Author: Mike Burrows

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

Four weeks until the February TTT/F

Posted on by Mike Burrows
February TTT/F

The next online Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer – the first since the one I did in person in India last December – begins on February 24th, spanning four consecutive afternoons UK time, beginning at 13:00 GMT, 14:00 CET, 8am ET, each session lasting no more than four hours.

It incorporates a number of recent improvements:

  1. The Foundation module (session 1) is organised now into four sections (from three), making it easier to navigate – a benefit to trainer and participant alike
  2. The two parts of the Inside-out Strategy module (sessions 2 & 3) have been switched around – the easier assessment debrief session now coming before the Discovery session, and the latter ending on a high with the recently reincorporated X-Matrix
  3. Updated material for session 4 also, which includes highlights of the Outside-in Strategy and Adaptive Organisation modules and some relatively new material on workshop design options

TTT/F comes with a year’s free membership of the Facilitator programme, upgradeable to Trainer, both of which include access to our signature assessment tools. It also includes access to the self-paced video-based versions of the Leading with Outcomes modules for your own study (and potentially for use in other ways, but talk to me first).

Not everyone joins TTT/F with the aim of becoming a Facilitator or Trainer. Some come for the challenge to existing ways of doing things that Leading with Outcomes brings. Some come for the conversation. Some come to hone their coaching skills, to add a strategy dimension to those, or, conversely perhaps, to bring a coaching dimension to their work as manager or consultant. Whatever your role, if you’re looking for participatory, outcome-oriented, and generative alternatives to managed change and the solution-driven rollout, you’ll be in the right place. Book now:

Again, that’s four weeks away. This week, it’s roundup day on Friday, and via a conversation on Slack, Silke Noll got me thinking about a blog post with the provisional title “Verbing the nouns of business agility”. There – I’m committed now! Watch out for that midweek, either this week or next.

Also in the calendar:

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.

The (Wholehearted) Adaptive Organisation Assessment, 2025 edition

Posted on by Mike Burrows

With grateful thanks to Olivier Bertrand, Marika Gartelius, Philippe Guenet, Ivaylo (Ivo) Gueorguiev, Andrew Kidd, and Craig Lucia, I’m pleased to confirm that the Adaptive Organisation Assessment has completed its recently-announced refresh. This assessment has multiple applications:

As you may have guessed from my opening thanks to our review team, native English speakers were in the minority. That’s great! You may know from the Agendashift Delivery Assessment already that we take very seriously the accessibility of our assessments and seek to eliminate any language that gets in the way of engagement. That includes jargon and prescription; its goal is not to teach, preach, sell, or judge but to get people thinking and talking, not worrying about how it’s worded or what plans those facilitating it may have in store for them.

You can try it now (or revisit your previous input) at agendashift.com/assessments/wholehearted. Get in touch if you see a use for it at your organisation; as hinted at above, there are plenty of options we can discuss.

Quickly while we’re here…

For the most feeble of excuses (my 60th birthday), this week’s office hours moves from Thursday to Friday, 14:00 GMT, 15:00 CET, 9am ET as usual. If you’re an Agendashift Academy subscriber or supporter, you’ll find this week’s event in the Events calendar. Non-subscribers are welcome; you can find the Zoom link on Slack also.

Other upcoming events (the first one a new addition – thank you Morten Elvang for the invitation):

There is also the possibility of doing some or all of Leading in a Transforming Organisation in Malmö in November. I know that’s months away, but if that could be of interest, do please let me know.

Related

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.

Upcoming

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Happy New Year! Kicking off 2025 with news of:

  1. Office hours – weekly Zoom on Thursdays, beginning this week
  2. Adaptive Organisation assessment – beginning Friday, taking the opportunity to review it before book 5 comes out
  3. The next online Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) – February 24-27, UK afternoons

Office hours

Getting things started right away, regular weekly “office hours” begin this week, Thursdays at 14:00 GMT, 15:00 CET, 9am ET. A quick update from me, then it’s over to you for informal Lean Coffee-style discussions on topics or questions in any way related to Leading with Outcomes. Not just outcome-orientation specifically, but leadership, organisation, strategy, Lean, Agile, systems, complexity, organisation development, and so on – really any topic relevant to the Agendashift and Leading with Outcomes communities.

If you’re an Agendashift Academy subscriber or supporter, you’ll find this week’s event in the Events calendar, and I’ll publish a new one early each week. I’ll post the Zoom link to Slack also.

There will be no meeting on February 27th as it clashes with Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator; more on that below.

Adaptive Organisation assessment

A small group of us drawn mainly from the book 5 review circles and the Leading with Outcomes trainer/facilitator community will be meeting on Friday afternoon UK time this week to review the wording and coverage of the Adaptive Organisation Assessment. The timing is important – book 5 is very close to completion and the assessment features prominently in it! It also plays a big role in the Adaptive Organisation Workshop, the Leading in a Transforming Organisation training and the online Leading with Outcomes modules Adaptive Organisation (I): Business agility at every scale and Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes, and scales. In other words, it’s up there now with the classic Agendashift Delivery Assessment importance-wise and I have no doubt that we can benefit from the experience of improving that one.

If you’re familiar with the Adaptive Organisation Assessment in particular already and would like to join us, shout.

Trainer-the-Trainer / Facilitator

In February, I’ll be holding not only the first TTT/F of the year, but the first online one since making some changes to the Foundation and Inside-out Strategy modules (we had a lot of fun with them in person in India last month). Also, signing up gives you a year’s free access to Facilitator (worth £479), which you can upgrade to Trainer at any time.

Academy subscribers will find their own booking page in the Academy’s Events calendar. Alternatively, you can sign up here:

Those sessions are as follows:

  1. Monday 24th February – Leading with Outcomes: Foundation – a trainer’s eye view on the this core module of the Leading with Outcomes curriculum, introducing the IdOO (“I do”) pattern – Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes
  2. Tuesday 25th February – Inside-out Strategy (I): Fit for maximum impact* – building on the Leading with Outcomes Assessment Debrief Workshop, this session’s exercises include the first of two experiences of our Clean Language coaching game 15-minute FOTO, Option Relationship Mapping, and of course the assessment tools
  3. Wednesday 26th February – Inside-out Strategy (II): On the same page, with purpose* – featuring classic exercises including Celebration-5W, Obstacles Fast and Slow, and the second experience of 15-minute FOTO
  4. Thursday 27th February – Beyond Inside-out – checking out the Adaptive Organisation and Inside-out Strategy modules, and looking behind the scenes at assessment and certificate administration

*Compared to previous runs of this training, the two Inside-out Strategy sessions are reversed, the assessment-related session coming first.

All sessions begin 13:00 GMT, 14:00 CET, 8am ET and finish by 17:00 GMT, 18:00 CET, 12noon ET.

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 of the year 2024

Posted on by Mike Burrows

I’m back now from an enjoyable and successful trip to India (which is why this is my first and only post of the month) and it’s that time again – the top 10 posts of the year, and another top 10 of still-popular classics.

Before we get to those, a reminder of what’s currently in the calendar:

Expect some additions to be announced in the new year.

Those two top 10 lists below. That’s it from me this year – have a great Christmas!

Top 10 posts of 2024

Mostly a year of two books – Organizing Conversations: Preparing Groups to Take on Adaptive Challenges, published this year (and available for your holiday reading!), and Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, coming soonish:

  1. From Flow to Business Agility (January) – by a big margin the most-read post of the year
  2. Agile’s Great Rebalancing: My next book’s take on the Agile manifesto (April)
  3. Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation (July)
  4. From classic Lean-Agile to Outcome-Oriented Enterprise Agility: The 10-year Journey (October)
  5. “Organizing Conversations” is now out (May)
  6. A taste of my own medicine: Why “Organizing Conversations” took two and a half years to write (June)
  7. Help our research: an “Organisational DNA test” (May)
  8. Assessment template tidyup and an update on book 5 (November)
  9. A big update to 15-minute FOTO (February)
  10. When to use which Leading with Outcomes workshop (March)

See also our media page for recordings and my Amazon author pages for the UK, the US, and Germany (three of my books are available in translation).

Top 10 still-popular classics

  1. What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints) (2023)
  2. My favourite Clean Language question (2019)
  3. Better user stories start with authentic situations of need (2016)
  4. Towards the wholehearted organisation, outside in (2018)
  5. Your organisation in 5 networks (2022)
  6. 15-minute FOTO’s cheat mode (2023)
  7. ‘Right to Left’ works for Scrum too (2018)
  8. Agendashift is not a maturity model (2018)
  9. #2MBM: Meaning before Metric, Measure before Method (2020)
  10. Stringing it together with Reverse Wardley (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.

Agendashift roundup, November 2024

Posted on by Mike Burrows

In this edition: In-person and online Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F); Content changes; Templates tidyup; Book 5 update; Upcoming; Top posts

In-person and online Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

Glad to repeat last year’s trip (thank you again to my friends at Innovation Roots for the invite), I leave for India early next week:

I have also added an online TTT/F to the calendar:

From purchase, TTT/F now gives you a year’s free Leading with Outcomes: Authorised Facilitator subscription which you can upgrade at any time to Authorised Trainer. That’s quite a saving! On top of that, participants of the Bengaluru training who are based in India get special pricing too.

Content changes

I should probably have done it years ago, but the latest TTT/F and its materials anticipate a couple of changes that I’ll make to the recorded materials in the new year also. First, in Leading with Outcomes v3.0, I’m switching around parts I & II of the Inside-out Strategy module. In workshop terms (the training modules expand on those), the assessment debrief workshop (chapter 2 of the Agendashift book) now comes ahead of the Discovery workshop (chapter 1). I love the Discovery workshop – in TTT/F’s predecessor, the Agendashift Deep Dive workshop, I could make it last a whole day – but if you’re new to the outcome-oriented style, working at a higher level of abstraction compared to the Assessment Debrief workshop is definitely harder work. I should have listened to Steven Mackenzie, who has always done it this way round…

The second change is to the Discovery workshop itself and the Inside-out Strategy module that builds on it. Their v3.0 materials now include Karl Scotland’s TASTE and TASTE-T (“tasty”) X-Matrix tools. With practice, you can use these standalone, but if you’re new to them, they’re much easier to engage with as the climax of a string of Agendashift exercises, such that they organise what has previously been generated. It’s a great addition and I would like to thank Karl for the tool and Philippe Guenet for developing the integration – you may remember that Philippe took over part of day 1 of Leading in a Transforming Organisation in London a few months ago. Credit for “tasty” goes I think to Chris Combe, who was a participant there.

Templates tidyup

Existing facilitators and trainers will know that I have recently tidied up the menu of assessment templates, which, translations included, is getting quite long. The most-used and recommended templates are now at the top the of list. For more info on that, read the announcement.

Book 5 update

The abovementioned announcement also includes an update on book 5, Wholehearted: Engaging with the Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. I can now go a little further: after the latest round of comment (thank you Simon Rohrer and Teddy Zetterlund) and revision, I find myself suddenly and unexpectedly a lot happier with it. One comment could easily change that, and there’s still a lot of reaching out and so on to be done before I get to the publication part, but writing-wise at least, it feels like I’m on the home stretch now.

Upcoming

Top posts

It seems my recent hiatus has made room for some old favourites!

  1. Agendashift is not a maturity model (November 2018)
  2. My favourite Clean Language question (January 2018)
  3. Better user stories start with authentic situations of need (October 2016)
  4. Your organisation in 5 networks (November 2022)
  5. From classic Lean-Agile to Outcome-Oriented Enterprise Agility: The 10-year Journey (October 2024)

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.

Assessment template tidyup and an update on book 5

Posted on by Mike Burrows

It has been quite a while since I’ve blogged about Agendashift’s suite of assessments, but I did a tidyup over the weekend, so here we are! One of those assessments is connected to book 5, so I’ll give an update on that too.

There are a lot of assessment tools out there, but we think ours are special. Many seek to teach, judge, or sell, and as I once said about maturity models, too often they say more about the vendor than the client. That makes them inauthentic, and not a great place therefore to start an honest conversation.

Our style guide (also the basis of a workshop exercise in which you write your own assessments prompts) gives a sense of where we’re coming from:

Inclusive

  • Sentences starting with “We” or “Our”
  • Statements that most of your colleagues could embrace

(Simple) present tense:

  • Not impossibly out of reach
  • There may be signs of this happening already

Non-prescriptive:

  • Not specifying how this outcome will be achieved
  • Allowing multiple realisations

That’s for background; none of that changes in my weekend update. I have simply renamed some of them and resequenced the menu.

If you are an Authorised Facilitator or Trainer, you have access to the full set. Filtered for English (EN) templates only, this is what the list looks like now:

If you are an Academy subscriber, you have access to the mini templates:

Aside: You can subscribe on a monthly basis and there’s a 1-week free trial, so it’s not a big commitment. And the video-based training module Inside-out Strategy (II): Fit for maximum impact to which you’ll have access gives a lot of insight into how we facilitate it. You could do the Foundation module first, leave part (I) of Inside-out Strategy until later (I’m in the process of switching them around anyway, so it’s not cheating), and you’d be well-prepared for your first small-scale test.

Back to the assessments, certain less-used templates have been demoted to the bottom of the list. Templates with language code “EN-old”, are retained only for the sake of old surveys. Language code “EN-simplified” has gone; that has been the preferred language for long enough, and I have merged it into EN. The old adaptability assessment from the 1st edition of the Agendashift book has also fallen into disuse; the idea was good at the time – re-use the delivery assessment, replacing “delivery” with “change” – but it is superseded by the stronger Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment.

On that last point, you can try the full-length version of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment by participating in our global survey, the data from which (anonymised, of course) is helping some really interesting PhD research. Below is the survey and some background on the research:

    Further to that, watch out next year for book 5, Wholehearted: Engaging with the Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, which goes into the model that supports that assessment tool. Its first three chapters correspond to the model’s three “spaces”:

    1. Delivering, Discovering, Renewing – the value-adding work of the organisation and the systems that support it
    2. Adaptive Strategising – guiding that work and bringing a sense of identity
    3. Mutual Trust Building – opening up the preceding two spaces to each other, minimising the risk that their decision-making lacks adequate context

    What if between those three spaces and between their constituent parts, their relationships were in healthy and productive balance? That’s the basis of Part I, Business Agility at Every Scale.

    The first two chapters of Part II, Between Spaces, Scopes, and Scales, bring together some really practical organisational theory that you won’t find in one place elsewhere:

    1. The Space Between – a window on the relationships between different levels of scale
    2. Organising without Reorganising – avoiding the big reorg, promoting self-organisation at scale

    It finishes with:

    1. What Lies Beneath – digging below the model’s mainly relational perspective to the level of constraints and affordances

    I am very pleased with how it is turning out, but it’s not quite at the publication stage yet, and it will be a while before I announce timelines. Meanwhile though, if 1) you are experienced enough to guess from that overview that I’m in that tricky no man’s land between the systems and complexity worlds and 2) you find that thought more intriguing than horrifying, please get in touch!

    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 2024

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    Just a short one this month. “Real life intrudes”, as they say; our daughter just spent two weeks in the children’s hospital and was very unwell for longer than that, so it is just as well that I had done that clearing the decks exercise beforehand! Glad to report that’s she is better now than she has been for a while.

    Top posts

    On the 10th I did manage to record that webinar with my friends at Businessmap (formerly Kanbanize), in which we looked back on the 10 years since Kanban from the Inside was first published. The recording is now available and posted to the blog:

    The Agendashift 2nd edition was published only three years ago. Still, that’s long enough ago that I can see how certain things have developed since. Also posted this month:

    Other well-read posts:

    1. From Flow to Business Agility (January)
    2. ‘Right to Left’ works for Scrum too (July 2018)
    3. Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation (July)
    4. My favourite Clean Language question (January 2019)
    5. A taste of my own medicine: Why “Organizing Conversations” took two and a half years to write (June)

    December: India!

    For the aforementioned reasons, I have no public engagements in November. I am however very much looking forward to visiting India again in December at the invitation of my friends at Innovation Roots:

    That’s it for October! All being well, normal service will resume shortly.

    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.

    From classic Lean-Agile to Outcome-Oriented Enterprise Agility: The 10-year Journey

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    That’s the name of a webinar recorded last week in celebration (a couple of weeks late) of the 10th anniversary of the publication of my first book, Kanban from the Inside. The discussion ranged over all four books and the upcoming “book 5”. Many thanks to hosts Albena Georgieva and Nora Pavlova of Businessmap (formerly Kanbanize) and everyone who participated in the Q&A. Congrats also to Stuart Gibbons who won a copy of Organizing Conversations (his choice – he could have had any one of the four). Enjoy!

    Related

    A selection of posts on topics mentioned:

    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.

    Engage, Invite, Celebrate – it was there all along

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

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

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

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

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

    Look again at that second job:

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

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

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

    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 2024

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    In this edition: Into the fourth quarter; Ten years and more; Top posts (and book 5 clues)

    Into the fourth quarter

    Earlier this month I posted Clearing the decks and several people were kind enough to reach out in response. As I said at the time, nothing bad was happening, but I did feel the need to create some wiggle room, which I’m now enjoying.

    Cancelling the upcoming LIKE and TTT/F trainings does have implications for the Leading with Outcomes Authorised Facilitator and Trainer programmes. For the time being, it is no longer a prerequisite to take one of these trainings; you can subscribe to those programmes directly from the Agendashift Academy’s Store page now. In fairness to those who have attended one of those trainings previously and didn’t take up a discounted subscription at the time, ping me for a discount code and you can have the first year of Facilitator for free or the equivalent amount off Trainer. For attendees of the in-person TTT/F in India – last years’s and the upcoming one – the same applies, and there is India-specific pricing also. Again, ping me.

    I’m still doing speaking engagements (both of the October events are free, by the way), and there will likely be some additions. After those changes, my calendar now looks like this:

    October

    December

    Ten years and more

    September saw a very nice milestone: it has been ten years since the publication of my first book, Kanban from the Inside (KFTI). There are of course some things I’d do differently were I to write it again (which I won’t!), but I remain very proud of it. Moreover, its approach of using some central perspective to integrate ideas from a diverse range of sources is one that I keep using. For KFTI that central perspective was that of a values model; later books developed an outcome-oriented perspective, and book 5 has a central, organising framework, the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation.

    More about that anniversary here:

    Thinking about this end of that ten-year period, I will add that although this year’s release Organizing Conversations took two and a half years to write – a long time for a comparatively short book – I don’t regret the delay that this commission brought to what will now be my fifth book. Not only does the delay mean that its ideas are that much better developed, there are some important distinctions brought out in Organizing Conversations that I wouldn’t have thought much about otherwise.

    I do now have a complete first draft of book 5, but it won’t be published until next year – sorry! Meanwhile, let me recommend Organizing Conversations and also Right to Left, the latter available also as an audiobook narrated by yours truly. Of my four past books (see my new Amazon Author page for the UK, the US, and Germany), those are the two that together best describe where I will be coming from. And for more clues, see the posts below that I’ve marked with an asterisk, and join me at one of those abovementioned events!

    Top posts (and book 5 clues)

    1. Clearing the decks (September)
    2. Your organisation in 5 networks (November 2022)*
    3. It only took me ten years (September)
    4. Better user stories start with authentic situations of need (October 2016)
    5. What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints) (October 2023)*

    *Book 5 clues! These likewise, and they all look set to appear in the top 10 for the year:

    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.