Agendashift roundup, July 2024

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

Engage, Invite, Celebrate!

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

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

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

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

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

Summer reading and writing

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

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

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

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

Your organisation in 5 networks (October 2022)

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

Autumn programme

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

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

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

The Great Consolidation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Agendashift: Serving the transforming organisation
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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.