Author: Mike Burrows

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

Verbing the nouns of business agility

Posted on by Mike Burrows

(This post is closed for comments but it is discussed on LinkedIn here)

Silke Noll, who is 1) the Agendashift community’s resident expert in all things intercultural, and 2) a member of book 5’s review team, said something interesting to me this weekend:

Are the findings about knowledge organisation simply due to the fact that Western language encourages the use of nouns, which results in categories of objects, and Eastern languages encourage the use of verbs, which the consequence that it is relationships that are emphasized?

Western languages force a preoccupation with focal objects as opposed to context. English is a “subject-prominent” language. … For Westerners, it is the self who does the acting; for Easterners, it is something that is undertaken in concert with others or is a consequence of the self operating in the field of forces.

Silke was quoting Richard Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why. I haven’t read it myself, but it’s next on my list! We went on to discuss book 5’s deliberate use of verbs in the present continuous tense, or “-ing” words, to you and me. I observed that the corresponding noun forms can be a trap. Organisations act as though it’s enough to have certain things – a strategy and an execution capability, for example. Having seen a former employer lose 50 billion dollars that way – a catastrophic loss from which it was fortunate to survive – I think I may be allowed a degree of scepticism.

So… how does this “verbing” thing work?

Execution or, if you prefer, delivery, becomes delivering, discovering, renewing – three verbs for the price of one or two nouns! It’s not enough just to deliver; you need to be discovering what you should be delivering, which includes but is not limited to discovering how well the things you deliver actually perform in the real world. And if you are going to be delivering new things, you’ll need new capabilities. I could have used “developing” for that, but because in relation to products and software it means something more specific, “renewing” it is.

Now that the value-creating work (sneaking an “ing” word into a noun phrase) of that delivering-discovering-renewing space is seen as something more present and continuous, yesterday’s strategy won’t do – at least not for long. It becomes adaptive strategising, and its job is to ensure that the organisation (or organisational scope – this model is beautifully fractal) never runs out of options in a game whose rules may be changing. Not just reactive, “responding to change”, but proactive, prospective, anticipatory, making things happen.

The team that strategises together stays together

For any organisational scope that is meaningful enough to its participants that they identify with it, some of that strategising will be devoted to maintaining and sometimes challenging and even changing that identity (on the change part, think of the pivot as an extreme example). “The team that strategises together stays together”, one might say. A self-governing scope that is serious about sticking around goes further: it manages the balances between thinking and doing, planning and executing, and so on, even the three-way balance between delivering, discovering, and renewing. Key to long-term sustainability is adjusting those balances as conditions change.

Balance is no less important in the delivering-discovering-renewing space. You might follow world-class practices in the value-creating work, but if multiple people are involved and you are not coordinating effectively, much of their effort will go to waste. Neither though do you want people serving best-of-breed coordination systems (tools, processes, etc) that don’t work for them. It’s much the same with organising, which is what connects the adaptive strategising space with the delivering-discovering-renewing space; it’s counterproductive to organise around goals and plans in ways incompatible with capability and capacity, or for that matter those coordination systems. In fact, between the value-creating work, coordinating, and organising there is a three-way balance to maintain, four if you include the customer. Small wonder that in a single endeavour there can be multiple, contradictory views on what actual progress is being made, how everything is performing, and what its most important issues might be (which is one reason why a clear customer focus can be transformative).

Between the two “spaces” I’ve mentioned – delivering-discovering-renewing and adaptive strategising – balance is mostly accounted for by self-governing (that’s its job), but that’s not quite the end of the story. The capacities that an organisation or scope has for communication and decision-making are finite. To assume perfect information flow is to risk bad decision-making and further taxing those limited capacities. Whether strategy-related or delivery-related, decisions need context. It’s crucial to escape the routine for contextualising – think going to the gemba, managing by walking around, and sense-making conversations of various kinds. That’s central to mutual trust-building; this third space is responsible for ensuring that the other two understand each other so that the more trustworthy organisation can use its precious capacities effectively.

I could go on! In the relationships between and across different scales of organisation there are several strands: structuring (the work, the organisation, and by implication, its business environment), translating (between the different levels of abstraction that apply up and down the organisation), reconciling (between the strategies of related scopes), and more – connecting, participating, identifying.

Verb forms aside for a moment, the deeper magic here is a relational model. Things have relationships, they relate to each other. For better and for worse they constrain each other’s behaviours. Over time, they co-evolve, perhaps becoming structurally coupled to the point that they can’t be changed independently. More even than the things that they relate, relationships can be described as being in healthy and productive balance, departures from which likely indicate some kind of dysfunction. That’s powerful: if you’re at a loss to work out what’s wrong with something by looking at what’s inside, now you have several more perspectives and your range of potential solutions is greatly expanded. You might not even need a definitive diagnosis; mere possibility may be enough motivation for change.

But those “ing” words do matter. Think less about what you have and more about what is happening – what must be happening, because in this descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive) model, everything I have described really must be there. They might not be all working as well as they could, their relationships might not be entirely healthy and productive, but if enough people identify with an organisational scope strongly enough to care, all of those things will be there. Start noticing them and their relationships. Talk about them. See what happens!

Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (aka book 5) is due in the coming months, i.e. soonish. Watch this space!

(This post is closed for comments but it is discussed on LinkedIn here)

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.

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.