…what should you expect from my second book?
TLDR: Agendashift wouldn’t have happened without Kanban from the Inside. It is however very much its own book. I think you will enjoy it 🙂
Not only is Agendashift not a book about Kanban – in fact it is very consciously method-neutral – it makes few assumptions about the reader’s knowledge of Kanban either. In terms of detailed content then, the overlap is minimal and both books stand alone. The resonances between the two are however very strong:
- The titles of the first six chapters of KFTI make an appearance in Agendashift chapter 2 (Exploration) as the headings of the Agendashift values-based delivery assessment. These are the values of Transparency, Balance, Collaboration, Customer focus, Flow, and Leadership. If you’re wondering what happened to Understanding, Agreement, and Respect (KFTI chapters 7, 8, and 9), they belong with Leadership (which shouldn’t be a big surprise).
- Reverse STATIK (which was developed while KFTI was nearing completion) reappears in chapter 3 (Mapping), not as an improvement process, but to provide a sense of narrative flow to the transformation map, something the values can’t easily provide.
- The same sense of respect for a broad range of models described in KFTI part II, in particular Agile, Lean, Lean-Agile, Lean Startup, Cynefin, Systems Thinking, and Scrum. If anything, the appreciation is deepened thanks to experience and integration.
Moreover, you can see the final chapter of KFTI (chapter 23, Rollout) as the springboard for Agendashift, a more thoroughly exercised how-to – not for Kanban, but for continuous transformation, a term not found in the older book. Expect these themes from chapter 23 to be developed more fully:
- Making the agenda for change visible
- Pulling change through the system
- Making a connection between purpose and transformation
- Identifying increments of change
- Managing change visually
- Recognising different kinds of change (and choosing appropriate tools)
The section Identifying increments of change contained the seeds for the Agendashift values-based delivery assessment, which in turn gave rise to the transformation mapping workshop and our now well-rehearsed routines for identifying priorities, obstacles, outcomes, options, actions, and so on. These are covered in chapters 2-4 of the new book.
In short, Agendashift wouldn’t have happened without Kanban from the Inside. It is however very much its own book. I think you will enjoy it 🙂
Read them both:
- Agendashift: clean conversations, coherent collaboration, continuous transformation (part I) [leanpub.com]
- Kanban from the Inside: Understand the Kanban Method, connect it to what you already know, introduce it with impact [amazon.co.uk, also on amazon.com]
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