Exactly one year ago today, Agendashift had its public launch. We went live with 22 partners signed up, each of them licensed to 1) use our unique online assessment tool, 2) use our workshop material, and 3) claim a spot in the Agendashift partner directory.

In those 12 months we have grown nearly threefold to 60 partners in 18 countries – 21 in the UK, 13 in the US, 4 in Germany, 3 each in France, India, and Sweden, 2 in Belgium, and 1 each in Argentina, Austria, Canada, Greece, Ireland, Israel, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, and Turkey. That’s quite a spread!

Since the first public workshop in Leeds, the tools and materials have undergone frequent revision, thanks in no small part to the input of partners and workshop participants. I myself will be taking the workshop outside Europe more often, visiting India, South Africa, and (very likely) the US in the coming months.

Then came the book. Agendashift has been a very different experience to my first book, Kanban from the Inside. Instead of rushing to get it into print, I released a completed part I online on Leanpub in May, expecting it to lurk there quietly while I got on with part II. Of course it didn’t quite work out that way – I’ve since published 3 revisions and I don’t promise that they’ll be the last, such is the ease by which they can now be done. And when it does go to print, Part I may well become Book 1.

I have more unfinished business in the area of machine learning. Back in June I announced the Agendashift unbenchmarking service, which uses so-called unsupervised learning techniques to help identify particular points of interest in survey results. I have since been experimenting with clustering – techniques that won’t just enhance the analytics, they will also create opportunities to connect people. eHarmony for Lean-Agile, if you like!

There have been a couple of surprises. The first is just how comfortably Clean Language and Cynefin have integrated themselves into Agendashift’s distinctively outcome-centric approach to transformation, to the extent that it’s now hard to imagine their absence. They compliment each other very well: our Clean Language-based workshop game ‘15-minute FOTO’ generates narrative fragments in the form of outcomes that are ideally suited to further interaction via the Cynefin four points contextualisation exercise. Furthermore, they both have wider impact, Clean Language in helping us minimise unhelpful assumptions and opening the door to valuable things that we practitioners might easily exclude, and Cynefin for allowing us to acknowledge the limits of some of our tools (which, ironically, makes them stronger).

The other surprise shouldn’t have been a surprise at all, the way that interacting with other people (many of whom I would have met were it not for Agendashift) has been so rewarding. In every respect that Agendashift has grown, it has grown through interaction. And overwhelmingly, those interactions have been a pleasure to participate in or even simply to observe. If you’ve been part of it, I want to thank you.

About Agendashift™

Agendashift is a modern, inclusive, non-prescriptive, and outcome-centric approach to organisational transformation. Notwithstanding its roots in Lean-Agile, Agendashift remains framework-neutral by intent and design. It is delivered via an online assessment/analytics tool, hands-on workshops, and follow-on coaching and technical training as needed. It is used both inside and outside of IT and across diverse industries, both technology-centric and otherwise.

Agendashift is brought to you by Positive Incline Ltd, UK-based specialists in Lean-Agile transformation. Founder Mike Burrows pioneered the values model for the Kanban Method that led to his definitive book, Kanban from the Inside (2014, Blue Hole Press). Part I of his new book Agendashift: clean conversations, coherent collaboration, continuous transformation was published May 2017.

For further information, download our 4-page overview or get in touch.

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Public workshops (see Events):
17-18 Sep, Bengaluru, India; 8th Nov, Cape Town, South Africa; 22-23 November, UK