Out of beta, Leading with Outcomes: Foundation goes fully live today

Too many organisations are habitually and perpetually distracted by solutions – often clumsy and inadequate solutions, solutions aimed at problems of little relevance to the business’s real challenges. Those solutions rarely live up to expectations, but still the organisation keeps paying the price – the pain of implementation and the business cost of all that distraction. What an expensive habit!

Up and down successfully transforming organisations, leaders in all kinds of roles have broken that habit. They know to lead not with solutions but with outcomes, inviting and sustaining engagement on what the organisation needs to achieve and on what it needs to become. And they have learned to keep those objectives integrated and relevant as things change and understanding evolves, a process that’s happening continuously at every level of organisation.

So if you’re a leader in a transforming organisation, whatever your level of experience, whatever your role, whatever your scope – team, team-of-teams, or something much bigger – Leading with Outcomes: Foundation is for you.

Yes, it’s here at last! It took a little longer than expected, but we leave beta proud of what we have created. If you participated in that beta, thank you!

What to expect

In bite-sized chunks – we take “self-paced” seriously – nearly two and a half hours of video instruction, no video more than a few minutes long
Four “chapters”:
1. Inside-out strategy: Fit for maximum impact – the biggest chapter, as it introduces the Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes structure, Agendashift’s IdOO (“I do”) pattern
2. Outside-in strategy: Positioned for success
3. Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale
4. Innovating for performance: Ideation, experimentation, and feedback
Over the course of those four chapters, 18 exercises taking you through that process
A student workbook in a choice of convenient formats
A student community where you can ask questions, share insights, and meet other leaders

All of it is designed for leaders at every level of organisation. Whatever your level of experience or authority, whether you’re a leader in a team, a team-of-teams, or the whole enterprise, you’ll find it relatable, fresh, and with just the right level of challenge. All for €99!

What’s new

What makes Leading with Outcomes: Foundation different to anything we’ve done before:

Our audience, “leaders in transforming organisations”, a description we hope many will be able to relate to, likewise the Agendashift Academy’s new strapline, “Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”
Compared to our workshops, it is unequivocally a training product, designed and delivered as such

To that first point, my empathy towards leaders in transforming organisations is very real, because I’ve been there myself. During the banking crisis I led a global department that found itself uncomfortably close to the centre of the storm. I’ve been a CTO in a startup, looking for its exit, needing to transform itself in the process. I’ve had hands-on leadership roles in two government digital transformations and advised others, much of that at the kind of scale that kept me in mind of what it was like to lead teams or to manage managers for the first time. More recently, it seems that Agendashift, its community, and its ecosystem are constantly evolving – something I’m glad about and a different kind of leadership responsibility perhaps, but still I feel it.

That second, training-related point is important too. Up to now, Agendashift has been largely a workshop-based product. But many workshops – including some very enjoyable and productive ones – should not be understood as training. The Leading with Outcomes curriculum will of course include the workshops for which we are best known, but LwO:Foundation is designed from the ground up as training. Its primary goal is clear: it is to greatly increase the number of leaders at all levels of experience and authority who are equipped to participate thoughtfully and effectively in the processes of strategy and transformation. Helping leaders increase their impact is how we increase ours.

What stays the same

What stays the same is the question:

What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?

At a minimum, Leading with Outcomes: Foundation demonstrates the practicality of an outcome-oriented approach, all students having the opportunity to practice some basic strategy development themselves (and no, that is not above anyone’s pay grade, nor a job only for specialists). We hope that this will whet the appetite to develop fluency in the language of outcomes, whether that’s to enhance their leadership skills at their place of work or to support others.

What’s in store

After the LwO:Foundation prerequisite, Leading with Outcomes branches out into three tracks:

Inside-out strategy – working on the experience and capability of the organisation (or your unit thereof), creating new possibilities, gaining fluency in the language of outcomes
Outside-in strategy – keeping your organisation/unit well positioned in its business environment, meeting strategic needs, creating the right perceptions, developing product offerings, building a platform, creating advantage
Adaptive organisation – helping the organisation become the organisation it needs to become, addressing its imbalances, disconnects, and other structural issues within and between levels, developing its people, and accelerating its learning

Each has modules in two formats, study (self-paced or classroom-based) and experiential (the workshops, in other words). As with Foundation, nothing is only for specialists; nothing is above (or below) anyone’s pay grade. Always, we start with the context that matters, yours.

The tracks will roll out in the above sequence over the course of 2022. Once they’re all in place, you’ll be able to take modules in whichever order suits you best. They will feature some of our best-known tools: Celebration-5W, 15-minute FOTO, the Agendashift Delivery Assessment, the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation Assessment, multiple mapping tools, Changeban, and more. The dual-format approach of each track means that you’ll have the opportunity both to experience these tools as a participant and to understand them from a more expert perspective.

What does it mean for Agendashift’s practitioner community?

Many in the Agendashift community are practitioners – consultants, coaches, facilitators, trainers, and so on. What does Leading with Outcomes mean for them?

Honestly, it is early days, and for me, 2022 will be dominated by the development of the three tracks. We don’t have all the details defined yet but we are making it possible to participate in more ways:

Participating in the same training that your clients will take
Participating economically as an affiliate
Participating as a connector of communities
Delivering certifiable training and/or workshops yourself

The first two of those options exist from day 1, with generous discounts/commissions for affiliates. The third option however isn’t yet well defined at all, and developing the pathway to the last one is a significant piece of work in its own right. We do know though that there is significant appetite already, and we are very open to working with others. With the right participation, perhaps it will come together sooner rather than later.

Let’s do this

If you need to explore with us what it might mean to bring Foundation, the Leading with Outcomes curriculum or parts thereof into your organisation – perhaps as part of your leadership development or organisation development programme – don’t hesitate to get in touch. You can reach us via support@agendashift.academy, the Agendashift contact page, or you can contact me directly at mike@agendashift.com. Likewise if you see yourself participating in some of the other ways I have described – there is plenty of opportunity there!

What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?