We did it! Agendashift is out of beta and 22 awesome Lean-Agile coaches, consultants, and trainers have joined me as authorised partners and facilitators. Each of them has full access to the Agendashift tools and materials and will be using them with their clients  (many in fact are already doing so).

The choice of the word “partner” has turned out to be very apt. It has been a genuine pleasure to take each of them through the onboarding process in one to two hours of video calls. We’ve had a great time in our Slack community in recent weeks too, and we’ve collaborated on a number of significant refinements and enhancements to the tools, the prompts, and the workshop materials.

Meet the first 21 partners

Excluding one name kept private by the choice of their employer (a scenario we anticipated and were happy to cater for), see them listed in their full glory in the partner directory.

But let me name and thank them here too:  Alexei Zheglov (Canada), Andrea Chiou (USA), Brad Hughes (USA), Chris Roberts (UK), Colm O’hEocha (Ireland), Dragan Jojic (UK), Ian Carroll (UK), Irshad Nizami (India), Jose Casal (UK), Jussi Mäkelä (Sweden), Karl Scotland (UK), Kenny Grant (UK), Martien van Steenbergen (Netherlands), Mike Leber (Austria), Nikos Batsios (Greece), Olivier MY (France), Patrick Steyaert (Belgium), Russ Lewis (UK), Sathish K Mohanraj (USA), Susanne Bartel (Germany), and Thorbjørn Sigberg (Norway).

What are they able to do?

Authorised partners have full access to the following:

• The Agendashift values-based delivery assessment, our distinctively non-prescriptive, non-judgemental, methodology-neutral tool, refined continuously beyond all recognition through use and collaborative, community-based review since it was first extracted from my book. Many partners already use it in their one-to-one coaching and to support team or organisation-wide exercises.
• The Agendashift debrief/action workshop: a powerful synthesis of Lean-Agile values, exploration techniques from Clean Language, and complexity thinking from Cynefin. Thoroughly modern in its philosophy and choice of tools, its job is to foster deep agreement on objectives, outcomes, and actions whilst maintaining alignment on broader organisational concerns.
• The Agendashift transformation strategy framework: our 10,000-foot view of the Lean-Agile transformation process. This keeps us both real and empathetic, reminding us of the scale of the challenge faced by anyone with leadership responsibility and the heart for transformation.

What does it mean for me?

Whether you’re a coach or a manager, if you’re in the business of Lean-Agile transformation, Agendashift is for you. Our partners can assist you (they’d be delighted of course) or you can join the programme, become an Agendashift facilitator, and have these powerful tools at your disposal.

Intrigued but not sure? Our Slack community is three times the size of our partner community. To put that another way, one third of our Slack community are already partners! Join us (you would find us most welcoming) and you’ll soon get a sense of what we’re all about. Or get in touch and we’d be happy to talk you through your options.

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As part of the preparations for next week’s partner programme launch, I’m capturing the key points of the onboarding process in a series of reference pages. Those that seems fit to publish I’ll post here on the Agendashift blog.

Step 1: Sign up

You may have done this already. If not, the way to get an Agendashift user account is to participate in a survey. There’s always one running at www.agendashift.com/surveys/featured and you can see it here on the home page:

Sign up with your full name, preferred email address, and password (at least 8 characters long):

Thoughtfully, and with a real situation in mind as you do it, have a go at the survey. As described in the sign up page, you’re seeing the “mini” version of the Agendashift values-based delivery assessment. This includes 18 of the 40+ prompts of the full template, organised by the same values – Transparency, Balance, and so on.

Step 2: Provide your profile details

Once you’re done with the survey (it will take only a few minutes), take a look at your user profile. If you plan to join the partner programme or if you want others to see your profile it will be worth the few moments it takes to give it some polish.

You can reach it by clicking “My profile” on the “Account” menu, seen here in both desktop and hand-held screen widths (on the latter it’s hidden behind the “hamburger” menu)

Here’s mine:

Note that the image displayed is the gravatar associated with my email address. If you don’t have one, register for yours at en.gravatar.com. Be aware that it may take a few minutes after registration before yours appears (don’t ask me why).

Other than your email address and your gravatar, everything here is editable. Hit the Edit button and you’ll see something like this:

Most of this is self-explanatory, but a few notes:

• You can add relevant credentials such as “KCP” or “CSM” to your title if you wish
• The fields for your website, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook etc are all completely optional. If you wish to use them, please enter full urls beginning with http:// or https://
• The “Viewable” checkbox controls whether your profile page is accessible by people other than your survey administrator or the site admin (ie me). This field becomes somewhat redundant should you wish also to be “Listed” – the latter implies the former.
• Whether or not you appear in the partner directory is under our joint control. “Listed” indicates you’d like to be there (you may have valid reasons not to, even if you are a partner).
• If “Listed” is checked and I in the role of administrator have checked “Listable” also, then bingo, you’re in. I also control whether you are able to administer your own contexts and surveys. These adare visible only to me; I update them during the onboarding process:

Step 3: Hey presto!

Finally, here’s what my listing in the partner directory looks like:

This entry neatly summarises almost all the information provided: name, title, location, and online identities. The only information that remains to be seen only in the profile page is the bio.

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Just 8 days until the September 14th and the official launch of the Agendashift partner programme! It seems a good time to review what we have and take a look at some of the most recent changes:

1. The Agendashift values-based delivery assessment: Not your typical consultant’s practice-centric checklist (forgive me if I sound cynical here) but a non-prescriptive, non-judgemental, methodology-neutral tool, based initially on the last chapter of my book and refined repeatedly through use and collaborative, community-based review over the two years since. No emailing of spreadsheets (horrible!) it’s all online, and used to support one-to-one coaching, team exercises, and organisation-wide surveys.
2. The Agendashift debrief/action workshop: This is packaged as a Lean-Agile strategy deployment workshop (an accurate but jargony description) but it also helps convey Agendashift’s coaching and change management philosophy to new partners and to demonstrate how 21st century tools such as Clean Language, Cynefin, and Lean Startup can be integrated into a coherent and pleasing whole.
3. The Agendashift transformation strategy framework: our 10,000-foot view of the Lean-Agile transformation challenge. Just the ‘6+1 strategies’ of our white paper’s title serves as a reminder that it’s a multi-dimensional challenge with a lot to consider! It serves me well also as a structure for organising thoughts on leadership.

The last few pieces of the jigsaw lead to a better integration of #2 and #3.

I’m very happy with how the introduction of Clean Language and Cynefin helps us elicit and explore outcomes at both the strategic level (at the level of the long-range objectives and challenges that participants bring to the workshop) and the immediate (at the level of the priority areas and actions that the workshop largely deals with). I’m indebted to Karl Scotland and Liz Keogh for helping this to crystallise in the way that it did, and to Karl again for experimenting with it and sharing his experiences.

At last (I’m still kicking myself for not spotting the gap and the opportunity sooner), pathways, a term I shamelessly borrow from my Hivemind colleagues Ian Carroll and Dave Clark.

Here’s why pathways matter: The tools and the techniques are great, the values and the thinking behind them make sense, the prompts are helpfully revealing and thought-provoking, and we’ve learned to generate, frame and develop a handful of actions around which we have deep agreement on underlying needs, desired outcomes, and how we intend to achieve them. Wonderful! Now what?

Pathways are a rough – or not so rough – guide to the territory ahead. Our online tooling includes one already (based on the Reverse STATIK model) but many practitioners already have their own (which is fine – we’re methodology-neutral after all). Our template starts with the basics of process management, adds some sophistication, then works its way up to organisational stuff. It’s a simple starting point for agreement on a way forward over a period of weeks or months, whether what’s needed is a detailed transformation plan (Ian is working on tools to track this) or some high level agenda, perhaps just the agreement to revisit each category in turn in successive retrospectives.

Have the right people in your organisation reconcile the pathway agreed in the workshop with the strategy framework and you should have some confidence that people are suitably aligned and most of the bases will be covered in due course. That’s the theory anyway!

Don’t panic, we’re not about to go all top-down on you. Pathways are way to meet the needs of sponsors and participants alike – a credible plan-for-a-plan, the product of a facilitated process, and the fruit of agreement (value #8), where buy-in is an early outcome, not a problem to be overcome at the end.

It’s really happening

8 days isn’t long but it’s not too late to join us if you’d like to have your name included in our partner directory on launch day. Interested? Check out the programme or simply hang out in our Slack community, get a feel for the place, and join the conversation when you’re ready.

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Our biggest release yet went out on Tuesday morning, all part of the run-up to the official launch of the Agendashift partner programme next month (worth checking out now – we’re accepting people already).

Check out:

1. User profile pages (here’s mine):  All users have one, but yours is visible to no-one other than you and your survey admin until you choose to enable.
2. The partner directory  – empty by design until official launch next month.
3. At last the page describing the partner programme  (and the small print, the partner license agreement).
4. If you have access to a survey charts page, try changing the template (eg from the original template to a ‘pathway’ one). This is more important than it may sound; separate blog post to follow soon.
5. Useful if you manage more than one context, your session history of up to 5 contexts is now shown on the Context menu.
6. “Surveycodes”: short codes that participants can use to access surveys, a feature available to all survey admins and invaluable in a training or workshop environment. I’ve been recommending the use of third-party link shorteners up to now, but no more!
7. Lots of work under the covers; a JSON API drives pretty much everything now.
8. A ton of content and design improvements too.

You can try that #6 for yourself. Here, for example, is the surveycode for the 2016 global survey: 5fFNLZ. From the Agendashift home page follow the link “Got a surveycode?” (or find it on the “More” menu wherever you are), and submit the code via the form there.

Last but not least, we’re on Slack now! Ping me for your invite.

Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Links: Home | Partner programme | Resources | Contact | Mike
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter