023 3-4 December, Bengaluru, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

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 four modules in the recommended order:

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation Adaptive Organisation , two parts:Part I: Business agility at every scalePart II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 per month, business subscriptions from £269 per month, with discounts available on both kinds of plan for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. Our next TTT/F trainings take place in September (online) and December (Bengaluru, India).

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

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 08, 2023 22:33

15-minute FOTO’s cheat mode

15-minute FOTO, Agendashift’s Clean Language-inspired coaching game, has a cheat mode! It’s a question that’s not on the card*:

The secret question:

Why is that important?

If you’re starting with an obstacle that seems to beg the answer to “What would you like to have happen?”, try “Why is that important?” instead. Much more interesting! Yesterday in Melbourne, it worked so well that nearly every conversation in the game began that way. You can’t be sure that what gets generated will be an obstacle or an outcome – if the answer is long, probably some of both – so listen carefully and choose your next question accordingly.

That’s not its only use. If you feel that you’ve exhausted “Then what happens?”, try “Why is that important?”. Want to go back to something mentioned earlier in the conversation? Same question, prefixing it with “And when…” to reference the thing of interest.

If “Why is that important?” works so well, why is it not on the card? Well, it’s not a canonical Clean question; it’s only “cleanish”. In the wrong context, that question can be loaded with assumption. If I ask it of (say) an obstacle that someone has taken the trouble to prioritise, refine, and so on, it’s important, no problem. But if I ask it of something whose importance isn’t established, I’m making an assumption. If our goal is to explore the model existing or being built in someone else’s mind, let’s treat it (and by implication, that other person, the client) with due respect. To bring our own assumptions into the conversation would risk tainting that model, perhaps irrecoverably. So use with care!

I have no plans to add that question (or any other – Clean or cleanish) to the cue card. I’m in no hurry to add it to the facilitation deck either. It can be our little secret

While we’re here, a couple of special offers:

The event I’m doing this week in Melbourne comes to Manchester next month. Check out Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation , 20% off with coupon code BLOG20You may remember that I contributed the foreword to Allan Kelly’s Succeeding with OKRs in Agile; he’s offering 20% off his Writing OKRs masterclass, also next month

Both of those links have the discounts already applied for you. For the first one, larger discounts are available for for public sector, non-profits, etc; ping me if they apply.

*Note that the card has received some minor updates recently, most notably the four bullets upper left, straddling the Obstacles/Outcomes boundary – not a replacement for the facilitation deck but a useful reminder. Grab the latest from here if you’re an Academy subscriber, from the 15-minute FOTO dropbox if you have access to that, or request access here.

Related

15-minute FOTO, version 12 (May 2022) Announcing 15-minute FOTO version 11 (November 2021) My favourite Clean Language question (January 2019)Upcoming events

With me (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise indicated:

October:

09 October, Melbourne, Australia:
Kanban Australia 2023 17 October, online, 15:00BST, 16:00CEST, 10am EDT:
Free webinar/AMA: How do we keep outcomes in the foreground? 26 October, online, 15:00BST, 16:00CEST, 10am EDT:
Experience/practice session: Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment

November:

09 November, online, 15:00GMT, 16:00CST, 10am ET:
Free webinar/AMA: Where to start? Where next? 09 November, online meetup, 11:30GMT, 12:30CST, 06.30am ET:
Between spaces, scopes, and scales: What the scaling frameworks don’t tell you 14-16 November, Manchester, UK:
Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation 23 November, online, 15:00GMT, 16:00CET, 10am ET:
Experience/practice session: The Agendashift Delivery assessment

December:

1-2 December, Bengaluru, India:
Kanban India 2023 3-4 December, Bengaluru, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

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 four modules in the recommended order:

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation Adaptive Organisation , two parts:Part I: Business agility at every scalePart II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 per month, business subscriptions from £269 per month, with discounts available on both kinds of plan for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. Our next TTT/F trainings take place in September (online) and December (Bengaluru, India).

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

View more on Mike Burrows's website »

Like • 0 comments • flag

Published on October 05, 2023 13:07