Author: Mike Burrows

Champion and enabler of outcome-oriented transformation & strategy; Agendashift founder, Agendashift Academy co-founder, 3-time author

Adaptive Organisation (I)

Posted on by Mike Burrows
Announcing Adaptive Organisation part I (00:01:53)

Out now: chapter 3 of Adaptive Organisation, the fourth and final module of Leading with Outcomes. This latest chapter, Mutual Trust Building, completes part I, for which a certificate of completion applies.

Part I, Business agility at every scale covers the three overlapping “spaces” of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, an accessible, “start where you are”, and complexity-conscious rendition of the Viable System Model:

  1. Delivery, Discovery, and Renewal:
    • Inside value creation’s inner learning loop
    • Turning intent into progress, and experiments into intelligence and insights
    • Reconciling Agile and business agility
  2. Adaptive Strategy:
    • Making organising commitments, autonomy at every scope and scale
    • Understanding self and environment, creating and managing options accordingly
    • Actively maintaining coherent identity, purpose, and values 
  3. Mutual Trust Building:
    • Models of trust-building leadership
    • The systemic role of trust
    • Sensemaking – making meaningful progress in the presence of ambiguity

The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation as described in part I is already a fractal, “every scale” model. Nevertheless, when it comes to challenges of scale, there is still plenty to talk about that is not well covered elsewhere. What should be happening between scales? How can we think less statically about structure and process? How do we get the organisation engaged on all of this?

With all of that on the agenda, Part II, Between spaces, scopes, and scales should begin its rollout in the coming days, one chapter at a time:

  1. Between and across scales:
    • Navigating formal structure
    • Your organisation in 5 networks
    • Between and across scales: Structuring, connecting, translating, and reconciling
  2. Organising at human scale 
    • Thinking in circles – organising without reorganising
    • Teaming and re-teaming
    • The developmental organisation 
  3. Possibility and purpose
    • Conversations on organisation in the language of outcomes
    • Developing and pursuing strategy

Read on to find out how to access Adaptive Organisation!

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 four modules in the recommended order:

  1. Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
  2. Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact
  3. Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success
  4. Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale (parts I and II, a certificate for each)

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 per month, business subscriptions from £269 per month, with discounts available on both kinds of plan for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors.

See below for public training events, discounted for subscribers.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes yourself, see our Authorised Facilitator and Trainer Programmes. Our next TTT/F training takes place in May.

Upcoming events

With me (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise indicated

*For the June events indicated with an asterisk, see Three days in sunny June, London – and note the recent date change!

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Facilitator and Trainer Programmes

We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.

Balance, constraint, and freedom

Posted on by Mike Burrows

An inspiring taster of something big clearly brewing

Ryan Behrman, organiser of the Systemic Agility meetup

Thank you Ryan! That “something big” is the Leading with Outcomes module Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale and the model behind it, the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. By happy coincidence, chapter 2 of the module’s latest iteration (beta 2) is released today.

What prompted Ryan’s comment was a talk I gave last week at the abovementioned meetup – see below for the recording. It draws from chapter 4 of beta 1, which remains available to subscribers until beta 2 gets that far, which shortly it will. Thanks in no small part to the conversations that my talk spawned, I’ll be updating both the talk and the training module – the talk iterating towards a keynote I’ll be giving later in the year, the training material benefiting in the process.

The theme of “balance, constraint, and freedom” comes up both in the video and in a short interlude that follows chapter 2 and is released with it today. The module and its underlying model draw on two perspectives on organisation, namely complexity and systems, and it’s nice to bring the two together:

  • What does it mean to have things in balance with each other – in healthy and productive relationship? (In the talk I expand both what might be meant by “things” and what gets in the way of that kind of balance)
  • What does it mean to have the right constraints – constraints of various kinds that in combination keep us away from unhealthy and unproductive states and steer us towards more desirable states, maintaining our organisation’s coherence all the while?
  • And both the flip side of constraint and the product of those healthy relationships: what does it mean when we have freedom – freedom to do the right thing, freedom to collaborate creatively, freedom to find innovative solutions, freedom to reimagine who we are, freedom to redefine ourselves?

The complexity and systems perspectives each bring their own ranges of tools, but before we get technical, what does that right balance, constraint, and freedom feel like? Already, that’s a starting point for an interesting conversation. A more detailed and theory-informed conversation might be the next step, but don’t neglect the informal opportunities either – sometimes they’re the most revealing.

To the recorded talk specifically, if you detected the hint of a health warning in my mention above of updates and iteration, it is only that in this version I risk getting into more detail than I would want in a keynote. Not that it was a problem here – in fact the feedback was very encouraging. Not for the first time, I’m being told that I’m describing something that is both needed and timely – something that others have been grasping at but didn’t quite have the words for.

Watch to the end for a special offer, and watch out for later versions. I have a good idea already of what the next one will look like.

Stop press: see Upcoming events below, 27th April.

Between spaces, scopes, and scales: What the scaling frameworks don’t tell you

Related posts

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 four modules in the recommended order:

  1. Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
  2. Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact
  3. Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success
  4. Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale (parts I and II, a certificate for each)

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 per month, business subscriptions from £269 per month, with discounts available on both kinds of plan for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors.

See below for public training events, discounted for subscribers.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes yourself, see our Authorised Facilitator and Trainer Programmes. Our next TTT/F training takes place in May.

Upcoming events

With me (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise indicated

*For the June events indicated with an asterisk, see Three days in sunny June, London – and note the recent date change!

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Facilitator and Trainer Programmes

We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.

Three days in sunny June, London (updated)

Posted on by Mike Burrows

[Updated 2022-03-20 – dates changed to accommodate block bookings!]

London, UK, venue TBC. Three days, each available separately, each certified. Buy two consecutive days and save 20%. Buy all three together and save 30%:

  • Day 1. Tuesday, June 20th: Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
  • Day 2. Wednesday, June 21st: Adaptive Organisation (I): Business agility at every scale
  • Day 3. Thursday, June 22nd: Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes, and scales

Save a further 10-40% with the discount code shown on your Agendashift Academy subscription – see the What’s included page of your Welcome course in your Academy library.

Book your 1, 2, or 3 days here:

Just in the last few days, I’ve had some capacity free up in April; please get in touch if interested in hosting any of the above privately. I will throw in a free 3-month Agendashift for Business subscription for up to 25 people, and as mentioned in last month’s roundup, while the self-paced version of Adaptive Organisation remains in beta (see below) I will be glad to discount the in-person version substantially. Please note that my ability to travel outside the UK remains somewhat limited.

Happening this week:

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Facilitator and Trainer Programmes

We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.

Agendashift roundup, February 2023

Posted on by Mike Burrows

I have had covid for most of the past week, and though I don’t feel seriously ill, coupled with the facts 1) that with my wife I’m part of a 24*7 care team for a vulnerable family member, and 2) that I’ve been called to jury service next month, I’ve had to make some changes.

So, in calendar order:

  • Next week’s Foundation is unfortunately cancelled
  • Next week’s webinar (with guests) and meetup are still going ahead – and I’m greatly looking forward to both
  • If you’re in India next month, don’t miss Karl Scotland’s Foundation
  • My next public workshop is in April, by the kind invitation of Gervase Bushe and hosted by the Cape Code Institute, details here
  • The May Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) is now open for bookings – UK mornings, relatively APAC-friendly timings (less convenient for the Americas this time round)
  • The June Foundation has moved from mornings to afternoons

If you’re wondering meanwhile how this month’s TTT/F went, check this out.

Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale

There has been some impact on the not-quite-finished Adaptive Organisation module too, but I’m seeing it very much as a blessing in disguise. As agreed at a Zoom call yesterday with trainers participating in its beta programme, I will:

  1. Release the existing videos to Academy subscribers as-is as “Beta 1” – without captions, workbook, or the final chapter
  2. Release a greatly improved Beta 2 chapter by chapter

I gave a preview of Beta 2 at this month’s TTT/F, where one participant described it as “all I hoped it would be”. Yesterday’s Zoom was similarly encouraging, and I’m confident that it will be worth the wait.

From April onwards I will have capacity for private training. While Adaptive Organisation remains in beta it will be available in multiple formats at preferential pricing – so shout now if it could be of interest.

Top posts

  1. Start where you are (February)
  2. Sell the pain, not the solution, the theory, or the blame (December)
  3. Your organisation in 5 networks (November)
  4. Between spaces, scopes, and scales (February)
  5. Leaders as keepers of context (September)

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Facilitator and Trainer Programmes

We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.

Upcoming events

With me (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise indicated

*For the June events indicated with an asterisk, see Three days in sunny June, London – and note the recent date change!

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. ~Arthur Ashe

Between spaces, scopes, and scales

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Perhaps you’ve been wondering where I’ve been going with posts like Your organisation in 5 networks and Start where you are. Well, just in the last few days the Systemic Agility community have given me the perfect opportunity for the big reveal. I’ll be speaking at their meetup at 17:30 GMT on Thursday, March 9th:

To set some expectations: Networks will of course play a role, but it’s not only about those. No, I won’t be ranting against any particular framework or against frameworks in general. Much more constructively, it’s about accessing some of the deep magic of organisation. Or should I say organising?

The previous day but in the UK morning for the sake of our Australia-based guests, it’s the next in our monthly webinar/AMA series The questions that drive us:

Note that 09:30 GMT is not 10am ET as previously advertised. Apologies to our friends in the US if you were misled – 4:30am is early indeed!

It will be a busy week – there’s more! The next interactive Leading with Outcomes: Foundation begins on the Tuesday. Three sessions of two and a half hours each on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons (UK time) 7th-9th March, 14:00-16:30 GMT:

  • Session 1. (Tuesday 7th) Leading in a transforming organisation – introducing outcome-oriented change
  • Session 2. (Wednesday 8th) Meaningfulness, significance, and direction – two kinds of strategy and a virtuous circle
  • Session 3. (Thursday 9th) Moving into action – ideas, experiments, feedback, and learning

We’re having a lot of fun with Foundation right now in the February Train-the-Trainer/Facilitator and I’m already looking forward to doing it again. Join us! And don’t hesitate to ping me for a discount code – public or non-profit sectors, un/under-employed, participants in previous events, yada, yada, they all count, and that goes for the self-paced version of Foundation too.

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Facilitator and Trainer Programmes

We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.

Upcoming events

With me (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise indicated

*For the June events indicated with an asterisk, see Three days in sunny June, London – and note the recent date change!

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. ~Arthur Ashe

Start where you are

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.

Arthur Ashe

“Start where you are” doesn’t have to be about process! Try this exercise:

  1. Disregarding organisational boundaries, and in relation to the work you are already committed to (your “organising commitments”), who do you interact with? Then reflexively: who interacts with you regarding their organising commitments? And transitively: who do they interact with, who interacts with them, and so on outwards?
  2. Again disregarding organisational boundaries, and whether as an act of planning or of response to something unexpected, who do you consult with when your organising commitments need to change? And again reflexively and transitively: Who consults with you, who do they consult with, and so on outwards?
  3. Now reflect on the relationships you have identified in those two networks. Whose relationships don’t you understand as well as you might? To the extent that it affects your own work, what context do you lack that others might be able to provide? Who else might be struggling for lack of context that you or someone closer to you might be able to provide? Is it time then for some trust-building conversations?

Now you know where you are, start!

Related posts:

While we’re here, a couple of updates to upcoming events (see below):

  • The next TTT/F begins in just over a week on Wednesday 15th – ping me for a coupon code if you need one
  • I’ve added the April edition of our monthly free webinar/AMA series

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Facilitator and Trainer Programmes

We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.

Upcoming events

With me (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise indicated

*For the June events indicated with an asterisk, see Three days in sunny June, London – and note the recent date change!

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. ~Arthur Ashe

Agendashift roundup, January 2023

Posted on by Mike Burrows

In this edition: February and March; Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale; Top posts; Events, self-paced training, and media

February and March

Approaching fast, the next of our monthly webinar and AMA sessions takes place on Thursday. And starting on the 15th, the next Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer/Facilitator (TTT/F):

The webinar is free of course – all welcome – and for TTT/F, discounts apply. If you’re an authorised trainer or facilitator, a partner past or present, an attendee of a past workshop, you’re a government/education/non-profit employee, or if you’re un/under-employed, don’t hesitate to get in touch for a coupon code.

Disappointingly, my trip to Berlin got postponed until April at the earliest – my sincere apologies if you were hoping to join me there. April is I think too soon for another public event, but if you have a core of participants ready to go, shout.

March sees our next Leading with Outcomes: Foundation (discounts as above), and for the webinar series, guests!

Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale

I’m pleased to report that the fourth and final Leading with Outcomes module, Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale is now in limited beta, with the self-paced version launching properly in the coming weeks. I am super-excited about this module – I still have a fourth book to publish, but I think this will lead to the fifth!

I’m ready now to offer also it in the form of interactive training over two days, ideally in person. My plan is to offer it initially with a heavy discount that decreases rapidly, disappearing entirely as soon the module is ready for other authorised trainers to use. If that sounds like an opportunity for your organisation or for a client of yours, do let me know.

Top posts

  1. It’s 10 years since the post that changed my career
  2. Your organisation in 5 networks (November 2022)
  3. What I really think about Kanban (April 2022)
  4. ‘Right to Left’ works for Scrum too (July 2018)
  5. Better user stories start with authentic situations of need (October 2016)

Events, self-paced training, and media

Events

Self-paced training – Leading with Outcomes at the Agendashift Academy

All included in your Agendshift for Individuals subscription, the four modules of Leading with Outcomes:

  1. Leading with Outcomes: Foundation (available also interactively, see Events above)
  2. Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact
  3. Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success
  4. Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale (in limited beta, launching soon)

Highly affordable multi-user Agendashift for Business subscriptions are also available – please contact me for a brochure.

Media

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Facilitator and Trainer Programmes

We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.

A couple of changes for February

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Quick one…. For reasons beyond my control, the February Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) has moved a day or two. It is still four sessions over two consecutive weeks, but no longer the same two days each week. Now it’s Wednesday, Thursday, Monday, and Tuesday afternoons (UK time), 15th-21st of February.

Programme information and booking pages:

Sessions begin at 13:00GMT, 14:00CST, 8am ET, will be a maximum of four hours each, and include multiple breaks.

Before that I’m in Berlin on the 7th and 8th for a two-day in-person workshop focussed on leaders and leadership in transforming organisations:

This was first mooted as an in-person TTT/F so be aware of that change too.

Questions about those or anything else? The next free webinar/AMA is on February 2nd:

As for what’s happening in March, see the events calendar below. Hope to see you soon!

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Facilitator and Trainer Programmes

We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.

Upcoming events

With me (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise indicated

*For the June events indicated with an asterisk, see Three days in sunny June, London – and note the recent date change!

It’s 10 years since the post that changed my career

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Happy New Year! For me it’s a big anniversary: this time in 2013 I had spent the New Year’s break taking the principles and practices of the Kanban Method, and from them abstracting a system of nine values. Then on January 3rd, I published Introducing Kanban through its values. Kanban’s values model was born.

Nine values are quite a lot to hold in one’s head at once, so I soon learned to present them in groups:

  • An initial six, or two groups of three: transparency, balance, and collaboration, then customer focus, flow, and leadership
  • Then understanding, agreement, and respect, which for reasons of brevity are often subsumed under leadership

In most of the decade since, it has been my most-read post each year. And it led to my first book, Kanban from the Inside (2014), which remains a Lean-Agile classic. Great! Now what?

I had no interest in making Kanban any more technical than it already was; if anything, the values model would always draw me in the opposite direction. Neither was I drawn to the emerging Kanban Maturity Model (or any other such model). What I did instead was to allow a common problem to bother me: why do so many people arrive at the training class not knowing why they are there? Tempting as it might have been to see that as a failure of administration or marketing, I saw it instead as a symptom that there were important organisational conversations that simply weren’t happening.

I realised quickly that this problem was far from unique to Kanban. To those that resent having had Scrum or (later) SAFe thrust upon them, the Agile manifesto’s “People and interactions over processes and tools” must ring rather hollow.

That took me away from Kanban into the realms of organisation, leadership, and strategy, to the development of Agendashift, and then sort of full circle, not back to Kanban and Lean-Agile specifically, but to business agility. Ten years on, as practice gets refined through use, as its message gets refined through the telling, and as we dig ever-deeper roots into the available theory, three main topic areas co-evolve together:

  1. As described now in two editions of the Agendashift book (2nd ed 2021), Agendashift the engagement model (thank you Daniel Mezick for describing Agendashift as such) and dialogic/generative organisation development approach (thank you Gervase Bushe & Bob Marshak), a way for practitioners to approach organisations without prejudging what solutions they will employ(/impose/inflict) and instead to help them have those missing conversations – engaging in participatory strategy, as it turns out
  2. The wholehearted organisation, a deliberately minimalistic values-based model of organisation and leadership, a spinoff from my third book, Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020) that unexpectedly gained a life of its own
  3. The leadership development curriculum Leading with Outcomes, which compared to Agendashift minimises detail relevant mainly to practitioners, and instead distils some easily-learned patterns, strategies, and organisational models relevant to leaders at all levels, leaders in transforming organisations most especially

Explicitly in both Agendashift and Leading with Outcomes and implicitly in wholehearted, we have doubled down on the eighth value of that initial nine-value model, namely agreement. What if we put agreement on outcomes before solutions? One way or another, I’ve been asking that question for most of the past ten years, and I have no doubt that it will keep me going for a good while yet.

I no longer identify as a Kanban guy. That separation was necessary to what followed, but all these years later I remain proud of the work I did there, of that first book, and of the blog post that started it all. Not that I’m planning on retiring anytime soon, but I have long seen it as marking the beginning of the rest of my career.

[Comment on this post on LinkedIn]

Related:

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Facilitator and Trainer Programmes

We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.

Upcoming events

With me (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise indicated

*For the June events indicated with an asterisk, see Three days in sunny June, London – and note the recent date change!

QOTD: Rosen on Elsasser on reductionism

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Elsasser pointed out that in the phase space of any organism, considered as a purely physical system, is in general of very high dimension. He argued further that the states in this phase space which are compatible with life will generally tend to be sparsely distributed in such as phase space; specifically, they will form a set of zero volume. Hence “almost all” states, and “almost all” trajectories in this space, will be incompatible with life. Furthermore, any attempt to form averages over the entire phase space will inevitably discard the biologically relevant states. Consequently, Elsasser argued, insofar as physics must deal entirely with such averages at the macroscopic level, biology is in principle irreducible to physics. It further follows that the laws governing the behaviour of biological systems are not inferrable from physical laws although they are compatible with them.

Robert Rosen, Anticipatory Systems, second edition (2012), published posthumously, p. 236

To which I would add: as physics is to biology, so too biology (and also neurology and psychology) to social systems.

Related:

[Comment on this post on LinkedIn]

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Facilitator and Trainer Programmes

We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.

Upcoming events

With me (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise indicated

*For the June events indicated with an asterisk, see Three days in sunny June, London – and note the recent date change!

Agendashift's models, sources, and inspirations
Agendashift’s models, sources, and inspirations