Author: Mike Burrows

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

When not to do Celebration-5W

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Celebration-5W is Agendashift’s trusty and energising context-capturing kickoff exercise. I say “trusty”, because I don’t think I have ever experienced a workshop that used it suffer for lack of context, and there have been times when I have regretted not using it. But could it be used inappropriately?

Before answering that question, a reminder of how it works. It’s in the genre of the time travel exercise, and its conceit is that you (by which I mean workshop participants) are using the journalistic 5W questions – Who, What, When, Where, Why – on the celebration you’re going to have when your next big breakthrough (one you haven’t made yet) is ready to be celebrated.

So, when shouldn’t you use it?

First, what is context? Here I mean it in the sense of what participants need to understand in common in order to have a productive conversation, and it lives at the intersection of situation and scope. If that is well enough established by the invitation and/or prework (an Agendashift assessment for example), you might not need it.

Then there are tradeoffs to consider. A narrower context is easier to understand, and for those for whom it is relevant, easier to engage with. The flip side of course is that for others, a narrower context can exclude people, perhaps unhelpfully. Conversely, a broader context engages more people but possibly at the cost of a more challenging experience.

Before choosing a context exercise or designing one, ask yourself the following:

  • Could it be that context will be well enough established already?
  • If we need to narrow (or possibly broaden) context, which dimension needs the most adjustment: scope or situation?

Perhaps to narrow the organisational scope would be to prejudge the outcome. Perhaps the situation deserves broad and diverse representation. Perhaps the same issues impact on different parts of the organisation in very different ways, but still the opportunity to explore them from different directions will be helpful. Perhaps the concept to be explored is sufficiently independent of scale that it is applicable to every scope.

“Perhaps” – several of those there! What I am learning is that the more the situation, issue, or concept at the heart of the event can be seen as scale-independent, the less you need convergence on scope. For example, if you are focussing on something as general as leadership, an exercise that could have the effect of limiting organisational scope might do more harm than good; stories of “leadership at every level” might be a much better starting point. Conversely, process and process-related issues don’t scale well, in which case an exercise like Celebration-5W should get you off to a great start. If it brings multiple scopes into play such that they can learn from each other, so much the better!

How does play out in Leading with Outcomes? Because it emphasises patterns over tools, Leading with Outcomes: Foundation doesn’t use Celebration-5W; it does however ask the question “What and who are we dealing with?”. Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale doesn’t use it either, but for a very different reason: the fractal model at its heart is scale-independent, and to consider how that works at (and between) multiple scopes and scales simultaneously (“everywhere all at once”) is very much the point. Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact and Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success do use it; if there is an inside and an outside, scope matters, and we might as well settle on it (or them) early.

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, July 2023

Posted on by Mike Burrows

In this edition: Foundation re-recorded and re-platformed; Looking ahead to the autumn season; Top posts

Foundation re-recorded and re-platformed

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation version 2.8 beta is now out on a different platform to the previously-recorded version, 2.1. As an experiment, the newer one is to be found not on the current learning management system (LMS), but on the community site for Agendashift Academy subscribers. The latter’s underlying platform is itself developing as an LMS and it presents therefore a consolidation opportunity.

Of the several iterations of Foundation so far, this is the one most influenced by the experience of trainers delivering it in person. It is definitely a smoother experience – 12 minutes shorter for no loss of content!

I’ll remove the beta tag when I have finished adding captions, which I’ll release one video at a time. AI does a decent first approximation but I still take the trouble to edit them manually.

With more about what to expect, some related posts:

And to sign up:

Looking ahead to the autumn season

September, October, November, December. Ok, December isn’t really autumn, and neither are the preceding months if you’re in the southern hemisphere (to which I am headed), but it will do!

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 (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!

While we’re here, there is no August webinar/AMA session. Not too long to wait though:

Top posts

  1. Explaining the “unreasonable effectiveness” of Agile (July)
  2. Three ways to understand the Leading with Outcomes universe (June)
  3. The wholeheartedness equation (June)
  4. My favourite Clean Language question (January 2019)
  5. Avoiding the disaster that is ‘solution-driven’ (June)

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.

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

Posted on by Mike Burrows

[Discuss on LinkedIn]

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)

[Discuss on LinkedIn]

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.

Explaining the “unreasonable effectiveness” of Agile

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Anyone who has worked in an environment where Agile is working well will agree: when it’s great, it’s really great. However, this post is not about what separates the great from the mediocre or worse (for that I would recommend my 2019 book Right to Left), but about Agile’s impact on the organisation more broadly.

Agile’s benefits are usually touted in terms of things like these:

  • Delivery speed (“twice the work in half the time”)
  • Rate of learning, enabled by incremental and iterative delivery coupled with regular reflection
  • Ability to adapt (“responding to change over following a plan”)
  • Customer satisfaction, enabled by the above

Don’t worry, I’m not about to say that there’s anything wrong with any of these. Notice however how all but the last one are about what’s happening in the team or value stream, and as is so often the case with things Agile-related, none of them have anything at all to say about the wider organisation.

This has long bothered me, but for once I am going to be positive about that poorly understood relationship. What if Agile’s “unreasonable success” (when it happens) could be traced to organisational effects attributable to the Agile manifesto’s emphasis on “individuals and interactions”?

Starting with the team:

  • Improvements to communication and decision-making capacity at team level encourage self-organisation and other emergent behaviours (this relationship has been observed for decades)

Then the overlooked but very significant second-order benefit:

  • The decision-making burden on the surrounding organisation is thereby reduced, increasing both its available decision-making capacity and the possibility of emergent outcomes at larger scales

More succinctly: Agile increases its surrounding organisation’s decision-making capacity. What it does with that is of course down to the organisation itself, but it’s interesting that if its communication capacity is correspondingly good (or correspondingly improved), emergent outcomes are made very much more likely. Nice, and without any mention of process, not the easiest of things to scale!

A couple of parallels:

  • Channeling Modig & Åhlström’s This is Lean, we might describe Agile as “a strategy for improving an organisation’s decision-making capacity”
  • Skelton & Pais’s Team Topologies talks of “reducing cognitive load”. It’s written more with team-level benefits in mind I think, but it’s an excellent starting point

To the first of those (and perhaps the second), it wouldn’t be completely wrong to describe Lean or Lean-Agile in those terms either. But that ship has sailed, and flow remains an important concept even if waste and its elimination lack something in attractiveness if not generativity.

Happily for me, I am free (within reason) to describe the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation in whatever way I like. Already, this idea of “improving an organisation’s decision-making capacity” is one of its key concerns.

Learn more:

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.

Developing & pursuing strategy in the language of outcomes
1

Agendashift roundup, June 2023

Posted on by Mike Burrows

In this edition: Leading in a Transforming Organisation; Between spaces, scopes, and scales; Webinar/AMA series; Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F); Top posts

Leading in a Transforming Organisation

Last week’s Leading in a Transforming Organisation in London was a special and productive time. Here are some of the participants sharing afterwards on LinkedIn:

As well as plenty of encouragement, I’ve had feedback of the actionable and throught-provoking kind too, and the material will continue to evolve. A sincere thank you to Philippe Guenet in that regard (I should add that he’s doing interesting things with the Foundation module himself). And thank you to our hosts, Craig Lucia, Stan Wade, and Adrian Potter of PA Consulting.

Next up (the Manchester event added today):

Meanwhile, two of this month’s blog posts flow from preparing for London or reflecting back on it afterwards:

Between spaces, scopes, and scales

Spurred on by Leading in a Transforming Organisation (from which it borrows), my talk “Between spaces, scopes, and scales” continues to develop. I gave a version to the BCS Agile Specialist Group this week (ie after London), and the recording should be available soon.

Next week I give it in-person in Nottingham:

And online in November:

Webinar/AMA series

I’ve added a couple more dates to the “Questions that drive us” webinar series (note that there won’t be one in August):

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

A reminder that there will be only one more online TTT/F this year (September), the other taking place in Bengaluru, India (December).

See also:

Top posts

  1. Avoiding the disaster that is ‘solution-driven’ (June)
  2. What the (Lean-)Agile scaling frameworks don’t give you (December 2020)
  3. Three ways to understand the Leading with Outcomes universe (June)
  4. Picturing Foundation (May)
  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.

Three ways to understand the Leading with Outcomes universe

Posted on by Mike Burrows

[2023-06-29 Updated the middle section to make the three approaches more visible]
[2023-06-30 Added the proposed Manchester event (November) to the calendar]

My 3-day training Leading in a Transforming Organisation went really well last week, can’t wait to do it again1! Inevitably, the question of what relates Agendashift, Leading with Outcomes, The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, etc came up, and while my answers were reasonable enough, I realised I still had a bit of work to do. So here we are with not just one, but three ways of joining the dots:

  1. Perspective: Values-based, Outcome-oriented2, Relational
  2. Curriculum: Patterns, Approaches, Tools
  3. Framework: Metaphor, Model, Method

1. Perspective: Values-based, Outcome-oriented, Relational

Essentially the sequence of my books, this progression is the most historically accurate:

Values-based: For me this began with a system of nine values abstracted from the Kanban Method, identified first in a 2013 blog post3 and expanded on in my first book Kanban from the Inside (2014). Not needing to limit myself to writing about principles and practices, nor even only to Kanban, I enjoyed expanding on those values and demonstrating how other frameworks could – with that values-based perspective – be seen as complementary.

Outcome-oriented: Our big “What if”: What if we put agreement on outcomes before solutions? Followed by How do we keep outcomes in the foreground? and How do we connect the two in a learning process? Around that concept and via a lot of collaborative experimentation, we developed a real alternative to managed change, which the world knows is woeful for anything interesting – so no shortage of motivation there! Agendashift (2018, 2021) describes the engagement model; Right to Left (2019, audiobook 2020) takes that outcome-oriented perspective to the Lean-Agile landscape as a whole. A fourth book (a commission) written for the dialogic/generative OD audience is near completion.

Relational: In both Agendashift and Right to Left there are clues that I am beginning to think in terms of mutual relationships. And inspired by Weick, the perspective shifts from organisation (something easily regarded as static) to organising (something active). More recent than the books, the Leading with Outcomes training material goes on to describe organising as “Finding relationships between things; In and through those relationships, helping their participants realise their potential”. A fifth book is at the planning stage.

2. Curriculum: Patterns, Approaches, Tools

Informed this time by the sequence of the four Leading with Outcomes Modules:

  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

As described recently in Picturing Foundation (May), Foundation’s job is to introduce these key patterns:

  • Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes – the IdOO (“I do”) pattern
  • Right to Left – working backwards from key moments of impact and learning
  • Meaning, Measure, Method – derived from the IdOO pattern, an ideation pattern

Foundation also introduces two complementary and long-established approaches to strategy:

  • Inside-out – starting with the internal experience and capability of the scope in question, working outwards to its external impact
  • Outside-in – starting with its customers, suppliers, competitors, and other aspects of its business environment and working through its internal implications

Leading with Outcomes includes a third approach, seen first in the Outside-in module and brought to the fore in Adaptive Organisation:

  • Relational – framing several crucial aspects of organisation primarily in terms of healthy, productive, and mutually beneficial relationships

Into the patterns plug the tools4, tool selection influenced by context and approach. Some tools are approach-specific; old favourites such as Celebration-5W, 15-minute FOTO, and so on appear in multiple modules. In Foundation meanwhile, we simplify the tools so as not to distract from the patterns.

3. Framework: Metaphor, Model, Method

More concretely: Wholehearted, The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, Agendashift, with the middle one of those taking a more central role.

Wholehearted – the metaphorical coming together of wholeness and “heartedness” as we think about organisation and leadership. In 2018, during the writing of Right to Left, this usage was inspired by the architect and father of the patterns movement, the late Christopher Alexander:

A thing is whole according to how free it is of inner contradictions. When it is at war with itself, and gives rise to forces which act to tear it down, it is unwhole. The more free it is of its own inner contradictions, the more whole and healthy and wholehearted it becomes.

The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander (1980, OUP USA)

Long story short, Wholehearted became the name of our mission statement and part of Agendashift’s branding (“the wholehearted engagement model”). Today, the concept appears in two of the four modules of the Leading with Outcomes training curriculum; Leading with Outcomes: Foundation opens with it. All that time, I have made a point of keeping wholehearted aspirational, exploring some of its implications but taking care not to ruin it by defining it as a process or some other model.

The role of organisational model (or should I say “model of organising”?) is taken by The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation5, which is roughly sketched out in the closing chapters of the 2021 second edition of Agendashift and much better developed in the final Leading with Outcomes module, Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale. It began as a Lean-Agile and outcome-oriented interpretation of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM), this providing the structure into which other favourite models could be plugged in. It has since become a radical “re-presentation” of VSM, taking care to minimise what could be regarded either as vestiges of implementation detail or part of the systems practitioner’s process, and to emphasise strongly meanwhile its relational aspects. Further, and in the interests of accessibility, we limit its scope to organisations (Beer’s original model is more abstract) and engage with it progressively (a high-level “top view” comprising just three “spaces”, more detailed “inside views” for each space, and a “side view” that exposes the relationships between organisational scales).

The model loses none of its diagnostic power, but method-wise, there’s a gap. Taking the place of typical systems practice (as-is modelling, diagnosis, and perhaps to-be modelling, etc), we have Agendashift, and it’s a fundamental change. Bypassing the modelling step and resisting the urge to scope things down, we integrate many organisational perspectives, participants bringing experiences from all of the organisational scopes and scales with which they identify, from whole organisation down to sub-team – “Everywhere all at once”, you might say6. While exploring the model situationally to the depth appropriate to the event (anything between a 2-hour assessment debrief and 2-3 days of in-depth training7), participants are developing organisational strategy in the language of outcomes, producing a form of strategy highly amenable to testing.

The Leading with Outcomes universe

To finish, let me draw attention to this post’s title: Three ways to understand the Leading with Outcomes universe. This could just as easily have identified Agendashift instead – it is after all the longest-established of the brands mentioned here! I’m not saying that I won’t continue to describe Leading with Outcomes as “Agendashift as leadership development”, or to use the two names interchangeably. Neither do I have any plans to rebrand the Agendashift Academy! But especially in relation to the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, Agendashift as the method to complement the model (replacing more traditional methods) seems important somehow. Funny how clarifying the relationship helps to clarify the things it relates. Who knew 😉

Notes

1Melbourne, Australia in October (see calendar below), and there are discussions about putting one on in Manchester in November or early 2024. It comprises one day of Foundation and two of Adaptive Organisation, making three in total. Ping me if interested, or in having one at a city near you.

2While I was planning this post, I initially called this first section Organising Concepts: Values, Outcomes, Relationships. I had forgotten just how important the -oriented of outcome-oriented is, and totally deserved the ensuing confusion! Our direction given by the outcomes we have chosen (for now) to pursue, solutions emerging from the people closest to the need and the opportunity. Outcome-driven (meaning target-driven or perhaps solution-driven in disguise) it is not. That way lies dysfunction. See Avoiding the disaster that is ‘solution-driven’ (June 2023).

3Introducing Kanban through its Values (January 2013)

4See agendashift.com/resources and specifically agendashift.com/asessments for the three approach-specific assessment tools.

5The name is inspired by Kegan & Lahey’s Deliberately Developmental Organisation – see their book An Everyone Culture (2016).

6See the white paper Everywhere all at once: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, an accessible, situational, and complexity-aware presentation of the Viable System Model.

7Between those extremes there is room for a 1-day Adaptive Organisation workshop. If you’re based in the UK or not too far away and might be interested in having one at your organisation, the first one or two will be on favourable terms. Again, ping me if interested.

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.

Developing & pursuing strategy in the language of outcomes

The wholeheartedness equation

Posted on by Mike Burrows

I have a confession to make. I still haven’t delivered the revised manuscript for my fourth book, but in spare moments I have begun work on my fifth, working title Wholehearted: Inside the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, business agility at every scale. There’s nothing like writing to make you revisit things that you thought were settled, and here I am looking again at wholehearted, for five years now the title and theme of Agendashift’s mission. Perhaps you haven’t thought of it in quite these terms before, but if you want your organisation to grow in wholeheartedness, then we’re here to help.

Tentatively (as questions, not prescriptions), let’s take Lean’s¹ “eliminate impediments” and apply it not to flow, but to wholeheartedness. Viewed from two sides (as a system, if you like):

If we eliminate impediments to wholeness, does that improve “heartedness”? If, for example, we simplify lines of communication or address issues of trust or coherence, do we make it more likely that people will be more engaged, acting with purpose and energy?

And going the other way, if we eliminate impediments to “heartedness”, does that improve wholeness? If, for example, we can relieve overburden, might the capacity freed thereby be used to tackle deeper, more structural issues?

I think it’s fair to say that there’s a limit to how much progress you can make on one side of the wholeheartedness equation before the other side begins to dominate. If it’s wholeness you seek, you need heartedness also, and vice versa.

Note, however, the “more likely” and “might” in my examples. Be careful of men bearing virtuous circles! If there is a virtuous circle here, we must (as I have written before) ask what mechanisms sustain it. That’s not delivered by wholehearted on its own as described here, but we do have that covered. Keeping wholehearted doing what it does best, representing an ideal to pursue:

But today’s exercise: if you want your organisation to grow in wholeheartedness, which of its two sides most need your attention? Wholeness or heartedness? And when you do that, then what happens?

¹Further to that Lean inspiration, Philippe Guenet tells me that there are encouraging resonances with The Flow System (Brian Rivera, John W. Turner, and Nigel Thurlow). I haven’t read that yet, but now I think about it, I’m not surprised. It’s on my list.

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
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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.

Developing & pursuing strategy in the language of outcomes

Avoiding the disaster that is ‘solution-driven’

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Organisations live with the status quo (old or new) or with failing or disappointing solutions because they let solutions replace strategy. Whatever goals they might have had, implementing the solution became the thing. Solution-driven, change-managed – call it what you like, it’s a disaster. And because a generation of leaders has been taught that this is “doing it properly”, they can’t see it!

In the following, solution refers to anything we’d like to implement (or at least try to implement) in pursuit of our goals. Products, tools, technologies, practices, frameworks – they all apply. With that broad definition in mind, what does progress look like? Framed as a series of questions, it looks something like this:

  1. Are there solutions that might work for us here?
  2. Is that solution feasible here?
  3. Now that we’re implementing that solution, does it seem to work, at least on its own terms?
  4. Does that solution deliver the outcomes we expected?
  5. Are we making the progress we expected on our wider goals?

There are hazards at every step:

  1. Moving on from a “solved problem” (solved only in your head, that is)
  2. Abandoning the strategy, because the one solution you thought of (or were sold) isn’t feasible
  3. Abandoning the strategy, living with a failing solution
  4. Abandoning the strategy, living with a disappointing solution
  5. Abandoning the strategy, when it seemed to be going so well

Organisations live with the status quo (old or new) or with failing or disappointing solutions because they let solutions replace strategy. Whatever goals they might have had, implementing the solution became the thing. Solution-driven, change-managed – call it what you like, it’s a disaster. And because a generation of leaders has been taught that this is “doing it properly”, they can’t see it!

To be fair to them, taught to think one way, most people won’t immediately see that the answer is to flip things around, to turn them on their head. Paradigm shifts are hard! But let’s try. Working backwards, or right to left, as we call it:

  1. What are our goals and measures of success (outcomes both)?
  2. What are our progress indicators (more outcomes) telling us?
  3. On what particular areas of opportunity (outcomes again) are we currently focussing, and where do we think they will lead?
  4. What have we learned from recent experiments (prototype solutions or smaller probes)?
  5. What are we learning from current experiments?
  6. What do we hope to learn (and to gain – outcomes again) from our next experiments?

Not solution-driven, strategic thinking quickly abandoned in the implementation of monolithic, ill-fitting solutions, but (quite literally) outcome-oriented, our direction given by the outcomes we have chosen to pursue. Outcomes before solutions, strategy both developed and pursued in the language of meaningful outcomes. No solution too big to fail, solutions of appropriate granularity emerging at the right time from the people closest to the problem, engaged people finding solutions they are motivated to implement. The strategy process and the innovation process properly wired up, working backwards from impact and learning.

There is some skill to be learned in the practice of outcome-orientation. Mostly though it’s a language that leaders at every level of experience and responsibility can easily learn. Acquire that language (it’s not hard) and practice it a bit (it’s an everyday thing, not only for set piece events) and the thinking quickly follows.

Related:

Breaking:

For a more organisational perspective, optional pre-reading for the upcoming Leading in a Transforming Organisation is a draft white paper with the long but quite descriptive title Everywhere all at once: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, an accessible, situational, and complexity-aware presentation of the Viable System Model. Mailing list subscribers will be offered the PDF to download today; alternatively you can request your copy here. Agendashift Academy subscribers have access to the source Google Doc for comment (see the Adaptive Organisation space); your access can be arranged if you have constructive comments to make. Or just send them to me!

And added to the calendar today:

Discuss this post on LinkedIn

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.

Developing & pursuing strategy in the language of outcomes

Agendashift roundup, May 2023

Posted on by Mike Burrows

In this edition: Leading in a Transforming Organisation; Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F); Keynote, webinar, and media pages; Agendashift Academy update; Top posts

Leading in a Transforming Organisation

The “London Event” (June) now has a proper name, a confirmed venue, and already a strong list of delegates signed up. In October it transfers to Melbourne, Australia, ahead of Kanban Australia, where I’m giving a keynote. In both cases, you can choose to do one, two, or three days, covering Leading with Outcomes: Foundation and Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale (parts I & II). Also, as outlined here, there is an upgrade path to Authorised Facilitator that bypasses TTT/F (more on that in a moment). Information on both events:

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

The latest online TTT/F concluded last week and there were a couple of nice updates on LinkedIn from Stan Wade and Zvonko Podbojec afterwards. The next TTT/F is now in the calendar for September, this time in the UK afternoons – a lot more convenient for timezones west of here! In December, I’ll be doing one in person in Bengaluru, India, (and yes, giving a keynote at Kanban India beforehand).

See also:

Keynote, webinar, and media pages

My talk “Between spaces, scopes, and scales” continues to iterate! The latest recording is now available on a new keynotes page. Related to that talk, a new webinars page has the recording of Flight Levels creator Klaus Leopold’s guest appearance at our monthly webinar.

I also had a lot of fun bringing up to date my “Right to Left” talk. You’ll find that and (from a few months ago) my short SEACOM keynote on the keynotes page too. In short, the latest versions of some of my favourite talks, together with slides, references, and links to related resources. Past recordings remain on the media page too if you want to see how things have evolved.

The next webinar:

I’m due to give “Between spaces, scopes, and scales” again on June 8th online and on July 6th in Nottingham. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, booking pages for those aren’t yet available. It’s looking tight for the 8th, so watch the events page for updates.

Agendashift Academy update

Now that all four modules of Leading with Outcomes are available online, I promised that after spending the month of May away from the camera I would give an update on future plans for the Agendashift Academy. Not necessarily in release order, I’m planning the following:

  • “Right to Left Bitesize” – a long series of bite-sized (ie short) episodes based on the assessment prompts that go with the Right to Left book, brought up to date (the book was published in 2019, the audiobook in 2020 with minimal changes). There are 60 prompts and I expect to use most if not all of them, so that will keep me going for some time!
  • “Right to Left: The Agendashift Academy podcast” featuring selected (ie a minority) of the above episodes, together with other material I’m happy to release publicly
  • As an experiment, hosting the above in the Academy’s community platform, with a view to migrating content to there from the training platform
  • Adding a “supporter” tier for access to material outside of the core Leading with Outcomes curriculum

Top posts

To see #1 and #3 on this list brought up to date, see also (under “Keynotes” above) the updated Right to Left talk.

  1. #2MBM: Meaning before Metric, Measure before Method (July 2020)
  2. Leaders as keepers of context (September 2022)
  3. I’m really enjoying Challenge Mapping (June 2020)
  4. My favourite Clean Language question (January 2021)
  5. Your organisation in 5 networks (November 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.

Picturing Foundation

Posted on by Mike Burrows

“At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, (agreement on) outcomes before solutions”

Last week I shared a picture (above), around which I built a new talk on Right to Left (the title of my 2019 book and 2020 audiobook). Not only did I enjoy bringing Right to Left up to date, I have now incorporated the picture into the deck for Leading with Outcomes: Foundation. I had the chance to test it today in session 1 of Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F).

[Update: A recording of that talk is available on the keynotes page]

Beginning with those words again, expanded slightly for emphasis, here is Foundation in overview:

“At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions – agreement on outcomes before solutions” – all of which we’ll be practising today.

In Chapter 1, we’ll be getting familiar with the conversational pattern central to Leading with Outcomes, namely the IdOO (“I do”) pattern. We’ll be using it to begin our exploration of leadership and strategy, and afterwards we’ll take the pattern apart and put it back together again. What does each part do? What if we skipped them? What if we overdid them?

Don’t take Chapter 2’s rather cryptic title too seriously (Update: it is now “Conversations in strategy”); what we’ll be doing here is to develop some strategy. Using that IdOO pattern again of course, but this time establishing context beforehand (establishing some common ground for our conversation) and organising the results of our conversations afterwards (it would be a shame to let it all go to waste).

In Chapter 3 we’ll move into pursuing strategy. We’ll learn another pattern – Meaning, Measure, Method, a great way to generate the solution ideas our strategy needs – and we’ll look at how we sustain the process. Often that is the hardest part, and we’ll begin with that. Lack of confidence in the process can be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, so we’ll be nipping that one in the bud right away.

So that’s Foundation, and it’s aptly named. You’ll see those patterns in every module and every workshop we do. The principles of outcome-orientation that we make explicit all the way through Foundation underpin all our other work. And they’re highly effective! Whatever their level of experience or scope, any leader can learn to lead with outcomes. You can learn to lead with outcomes!

Once again now: “At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, (agreement on) outcomes before solutions“

While we’re here, some quick updates:

In chronological order:

  • Although the recording of last week’s Right to Left session isn’t yet available, the one for my webinar session yesterday with special guest Klaus Leopold already is. Together with references, slides (unused, but hey, why waste them), and other goodies, find it here. The next webinar/AMA in the series will be on June 6th.
  • It’s not in the calendar yet, but late afternoon (UK time) on June 8th I’ll be giving the next iteration of the rapidly-evolving talk Between spaces, scopes, and scales: What the scaling frameworks don’t tell you. Also not yet in the calendar, the same talk on July 6th, this time in person in Nottingham, UK.
  • Too often known as “The June event”, the thing happening June 20th-22nd and also in Melbourne in October badly needs a snappier name! Answers on a postcard please (actually LinkedIn), discount coupons for all contributors

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.