What the (Lean-)Agile scaling frameworks don’t give you

Posted on December 10, 2020January 19, 2021 by Mike Burrows

[Minor edits 2020-12-11 and again 2021-01-08 with an updated title. It is now aligned to the final version of the manuscript that went to the publisher this week]

Not a gratuitous provocation but putting it out there for review. The text below comes from the final chapter of the forthcoming 2nd edition of Agendashift; it’s a quick first draft (written today) and I want feedback! The chapter is new to the 2nd edition; it is titled Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation and the excerpt below comes at the end of a section called Scaling up.

For context, we have by this point reconciled Agendashift with a powerful diagnostic tool, the Viable System Model (VSM). Stafford Beer’s classic model has lessons for all organisations that have the desire to “meet the demands of surviving in the changing environment”.

What the (Lean-)Agile scaling frameworks don’t give you

I can’t help noting that not everything identified in this reconciliation exercise is addressed well by the scaling frameworks. If you’re looking to one of those as the basis of your Deliberately Adaptive Organisation or (somewhat equivalently) as a model of business agility, here are five things that you may need to attend to yourself:

1. Meaningful experimentation

A worthwhile proportion – perhaps even the majority – of your delivery capacity will need to be devoted to objective-aligned insight generation. There is nothing adaptive about ploughing through backlogs of requirements and hoping for a good outcome. Random experimentation isn’t adaptive either; whilst it flexes some important muscles and can be a useful source of innovation, unless the bulk of it is meaningfully aligned to shared objectives (and driven from them in a way that creates meaning for the people doing the work), it’s unlikely to take you very far.

2. Meaningful negotiation between levels based on trust and transparency

If you’re not careful, cascading hierarchies of objectives end up as backlogs of requirements to be ploughed through, and we know where that leads. Dressing up that hierarchy in Agile terms – saga, epic, feature, story, etc – doesn’t change that.

Remember that what’s asked for, what’s needed, what’s possible, and what’s sensible are four different things. Moreover, each level will have its own language, its own way of looking at things, and its own measures of success, and it’s not helpful when one level projects (or worse, imposes) theirs onto another. Instead: trust-building transparency, then mutual understanding, then alignment.

3. Containers for multi-level, multi-loop organisational learning

I’m referring of course to your framework’s equivalent of the Outside-in Service Delivery Review (OI-SDR) and VSM system 4 more generally. How does your framework help you build and evolve shared models of the system and the world outside? How strong are the expectations of learning that it creates? How does it challenge? How does it help you monitor progress towards objectives? How does it challenge? How does it ensure that intelligence and insights are shared quickly across the organisation?

4. Meaningful participation in strategy

Let me say it again: It’s a funny kind of autonomy when strategy is something that happens to you. Now let me add that it’s a funny kind of adaptive strategy if it doesn’t know how to listen. What we have here are two organisational antipatterns that Agile frameworks – scaled or otherwise – has done little to address. Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect that they would, but when they’re sold as transformative models of organisation I believe that some scepticism is entirely appropriate.

5. Meaningful self-organisation at every scale

Not just who does what (better described as self-management), but self-organisation as the interplay between structure and spontaneity – who collaborates with whom, at whatever scale, and with what potential. How does your framework both encourage that to happen and ensure that when it happens it is done well?

How well does your scaled (Lean-)Agile implementation demonstrate those five things? The most likely answers are “not very” or “not at all”. If you’re thinking of embarking on a framework-based scaling initiative, I would suggest that it may pay to attend to these issues first. You’ll then be in a much better position both to understand what the frameworks still have to offer and to make whatever further changes now seem necessary.

To be clear, I’m not anti-framework. To understand how a scaling framework really works is to appreciate how its patterns have been integrated, and there’s definitely value in that. But anyone thinking that it’s cool to roll out a large framework waterfall-style is living in the 1990s! Expert-driven ‘tailoring’ doesn’t fundamentally change that. Much better to use your expertise to help people experiment with combining patterns from the full range of sources at their disposal.

What I really think about Scrum (August 2020)
What I really think about SAFe (October 2019)
Right to Left works for Scrum too (July 2018)

Upcoming workshops

19-20 January, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), Americas-friendly timing:
Leading with Outcomes (Americas)
09 February, one 2-hour session, Americas-friendly timing:
Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (Americas)
23-26 February, 8 online sessions of 120 minutes each, 2 per day over 4 days, EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation (EMEA)

All the usual discounts apply: repeat visits (not uncommon), partners, gov, edu, non-profit, country, un- or under-employment, bulk orders. If you think that one might apply to you, do please ask.

And if you’re thinking of becoming an Agendashift partner, it pays to sign up to that first (in fact it might even pay for itself).

A postscript to ‘How I Choose my Models’

Posted on December 3, 2020December 3, 2020 by Mike Burrows

With a view to referencing it in the Agendashift 2nd edition I’ve been checking out the new Cynefin book Cynefin – Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World (Dave Snowden & friends). It’s a book with many contributors and I wasn’t 100% sure what to expect but I’m enjoying it! If you have any interest in Cynefin I would definitely recommend it.

Despite appearances, this post isn’t about Cynefin. One contribution by Anne Caspari and Johann Entz von Zerssen really resonated with me, especially these two paragraphs from Anne (quoted with her permission):

I (Anne) come from 15 years of critical engagement with integral theory, adult development, and all kinds of change theories. When I started working with these theories and frameworks, they helped me immensely. They opened up my thinking and gave me a means to counteract both gross and subtle reductionism in practical work. This was especially helpful to me in my project management work in environmental planning and sustainability contexts. Adult development theory also helped me understand some of the phenomena I encountered in coaching and leadership work.

Over time, however, I experienced a growing scepticism around a new kind of reductionism that crept into most applications of these theories that often went unobserved by the respective communities. Examples include developmental bias (“we need to develop people”) in large parts of the integral theory scene and some very formulaic and linear applications of change theories (“step 5: find deeper meaning and purpose”). Since this kind of uneasiness is hard to pinpoint and address, I just noticed that I kept away. I settled at the fringes of these communities and did my own thing.

Yes! This! Exactly!

Anne’s struggle is the same as the one that triggered (via an outburst over Zoom of which I am not proud) the How I choose my models post. And the really funny thing: Andrea Chiou, the target of my outburst agrees with me. Violent agreement is a strange beast! From our Slack channel #what-i-am-reading (I pasted the above quote there as soon as I read it):

It is the ‘we need to’ of the ‘we need to develop people’ that annoys me. It separates ‘us’ from them -> increasing the gap between the ‘experts’ and the underdeveloped others.

And yes, you are doing your own thing.

It has been in fact a very interesting few weeks, one of those times when you’re really glad to be part of a diverse and supportive community with knowledge in areas I’ll never be expert in. My gut instinct hasn’t changed, I stand by every every word I wrote in How I choose my models, and yet I’ll be referencing some of that developmental stuff (caveated of course) in the 2nd edition.

The title of a new 6th and final chapter, Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, is inspired by Robert Kegan & Lisa Lahey Laskow’s Deliberately Developmental Organisation (DDO), a model described in their interesting but slightly scary book An Everyone Culture. The surprise (not least to me) is that the DDO model comes from the same stable as Adult Development Theory, my “trigger”! I’m grateful to Jonathan Sibley for pointing me in that interesting direction, also to Teddy Zetterlund for some earlier seed-sowing.

I’ve learned that living by these three bullets of mine is harder than I thought:

Models that have withstood scrutiny over a length of time

Models that treat the individual’s agency, creativity, and problem-solving ability with the utmost respect

Models that help to scale up the preceding

If I’m not going to ignore a ton of potentially valuable and relevant work, there’ll be times when I will need to remind myself that the model, my reaction to it, and the reactions I observe in others or fear from them, are different things. What helps to win me – albeit cautiously – over to DDO is that this is part of the model itself. Not in an especially self-aware way methinks, but it’s a start.

A last word to Jonathan, which I apply first to myself:

A great challenge is to build a model and then hold it lightly. And sometimes, followers hold the model more tightly than the founder does!

Upcoming workshops

19-20 January, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), Americas-friendly timing:
Leading with Outcomes (Americas)
09 February, one 2-hour session, Americas-friendly timing:
Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (Americas)
23-26 February, 8 online sessions of 120 minutes each, 2 per day over 4 days, EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation (EMEA)

All the usual discounts apply: repeat visits (not uncommon), partners, gov, edu, non-profit, country, un- or under-employment, bulk orders. If you think that one might apply to you, do please ask.

Agendashift roundup, November 2020

Posted on November 30, 2020January 20, 2021 by Mike Burrows

A quick one this time in advance of the big 2020 review next month. In this edition: New media; Upcoming workshops; Top posts

New media

Added to the media page this month:

Right to Left (Agile Summit Greece, September 2019) – my last big pre lockdown conference talk
I did two sessions at the Agile Leaders and Managers meetup in the space of a few weeks:
- Right to Left (September)
- Cleanish Strategy (November)

Upcoming workshops

19-20 January, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), Americas-friendly timing:
Leading with Outcomes (Americas)
09 February, one 2-hour session, Americas-friendly timing:
Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (Americas)
23-26 February, 8 online sessions of 120 minutes each, 2 per day over 4 days, EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation (EMEA)

All the usual discounts apply: repeat visits (not uncommon), partners, gov, edu, non-profit, country, un- or under-employment, bulk orders. If you think that one might apply to you, do please ask. We have a quorum already but the more the merrier.

The Outside-in Service Delivery Review (OI-SDR)

Posted on November 9, 2020 by Mike Burrows

It’s something of a work in progress but I have given the Outside-in Service Delivery Review (OI-SDR) its own page now, agendashift.com/oi-sdr, its content Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA). It’s long overdue – the OI-SDR was introduced in the 1st edition of Agendashift (2018), described more fully (with a case study) in chapter 5 of the Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020) and it will be revisited big time in the Agendashift 2nd edition due early 2021.

I don’t want to give too much away just yet but you can expect the second edition to be a lot stronger on questions of organisation, leadership, and (self-)governance than the first, and the OI-SDR is a key part of that (moreso than might be obvious at first glance). Meanwhile, there’s plenty in Right to Left if you haven’t already read that or listened to it, and the Deep Dive workshop – see Upcoming workshops below.

Towards the wholehearted organisation, outside in (May 2018)

Upcoming workshops

17-20 November, 8 online sessions (2 per day over 4 days) of 120 minutes each, EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation
19-20 January, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), Americas-friendly timing:
Leading with Outcomes (Americas)

Agile Uprising discusses Agendashift’s Leading with Outcomes workshop

Posted on November 2, 2020November 2, 2020 by Mike Burrows

On Sunday evening I got a very nice surprise – Twitter alerted me to this new episode from the Agile Uprising Podcast additional to my interview with Jay only a few weeks ago:

Join @mcaddell94 and @backdooragile as they discuss the @Agendashift workshop "Leading With Outcomes", taught by @asplake. SPOILER ALERT: take this course! https://t.co/rrnx1asGvV
— Agile Uprising (@AgileUprising) November 1, 2020

Listen here. SPOILER ALERT (per their tweet): take this course!

Slightly embarrassingly, when this went out on Sunday I had only this month’s Deep Dive workshop in the calendar. Naturally, this includes a deeper version of Leading with Outcomes, but still! So in gratitude to Jay and Mike the first public Agendashift workshop of 2021 will be Leading with Outcomes, scheduled late enough in the my (UK) afternoon for folks based in the Americas to join.

All the usual discounts apply: repeat visits (not uncommon), partners, gov, edu, non-profit, country, un- or under-employment, bulk orders. If you think that one might apply to you, do please ask.

17-20 November, 8 online sessions (2 per day over 4 days) of 120 minutes each, EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation
19-20 January, two 2½-hour sessions (1 per day), Americas-friendly timing:
Leading with Outcomes (Americas)

And I’ll mention this just this once: discount code UPRISING for 15% off either/both events.

workshop 2x1

Agendashift roundup, October 2020

Posted on October 30, 2020December 4, 2020 by Mike Burrows

In this edition: Media – recordings, articles, etc; November Deep Dive; Updates to Celebration-5W; Progress on the 2nd edition; Top posts

Media – recordings, articles, etc

Released this month:

Webinar recording: Good obstacle, bad obstacle: The recording
Podcast: Agile Uprising Podcast: Right to Left with Mike Burrows (agileuprising.libsyn.com)
Article: Outside-in and Right-to-Left: 2 Perspectives on Strategy Deployment(cutter.com)

I’ve taken the opportunity to gather these and similar resources from the past year or more on a new media page, agendashift.com/media. Over time I’ll add dig out some Agendashift-era conference recordings etc also. If you have any favourites you think I should add, let me know!

Thanks for those I’ve added so far go to the Cutter Consortium, Jay Hrcsko (Agile Uprising podcast), Martin Aziz & team (SquirrelNorth), Joe Auslander & Jakub Jurkiewicz (Joekub podcast), Ben Linders (InfoQ), Rahul Bhattacharya (Agile Atelier podcast), Mo Hagar (Agile on the Edge podcast), John Rouda (A Geek Leader podcast), Paul Klipp & Justyna Pindel (Agile Book Club podcast).

November Deep Dive

17th-20th November: Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation – eight 2-hour sessions over four days, EMEA-friendly timing. A practical, hands-on experience of Agendashift, the wholehearted outcome-oriented, engagement model.

Updates to Celebration-5W

There is a new version 4 deck for our workshop kickoff exercise, Celebration-5W. Like most of our exercises, games, templates etc it is Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA) and you can obtain it via its resource page agendashift.com/celebration-5w.

The main changes:

I’ve tweaked a key slide – see the image below – to suggest some initial iteration between When and What; the discussion (if not its later presentation) begins here
Unhiding the initial slides for facilitators – they weren’t showing up in Dropbox
In those initial slides for facilitators, the quote from Agendashift is now from the pending 2nd edition (more on that in a moment)

celebration-5w-2020-10-30

Progress on the 2nd edition

A couple of blog posts this month flow from (among other things) work on the 2nd edition of Agendashift:

From the second of those, nearly 3 weeks old now:

I’ll be pulling out all the stops, integrating (as Agendashift has done consistently for a long time) ideas and experience from Lean-Agile, organisation development, and strategy

Glad to report that this work on the 5th and final chapter is not only well underway, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now! Just a few more sections and I’ll have a first complete draft and I’ll be at the “90% done and still half the work to do” stage. I’m not quoting dates yet but quarter 1 of 2021 seems very doable.

How I choose my models

Posted on October 27, 2020December 3, 2020 by Mike Burrows

As demonstrated by the models-sources-inspirations picture below, I like my models. If you’ve read my third book Right to Left, you’ll know also that I have little time for the idea that there is one best model – one best Agile framework, for example. And the fun isn’t in choosing between them, not even in recognising what each of them can bring, but in integrating them. And it doesn’t stop there: this is not a one-shot process design exercise, but a process of continuous transformation. In short, I’m a pluralist, and I love to see what happens when models and their underlying patterns are allowed to combine.

Believe it or not, I am a picky though. In one of our weekly community Zoom sessions (see #community in Slack), that pickiness resulted in a conversation that was outside our usual norms (if the truth be told I was abrupt to the point of rudeness) and I reflected afterwards on what happened. Happily, we cleared things up quickly and had a much healthier conversation the following week after I had the chance to turn something heartfelt into something more articulate. What follows is a summary.

If Agendashift has taught me anything, it is to be very careful with assumptions. Credit for this goes to Clean Language, which turns the dial up to 11 on the discipline of its practitioners to minimise the influence of their private assumptions (which are SO not the point) on their conversations. This discipline applies most to their explicitly Clean conversations but it rubs off elsewhere in ways that need not mean “coachiness” when that is not called for. Practicing it subtly trains your brain to recognise when you are imposing yourself in ways that aren’t helpful.

You see that attention to assumptions in Agendashift’s outside-in strategy review. The way we make explicit its carefully minimal assumptions is of great help to the facilitator. See my recent Cutter paper for details (announcement included in my post last week); they’re also in Right to Left (chapter 5) and there will be brief coverage in the forthcoming 2nd edition of Agendashift also.

I tend to avoid models that encourage me to make assumptions about what is going in someone’s mind, how they will behave, how they will develop, and so on. The same at team level and organisation level, and I have come to be particularly sceptical of extrapolations from one of those levels to another. The replication crisis (en.wikipedia.org) gives me pause also. For better or for worse therefore, you won’t see Agendashift depending on many “popular” models of psychology, development, or maturity. This is not to say that they are valueless, rather that they make potentially unreliable foundations.

What I do appreciate:

Challenges to my own assumptions
Ways to moderate the impact of unsafe assumptions
Ways to bring assumptions and misalignments to the surface at the right time
Ways to encourage people to find their own solutions in the pursuit of outcomes (authentically shared outcomes most especially)
Ways to sustain all of the above – engines of transformation

And supporting those:

Models that have withstood scrutiny over a length of time
Models that treat the individual’s agency, creativity, and problem-solving ability with the utmost respect (you’ll permit me some personal values and base assumptions there I trust)
Models that help to scale up the preceding

Thankfully, the list of helpful and reliable models compatible with my outlook of optimistic pluralism outlook is long, a fact to which my Models, Source, and Inspirations picture attests. And please do not take the omission of a favourite model of yours as a snub; if I don’t have time to throw yours into the Great Model Collider™ in the hope that something interesting will fly out, perhaps you (or someone else) will.

Opinions mine, strongly held it would seem. Thank you Andrea Chiou and Tom Ayerst for putting up with me – we got there in the end 🙂

Upcoming workshops

Just the one event in the calendar for now – I’ll be adding some more soon, and feel free to twist my arm if you have a particular requirement, public or private. The full menu of workshops is laid out here and over the months I schedule them for most time zones.

17-20 November, 8 online sessions (2 per day over 4 days) of 120 minutes each, EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation

Good obstacle, bad obstacle: The recording

Posted on October 21, 2020December 14, 2020 by Mike Burrows

The recording of yesterday’s webinar Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle is now live on Youtube. You can find it and all the links mentioned in it gathered together here:

Webinar: Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle (agendashift.com/gobo)

I’ve added the deck to the Agendashift Assets Dropbox and you can request access to it via the above page. It’s CC-BY-SA, so feel free to have some fun with it.

While we’re here, let me repeat Monday’s updates, starting with the November Deep Dive:

17-20 November, 8 online sessions (2 per day over 4 days) of 120 minutes each, EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation

Don’t hesitate to ask for a discount code if you think you might qualify on grounds of country, non-profit, government, educational, etc. Also if you’d be a repeat participant, of which there have been a good number!

Jay Hrcsko interviewed me the other day for the Agile Uprising podcast and you can listen to the recording at the link below. Thanks Jay, that was a lot of fun!

Agile Uprising Podcast: Right to Left with Mike Burrows (agileuprising.libsyn.com)

Also in the “just happened” category, Cutter Consortium has just published an article of mine in the form of an Executive Update. It’s a little dense compared to my books but it was fun rehearsing that particular chain of thought for the Agendashift 2nd edition. Grab it here:

Outside-in and Right-to-Left: 2 Perspectives on Strategy Deployment (cutter.com)

Happening (or just happened)

Posted on October 19, 2020October 21, 2020 by Mike Burrows

Update: The webinar recording is now live – see here

Happening: Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle; Agendashift Deep Dive. Just happened: Agile Uprising podcast; Cutter Consortium paper

Tomorrow’s free webinar is sailing close to the 100 participant limit (to the point that I’ve asked anyone who can’t attend to cancel) but there are at the time of writing a single-digit number of tickets available. Get yours here:

20 October, Online, 10:00BST (GMT+1), 11:00CEST:
Free webinar: Good obstacle, bad obstacle (EMEA)

After that, the next big event is the November Deep Dive:

17-20 November, 8 online sessions (2 per day over 4 days) of 120 minutes each, EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation

Re that one, don’t hesitate to ask for a discount if you think you might qualify on grounds of country, non-profit, government, educational, etc. Also if you’d be a repeat participant, of which there have been a good number!

Meanwhile, Jay Hrcsko interviewed me the other day for the Agile Uprising podcast and you can listen to the recording at the link below. Thanks Jay, that was a lot of fun!

Agile Uprising Podcast: Right to Left with Mike Burrows (agileuprising.libsyn.com)

Outside-in and Right-to-Left: 2 Perspectives on Strategy Deployment (cutter.com)

And thank you Andrea Chiou, Jonathan Sibley, and Jon Cashmore for your help – very gratefully received!

Still not a fan of the PDCA cycle or the continuous improvement initiative

Posted on October 8, 2020October 15, 2020 by Mike Burrows

I’ve just finished the first decent draft of chapter 3 of the Agendashift 2nd edition and its segue into the more operational part of the book. Choosing my words here quite carefully: you can take this post as warning that I won’t be praising the PDCA cycle or the continuous improvement initiative. There, I said it. Heresy?

Last week I posted this question on LinkedIn:

Ask LinkedIn: Why does Lean Startup’s build-measure-learn loop seem often to sustain itself but the continuous improvement loop (PDCA) that inspired it typically run out of steam quickly? I’ve written on the PDCA problem more than once before and I have plans to do so again but I’m curious to know what people think [source]

36 comments and several good answers later, the one that best gets to the issue is this from my friend Patrick Hoverstadt:

My suspicion Mike is that this is structural – PDCA works ON the process, whereas build-measure-learn IS the process. If you stop doing PDCA, the work still goes on, product still gets produced and shipped and paid for, but it just stops improving. If you stop doing build-measure-learn, then the build part stops, so no product, and the business stops. PDCA shouldn’t be, but often is seen as an extra. [source]

The Agendashift book’s strapline is Outcome oriented change and continuous transformation, so I do need to get beyond just identifying the issue. Here’s how the new chapter 3 begins to tackle it (and for context, here first is the patterns picture):

patterns

The […] myth is that change happens naturally in cycles. You plan an experiment. You do the work of the experiment. You check the results of the experiment. You act on those results. Rinse and repeat, one experiment leading to the next. The PDCA cycle (<figure>) in other words.

Replace PDCA with another improvement cycle and the brutal fact remains: one experiment does not inevitably launch another. Improvement cycles are not perpetual motion machines; they do not sustain themselves. If ever you have wondered why continuous improvement initiatives seem to run out of steam so quickly, perhaps instead you should be wondering how they last any time at all.

Let’s look at two places where experimentation does seem widespread:

At the high tech startup

At Toyota, the inspiration for Lean

Size-wise, they’re at opposite ends of the scale. So what do they have in common? It can’t be the technology – many of Toyota’s experiments are remarkably low-tech. Common (and I would say glib) answers such as “leadership”, “sponsorship”, or “culture” don’t help much because their respective cultures are so different. There is a grain of truth to them though, and I believe the lesson is this:

Experimentation is sustained where these two things are true:

The learning that it generates matters to people

When that learning isn’t happening, it gets noticed

If you’re not a startup it would be inauthentic to pretend that your situations are equivalent. Even if genuinely you’re in a fight for survival, your organisation most likely has (or at least had) some viable business at its core; the startup lacks even that anchor. And don’t expect to magic up Toyota’s kaizen culture overnight – it took them generations after all.

Agendashift’s answer:

Experiments flow from meaningful outcomes and their measures of success (not rationalised the other way round), each experiment framed to ensure that learning will happen regardless of how it turns out

Experimentation is conducted in the full knowledge that multiple levels of learning will be accounted for in forums that matter

My advice is to abandon the notion of the cycle and to keep separate the framing of individual experiments, the day-to-day management of your active experiments, and the harvesting of learning. Of the three, the last is by far the most important; with the right focus on it, the other two fall into line behind it.

Hence the pattern Right to left strategy deployment, the right to left part signifying the working backwards from meaningful outcomes, the strategy deployment part a reminder (among other things) of the importance and relevance of the work. Solving problems just because they are there will no longer do.

A reminder of those three aspects to keep separate:

Framing experiments
Managing your portfolio of active experiments
Harvesting the learning

They’re covered across the final two chapters. The first two of those are well understood and the 1st edition covers them well. For the last one, which really means building a learning organisation, I’ll be pulling out all the stops, integrating (as Agendashift has done consistently for a long time) ideas and experience from Lean-Agile, organisation development, and strategy. Chapter 5 won’t be just the wrap-up chapter, it will be the climax, and I’m really excited about it. Happy to report that doing a 2nd edition is no drag 🙂

Before you go, a couple of dates for your diary:

20 October, Online, 10:00BST (GMT+1), 11:00CEST:
Free webinar: Good obstacle, bad obstacle (EMEA)
17-20 November, 8 online sessions (2 per day over 4 days) of 120 minutes each, EMEA-friendly timing:
Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation

Only a few places left for that first one. For the second, don’t hesitate to ask for a discount if you think you might qualify on grounds of country, non-profit, government, educational, etc. Also if you’d be a repeat participant, of which there have been a good number!

Agendashift as framework (April)
On not teaching PDCA (March 2016)
Good obstacle, bad obstacle (September)

Agendashift

Agendashift

Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation

What the (Lean-)Agile scaling frameworks don’t give you

What the (Lean-)Agile scaling frameworks don’t give you

1. Meaningful experimentation

2. Meaningful negotiation between levels based on trust and transparency

3. Containers for multi-level, multi-loop organisational learning

4. Meaningful participation in strategy

5. Meaningful self-organisation at every scale

Related:

Upcoming workshops

A postscript to ‘How I Choose my Models’

Upcoming workshops

Agendashift roundup, November 2020

New media

Upcoming workshops

Top posts

The Outside-in Service Delivery Review (OI-SDR)

Related

Upcoming workshops

Agile Uprising discusses Agendashift’s Leading with Outcomes workshop

Agendashift roundup, October 2020

Media – recordings, articles, etc

November Deep Dive

Updates to Celebration-5W

Progress on the 2nd edition

Top posts

How I choose my models

Upcoming workshops

Good obstacle, bad obstacle: The recording

Happening (or just happened)

Still not a fan of the PDCA cycle or the continuous improvement initiative

Related articles