Last week’s post Visualising Agendashift: The why and how of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation is already in the top 3 for 2019. Clearly it resonates! I will build on that post now by enumerating some the ways in which Agendashift scales – not by becoming bigger, heavier, more layered, or more bureaucratic, but by fitting its context.
The bottom line: Agendashift scales because it is scale-free (not an oxymoron, but using the technical term), evidenced by a fractal quality inside it, similar patterns occurring naturally at different scales.
First, there are some initial high level decisions to be made about scale:
- The initial organisational scope of the exercise (we find that it is well worth making this explicit)
- Who is invited to participate in workshops (and how that invitation should be given)
- Who is invited to participate in the pre-workshop assessment (at a minimum, this is the workshop participants for whom it is set as prework, but it is often widened)
- Any specific organisational themes that should mentioned in either invitation
Often, the exercise is centred on a leadership team of some kind, making the above decisions quite easy to make. However, I do make two recommendations:
- At least three levels of seniority should participate – not to make a virtue of hierarchy but allowing it to be bypassed for the sake of interesting and authentic conversations
- It’s good to get wide coverage in the assessment; potentially the whole business function and beyond, or some representative sample thereof
There are more choices about workshop design that we could make here, but usually they’re better left until later exercises and we’ll put them to one side for a moment.
In the workshop itself, scale is everywhere:
- In the warm-up exercise Celebration-5W, different table groups might generate anything from an internal technical achievement for a small team to things like “One billion pounds in turnover” or “Our millionth registration” (both of these are actual examples). I recall one team coming up with a new product idea!
- After True North (in Discovery) and the assessment debrief (in Exploration), obstacles can range from everyday niggles to fundamental misalignments and dysfunctions.
- For any given obstacle, the outcomes generated in 15-minute FOTO can range from short-term quick wins beyond even long-term goals through to enduring values. Surprisingly often, the entire range is covered in the course of a conversation that lasts only a few minutes.
- The Mapping exercises expose different kinds of structure in the naturally coherent (by construction) but still fragmentary output of the preceding exercises.
- In Elaboration, we bring focus where the range of options is high, looking up for the big payoff and down for opportunities for rapid learning and early value.
- In Operation, we raise awareness of the connection between everyday choices and bigger-picture organisation design
Discovery and Exploration both feature our Clean Language-inspired coaching game 15-minute FOTO. At first glance it might seem redundant but the repetition of the same tool in different settings demonstrates the utility, repeatability, and scale-independence and of the pattern (for that is what it is). Regardless of scale, you can:
- Reflect on the promise of the challenge in question
- Identify and (briefly) clarify the obstacles currently in the way of a successful conclusion to that challenge
- Rapidly explore the landscape of outcomes to be found when those obstacles are overcome, bypassed, or ignored
That might sound obvious, but for people used to the experience of conversations that start with solutions already decided, it’s both liberating and highly illuminating.
The workshop designer seeds this process with challenges that have some compelling promise, made all the more compelling by their avoidance of prescription. The off-the-shelf workshop design provides these in the form of the True North and the assessment prompts. These have been tested and refined through repeated use and I would recommend sticking to them initially (advice that may evolve as we gain more customisation experience). However, subsequent events may make use of harvested content, with the potential to make any broader ‘scale out’ excitingly fractal.
There’s a balance to be struck between focussing on new kinds of conversation (clean, outcome-oriented), and on new conversations (the follow-through on specific, newly-articulated outcomes). There’s win on both sides so perhaps I worry too much about whether I get the balance right, but why not have it both ways? Those new kinds of conversations re-seeded by those harvested outcomes. Now we’re talking!
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While we’re here, check out these opportunities to experience this for yourself in a public setting (for private settings reach out to me or your friendly neighbourhood partner). One of them is less than two weeks away:
- 16-17 July, Online – two 2h sessions on consecutive days:
Learning the language of outcomes (two 2h online sessions) - 9-10 September, Stockholm, Sweden (myself and Kjell Tore Guttormsen):
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation - 17-18 September, Athens, Greece (myself and Nikos Batsios):
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation - 3-4 October, London, UK:
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation - 26th October (changed from the 23rd), Istanbul, Turkey:
1-day Core Agendashift workshop: Facilitating outcome-oriented change - 13-14 November, Berlin, Germany:
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation
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