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.
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:
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.
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.
Office hours – weekly Zoom on Thursdays, beginning this week
Adaptive Organisation assessment – beginning Friday, taking the opportunity to review it before book 5 comes out
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.
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:
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
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
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
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:
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.
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.
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”:
Delivering, Discovering, Renewing – the value-adding work of the organisation and the systems that support it
Adaptive Strategising – guiding that work and bringing a sense of identity
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:
The Space Between – a window on the relationships between different levels of scale
Organising without Reorganising – avoiding the big reorg, promoting self-organisation at scale
It finishes with:
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!
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:
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.
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.
For this month’s webinar we were joined yesterday by Karl Scotland, who over the years has made a number of significant contributions to the development of Agendashift and Leading with Outcomes. You can access the recording and related bits & pieces here. Enjoy!
While we’re on free events, there are two more this month, both on the 18th:
The first is ostensibly a rerun of my Kanban Australia 2023 keynote for folks from New Zealand who couldn’t make it across, but no doubt you would be welcome to join. The second departs from the usual assessment-related exercises and moves to the “organise the strategy” step, ie mapping.
Thing 2: A big update to the assessment debrief workshop
Hot on the heels of the much-improved Inside-out Strategy (II): Fit for maximum impact, I have released the latest materials for the Leading with Outcomes Assessment Debrief Workshop, essentially chapter 2 of the Agendashift book and the workshop design around which the rest of Agendashift and later Leading with Outcomes were built. This is a big update, perhaps the biggest since the 2nd edition of the Agendashift book was published. Some of the more noteworthy changes:
The Ideal reflection on the assessment prompts moves from the Areas of Opportunity exercise (now 100% focused on prioritising prompts) to the Fast part of a debrief-specific version of Obstacles Fast and Slow. Both of the affected exercises are improved by this change, so why didn’t I think of that before?!?!
It has the new integrated 15-minute FOTO deck. Facilitators might like (as I do) to introduce both Lite and Classic formats; however you choose to do it, the key issues worth discussing at that point are getting started quickly and not getting stuck in a rut for too long.
Experiment A3 (optional) is positioned such that participants may choose whether to use it on a big (mapping-inspired) or small (solution-related) hypothesis
A new Right to Left-inspired exercise, Anticipating the Insights, uses the A3 as an excuse to look ahead to the next feedback opportunity – with some hints to make that not too far away
I have restored the Full Circle exercise. In a nutshell, you compose your own assessment prompts according to our style guide. Optional, but it can be really positive way to finish, and in other workshop designs this exercise has become quite central.
As of this morning, authorised trainers and facilitators have access to the latest materials. For them (or for you to check it out), Inside-out Strategy (II): Fit for maximum impact is their guide. If you’re interested in becoming a trainer or facilitator, check out the following:
*Some extra self-study required to qualify from this to trainer or facilitator, by which time you will be super-qualified (ie you’ll have covered more than TTT/F does).
A smaller commitment is to study Leading with Outcomes in your own time online – for its own sake as leadership development for leaders in transforming organisations, or for its insights into coaching, consulting, and facilitation, particularly in the areas of organisation and strategy. Again, I refer you to the store page.
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:
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.
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 immediate availability of the Leading with Outcomes Adaptive Organisation workshop
And closely related to that:
Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes and scales, v2.1 beta
Updates on Leading in a Transforming Organisation, Manchester
New experience/practice sessions begin next week
1. Announcing the immediate availability of the Leading with Outcomes Adaptive Organisation Workshop
This new 1-day workshop takes the two-part Adaptive Organisation training module (two days of training when done in person, three days when taken with Foundation) and dials down the training dimension to make it all about the conversations your organisation needs to have with itself.
It follows much the same structure as the training:
Introduction
Delivery-Discovery-Renewal – value-creating work and how it is coordinated and organised
Adaptive Strategising – keeping us in the game, strategising and self-governing
Mutual Trust Building – addressing the formal organisation’s deficit in information and decision-making capacity
Between and Across Scales – examining the relationships between scales of organisation
Organising at Human Scale – promoting adaptation, innovation, and learning at all scales
What Lies Beneath – dealing with organisational constraints
Points 1-5 above each correspond to a section of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment, and we’ll be working with that, making this a thorough health-check for your organisation. Per this recent blog post, the final part of the workshop takes it all forward into action, via some very interesting new tools for identifying and visualising organisational constraints.
The material has already been made available to authorised Leading with Outcomes facilitators and trainers. For myself, I am pleased to offer it in the form of a private, 1-day, in-person workshop. I charge a fixed rate for anywhere in mainland UK, and I make things as easy as I can for European destinations easily reachable from Manchester or East Midlands airport also. Outside those parameters – further afield, online, or spread over multiple days – let’s see what we can work out.
2. Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes and scales, v2.1 beta
I have already mentioned the two-part Adaptive Organisation training module on which the new workshop is based. This second announcement relates to its presentation in the form of online, video-based, self-paced training at the Agendashift Academy.
Following on from Adaptive Organisation (I): Business agility at every scale (v2.0 beta), I have released the first chapter of Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes and scales (v2.1 beta). Still to come in part II: two more chapters and an “interlude”, one of two windows into the in-person Leading in a Transforming Organisation. The beta tag will disappear when I’ve released all the videos and done their captions (still in progress for part I) and student workbook. Part I will at some point be re-recorded at version 2.1 or later but there is no great rush to do so – the two parts remain compatible.
Part I develops the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a model to describe any organisational scope at any scale (or many/all such scopes all at once!). Part II pays attention to issues of scale:
Relationships between scopes at different scales – between team and team-of-teams for example
The difficulty with which organisations adapt as scale increases
Identifying and managing organisational constraints
3. Updates on Leading in a Transforming Organisation: Manchester, 14-16 November
This will be my most diverse group yet at a public training. Thanks to staff from the NHS and two universities (three if you count former staff), it’s quite possible that consultants, coaches, and trainers won’t be in the majority. An experience to savour I think!
New this time: with some additional study, this event allows prospective trainers (not only facilitators) to bypass Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F); further information about that on the event page.
The material (shared with Adaptive Organisation parts I & II) can be considered well-tested now, even a joy to teach! Between London, Melbourne, and my preparations for Manchester, each of the two parts fits comfortably in a day, and they take things more consistently in an emergence and complexity-friendly way, which is to say bottom-up. Not that it was ever top-down, but making it more consistent has definitely added to its impact.
A different assessment tool each month, and we’re starting with the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment (mini edition), a version of the one used in all the Adaptive Organisation workshop and training products mentioned in this post. A great way to get a firsthand impression of what it’s all about!
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:
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.
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.
2024-05-10: Minor edits for consistency, in the summary most especially
2023-11-18: Improvements to the Constraints Club wording; Removed a pre-visualisation step of sorting by difficulty before sorting by energy
2023-11-07: Added the question “Out of what does that emerge?” to the Constraints Club exercise
This is a writeup of What Lies Beneath, a new string of exercises that now forms the final session of the Leading with Outcomes module Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes, and scales, and by extension, the 3-day in-person training Leading in a Transforming Organisation. I tested it in that latter form in Melbourne, Australia last week and will be bringing it back to the UK soon (Manchester, November 14-16).
In right to left style, I will describe it backwards:
Premise, goals, next steps
Visualisation: Estuarine Framework
Inquiry: Constraints Club
Establishing context: Assessment
I will summarise the process from start to finish at the end of this post.
Premise, goals, next steps
In a complex adaptive system (CAS), lasting change is achieved in two ways:
By shocking the system into finding a new configuration from which regression is unlikely
By changing the constraints under which the system operates
The first has some obvious drawbacks. How can you be sure how the system will respond? Not to rule out that option entirely but coherently with goals of adaptability (more on that later), we’ll be taking the second route. Broadly, we identify constraints that are open to change and prioritise some of those for further work, doing that in such a way that participants are well motivated to find and then act on potential solutions. That “moving into action” aspect – ideation, hypotheses, experiments, and feedback – is a mature part of Agendashift / Leading with Outcomes, and it won’t be developed further here.
Visualisation: Estuarine Framework
Feeding that “moving into action” aspect is this visual organisation of constraints – constraints having been identified in a generative process to be described shortly:
This is Dave Snowden’s Estuarine Framework, which comprises an Energy/Time “affordance grid” overlaid with boundaries between four groups of constraints:
Those we accept as given
Those we can’t manage on our own but might engage on with others
Those we can manage
Those volatile or flimsy enough that we need do little more than monitor them
The significance of the colours will be explained later, in the Inquiry section.
The Estuarine Framework is the visualisation part of Dave Snowden’s Estuarine Mapping [1]. I have been guilty of confusing the two names, but to disambiguate them: Mapping here is the overall process, and Dave uses Framework consistently with something familiar to most readers of this blog, his Cynefin Framework.
Energy here refers to the amount of energy (or quantities convertible to energy) required to make a constraint no longer applicable; Time similarly. Our inquiry process (which differs from Dave’s) captures them in the form of “true and fair statements”; here we are organising them according to the energy and time required to make those statements no longer true.
Consistent with other mapping techniques in the Agendashift / Leading with Outcome repertoire we build the visualisation in stages. This is not necessarily how Dave does it, but it will feel familiar to many:
Beginning with extreme examples – most and least energy requirement – arrange vertically by energy requirement, using all the available space
Decide where the 0 of the energy axis sits (some constraints may have enough pent-up energy that their net energy requirement is negative)
Keeping vertical positions fixed, organise horizontally by time requirement, again beginning with extreme examples so as to use all the available space
Make adjustments where an energy/time tradeoff may exist
Regarding constraints as affordances (ie things we can interact with in order to effect change), prioritise some for action, marking them visually in some way
In Melbourne, we built our visualisation horizontally on a tabletop, convenient in some ways but not at all conducive to photography. A photo of our work in Melbourne is available on request but it is so awful I do not include it here! That niggle aside, the feedback (linkedin.com) was enthusiastic, most notably:
“Energised by the E/T mapping exercise”
Inquiry: Constraints Club
The first rule of Constraints Club is not to mention constraints
Constraint can be a difficult word, often interpreted as something negative. But without the tendency of constraints to contain or connect, complex systems would not cohere. Although the preceding training / workshop material does deal explicitly with constraints, with that difficulty in mind we are experimenting here with identifying constraints without mentioning the term – a successful experiment, as it turns out.
In place of Estuarine Mapping’s constraint typology, a generative process:
Why is that important? – of a prompt, story, obstacle or outcome we have prioritised or captured
How do we experience that today? What stories can we tell?
Short sentences, true and fair observations
No blaming, theorising, or selling (solutions or theories)
If you struggle to write something that most people would easily agree with, scope it down – independent sentences, as few as needed
What makes it that way? What keeps it that way? Out of what does that emerge?
More true and fair observations, kept separately (or different colour)
Drilling down or expanding, rinse & repeat from 3, 2, or 1
For two aspects of that process, I’m grateful to Mushon Zer-Aviv, who is also doing some Estuarine-adjacent experimentation. The first is the idea of answering with short sentences that are (in my words) “true and fair observations”. The second is the drilling down aspect, which Mushon does with multiple mapping exercises. “No blaming, theorising, or selling a solution” references the Agendashift / Leading with Outcomes exercise Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle [2] that participants will by this time be familiar with; Mushon deals with those issues in his own way.
The idea (if not the wording) behind “scope it down” in cases of disagreement is Dave’s.
Mainly with visualisation in mind, answers to questions 2 and 3 are kept separate – in separate lists on paper or by using differently coloured stickies. This explains the two-tone colouring in the visualisation slide in the preceding section.
Establishing context: Assessment
The string of exercises we call What Lies Beneath begins with a twist or two on the long-established Agendashift Assessment Debrief. The first twist is that we’re debriefing the assessment as a whole not at the beginning of the event, but towards its end. We have however been interacting with it section by section for some time, developing all the while a model of organisation that is both relational and constraint-based, the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation [3]. This is an innovative “re-presentation” of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM), making it more accessible and (in the modern sense) complexity-friendly.
In contrast with typical systems practice, at no point do we seek to establish system boundaries. Instead, we take a “start where you are, everywhere all at once” approach, and this is reflected in the invitation to the assessment [4]. Participants each bring their perspectives on all the organisational scopes with which they individually identify, likely at multiple scales of organisation, ranging from sub-team to whole organisation and sometimes (as was the case last week) beyond.
The full Deliberately Adaptive Organisation assessment template has 35 prompts in the following 5 sections:
Delivery, Discovery, Renewal
Adaptive Strategising
Mutual Trust Building
Between Spaces, Scopes, and Scales
Organising at Human Scale
A free, 12-prompt mini template is available at [5].
Each participant scores each prompt on a four-point scale, then “stars” (ie multi-votes) prompts they would prioritise for further development. Participants may also compose their own prompts, for which purpose a style guide is provided.
The typical survey debrief proceeds as follows:
Score distributions overall
Areas of closest agreement
Strongest
Weakest
Most starred (ie most votes)
The second twist is to return at the end of the debrief to step 2, Areas of closest agreement, reviewing prompts that have the strongest consensus on scores. In the first pass, we have used this page of the debrief report to build confidence in the results, spending little time on what seems uncontroversial. Second time through though, we are wondering whether something interesting might be going on. Given the range of scopes and scales considered, might this level of consensus be seen as remarkable? What might explain that? The Constraints Club exercise isn’t limited to areas of high consensus on scores (rather on the strength of desire for change), but the thought certainly carries across.
Summary: What Lies Beneath
To finish, a summary of the process, this time forwards:
Assessment Debrief
Unconventionally, this finishes with revisiting areas of closest agreement, ie strongest consensus on scores
After the debrief, prioritise prompts that identify areas in which there is the strongest desire for change
Constraints Club
Initially to those prioritised prompts, in answer to the questions “How do we experience that today? What stories can we tell?“ and “What makes it that way? What keeps it that way? Out of what does that emerge?“, generate constraints in two lists (or colours)
Drill down and/or expand until a suitable number have been generated
Estuarine Framework
Arrange by energy and time
Draw boundaries
Moving Into Action
Prioritise constraints
Ideation, experimentation, feedback, etc
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my thanks to the following:
Dave Snowden, for the Estuarine Framework
Mushon Zer-Aviv, as mentioned in the Constraints Club section
Participants at the Melbourne Leading in a Transforming Organisation, October 2023, where the What Lies Beneath string was first tested
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:
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.
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.
Before you begin, think about all the organisational scopes you identify with. Formally-recognised or otherwise, your scopes bring together people, their value-creating work, and a sense of shared identity. Yours might include:
Teams, teams-of-teams, or bigger
Scopes smaller than teams
Cross-cutting scopes that intersect with multiple other scopes
Next, two kinds of “healthy and productive”:
Thinking about your scopes individually, how healthy and productive would you say they are?
How healthy and productive would you say are the relationships between scopes?
To the assessment itself:
As you score each assessment prompt, try to choose a point on our four-point scale that’s representative of all of your scopes
Where that’s hard to do authentically, you can restrict yourself to the scope or scopes with which you identify you most strongly
Don’t worry about being inconsistent – ranges of experience, opinion, and perspective are just as interesting as consensus, and our process will make good use of both
That’s quite a change from “Choose a scope and stick to it”! Given its length, I don’t know that I would use it frequently outside the Adaptive Organisation assessment, but for that one, it’s more in keeping with the module of the same name’s “Start where you are, everywhere all at once” approach.
Experience the full version of the assessment for yourself via the Melbourne (October) or Manchester (November) editions of Leading in a Transforming Organisation, or the online module Adaptive Organisation (I): Business Agility at every scale. Or a private event! If the 3-day Leading in a Transforming Organisation would be infeasible, various shorter options are available, and a new 1-day Adaptive Organisation workshop is ready to test, and on favourable terms. If that could be of interest, get in touch.
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:
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.
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.
Our first Leading with Outcomes Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator finished just a couple of days ago and already I’m looking forward to December’s! It was a productive time: in the first of four half-day sessions that began last week, I took the opportunity to debut a slimline 2.0 version of the Foundation module and I plan to have an even slicker 2.1 version ready for the December event.
Availability-wise, 2.0 is available to trainers now and 2.1 will be available as soon as it is tested (ie no later than December); for Academy subscribersI’ll record the latest available version early in the new year.
More information on the Trainer / Facilitator programmes and details of the next (more Americas-friendly) TTT/F here:
Meanwhile, recording for the fourth Leading with Outcomes module Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale has started. I don’t want to commit to a release schedule just yet but do expect visible (and consumable) progress in the coming weeks.
Agendashift assessments
Two things, both of them the work of Agendashift partners:
Watch Agendashift Assessments (youtube.com) – Agendashift partner Steven Mackenzie interviewed by Dan Gibson for the Add Agility podcast
Other templates are available; the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation Assessment was tested in a beta programme with multiple organisations a few months ago and it will feature in the forthcoming Adaptive Organisation module (see the Academy update above).
Patterns of Generative Conversations
It’s not quite back to the drawing board, but my current writing project needs rather more rework than I had anticipated. I’ve done enough already to know that it will be worth the effort, but suffice it to say that I am not currently quoting a publication schedule for what will be my fourth book. I still aim to start my fifth earlyish next year, the book of the module Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale.
18-26 April, Live online, 12pm-4pm EST Tuesdays and Wednesdays, April 18, 19, 25, 26 2023: Creating Generative Conversations by Leading with Outcomes – Part of the Cape Cod Institute’s BMI Series in dialogic organisation development
The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation Assessment was tested in a beta programme with multiple organisations a few months ago and will feature in the forthcoming Leading with Outcomes module Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale. Recording begins next week!
18-26 April, Live online, 12pm-4pm EST Tuesdays and Wednesdays, April 18, 19, 25, 26 2023: Creating Generative Conversations by Leading with Outcomes – Part of the Cape Cod Institute’s BMI Series in dialogic organisation development
In this edition: Leading with Outcomes: Foundation; 15-minute FOTO, version 11; New video on Agendashift assessments; Top posts
Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
As announced this morning to current and existing students, the “old” Leading with Outcomes will be retired soon, and its replacement will look and feel strikingly different.
Leading with Outcomes: Foundation goes into limited private beta this week, to be launched in full around the end of the year. We’re aiming for a much broader audience – all “leaders in transforming organisations” – and as the name suggests, it’s also the starting point for more. Henceforth, the name “Leading with Outcomes” covers a whole curriculum that reorganises the Agendashift Academy’s existing offerings (both self-paced and interactive) into three parallel tracks, for which the highly accessible Foundation module will be a prerequisite.
For more detail than that, you’ll have to wait for the announcements. Remember meanwhile our guiding principle: Agreement on outcomes before solutions – literally, leading with outcomes! If you share our desire to see more of that, up and down transforming organisations everywhere, then you understand the level of our ambition. We’re going to make it easier for more people to participate in the realisation of that vision, so if you’re with us, get ready.
15-minute FOTO, version 11
The latest version of our Clean Language-inspired coaching game 15-minute FOTO was announced this week, and the announcement drew a lot of interest. Read it here:
Agendashift 