Author: Mike Burrows

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

Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Takeaways from Manchester

Posted on by Mike Burrows

What was it? How did it go? What next? Where next?

What was it?

A three-day, in-person training, Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, which brings together roughly half of the Leading with Outcomes curriculum:

The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation is my 21st century take on a 20th century model, Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model. Fittingly, a fractal model of organisation meets a fractal model of engagement, the former approached in a relational and constraints-based way, the latter replacing the engineering approach more typically employed. These two aspects combine to make something accessible, complexity-friendly, and practical.

The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation
Leading with Outcomes


For an added bonus, Leading in a Transforming Organisation has by design enough experiential content that with some additional online learning it can serve also as an alternative to Leading with Outcomes Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F). At least a couple of participants attended with that purpose in mind.

How did it go?

A small sample of the overwhelmingly positive feedback:

  • Relevant to anyone with leadership responsibilities
  • A helpful journey through the neglected responsibilities of leadership – with helpful tools to attend to those responsibilities
  • A full learning experience – relevant, effective, great to share with others
  • Building on a journey throughout, in a practical, visual way
  • Can clearly see how this would apply to our organisation
  • This is the Leading with Outcomes masterclass

There were things I would change – in fact on day 3 we tested an impromptu change to how we finished each “chapter”, a change that I have since made to the materials for day 2 also. Quicker, more impactful, and more clearly setting off the two “interludes”, those being the opportunities to practice classic Agendashift exercises such as Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle, 15-minute FOTO, and various ways to (per the second slide above) “Organise the strategy”.

I was pleased that after some post-London rework, certain themes came out much more strongly:

  1. The value in a bottom-up understanding of organising – not that it doesn’t also work top down, but a bottom-up understanding is essential if you want to go with the grain of emergence and self-organisation or to promote those at non-trivial scales
  2. The question of How might we increase our decision-making capacity? came up repeatedly. Important again for reasons (i) of self-organisation (ref McCulloch), (ii) because the time will come when you don’t have enough of it, and (iii) because it reframes in an interesting and positive way concepts such as reducing waste (Lean) and minimising cognitive load (Team Topologies)
  3. The importance of context – not only in the senses (i) that it is folly to impose solutions from foreign contexts unquestioningly, or (ii) that context affects relationships, but (iii) in the sense that our delivery work and our strategic decision making will both suffer for lack of it – almost inevitably if we rest more than we should on formal structure, agreed process, and established communication paths

As anticipated in previous posts, Agile coaches were very much in the minority. Our hosts were the University of Manchester (a big thank you to Andrea Place for organising), several of the participants were members of staff with leadership and/or leadership development responsibility, and on day 1 we were joined by a senior leader from another university. It was fascinating to see the models, tools, and exercises applied not to a technology organisation but to a highly respected institution that celebrates its bicentenary next year. I find it very hard to believe that a process-based approach – process meant here in the Agile or Lean sense, not the OD sense – would have been anything like as successful.

What next? Where next?

With the event still fresh in my mind I updated the materials over the weekend. There are corresponding changes to be made to the shorter Adaptive Organisation Workshop, and they include changes to the What Lies Beneath string of exercises, whose blog post I have updated for reference already.

I won’t be re-recording the two-part online Adaptive Organisation module just yet (see Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy below for links). The existing version is still quite new, none of my most recent improvements invalidate in any way what’s there, and it’s more urgent that I re-record the much older Inside-out and Outside-in modules. Not only will it be good to realign those with the newer material, it will let me retire the old learning management system and thereby improve the Academy’s onboarding experience.

I’m hoping to run the three-day in-person event at least twice publicly in the UK next year. Very likely in London, and having taken it north to Manchester, I’m also looking at doing it somewhere between Bournemouth and Brighton on the south coast. Mainland Europe would be good too – Germany and/or Scandinavia seeming the most likely destinations. If you are interested in any of these options or any other (public or private), and especially if you can help get a group together (it doesn’t have to be large), let me know.

I intend to do the abovementioned 1-day Adaptive Organisation workshop in person a few times before I offer it online, in both cases only privately. Accordingly, introductory pricing (with further discounts for public sector, non-profit, etc) remains available until the end of January, possibly for delivery at a later date if you get your order in soon enough. Unless a longer trip can be made worthwhile, I’m looking to do it in the UK or in European destinations easily reachable from Manchester or East Midlands airports. If you’re suitably located and your organisation could use an organisational strategy exercise soon, there’s an opportunity here not to be missed.

Upcoming events

February

March

*TTT/F and (where shown) LIKE events include free one-year membership of the Leading with Outcomes Authorised Facilitator programme, upgradeable to Authorised Trainer at any time. Both of those include access to the video-based Leading with Outcomes training and the full range of Agendashift assessment tools.

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:

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

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

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.

A small update to the Constraints Club exercise

Posted on by Mike Burrows

With a week to go to the Manchester training, let me mention a recent (post-Melbourne) update to the Constraints Club exercise. As you may recall, this forms part of the string of exercises described in some detail in the blog post What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints), which I have updated too.

For full context, read that post. Here though is the relevant slide, to which I have added the question “Out of what does that emerge?”:

Image: The Constraints Club slide

About the Manchester training (see Upcoming events below), this is probably my last opportunity to mention the following:

  • 1-day, 2-day and 3-day tickets available. Use BLOG20 for 20% off, and ping me if another discount might apply. There will be NHS and university staff attending – they and other public/educational/non-profit employees get at least 40% off.
  • It is not its primary purpose, but I should mention that as described on the event page and below, it offers a path to Authorised Leading with Outcomes Facilitator and Trainer also.

Upcoming events

February

March

*TTT/F and (where shown) LIKE events include free one-year membership of the Leading with Outcomes Authorised Facilitator programme, upgradeable to Authorised Trainer at any time. Both of those include access to the video-based Leading with Outcomes training and the full range of Agendashift assessment tools.

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:

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

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

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.

Agendashift roundup, October 2023

Posted on by Mike Burrows

In this edition: From Melbourne to Manchester; Adaptive Organisation workshops; Adaptive Organisation online; More free sessions; Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and alternatives; Top posts

From Melbourne to Manchester

It was a privilege to open the inaugural Kanban Australia – congratulations to Daniel Ploeg and the team there for putting on such a great event! The Leading in a Transforming Organisation training/workshop held the preceding week wasn’t as well attended as we might have liked, but it was highly productive nevertheless. Two blog posts describe some of what came out of it:

My eldest son moved to Sydney last year, so if anyone wants me back in Australia, count me in 🙂 Between training and conference we enjoyed the weekend together in Melbourne, and I joined him in Sydney afterwards.

Back in the UK, my youngest son lives in Manchester, and by pure coincidence that happens to be the location of the next Leading in a Transforming Organisation, which begins in two weeks on November 14th. Our hosts are the University of Manchester (thank you Andrea), and we have already the most diverse group of attendees signed up I have yet managed to assemble. There is still time to grab a place:

1-day, 2-day and 3-day tickets available. Use BLOG20 for 20% off, and ping me if another discount might apply. There will be NHS and university staff attending – they and other public/educational/non-profit employees get 40% off.

It is not its primary purpose, but I should mention that as described on the event page and below, it offers a path to Authorised Leading with Outcomes Facilitator and Trainer also.

Adaptive Organisation workshops

This new 1-day workshop takes the two-part Adaptive Organisation training module (two days of training when done in person, three days when taken with Foundation) and dials down the training dimension to make it all about the conversations your organisation needs to have with itself. Read more in the recent announcement:

For myself, I am offering this workshop only privately, initially with introductory pricing. The materials are available already to authorised Facilitators and Trainers, and if the latter want to experiment with offering it publicly, I won’t stand in their way.

Adaptive Organisation online

Quick updates on the online version of the two-part Adaptive Organisation module:

There is still some work to be done, but were you to start Foundation now, there’s a good chance that the beta tags will gone by the time you get to the above. Don’t wait for part 1 to get re-recorded as version 2.1 or later – that won’t happen until after the Inside-out and Outside-in strategy modules are re-recorded and I can retire the old learning management system, early 2024.

While we’re here, my Adaptive Organisation-related keynote gets an online airing on the 9th, courtesy Blackmetric’s BA community meetup (thank you Adrian Reed):

A busy day, as you’ll see in a moment!

More free sessions

The first free experience/practice session took place last week. A lot to fit in the hour but we did it, just! The next of those and the existing webinar/AMA sessions, one of each per month:

Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and alternatives

Unusually, the next TTT/F is in person:

That is thanks to another conference (thank you Prachi, Noopur, and team):

Really glad to be revisiting India – I’ve been several times, thoroughly enjoyed it every time, and after Australia, it will be only my second trip abroad since covid!

I have pencilled in the next online TTT/F for February:

  • 6-14 February, online, Tuesday & Wednesday afternoons (UK time):
    Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) – to be confirmed

I’ll announce that separately when the booking page is up.

Together with some extra online study and an onboarding call, your alternative to TTT/F is the in-person Leading in a Transforming Organisation. If you would like me to hold one of those somewhere near you in 2024, please get in touch. I’m thinking a couple in the UK (London and perhaps the south coast) and in mainland Europe too (Germany and/or Sweden perhaps). I’m open to travelling further (ie North America and Asia) if numbers or other opportunities make the longer trip worthwhile.

Top posts

  1. What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints)
  2. 15-minute FOTO’s cheat mode
  3. My favourite Clean Language question (January 2019)
  4. Announcing a new Adaptive Organisation workshop (and more)
  5. On values, meaningfulness, and change – parallels with Bateson and Mead (May 2022)

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:

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

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

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.

Announcing a new Adaptive Organisation workshop (and more)

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Announcing:

  1. The immediate availability of the Leading with Outcomes Adaptive Organisation workshop

And closely related to that:

  1. Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes and scales, v2.1 beta
  2. Updates on Leading in a Transforming Organisation, Manchester
  3. New experience/practice sessions begin next week

1. Announcing the immediate availability of the Leading with Outcomes Adaptive Organisation Workshop

This new 1-day workshop takes the two-part Adaptive Organisation training module (two days of training when done in person, three days when taken with Foundation) and dials down the training dimension to make it all about the conversations your organisation needs to have with itself.

It follows much the same structure as the training:

  1. Introduction
  2. Delivery-Discovery-Renewal – value-creating work and how it is coordinated and organised
  3. Adaptive Strategising – keeping us in the game, strategising and self-governing
  4. Mutual Trust Building – addressing the formal organisation’s deficit in information and decision-making capacity
  5. Between and Across Scales – examining the relationships between scales of organisation
  6. Organising at Human Scale – promoting adaptation, innovation, and learning at all scales
  7. What Lies Beneath – dealing with organisational constraints

Points 1-5 above each correspond to a section of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment, and we’ll be working with that, making this a thorough health-check for your organisation. Per this recent blog post, the final part of the workshop takes it all forward into action, via some very interesting new tools for identifying and visualising organisational constraints.

The material has already been made available to authorised Leading with Outcomes facilitators and trainers. For myself, I am pleased to offer it in the form of a private, 1-day, in-person workshop. I charge a fixed rate for anywhere in mainland UK, and I make things as easy as I can for European destinations easily reachable from Manchester or East Midlands airport also. Outside those parameters – further afield, online, or spread over multiple days – let’s see what we can work out.

2. Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes and scales, v2.1 beta

I have already mentioned the two-part Adaptive Organisation training module on which the new workshop is based. This second announcement relates to its presentation in the form of online, video-based, self-paced training at the Agendashift Academy.

Following on from Adaptive Organisation (I): Business agility at every scale (v2.0 beta), I have released the first chapter of Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes and scales (v2.1 beta). Still to come in part II: two more chapters and an “interlude”, one of two windows into the in-person Leading in a Transforming Organisation. The beta tag will disappear when I’ve released all the videos and done their captions (still in progress for part I) and student workbook. Part I will at some point be re-recorded at version 2.1 or later but there is no great rush to do so – the two parts remain compatible.

Part I develops the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a model to describe any organisational scope at any scale (or many/all such scopes all at once!). Part II pays attention to issues of scale:

  1. Relationships between scopes at different scales – between team and team-of-teams for example
  2. The difficulty with which organisations adapt as scale increases
  3. Identifying and managing organisational constraints

3. Updates on Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Manchester, 14-16 November

This will be my most diverse group yet at a public training. Thanks to staff from the NHS and two universities (three if you count former staff), it’s quite possible that consultants, coaches, and trainers won’t be in the majority. An experience to savour I think!

New this time: with some additional study, this event allows prospective trainers (not only facilitators) to bypass Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F); further information about that on the event page.

The material (shared with Adaptive Organisation parts I & II) can be considered well-tested now, even a joy to teach! Between London, Melbourne, and my preparations for Manchester, each of the two parts fits comfortably in a day, and they take things more consistently in an emergence and complexity-friendly way, which is to say bottom-up. Not that it was ever top-down, but making it more consistent has definitely added to its impact.

While still in Melbourne I wrote up two changes:

And the Manchester event itself:

4. New experience/practice sessions begin next week

Next week, the first of what will become a monthly fixture:

A different assessment tool each month, and we’re starting with the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment (mini edition), a version of the one used in all the Adaptive Organisation workshop and training products mentioned in this post. A great way to get a firsthand impression of what it’s all about!

Upcoming events

February

March

*TTT/F and (where shown) LIKE events include free one-year membership of the Leading with Outcomes Authorised Facilitator programme, upgradeable to Authorised Trainer at any time. Both of those include access to the video-based Leading with Outcomes training and the full range of Agendashift assessment tools.

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:

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

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

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.

What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints)

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Updates

  • 2024-05-10: Minor edits for consistency, in the summary most especially
  • 2023-11-18: Improvements to the Constraints Club wording; Removed a pre-visualisation step of sorting by difficulty before sorting by energy
  • 2023-11-07: Added the question “Out of what does that emerge?” to the Constraints Club exercise

This is a writeup of What Lies Beneath, a new string of exercises that now forms the final session of the Leading with Outcomes module Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes, and scales, and by extension, the 3-day in-person training Leading in a Transforming Organisation. I tested it in that latter form in Melbourne, Australia last week and will be bringing it back to the UK soon (Manchester, November 14-16).

In right to left style, I will describe it backwards:

  • Premise, goals, next steps
  • Visualisation: Estuarine Framework
  • Inquiry: Constraints Club
  • Establishing context: Assessment

I will summarise the process from start to finish at the end of this post.

Premise, goals, next steps

In a complex adaptive system (CAS), lasting change is achieved in two ways:

  1. By shocking the system into finding a new configuration from which regression is unlikely
  2. By changing the constraints under which the system operates

The first has some obvious drawbacks. How can you be sure how the system will respond? Not to rule out that option entirely but coherently with goals of adaptability (more on that later), we’ll be taking the second route. Broadly, we identify constraints that are open to change and prioritise some of those for further work, doing that in such a way that participants are well motivated to find and then act on potential solutions. That “moving into action” aspect – ideation, hypotheses, experiments, and feedback – is a mature part of Agendashift / Leading with Outcomes, and it won’t be developed further here.

Visualisation: Estuarine Framework

Feeding that “moving into action” aspect is this visual organisation of constraints – constraints having been identified in a generative process to be described shortly:

This is Dave Snowden’s Estuarine Framework, which comprises an Energy/Time “affordance grid” overlaid with boundaries between four groups of constraints:

  1. Those we accept as given
  2. Those we can’t manage on our own but might engage on with others
  3. Those we can manage
  4. Those volatile or flimsy enough that we need do little more than monitor them

The significance of the colours will be explained later, in the Inquiry section.

The Estuarine Framework is the visualisation part of Dave Snowden’s Estuarine Mapping [1]. I have been guilty of confusing the two names, but to disambiguate them: Mapping here is the overall process, and Dave uses Framework consistently with something familiar to most readers of this blog, his Cynefin Framework.

Energy here refers to the amount of energy (or quantities convertible to energy) required to make a constraint no longer applicable; Time similarly. Our inquiry process (which differs from Dave’s) captures them in the form of “true and fair statements”; here we are organising them according to the energy and time required to make those statements no longer true.

Consistent with other mapping techniques in the Agendashift / Leading with Outcome repertoire we build the visualisation in stages. This is not necessarily how Dave does it, but it will feel familiar to many:

  1. Beginning with extreme examples – most and least energy requirement – arrange vertically by energy requirement, using all the available space
  2. Decide where the 0 of the energy axis sits (some constraints may have enough pent-up energy that their net energy requirement is negative)
  3. Keeping vertical positions fixed, organise horizontally by time requirement, again beginning with extreme examples so as to use all the available space
  4. Make adjustments where an energy/time tradeoff may exist
  5. Regarding constraints as affordances (ie things we can interact with in order to effect change), prioritise some for action, marking them visually in some way

In Melbourne, we built our visualisation horizontally on a tabletop, convenient in some ways but not at all conducive to photography. A photo of our work in Melbourne is available on request but it is so awful I do not include it here! That niggle aside, the feedback (linkedin.com) was enthusiastic, most notably:

“Energised by the E/T mapping exercise”

Inquiry: Constraints Club

The first rule of Constraints Club is not to mention constraints

Constraint can be a difficult word, often interpreted as something negative. But without the tendency of constraints to contain or connect, complex systems would not cohere. Although the preceding training / workshop material does deal explicitly with constraints, with that difficulty in mind we are experimenting here with identifying constraints without mentioning the term – a successful experiment, as it turns out.

In place of Estuarine Mapping’s constraint typology, a generative process:

  1. Why is that important? – of a prompt, story, obstacle or outcome we have prioritised or captured
  2. How do we experience that today? What stories can we tell?
    • Short sentences, true and fair observations
    • No blaming, theorising, or selling (solutions or theories)
    • If you struggle to write something that most people would easily agree with, scope it down – independent sentences, as few as needed
  3. What makes it that way? What keeps it that way? Out of what does that emerge?
    • More true and fair observations, kept separately (or different colour)
  4. Drilling down or expanding, rinse & repeat from 3, 2, or 1

For two aspects of that process, I’m grateful to Mushon Zer-Aviv, who is also doing some Estuarine-adjacent experimentation. The first is the idea of answering with short sentences that are (in my words) “true and fair observations”. The second is the drilling down aspect, which Mushon does with multiple mapping exercises. “No blaming, theorising, or selling a solution” references the Agendashift / Leading with Outcomes exercise Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle [2] that participants will by this time be familiar with; Mushon deals with those issues in his own way.

The idea (if not the wording) behind “scope it down” in cases of disagreement is Dave’s.

Mainly with visualisation in mind, answers to questions 2 and 3 are kept separate – in separate lists on paper or by using differently coloured stickies. This explains the two-tone colouring in the visualisation slide in the preceding section.

Establishing context: Assessment

The string of exercises we call What Lies Beneath begins with a twist or two on the long-established Agendashift Assessment Debrief. The first twist is that we’re debriefing the assessment as a whole not at the beginning of the event, but towards its end. We have however been interacting with it section by section for some time, developing all the while a model of organisation that is both relational and constraint-based, the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation [3]. This is an innovative “re-presentation” of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM), making it more accessible and (in the modern sense) complexity-friendly.

In contrast with typical systems practice, at no point do we seek to establish system boundaries. Instead, we take a “start where you are, everywhere all at once” approach, and this is reflected in the invitation to the assessment [4]. Participants each bring their perspectives on all the organisational scopes with which they individually identify, likely at multiple scales of organisation, ranging from sub-team to whole organisation and sometimes (as was the case last week) beyond.

The full Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment template has 35 prompts in the following 5 sections:

  1. Delivery, Discovery, Renewal
  2. Adaptive Strategising
  3. Mutual Trust Building
  4. Between Spaces, Scopes, and Scales
  5. Organising at Human Scale

A free, 12-prompt mini template is available at [5].

Each participant scores each prompt on a four-point scale, then “stars” (ie multi-votes) prompts they would prioritise for further development. Participants may also compose their own prompts, for which purpose a style guide is provided.

The typical survey debrief proceeds as follows:

  1. Score distributions overall
  2. Areas of closest agreement
  3. Strongest
  4. Weakest
  5. Most starred (ie most votes)

The second twist is to return at the end of the debrief to step 2, Areas of closest agreement, reviewing prompts that have the strongest consensus on scores. In the first pass, we have used this page of the debrief report to build confidence in the results, spending little time on what seems uncontroversial. Second time through though, we are wondering whether something interesting might be going on. Given the range of scopes and scales considered, might this level of consensus be seen as remarkable? What might explain that? The Constraints Club exercise isn’t limited to areas of high consensus on scores (rather on the strength of desire for change), but the thought certainly carries across.

Summary: What Lies Beneath

To finish, a summary of the process, this time forwards:

  1. Assessment Debrief
    • Unconventionally, this finishes with revisiting areas of closest agreement, ie strongest consensus on scores
    • After the debrief, prioritise prompts that identify areas in which there is the strongest desire for change
  2. Constraints Club
    • Initially to those prioritised prompts, in answer to the questions “How do we experience that today? What stories can we tell?“ and “What makes it that way? What keeps it that way? Out of what does that emerge?“, generate constraints in two lists (or colours)
    • Drill down and/or expand until a suitable number have been generated
  3. Estuarine Framework
    • Arrange by energy and time
    • Draw boundaries
  4. Moving Into Action
    • Prioritise constraints
    • Ideation, experimentation, feedback, etc

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my thanks to the following:

  • Dave Snowden, for the Estuarine Framework
  • Mushon Zer-Aviv, as mentioned in the Constraints Club section
  • Participants at the Melbourne Leading in a Transforming Organisation, October 2023, where the What Lies Beneath string was first tested

References

[1] Dave Snowden, Estuarine Framework (cynefin.io)
[2] Mike Burrows Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle (agendashift.com)
[3] Mike Burrows, Everywhere all at once: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (docs.gogle.com)
[4] Mike Burrows, An invitation to a more thoughtful assessment, September 2023, (blog.agendashift.com)
[5] Global survey: Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, mini edition (agendashift.com)

Upcoming events

February

March

*TTT/F and (where shown) LIKE events include free one-year membership of the Leading with Outcomes Authorised Facilitator programme, upgradeable to Authorised Trainer at any time. Both of those include access to the video-based Leading with Outcomes training and the full range of Agendashift assessment tools.

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:

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

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

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.

15-minute FOTO’s cheat mode

Posted on by Mike Burrows

15-minute FOTO, Agendashift’s Clean Language-inspired coaching game, has a cheat mode! It’s a question that’s not on the card*:

The secret question:

Why is that important?

If you’re starting with an obstacle that seems to beg the answer to “What would you like to have happen?”, try “Why is that important?” instead. Much more interesting! Yesterday in Melbourne, it worked so well that nearly every conversation in the game began that way. You can’t be sure that what gets generated will be an obstacle or an outcome – if the answer is long, probably some of both – so listen carefully and choose your next question accordingly.

That’s not its only use. If you feel that you’ve exhausted “Then what happens?”, try “Why is that important?”. Want to go back to something mentioned earlier in the conversation? Same question, prefixing it with “And when…” to reference the thing of interest.

If “Why is that important?” works so well, why is it not on the card? Well, it’s not a canonical Clean question; it’s only “cleanish”. In the wrong context, that question can be loaded with assumption. If I ask it of (say) an obstacle that someone has taken the trouble to prioritise, refine, and so on, it’s important, no problem. But if I ask it of something whose importance isn’t established, I’m making an assumption. If our goal is to explore the model existing or being built in someone else’s mind, let’s treat it (and by implication, that other person, the client) with due respect. To bring our own assumptions into the conversation would risk tainting that model, perhaps irrecoverably. So use with care!

I have no plans to add that question (or any other – Clean or cleanish) to the cue card. I’m in no hurry to add it to the facilitation deck either. It can be our little secret 😉

While we’re here, a couple of special offers:

Both of those links have the discounts already applied for you. For the first one, larger discounts are available for for public sector, non-profits, etc; ping me if they apply.

*Note that the card has received some minor updates recently, most notably the four bullets upper left, straddling the Obstacles/Outcomes boundary – not a replacement for the facilitation deck but a useful reminder. Grab the latest from here if you’re an Academy subscriber, from the 15-minute FOTO dropbox if you have access to that, or request access here.

Related

Upcoming events

February

March

*TTT/F and (where shown) LIKE events include free one-year membership of the Leading with Outcomes Authorised Facilitator programme, upgradeable to Authorised Trainer at any time. Both of those include access to the video-based Leading with Outcomes training and the full range of Agendashift assessment tools.

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:

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

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

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.

Agendashift roundup, September 2023

Posted on by Mike Burrows

In this edition: Experience/practice sessions; Leading in a Transforming Organisation; Looking ahead to December; Top posts

(New! Free!) Experience/Practice sessions

I have added two more dates to the calendar, the first experience/practice sessions of what should become a monthly fixture (series link):

They’re a chance to try one of our famously inclusive, non-prescriptive, and framework-agnostic assessments (a different template each month) and to experience with others some post-assessment conversations, Agendashift-style.

Post-debrief conversations will follow the IdOO (“I do”) pattern – Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes, for which materials based on Leading with Outcomes: Foundation will be provided. If, within that structure, you would like to take the brief opportunity to practice our Clean Language coaching game 15-minute FOTO (Academy version here), this should be possible, numbers permitting.

These are in addition to the free monthly webinars that continue to cycle through the three “questions that drive us” (series link). The next two of those:

Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

I’m both counting down the days to Australia and looking ahead to Manchester!

This is where it’s happening in Agendashift-land right now. If you’re tired of approaches to organisational challenges that can’t see beyond process (and trust me, it’s liberating to get past that) and have little of consequence to say about complexity, get yourself to one of these if you possibly can.

I should mention that my trip to Australia – my first trip abroad since COVID – is thanks to Kanban Australia 2023. Thank you Daniel and the rest of the organising team!

Looking ahead to December

In early December I’m off to India for Kanban India and the last TTT/F of the year:

And a thank you to Noopur, Prachi, and the rest of the organising team there too!

Top posts

  1. An invitation to a more thoughtful assessment (September)
  2. My favourite Clean Language question (January 2019)
  3. What I really think about Scrum (August 2020)
  4. Your organisation in 5 networks (November 2022)
  5. From Reverse STATIK to a ‘Pathway’ for continuous transformation (October 2019)

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:

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

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

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.

An invitation to a more thoughtful assessment

Posted on by Mike Burrows

All the organisational scopes you identify with

Before you begin, think about all the organisational scopes you identify with. Formally-recognised or otherwise, your scopes bring together people, their value-creating work, and a sense of shared identity. Yours might include:

  • Teams, teams-of-teams, or bigger
  • Scopes smaller than teams
  • Cross-cutting scopes that intersect with multiple other scopes

Next, two kinds of “healthy and productive”:

  1. Thinking about your scopes individually, how healthy and productive would you say they are?
  2. How healthy and productive would you say are the relationships between scopes?

To the assessment itself:

  • As you score each assessment prompt, try to choose a point on our four-point scale that’s representative of all of your scopes
  • Where that’s hard to do authentically, you can restrict yourself to the scope or scopes with which you identify you most strongly
  • Don’t worry about being inconsistent – ranges of experience, opinion, and perspective are just as interesting as consensus, and our process will make good use of both

That’s quite a change from “Choose a scope and stick to it”! Given its length, I don’t know that I would use it frequently outside the Adaptive Organisation assessment, but for that one, it’s more in keeping with the module of the same name’s “Start where you are, everywhere all at once” approach.

Experience the full version of the assessment for yourself via the Melbourne (October) or Manchester (November) editions of Leading in a Transforming Organisation, or the online module Adaptive Organisation (I): Business Agility at every scale. Or a private event! If the 3-day Leading in a Transforming Organisation would be infeasible, various shorter options are available, and a new 1-day Adaptive Organisation workshop is ready to test, and on favourable terms. If that could be of interest, get in touch.

Related

Upcoming events

February

March

*TTT/F and (where shown) LIKE events include free one-year membership of the Leading with Outcomes Authorised Facilitator programme, upgradeable to Authorised Trainer at any time. Both of those include access to the video-based Leading with Outcomes training and the full range of Agendashift assessment tools.

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:

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

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

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.

Adaptive Organisation (I): Business agility at every scale v2.0 beta

Posted on by Mike Burrows

As first mentioned to Academy subscribers here, I’m delighted to announce that the videos for all three chapters of v2.0 of Adaptive Organisation (I): Business agility at every scale have been released. As done previously for the Leading with Outcomes: Foundation module, it remains in beta until I’ve released the new workbook and added captions (hand-edited) to all videos. The previous version (v1.6) remains available for the time being on the old learning management system.

Part I covers key building blocks every leader needs to know about organising for adaptability:

  • The three overlapping spaces of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation
  • Integrating strategy, delivery, and mutual trust-building
  • Managing complexity, finding balance in these and other relationships at every scale

As well as the usual improvements in flow we’ve seen with iterations of this and other modules, these are the main changes since v1.6:

  • A greater and earlier emphasis on emergence and self-organisation
  • An earlier introduction of this modules’s complexity-friendly “start where you are, everywhere all at once” approach, seen first with the accompanying assessment
  • Better integrating the relational and constraint-based aspects of organising (we’ll build on this in some leading-edge complexity-related material in part II)
  • A new interlude between chapters 2 and 3 incorporating workshop exercises from our in-person training, Leading in a Transforming Organisation

For news on progress on both parts I and II (the latter under development as part of my preparations for my Melbourne and Manchester trainings):

*Subscriber-only. For access to these and to all the Leading with Outcomes modules, visit our Store.

Related:

Upcoming events

February

March

*TTT/F and (where shown) LIKE events include free one-year membership of the Leading with Outcomes Authorised Facilitator programme, upgradeable to Authorised Trainer at any time. Both of those include access to the video-based Leading with Outcomes training and the full range of Agendashift assessment tools.

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:

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

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

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.

Agendashift roundup, August 2023

Posted on by Mike Burrows

In this late summer edition: Responding to “Scrum is cancer”; Foundation 2.8, Adaptive Organisation 2.0; Looking ahead to the autumn season; Top posts

Responding to “Scrum is cancer”

Doing the rounds on LinkedIn and X / Twitter is the abovementioned. My response here (linkedin.com).

Related:

Foundation 2.8, Adaptive Organisation 2.0

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation version 2.8 beta is now out of beta. As mentioned last month it is to be found not on the Agendashift Academy’s old learning management system (LMS) but on what until recently served only as the community platform for Academy subscribers. The latter is itself developing as an LMS and it presents therefore a consolidation opportunity.

Again as mentioned last month, of the several iterations of Foundation so far, this is the one most influenced by the experience of other authorised trainers (ie not only me) delivering it in person. It is definitely a smoother experience – 12 minutes shorter for no loss of content!

Next up for the same treatment is the two-part Adaptive Organisation module. Recording has started for the first part, Adaptive Organisation (I): Business agility at every scale. It will include some exciting new content (we’re turning up the dial on the complexity-related matters already integral to it), but not at the cost of any significant increase in length. At least that’s the plan; what I can promise is that for Academy students authorised trainers alike it will be a smoother experience.

The previous version (1.6) of Adaptive Organisation is still available meanwhile, and I dare say it remains the most refreshing treatment of its subject matter you will find anywhere. And don’t forget the Agendashift classics, Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact and Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success.

With more about what to expect, some related posts:

If you’re not already a subscriber, sign up here.

Looking ahead to the autumn season

It being the summer here (though not where I am next headed)…

September and December bring different opportunities to do Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F):

Those are, respectively, the last chance to do TTT/F online this year, and the first to be held in person. Between those two, I’m doing Leading in a Transforming Organisation on opposite sides of the world:

These events are driving forward the Foundation and Adaptive Organisation modules as mentioned above (one day of the former, two days of the latter), and it has been a delight to see how well they go together – hence the abovementioned resequencing. If you have any interest in what it means to lead in an organisation that is transforming (and what organisation isn’t?), join us!

I should mention that my trips to Australia and India – my first trips abroad since COVID – are thanks to these conferences:

I’m grateful to the organisers of both. And yes, there will be some kanban content in my keynotes – I haven’t forgotten my roots!

Finally, with the end of summer approaching, there are only days to wait until the monthly webinar/AMA sessions restart:

Top posts

  1. Explaining the “unreasonable effectiveness” of Agile (July)
  2. When not to do Celebration-5W (August)
  3. My favourite Clean Language question (January 2019)
  4. Leaders as keepers of context (September 2022)
  5. Picturing Foundation (May)

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:

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

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

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.