Engage, Invite, Celebrate – it was there all along

Posted on by Mike Burrows

In July, I posted Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation, which takes us from a Christopher Alexander quote that has inspired me for a number of years to Engage, Invite, Celebrate, a nice little leadership model:

  1. Engaging on the right challenges – attending to all that makes the organisation unwhole, i.e. to what makes it in any way disconnected, incomplete, unbalanced, incoherent, or otherwise dysfunctional; attending also to what might lead to a sense of unwholeness in the future – opportunities missed, for example
  2. Inviting people to participate – not only for their perspectives and ideas but for the integration (i.e. making whole) that happens when you bring people together 
  3. Celebrating their initiative – amplifying the organisation’s capacity to innovate, not only in terms of enhanced products and services but in terms of the organisation’s own development also

It’s hardly an accident that things worked out this way, but I just noticed that I was only a hairsbreadth away from Engage, Invite, Celebrate years ago. Here, from the Agendashift 2nd edition (2021) are the three “jobs” that I suggested that an engagement model should do:

  1. To structure and support the work of change agents like you – not just external facilitators, consultants, and coaches, but leaders, managers, and other employees whose remit or desire involves encouraging some strategic kind of change to come to life
  2. To help the organisations concerned engage their staff meaningfully in change-related work, inviting the level of participation necessary, and sustaining the expectation of further success as outcomes are achieved and momentum is built
  3. With and through their staff, to help keep the different parts of these organisations engaged with each other, all of them enjoying the best chance to thrive even as they change at different speeds

Look again at that second job:

  1. To help the organisations concerned engage their staff meaningfully in change-related work, inviting the level of participation necessary, and sustaining the expectation of further success as outcomes are achieved and momentum is built

So close! Since then, I’ve changed the focus of Engage and the tone of Invite, but that’s to be expected if I’m going from a change paradigm to a leadership model. I didn’t use the word Celebrate there, but arguably, that’s where the meaning has changed the least. “Further success” implies past success, and what do we do when we’re working Right to Left (2019), anticipating and working backwards from those key moments of impact and learning, reviewing our work most-complete first? We begin with what we’ve most recently achieved, celebrating it. It was there all along!

While we’re here, please note the time of today’s webinar, The 10-year Journey: From Classic Lean-Agile to Outcome-Oriented Enterprise Agility. It begins later than recent blog posts have suggested, at 17:00 BST, 18:00 CEST, 12noon EDT.

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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.