[Updated 2022-03-20 – dates changed to accommodate block bookings!]
London SW1, UK. Three days, each available separately, each certified. Buy two consecutive days and save 20%. Buy all three together and save 30%:
Day 1. Tuesday, June 20th: Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
Day 2. Wednesday, June 21st: Adaptive Organisation (I): Business agility at every scale
Day 3. Thursday, June 22nd: Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes, and scales
Save a further 10-40% with the discount code shown on your Agendashift Academy subscription – see the What’s included page of your Welcome course in your Academy library.
Just in the last few days, I’ve had some capacity free up in April; please get in touch if interested in hosting any of the above privately. I will throw in a free 3-month Agendashift for Business subscription for up to 25 people, and as mentioned in last month’s roundup, while the self-paced version of Adaptive Organisation remains in beta (see below) I will be glad to discount the in-person version substantially. Please note that my ability to travel outside the UK remains somewhat limited.
Happening this week:
I’m excited also to announce that beta 2 of the self-paced version of Adaptive Organisation (parts I and II) begins its chapter-by-chapter release today; if you’re an Academy subscriber, you’ll be notified in the usual way. If you’re not yet a subscriber, start here!
We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.
I have had covid for most of the past week, and though I don’t feel seriously ill, coupled with the facts 1) that with my wife I’m part of a 24*7 care team for a vulnerable family member, and 2) that I’ve been called to jury service next month, I’ve had to make some changes.
So, in calendar order:
Next week’s Foundation is unfortunately cancelled
Next week’s webinar (with guests) and meetup are still going ahead – and I’m greatly looking forward to both
If you’re in India next month, don’t miss Karl Scotland’s Foundation
My next public workshop is in April, by the kind invitation of Gervase Bushe and hosted by the Cape Code Institute, details here
The May Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) is now open for bookings – UK mornings, relatively APAC-friendly timings (less convenient for the Americas this time round)
If you’re wondering meanwhile how this month’s TTT/F went, check this out.
Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale
There has been some impact on the not-quite-finished Adaptive Organisation module too, but I’m seeing it very much as a blessing in disguise. As agreed at a Zoom call yesterday with trainers participating in its beta programme, I will:
Release the existing videos to Academy subscribers as-is as “Beta 1” – without captions, workbook, or the final chapter
Release a greatly improved Beta 2 chapter by chapter
I gave a preview of Beta 2 at this month’s TTT/F, where one participant described it as “all I hoped it would be”. Yesterday’s Zoom was similarly encouraging, and I’m confident that it will be worth the wait.
From April onwards I will have capacity for private training. While Adaptive Organisation remains in beta it will be available in multiple formats at preferential pricing – so shout now if it could be of interest.
We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.
Upcoming events
With me (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise indicated.
Perhaps you’ve been wondering where I’ve been going with posts like Your organisation in 5 networks and Start where you are. Well, just in the last few days the Systemic Agility community have given me the perfect opportunity for the big reveal. I’ll be speaking at their meetup at 17:30 GMT on Thursday, March 9th:
To set some expectations: Networks will of course play a role, but it’s not only about those. No, I won’t be ranting against any particular framework or against frameworks in general. Much more constructively, it’s about accessing some of the deep magic of organisation. Or should I say organising?
The previous day but in the UK morning for the sake of our Australia-based guests, it’s the next in our monthly webinar/AMA series The questions that drive us:
Note that 09:30 GMT is not 10am ET as previously advertised. Apologies to our friends in the US if you were misled – 4:30am is early indeed!
It will be a busy week – there’s more! The next interactive Leading with Outcomes: Foundation begins on the Tuesday. Three sessions of two and a half hours each on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons (UK time) 7th-9th March, 14:00-16:30 GMT:
Session 1. (Tuesday 7th) Leading in a transforming organisation – introducing outcome-oriented change
Session 2. (Wednesday 8th) Meaningfulness, significance, and direction – two kinds of strategy and a virtuous circle
Session 3. (Thursday 9th) Moving into action – ideas, experiments, feedback, and learning
We’re having a lot of fun with Foundation right now in the February Train-the-Trainer/Facilitator and I’m already looking forward to doing it again. Join us! And don’t hesitate to ping me for a discount code – public or non-profit sectors, un/under-employed, participants in previous events, yada, yada, they all count, and that goes for the self-paced version of Foundation too.
We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.
Upcoming events
With me (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise indicated.
Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
Arthur Ashe
“Start where you are” doesn’t have to be about process! Try this exercise:
Disregarding organisational boundaries, and in relation to the work you are already committed to (your “organising commitments”), who do you interact with? Then reflexively: who interacts with you regarding their organising commitments? And transitively: who do they interact with, who interacts with them, and so on outwards?
Again disregarding organisational boundaries, and whether as an act of planning or of response to something unexpected, who do you consult with when your organising commitments need to change? And again reflexively and transitively: Who consults with you, who do they consult with, and so on outwards?
Now reflect on the relationships you have identified in those two networks. Whose relationships don’t you understand as well as you might? To the extent that it affects your own work, what context do you lack that others might be able to provide? Who else might be struggling for lack of context that you or someone closer to you might be able to provide? Is it time then for some trust-building conversations?
We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.
Upcoming events
With me (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise indicated.
In this edition: February and March; Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale; Top posts; Events, self-paced training, and media
February and March
Approaching fast, the next of our monthly webinar and AMA sessions takes place on Thursday. And starting on the 15th, the next Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer/Facilitator (TTT/F):
The webinar is free of course – all welcome – and for TTT/F, discounts apply. If you’re an authorised trainer or facilitator, a partner past or present, an attendee of a past workshop, you’re a government/education/non-profit employee, or if you’re un/under-employed, don’t hesitate to get in touch for a coupon code.
Disappointingly, my trip to Berlin got postponed until April at the earliest – my sincere apologies if you were hoping to join me there. April is I think too soon for another public event, but if you have a core of participants ready to go, shout.
March sees our next Leading with Outcomes: Foundation (discounts as above), and for the webinar series, guests!
Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale
I’m pleased to report that the fourth and final Leading with Outcomes module, Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale is now in limited beta, with the self-paced version launching properly in the coming weeks. I am super-excited about this module – I still have a fourth book to publish, but I think this will lead to the fifth!
I’m ready now to offer also it in the form of interactive training over two days, ideally in person. My plan is to offer it initially with a heavy discount that decreases rapidly, disappearing entirely as soon the module is ready for other authorised trainers to use. If that sounds like an opportunity for your organisation or for a client of yours, do let me know.
18-26 April, Live online, 12pm-4pm EST Tuesdays and Wednesdays, April 18, 19, 25, 26 2023: Creating Generative Conversations by Leading with Outcomes Mike Burrows, part of the Cape Cod Institute’s BMI Series in dialogic organisation development
We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.
Quick one…. For reasons beyond my control, the February Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) has moved a day or two. It is still four sessions over two consecutive weeks, but no longer the same two days each week. Now it’s Wednesday, Thursday, Monday, and Tuesday afternoons (UK time), 15th-21st of February.
We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.
Upcoming events
With me (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise indicated.
Happy New Year! For me it’s a big anniversary: this time in 2013 I had spent the New Year’s break taking the principles and practices of the Kanban Method, and from them abstracting a system of nine values. Then on January 3rd, I published Introducing Kanban through its values. Kanban’s values model was born.
Nine values are quite a lot to hold in one’s head at once, so I soon learned to present them in groups:
An initial six, or two groups of three: transparency, balance, and collaboration, then customer focus, flow, and leadership
Then understanding, agreement, and respect, which for reasons of brevity are often subsumed under leadership
In most of the decade since, it has been my most-read post each year. And it led to my first book, Kanban from the Inside (2014), which remains a Lean-Agile classic. Great! Now what?
I had no interest in making Kanban any more technical than it already was; if anything, the values model would always draw me in the opposite direction. Neither was I drawn to the emerging Kanban Maturity Model (or any other such model). What I did instead was to allow a common problem to bother me: why do so many people arrive at the training class not knowing why they are there? Tempting as it might have been to see that as a failure of administration or marketing, I saw it instead as a symptom that there were important organisational conversations that simply weren’t happening.
I realised quickly that this problem was far from unique to Kanban. To those that resent having had Scrum or (later) SAFe thrust upon them, the Agile manifesto’s “People and interactions over processes and tools” must ring rather hollow.
That took me away from Kanban into the realms of organisation, leadership, and strategy, to the development of Agendashift, and then sort of full circle, not back to Kanban and Lean-Agile specifically, but to business agility. Ten years on, as practice gets refined through use, as its message gets refined through the telling, and as we dig ever-deeper roots into the available theory, three main topic areas co-evolve together:
As described now in two editions of the Agendashift book (2nd ed 2021), Agendashift the engagement model (thank you Daniel Mezick for describing Agendashift as such) and dialogic/generative organisation development approach (thank you Gervase Bushe & Bob Marshak), a way for practitioners to approach organisations without prejudging what solutions they will employ(/impose/inflict) and instead to help them have those missing conversations – engaging in participatory strategy, as it turns out
The wholehearted organisation, a deliberately minimalistic values-based model of organisation and leadership, a spinoff from my third book, Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020) that unexpectedly gained a life of its own
The leadership development curriculum Leading with Outcomes, which compared to Agendashift minimises detail relevant mainly to practitioners, and instead distils some easily-learned patterns, strategies, and organisational models relevant to leaders at all levels, leaders in transforming organisations most especially
Explicitly in both Agendashift and Leading with Outcomes and implicitly in wholehearted, we have doubled down on the eighth value of that initial nine-value model, namely agreement. What if we put agreement on outcomes before solutions? One way or another, I’ve been asking that question for most of the past ten years, and I have no doubt that it will keep me going for a good while yet.
I no longer identify as a Kanban guy. That separation was necessary to what followed, but all these years later I remain proud of the work I did there, of that first book, and of the blog post that started it all. Not that I’m planning on retiring anytime soon, but I have long seen it as marking the beginning of the rest of my career.
We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.
Upcoming events
With me (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise indicated.
Elsasser pointed out that in the phase space of any organism, considered as a purely physical system, is in general of very high dimension. He argued further that the states in this phase space which are compatible with life will generally tend to be sparsely distributed in such as phase space; specifically, they will form a set of zero volume. Hence “almost all” states, and “almost all” trajectories in this space, will be incompatible with life. Furthermore, any attempt to form averages over the entire phase space will inevitably discard the biologically relevant states. Consequently, Elsasser argued, insofar as physics must deal entirely with such averages at the macroscopic level, biology is in principle irreducible to physics. It further follows that the laws governing the behaviour of biological systems are not inferrable from physical laws although they are compatible with them.
Robert Rosen, Anticipatory Systems, second edition (2012), published posthumously, p. 236
To which I would add: as physics is to biology, so too biology (and also neurology and psychology) to social systems.
We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.
Upcoming events
With me (Mike Burrows) unless otherwise indicated.
In this year-end edition: How far we’ve come; Top 10 new posts of 2022 and most recently; Still going strong, our most-read classic posts; Events, self-paced training, and media
How far we’ve come
It hardly seems possible, but Leading with Outcomes: Foundation only came into being this year. It launched in February, and a significantly updated second version came out as recently as November. The big surprise for me was how much I enjoyed creating and even re-doing it, and teaching it interactively has been a blast too. Far from being dull, there can be something deeply satisfying about going back to basics.
April saw Big changes for the Agendashift Academy, moving from per-module pricing to an all-you-can-eat subscription model. Affordable to the subscriber and easier for me to administer, it’s a win-win! In July we announced Authorised Facilitator and Trainer Programmes for Leading with Outcomes and so far we have held two Train-the-Trainer/Facilitator (TTT/F) events. We’ve had multiple facilitators up and running since September (essentially this replaces the old partner programme) and the first few trainers are coming onstream now, more about them in the new year. For details of the next TTT/F in February, check Events below.
I have a vulnerable family member, and nearly everything I’ve done work-wise since early 2020 has been done from home. Hugely grateful therefore to have both a supportive wife and a great room (“the studio”) to work from. Glad also though to be planning my first trip abroad since Covid, and it’s to a favourite destination, Berlin. If you want useful feedback, go to Berlin! The last time I went (2019) resulted in Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle and that’s now a fixture; who knows what will happen this time (February 7-8)?
Also looking ahead to next year, this week I delivered (at the second attempt) the manuscript for Patterns of Generative Conversations, to be published soonish as part of the BMI Series in Dialogic Organization Development. I’ll have more to say about it when it is released, but suffice it to say that having something Agendashift-related published here represents a significant milestone.
So an exciting 2022 and much to look forward to. Wishing you the same for 2023!
Self-paced training: delayed in favour of the re-recorded Foundation, the Adaptive Organisation module is back in production, to be released early next year
Media: interviewed by Jeff Keyes of Atlassian, December 11th
18-26 April, Live online, 12pm-4pm EST Tuesdays and Wednesdays, April 18, 19, 25, 26 2023: Creating Generative Conversations by Leading with Outcomes Mike Burrows, part of the Cape Cod Institute’s BMI Series in dialogic organisation development
We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.
A strategy that ignores the obstacles is liable to fall at the first hurdle. That’s if it even gets that far – who will take seriously a strategy that ignores the issues? Turn those obstacles into outcomes Agendashift-style, and organise them so that you can establish a sense of direction, identify places to focus your efforts, and measure progress and success, well you’re in much better shape.
Most things Agendashift-related come with leadership lessons too, hence Leading with Outcomes. Here, in a psychologically safe environment, it must be ok to talk about obstacles. As a leader, you have a responsibility to encourage that to happen. But we can take that basic lesson further: how we talk about obstacles matters too.
Ever since a workshop in Berlin in 2019*, we’ve paid closer attention to how obstacles are framed. What started out as an effort to debug one breakout group’s frustrating experience turned into a new exercise, Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle (yes there’s a nod to Rumelt in the name there).
Ostensibly, the exercise’s job is to frame obstacles such that the conversations to turn them into outcomes will be productive and satisfying, even enjoyable. What we repeatedly find though is that it helps us get to deeper issues and at the same time puts a spotlight on the organisation’s discourse. A bugfix becomes a key feature!
The exercise’s goal is to produce obstacles that are real, relevant, and representative – describing things that colleagues would quickly recognise, that affect their everyday work, and worded as they might word them. As per the title of this post, the trick (if “trick” is the right word – it can take real effort) is to sell the pain, not the solution, the theory, or the blame.
Some examples of “bad” obstacles:
Lack of a knowledge management system
Lack of people, money, or time
Lack of WIP limits
Lack of the Agile mindset
Lack of leadership
Lack of quality
The problem isn’t the “lack of” language (or “scarcity language”, as I sometimes call it), though that’s a strong smell. The problem is what those obstacles are selling: solutions, theories, or blame (or a combination), all of which get in the way of agreement. They’re easily dismissed (they may exclude better solutions or theories, for example), they call for things that everyone knows are unlikely to be forthcoming, or people feel judged by them.
Instead of those “lack ofs”, tell the more interesting side of the story. Sell the pain. Identify the real issue. That way lies the path to agreement on outcomes, a more coherent and robust strategy, and a more purposeful innovation process. And if you want your organisation’s discourse to improve, try paying attention to how obstacles are articulated. The conversation to turn a bad obstacle into a good one (in your next retro, perhaps) might be more important than you might think.
*See Events below – I’ll be back in Berlin in February, my first trip outside the UK since Covid!
18-26 April, Live online, 12pm-4pm EST Tuesdays and Wednesdays, April 18, 19, 25, 26 2023: Creating Generative Conversations by Leading with Outcomes Mike Burrows, part of the Cape Cod Institute’s BMI Series in dialogic organisation development
We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.
Agendashift 