Agendashift roundup, August 2021

Posted on August 31, 2021October 20, 2021 by Mike Burrows

By design a quiet month blog-wise, but still plenty happening! In this edition: Another non-update on the big reveal; Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation; Another virtual trip to New Zealand; Agile Uprising Podcast; Top posts, recent and classic

Another non-update on the big reveal

Unusually, there are no public Agendashift workshops in the calendar right now – in fact we cancelled some. With some changes, they will resume shortly. Yes, we’re up to something! More here (but not much):

Not quite ready for the big reveal

Still foundational to what’s coming, this self-paced training:

Leading with Outcomes (academy.agendashift.com)

Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

One item under active development that I don’t mind talking about is the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (deliberately-adaptive.org). In the coming months there’ll be new training modules (both self-paced and interactive) that depend on it. Meanwhile, I have multiple pilot projects at home and abroad getting underway with the new assessment tool, and the early results are very encouraging, suggesting a good fit with the now quite mature trust-building and agreement-based approach to assessment already pioneered and formalised in Agendashift.

For a taste of what’s to come in this area, don’t miss this webinar on September 9th kindly hosted by Adrian Reed of Blackmetric Business Solutions:

Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation – business agility at every scale with Mike Burrows

I’ve done a lot of work on this since my slightly rushed presentation at Lean Agile Global and I’m looking forward to this very much!

Another virtual trip to New Zealand

Talking of presentations, I’ve been doing ‘Leading with and Transforming with Outcomes’ at meetups for a while now. They’re interactive enough that no two are ever alike! Returning in June to the New Zealand Limited WIP Society this fantastic comment came in the debrief on the breakouts (around 51:25 in the recording, which only recently hit YouTube):

You’ve taken us into a space where, for me anyway, I’ve not quite been in that space before

To understand how we got there, watch it here:

Mike Burrows: Leading and Transforming with Outcomes (youtube.com)

And a followup blog post:

Inside-out or outside-in? A strategy warmup (June)

Agile Uprising Podcast

I was delighted to be invited back to the Agile Uprising Podcast, interviewed jointly this time by Claudia Orozco-Gomez and Jay Hrcsko. It’s about the 2nd edition of the Agendashift book and is done with the benefit both of a few months’ perspective and the fact that my interviewers have both participated in Agendashift workshops. Hear it here:

Agendashift with Mike Burrows

In this week’s episode Claudia Orozco-Gomez and Jay Hrcsko sit down with the creator of Agendashift (and repeat podcast guest 🙂 Mike Burrows to discuss the second edition of his book. We’ve covered some of the Agendashift classes before as well as Mike’s most-recent book (Right to Left) and we were quite excited to discuss Agendashift, what led to the newest edition, what learnings Mike and his team have gained to lead to a second edition, and we get to thank him in person for beautifully explaining how to use Cynefin. Enjoy!

Not quite ready for the big reveal

Posted on August 18, 2021October 20, 2021 by Mike Burrows

You wouldn’t necessarily know it from the blog, but we’ve been busy over the summer months. We’re not quite ready for the big reveal but I can say that it will bring some changes to our programme of public workshops. Unfortunately, it necessitates the rescheduling or withdrawal of events previously in the calendar, and in the interests of simplicity, we’ve done a complete clear-out. If you were about to make a booking, our apologies.

Some things don’t change: our self-paced online training Leading with Outcomes is still available. It will help you in the following areas:

Building shared understanding of context
Framing obstacles for maximum engagement
Holding meaningful conversations about outcomes
Approaching outcomes strategically

For leaders of all kinds – managers, business architects, coaches, consultants, facilitators, etc – there are some valuable skills there. And as the foundation for everything else the Agendashift Academy will offer its role remains secure, so don’t hesitate! Book here:

Leading with Outcomes (academy.agendashift.com)

What if we put authentic agreement on meaningful outcomes ahead of solutions?

Welcome to Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model

Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation

All Agendashift assessments now available in Korean

Posted on August 2, 2021 by Mike Burrows

With thanks to Seungbin Cho, all of the Agendashift assessments are now available in Korean. That includes:

As described chapters 2 and 3 of Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation, the Agendashift Delivery Assessment in original, mini, pathway, and adaptability variants
As announced recently here and inspired by chapters 5 and 6, the new Deliberately Adaptive Organisation Assessment
The Right to Left Assessment – a template made from the reflection points at the end of each chapter of Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile

The Delivery Assessment and its several variants have been translated into 12 languages but this is a first for the Right to Left and Deliberately Adaptive Organisation templates. Thank you Seungbin for breaking some new ground 🙂

Try the mini version of the Delivery assessment in any of the supported languages for free:

The full version of the Delivery assessment features in these training modules:

Leading with Outcomes (self-paced, anytime)
5-6 October, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Coaching with Outcomes (EMEA)

For the full set of templates (and more):

Become an Agendashift Partner

What if we put authentic agreement on meaningful outcomes ahead of solutions?

Welcome to Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model

Agendashift roundup, July 2021

Posted on July 29, 2021August 31, 2021 by Mike Burrows

It’s summer here – schools out since last week – and I’m going to make this a short one. Here’s the latest:

At the top of our media page you’ll find some new additions, in particular interviews with Radek Orszewski (don’t be put off by the Polish introduction – it’s in English from 05:40 onwards) and Jean Shin (released in two parts, so scroll down for part 1 first). Fingers crossed the recording of my evening at the Agility Leadership Network meetup will be up soon also – great hosts and a highly enjoyable session.
I’m now recording the fourth and final session of the next self-paced training module Outside-in Strategy with Outcomes. Expect an early September launch and likely some pre-launch activity in August. Some great feedback on Leading with Outcomes meanwhile; if you’re partway through it or thinking about doing it and would like a quick Zoom about it, do drop me a line.
I got an amazing response to my call for pilots for the new assessment tool, excited not just by the volume of replies but by the diversity of the organisations involved. If you’re interested but didn’t respond right away, I do still have capacity and the offer is still open. Not for long though!

Upcoming

14 September, one 2½-hour session, Americas-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (Americas)
5-6 October, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Coaching with Outcomes (EMEA)

And always at your convenience and pace:

Leading with Outcomes

Optimising for Significance

Posted on July 22, 2021October 20, 2021 by Mike Burrows

It has been a couple of years since I first read John Doerr’s OKR classic Measure what Matters. You may remember my blog post at the time: There will be caveats: Warming cautiously to OKR. What I might not have mentioned then was that I very nearly didn’t read the book – I found the title quite off-putting!

My discomfort with Doerr’s title – misplaced as it turns out – is explained by a catchphrase I later coined: Meaning Before Method, one of two MBM’s which as a pair actually map very well to OKR. In recent weeks I’ve read (or rather listened to) the book once more and enjoyed it. As for the title, more accurate but less catchy would be Measure things predictive of success in your clear and audacious objectives, taking care to preserve meaning. No issue with that!

I took the trouble this time to follow up on one of Doerr’s few references, in particular Dov Seidman’s How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything (another being former Intel chief Andy Grove’s High Output Management, which I am still to read). This early quote grabbed me, emphasis mine:

Think of it as a shift from valuing size to valuing significance. Conversations about “how much” constantly echo throughout business, politics, and our personal lives: How much revenue can we squeeze into this quarter? How much debt can we tolerate? How much growth can we generate? How big should government be? But “How much?” and “How big?” aren’t the right questions. Instead we should be asking how we can create organizations and societies that mirror our deepest values.

The expanded edition did feel a little long but I was rewarded for holding on until the end (emphasis his this time):

Before we part company, I want to leave you with one more paradox, the paradox of success, and it’s a corollary to the paradox of happiness. You cannot do success; you cannot achieve it by pursuing it directly. Success is something you get when you pursue something greater than yourself, and the word I use to describe that something is significance. All measures of success share one commonality: They signify the value of your passage through life. You can go on a journey of significance—a journey to do, make, extend, create, and support value in the world; and I believe, in the spirit of the Johnson & Johnson Credo, it is this journey that should bring you success, however you measure it.

Pursuing significance, in the end, is the ultimate how.

I talk quite a bit about meaning in work and I am resolved now to do the same with significance. Noting that close colleagues can vary hugely on the meaning they draw from their work (for some the craft, for some the challenge, for others the meeting of needs, for example), I should say that I don’t believe that anyone has the right to dictate how others draw meaning from their work. Helping them find it though, that’s another matter – it’s one bullet of my three-bullet summary definition of Servant Leadership (see the last chapter of my book Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile). Moreover, if leaders aren’t articulating credibly the significance of the work and encouraging others to explore and even challenge it – well that’s definitely a problem.

If optimising for value is a dead end (I can’t be alone in finding much of what is said in Agile circles about value delivery to be empty or even dysfunctional), perhaps we should be optimising instead for significance, expecting meaning (and other good things) to follow. I have a hunch that it’s going to be fun finding out what that really means.

What if we put authentic agreement on meaningful outcomes ahead of solutions?

Welcome to Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model

Pilots wanted

Posted on July 12, 2021July 12, 2021 by Mike Burrows

As of the past week or so, Agendashift partners now have access to a new assessment template, a spin-off from the 2nd edition of the Agendashift book. It’s an Agendashift-style (non-prescriptive, non-judgemental, outcome-oriented, trust-building, etc) assessment tool for the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (deliberately-adaptive.org) and a significant development.

It’s a key part of the roadmap for 2021, both in its own right and as a stepping stone to Transforming with Outcomes, the third of three self-paced training modules (the first, Leading with Outcomes, is already up and running and the second, Outside-in Strategy with Outcomes, launches soon). The assessment is highly accessible and requires no special knowledge on the part of participants; nevertheless, the underlying model is super interesting.

The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation integrates Agendashift and the Deliberately Developmental Organisation (see Bob Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey’s 2016 book An Everyone Culture) into the Viable System Model. VSM is Stafford Beer’s classic at-every-scale (fractal) model of systems that “have the desire to meet the demands of a changing environment”, and it’s a model of extraordinary diagnostic power. Combining it with Agendashift creates the opportunity to use it in a dialogic way – not diagnosing and prescribing, but helping the organisation have the conversations it needs to have with itself.

The assessment comprises 35 prompts across 5 categories:

Intentful Knowledge Discovery
Mutual Trust Building
Adaptive Strategy
Between and Across Levels
Self-governance, Self-development, and Self-organisation

I’m looking for potential pilots to test the assessment, complete with its accompanying Agendashift-style debrief and followup exercises.

Further to the fourth of the above categories, Between and Across Levels, I’m particularly interested in contexts where there’s the potential for strategy to develop at and across multiple levels of organisation – in teams of teams for example.

To set some expectations:

There are no set limits to the number of survey respondents – typically most will respond online in their own time but scheduled one-to-ones for a selected few can work well too
The debrief workshop requires 6-25 participants, ideally representing at least 3 levels of seniority

The debrief workshop identifies the raw materials for an Agenda for Change, a shared organisational strategy:

Survey results sliced & diced in various ways
Survey prompts prioritised in breakout groups of 3-5 people
In those groups, consideration of what those most important prompts could mean for you in context, when they’re working at their “ideal best” for you
Obstacles and outcomes, in each breakout group’s own words

The IdOO (“I do”) pattern and very much as recommended in the book (the Exploration chapter specifically), with room also to explore the models behind the new tool. The process for moving forward from there is well practiced; I can get you started in a few hours if you’d appreciate help with organising outcomes strategically, designing some initial experiments etc.

All in all, it comes to a few hours to at most a few days work at heavily discounted rates – I am not in the market for longer engagements. Think of this as sponsored research for mutual benefit. I’m looking to do a few of these between now and late autumn – mainly to test the assessment, to compare results within and across diverse organisations (so there’s no right kind of organisation if you were wondering about that), and later in the year perhaps to pilot the training (interactive &/or self-paced).

Interested? Contact me here!

What if we put authentic agreement on meaningful outcomes ahead of solutions?

Welcome to Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model

Agendashift roundup, June 2021

Posted on June 30, 2021July 29, 2021 by Mike Burrows

In this edition: Two podcasts; Self-paced training at the Agendashift Academy; Upcoming; Top posts

Two podcasts

In recent weeks I have done interviews for a number of different podcasts. Two were released during in June:

Mike Burrows on the 2nd Edition of Agendashift – Xagility™ podcast (John Coleman, anchor.fm)
Agendashift: The Art of Collaboration with Mike Burrows – Daily of the Month podcast (Joshua Baker & Andreas Wittler, in English after an initial 40 seconds of German, open.spotify.com)

Self-paced training at the Agendashift Academy

Our most recent change at the Agendashift Academy: you can work your way through Leading with Outcomes as quickly as you wish, no longer are you expected to wait a week between of its each four sessions.

Meanwhile, I’m busy recording our next self-paced training, Outside-in Strategy with Outcomes. It’s due this summer so watch out for its launch in the coming weeks! See meanwhile entry #1 in Top posts below.

Later this year will come Transforming with Outcomes. As previewed at deliberately-adaptive.org and described in the Agendashift 2nd edition, we will explore here the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. In short, this means plugging Agendashift into the Viable System Model, seeing how it scales both up and down, describing a path towards business agility at every scale. Still some months to go before this comes out but we’ll be publishing at least one new tool in the meantime. Already we have a number of partners reviewing it and preparing to test it – news on that soon!

Upcoming

Just a few days until the next interactive workshop:

6-7 July, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), APAC-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Coaching with Outcomes (APAC)
14 September, one 2½-hour session, Americas-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (Americas)
5-6 October, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Coaching with Outcomes (EMEA)

And always at your convenience and pace:

Leading with Outcomes

Inside-out or outside-in? A strategy warmup

Posted on June 22, 2021June 22, 2021 by Mike Burrows

In case you have been wondering why it has been quieter than usual here, we had four night’s worth of respite break last week (long story but it was great, the longest break we’ve had since the pandemic started). Refreshed and energised, by the power of Zoom I was in New Zealand early in the morning of my first day back for a Limited WIP Society meetup and I thought it would be fun to try an experiment.

As per most of my meetup appearances we did a IdOO (“I do”) pattern exercise, three breakouts discussing the Ideal, Obstacles, and Outcomes for a given challenge. Composed for the event, here’s the challenge we used:

Imagine…

…reaching the right customers, meeting their strategic needs*, achieving results in the way to which we aspire

*strategic needs: their needs, our strategy

(And here is that challenge plugged into the IdOO Breakout Generator announced last month)

There are several things going on that challenge, and I was careful not to steer people towards any particular element. In the debrief afterwards:

To which part did you most respond? Right customers and their strategic needs, or how we achieve them? If right customers and their strategic needs, chat “outside-in”. If you responded mainly to the how part, “inside-out.

Interestingly, the split was roughly 50:50.

Inside-out and outside-in describe two important and complementary approaches to strategy. If you start with developing capability, performance, or culture, it’s inside-out. Whether or not it qualifies as effective strategy depends on a few things: if you identify one or more meaningful objectives (not too many of those – you need focus), some measures of success (how to know that you’re winning), the most important obstacles you’ll likely need to overcome (no point focussing on the wrong obstacles or obstacles that don’t really exist), and other sources of uncertainty (be honest now), you’ve made a good start, but still you’re set up for failure if you can’t back that up with the necessary commitments.

You can get all of that right and still waste a lot of time finding out that it’s all completely irrelevant from the customer’s perspective – a potentially catastrophic problem if left unaddressed. The alternative? Outside-in means starting from the customer and other actors in the changing business environment, and working inwards. In the process, it creates meaning and context for what happens inside, a powerful exercise in alignment when done right.

Don’t get me wrong, organisations absolutely need to balance both perspectives, and it’s good to be skilled in facilitating both approaches. It’s good also to know which one you’re doing, and to recognise when the other is what’s needed or is happening anyway (trust me, it happens, and it can be a good thing).

If you know you have an urgent need to look at things from both ends, my firm advice is to start outside-in. With the right kind of structure you’ll get quickly to a point where you can bounce back out again, and the whole exercise will make so much more sense. Agreeing instead on a load of improvement work that later turns out to be irrelevant is at best wasteful, and at worst, demoralising.

Back from my break I have started recording Outside-in Strategy with Outcomes, the outside-in complement to the self-paced training Leading with Outcomes with which we launched the Agendashift Academy last month. Together with our signature interactive workshops – see Upcoming below for dates – we’re building a comprehensive training programme, all designed to help organisations, their leaders, and their expert practitioners thrive together in a changing environment. For us that means some motivating objectives for the year consistent with our mission, and some new capabilities to develop. And don’t worry, no shortage of commitment!

The IdOO pattern as leadership model (May)
What do I mean by ‘generative pattern’? (May)
Towards the wholehearted organisation, outside in (May 2018)

Resources (agendashift.com/resources)

Upcoming

Always and at your convenience:

Leading with Outcomes

Further self-paced training modules in the pipeline:

Outside-in Strategy with Outcomes – due summer 2021
Transforming with Outcomes – due autumn/winter 2021

Scheduled:

6-7 July, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), APAC-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Coaching with Outcomes (APAC)
14 September, one 2½-hour session*, Americas-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (Americas)
5-6 October, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Coaching with Outcomes (EMEA)

Upcoming

Always and at your convenience:

Leading with Outcomes

Further self-paced training modules in the pipeline:

Outside-in Strategy with Outcomes – due summer 2021
Transforming with Outcomes – due autumn/winter 2021

Scheduled:

6-7 July, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), APAC-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Coaching with Outcomes (APAC)
14 September, one 2½-hour session*, Americas-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (Americas)
5-6 October, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Coaching with Outcomes (EMEA)

What if we put authentic agreement on meaningful outcomes ahead of solutions?

Welcome to Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model

Loved Adam Grant’s Think Again

Posted on June 9, 2021June 22, 2021 by Mike Burrows

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On Daniel Hulter’s recommendation I grabbed the audiobook edition of Adam Grant’s Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (Penguin Audio, 2021). Loved it, highly recommended!

Let me share a couple particularly relevant quotes. The first one sits very well with Agendashift’s opening two chapters, the second with the closing two and a bit:

Listening well is more than a matter of talking less. It’s a set of skills in asking and responding. It starts with showing more interest in other people’s interests rather than trying to judge their status or prove our own. As journalist Kate Murphy writes, we can all get better at asking truly curious questions that don’t have the hidden agenda of fixing, saving, advising, convincing, or correcting.

Rethinking is more likely to happen in a learning culture, where growth is the core value and rethinking cycles are routine. In learning cultures, the norm is for people to know what they don’t know, doubt their existing practices, and stay curious about new routines to try out. Evans shows that in learning cultures, organisations innovate more and make fewer mistakes. After studying and advising change initiatives at NASA and the Gates Foundation I’ve learned that learning cultures thrive under a particular combination of psychological safety and accountability.

He goes on to describe something quite similar to my “expectation that learning will be accounted for” (deliberately-adaptive.org).

That’s all! Enjoy!

Upcoming

Always and at your convenience (and highly relevant to the first of the quotes above, as is Coaching with Outcomes below):

Leading with Outcomes

Scheduled:

6-7 July, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), APAC-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Coaching with Outcomes (APAC)
14 September, one 2½-hour session*, Americas-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (Americas)
5-6 October, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Coaching with Outcomes (EMEA)

What if we put authentic agreement on meaningful outcomes ahead of solutions?

Welcome to Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model

Latest media and calendar updates

Posted on June 2, 2021 by Mike Burrows

Quick one – already some changes since last week’s roundup!

New on Agendashift’s media page, a followup interview with John Coleman:

2021-06-01, audio, podcast:
Mike Burrows on the 2nd Edition of Agendashift
Xagility™ (anchor.fm)

With workshops, meetups & webinars, here’s how the events calendar looks for the next few weeks:

10 June, DevOps.com webinar :
OKRs: Friends or Foes?
17 June, Online meetup, Kanban New Zealand – the Limited WiP Society:
Leading and Transforming with Outcomes
6-7 July, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), APAC-friendly timing:
Agendashift interactive: Coaching with Outcomes (APAC)
07 July, Online meetup – Expert Agile Club:
Leading and Transforming with Outcomes

And always the self-paced option – time and pace convenient to you:

Leading with Outcomes

Hope to see you at at least one of those!

What if we put authentic agreement on meaningful outcomes ahead of solutions?

Welcome to Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model