Resequencing Leading with Outcomes, what’s next, and how you can help

Posted on by Mike Burrows

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Following the success of June’s first 3-day Leading in a Transforming Organisation, I’m initiating a resequencing of the Leading with Outcomes curriculum. It will take a while to implement in full (in particular, re-recording video-based content takes time, and I won’t be doing that for this reason alone), but consider this now the recommended flow:

  1. Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
  2. Adaptive Organisation, two parts:
    • Part I: Business agility at every scale
    • Part II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales
  3. Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact
  4. Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success

Basically, the Adaptive Organisation module moves up from last to second. Not only had I overestimated its reliance on Inside-out and Outside-in, I had greatly underestimated just how well Foundation and Adaptive Organisation go together. Foundation introduces the metaphor of the wholehearted organisation [1]; Adaptive Organisation provides a model [2] of how it might be pursued. Foundation introduces three key patterns [3] for the integrated development and pursuit of strategy; Adaptive Organisation builds on those, both conceptually and practically.

Viewed from the perspective of skills [4], the progression still seems natural. Adaptive Organisation does introduce some tools not seen in Foundation, but they play a supporting role, not the focal role they play in Inside-out and Outside-in. And I’m looking forward to discovering what it feels like to do (or in my case, re-record) those explicitly strategy-related modules with Adaptive Organisation as their platform.

Aside: Self-paced study or group participation?

Same excellent content, very different experiences, and not a binary choice! Subscribe to the Agendashift Academy and not only will you gain access to all four modules, but for monthly and yearly subscriptions you’ll get discounts of (respectively) 10% and 25% on the following:

These aren’t so far away, so why not use the summer for study?

What’s next, and how you can help

My next chunk of development work (internally-funded and for the benefit of all authorised facilitators, not done on the client’s clock) is to take the Adaptive Organisation training module and extract from it a 1-day workshop. Essentially a more model-driven version of the tried-and-tested Agendashift Assessment Debrief workshop, it will carry over some of the themes and purposes of the training. It will help participants to look below the surface of process and practice and to see deeper organisational relationships, the imbalances, contradictions, and other dysfunctions that plague them, and the constraints within which they operate. As well as putting things like Lean, Agile and business agility into broader organisational context – interesting in itself [5] – it will be, like everything we do, fully aligned to the following objective:

“At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.”

How you can help: With special emphasis on “the constraints within which they operate”, I would like to test this new workshop in a real-world setting, ideally before I take Leading in a Transforming Organisation to Australia in October. If it could be of interest to your organisation, you’re based anywhere in the UK or somewhere easily reachable from Manchester Airport, and you can get 6-15 people together for a day in September that works for all of us, I will be glad to facilitate the online assessment and in-person workshop at a very meaningful discount. If that’s you, get in touch.

References

[1] The wholeheartedness equation (June)
[2] Everywhere all at once: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, an accessible, situational, and complexity-aware presentation of the Viable System Model (agendashift.com)
[3] Picturing Foundation (May)
[4] Three ways to understand the Leading with Outcomes universe (June)
[5] Explaining the “unreasonable effectiveness” of Agile (July)

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Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy
“Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”

Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:

  1. Foundation module:
  2. Inside-out Strategy:
  3. Adaptive Organisation:
  4. Outside-in Strategy:

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At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.