We had a bit of fun in the Cardiff workshop a few days ago taking a prompt from the Agendashift delivery assessment and negating it. Here’s the original:

We bring work into the delivery process only as capacity allows, preferring to finish work items already in progress than to start new work items

Via some mysterious wormhole (the details aren’t important), here’s a version that came from some negligent universe’s Agendashift assessment:

We’re happy to let work into our delivery process regardless of the consequences [on work already in progress and on potentially overburdened people]

I put the second half in brackets because the determinedly negligent (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) probably wouldn’t bother to think that hard.

From a more evil universe:

We push work into already-overburdened systems in the full knowledge of the impact it will have on people, existing work, and its customers. The power!

No-one would do that back here in the real, right?

Here are a few more. Can you guess what the original prompts look like?

We are careful to keep progress on our work to ourselves, thereby avoiding the temptation to work with others

We prefer to store up our work rather than allow it reach our customers when it is ready

Neither our decisions, our setting of customer expectations, nor our priorities for improvement have any basis whatsoever in fact

We like our assumptions untested (like our code)

Curious? You can try a mini assessment with a small subset of the full template on teams of up to 10 people by signing up to the trial and here for the unrestricted version (paid). The same 18 prompts (out of the full 43) of the mini assessment also feature in chapters 2, 3, and 5 of the Agendashift book. The place for questions, comments, experience reports, and suggested improvements is the #assessments channel in the Agendashift Slack. Enjoy!