So here it is, the Who, What, Where, When, and Why of a new Agendashift workshop: Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services.
Who
Well… you of course! In one or more of the following roles:
- As the sponsor of a strategy workshop for your product line or service (or perhaps your team, department, division, or whole organisation, but there’s more on this workshop’s scope, intent, and alternatives further down this post)
- As a participant, anyone with a stake in the strategy for your product or service
- As a practitioner, attending a public workshop, ready to practice, to learn, and be challenged
- As an Agendashift partner, authorised to facilitate of what looks set to be the easiest of our workshops to run
What
From the blurb (there’s more there):
Impact! is a 1-day Agendashift workshop focussed on products and services. It is suitable for product teams, service delivery teams, managers, and expert practitioners. It covers:
- Capturing business context
- Hypotheses and experiments
- Alternative/complementary expressions of user need
- Thinking strategically about outcomes
- Managing your portfolio of experiments – optimising and organising for learning
- Experiment design with A3
- And briefly, some implications for organisation design
Many of the concepts covered in the Impact! workshop are introduced in Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile, chapters 5 and 6. Reading the book is not a prerequisite, but if you enjoyed the book, you’ll love the workshop – and vice versa!
Coming as it does from the Agendashift stable, you can be sure that our needs-based and outcome-oriented philosophy shines through. The tools you’ll experience, among them Celebration-5W, 15-minute FOTO, Changeban, and Experiment A3 – all open source – aren’t about imposing cookie-cutter solutions on people but creating opportunities for them to participate in a collaborative exploration of the landscape of obstacles and outcomes, within which your key opportunities lie.
When & Where
We’re already doing Impact! workshops privately, and interest from other partners (Stockholm-based partner Teddy Zetterlund for example has two in the pipeline) has enabled us to iterate rapidly, refining the content and improving the overall experience. If you’d like to host one, get in touch, or check out the partner directory and find a partner near you.
The first two public outings of the Impact! workshop will be in February, in the US and the UK:
- 4th February, Tampa, FL, USA – the day before the first Open Leadership Symposium of 2020 (your ticket is part of a 1, 2, or 3-day bundle – you choose the bundle when you select your ticket and then the workshop on checkout)
- 14th February, London, UK
It’s no accident that we’re launching at an Open Leadership Network event. As I’ve been saying in the run-up to Berlin (November 19th with masterclasses either side; ping me for a chunky discount):
For the kind of engagement that sparks not just effort but collaboration, self organisation, and innovation, ‘generative’ beats ‘prescriptive’ hands down. Conversely, if you want to destroy those things, try imposition.
And the good news: It’s really not that hard! Sadly under-recognised by mainstream Agile but there are some great engagement models out there. Agendashift is mine I’m but proud to part of an openleadership network that gathers multiple and complementary approaches together.
Why
For a year or more there have been two families of Agendashift workshop:
- Transformation strategy workshops Core, Applied, and Advanced, Core and Advanced being suitable for public training workshops, Applied for internal use, focussed on the host/client organisation
- Outside-in strategy review workshops, for which the material exists for use by partners but in a form suitable only for internal use
The first family is very much as described in Agendashift, the second in Right to Left chapter 5, “Outside in” – for a number of readers its most impactful chapter. See also Oslo-based partner Kjell Tore Guttormsen describe his positive experience facilitating it prior to Right to Left‘s publication.
We have now a very encouraging answer to questions posed in Agendashift: if we replaced or even removed the Lean-Agile content from Agendashift – the True North and the assessments in particular – would what’s left still be valuable? Can we do other things with the various tools? Yes to both! Very much so!
Partly to address the suitability of the outside-in strategy review workshop for public use (and also because its joint theme interests us greatly), I’ll be meeting partners Karl Scotland and Steven Mackenzie and guest contributor Mike Haber in London soon to plan a 2-day Wholehearted:OKR workshop. Meanwhile and very fortuitously, the opportunity to do a private 1-day workshop for a group of product consultants gave me the ideal head start, and the Impact! workshop is the result.
From time to time, transformation strategy workshops go in the direction of product strategy instead of their usual focus on ways of working. Similarly, I’ve already seen the new workshop go in the direction of business strategy, which is more the domain of the generic outside-in review. That’s the power of the generative approach at work and I don’t mind it at all, but still it’s good to be able to offer these choices explicitly at the time the workshop is organised. An easier sell, certainly!
Related posts
- There will be caveats: Warming cautiously to OKR (September)
- Visualising Agendashift: The why and how of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (June)
- What kind of Organisational Development (OD)? (And a book recommendation) (May)
- Agendashift’s many extension points (2018)
- An outside-in strategy review, Agendashift style (2018)
- Engagement: more than a two-way street (2018)
Upcoming workshops – Berlin, Oslo, Malmö, and online
New dates for USA and UK coming soon!
- 13-14 November, Berlin, Germany:
2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation - 9-10 December, Oslo, Norway:
2-day Advanced Agendashift: Coaching & leading continuous transformation - 11-12 December, Online – two 2h sessions on consecutive days:
Learning the language of outcomes (two 2h online sessions) - 4th February, Tampa, FL, USA:
Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services - 14th February, London, UK
Impact! Strategically outcome-oriented for products and services - 11-12 March, Malmö, Sweden – Julia Wester & myself:
Advanced Agendashift: Coaching and Leading Continuous Transformation - 8-9 June, Oslo, Norway:
2-day Advanced Agendashift: Coaching & leading continuous transformation
From the exciting intersection of Lean-Agile, Strategy, and Organisation Development, an engagement model fit for the 21st century!
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