This is turning into a series! You may wish to read these first:

• Visualising Agendashift: The why and how of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (in just days the third most popular post this year)
• How Agendashift scales

Here’s a super-quick variation on Agendashift’s Discovery and Exploration sessions. First I’ll describe it, and then explain how it differs from the by-the-book version.

10-minute Discovery

Let me quickly explain how we kick this off – I’m asking the same of everyone I’m meeting today:

• First, just a little about yourself – your role, what you’re responsible for, and so on.
• Then, for a multi-month timescale of your choosing, tell me what outstanding success would look like – describing something truly celebration-worthy if you can
• Finally, what obstacles are in the way of that?

And do you mind if I take notes?

I ask all of the above in one go, and give the interviewee the space to answer, lightly guided as necessary. 10 minutes max!

50-minute (or less) Exploration

Now we go to the assessment, which typically (although not always) has been completed by my interviewee in advance. We begin with a quick review of their overall and per-category score distributions (some reassuring noises may be required here; these low scores are very common):

With this alternative view it may be easier to infer some kind of narrative:

• Collaboration and transparency at the top – evidence perhaps of some Agile working
• Seeing flow and balance scoring close together would come as no surprise to any student of Lean or Kanban
• To the trained eye of our machine learning model, the score for leadership looks surprisingly low relative to everything else (hence the amber colouring)
• I tell them that sadly, a low score for customer focus is very common (something that 20 years of Agile has failed to fix)

We spend no more than a few minutes on the category-level summaries. We skim or skip over most of the report (more on these parts later) and land here on the ‘starred’ items. Out of the 43 prompts of the full assessment, these have been prioritised for further discussion:

For each of those prompts in turn, these questions are asked (one at a time this time):

• What would it be like if this was working at its best for you?
• What obstacles are in the way of that?
• What would you like to have happen?
• Then what happens?
• etc

In well under an hour in most cases, the meeting is concluded. I write up my notes and include them in a thank you email. Done!

What just happened? What’s different?

Let’s compare that to a more typical Discovery/Exploration, done workshop style. First, Discovery:

• Celebration-5W – normally done in table groups and taking (say) 40 minutes to introduce, do, and debrief – is condensed into a question (in fact one part of a multi-part question): “Then, for a multi-month timescale of your choosing, tell me what outstanding success would look like – something truly celebration-worthy”
• We skip True North and jump straight to obstacles, still expecting that many of the obstacles heard will relate to ways of working and other organisational issues
• No 15-minute FOTO (with participants ‘coaching’ each other, generating outcomes); if there’s any outcome generation at all, it is cursory at best
• No time spent organising outcomes (no ‘Plan on a page’); if they’re generated at all they just get recorded in my notes

Then Exploration:

• At best, we skim over most of the debrief slides: strengths, weaknesses, areas of high and low consensus
• No group-wise prioritisation of prompts or their respective obstacles
• Again, no 15-minute FOTO ; it’s me asking the questions (and I’m free to use a wider palette of questions with perhaps some cleanish freestyling)
• Again, no time spent organising outcomes (no Mapping); they just get recorded in my notes

The big difference though isn’t the stripped-down meeting design. It’s that instead of working with several people together workshop-wise, I’m spending an hour or so at a time with a succession of people on a one-to-one basis. Instead of acting as facilitator, I’m the roving consultant (albeit a “clean” one). And instead of participants collaborating with each other, they’re my interviewees.

Naturally, there’s a tradeoff. Less time is required from participants, and for many, that’s welcome. Unfortunately, it also means little (if any) time spent facilitating agreement on outcomes (principle #2). If I’m able to report back to my sponsors a coherent picture thanks to the similarity of interview results, this omission might be fixable. That’s a big if though; what seems the most efficient might not be the most effective in the end!

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Upcoming public Agendashift workshops
– online, Stockholm, Athens, London, Istanbul, Berlin

• 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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Leading change in the 21^st century? You need a 21^st century engagement model:

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