That was last Thursday, and today it sits at #3 on LeanPub. Can we get it to #1 before tomorrow?
Before the third announcement, a reminder: “Office hours” / AMA (Ask Mike Anything) restarts tomorrow after a two-week break. Join me on Zoom most Thursdays at 2pm UK time, i.e. 14:00 GMT, 15:00 CST. If you’re based outside of Europe, check times carefully; here, daylight savings time hasn’t kicked in yet. Call details will be published tomorrow morning on Slack and (for subscribers) at the Agendashift Academy.
Leading with Outcomes: Foundation 3.1.2
So to that third announcement, the release at the Agendashift Academy of the latest version of our Foundation module. Already well-tested in the classroom, it runs more smoothly than its predecessors, and now it’s available in self-paced video-based form.
Engage, Invite, Celebrate, a leadership model that features prominently in Wholehearted
Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes, aka the IdOO (“I do”) pattern, the strategy-related conversation pattern that’s at the heart of Organising Conversations (2024) and Agendashift (2nd edition 2021)
Right to Left, all about impact and learning, it’s the pattern that gave its name to my 2019 book and 2020 audiobook
This third announcement also relates to the first one. How do we squeeze 3 days of Leading in a Transforming Organisation into 14 hours of cohort-based training? We cheat, that’s how! Join Leading in the Knowledge Economy and get free access to the video-based material, Foundation included.
As you can imagine, it has been an intense few weeks. Not that it stops! Next week I have a private Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (yes that’s a thing; the next public one is in June). And I need to get Wholehearted onto Amazon. I can’t wait to have a print copy in my hands!
I say “prerelease” – so far it’s only available digitally on LeanPub – but it’s done, including an awesome foreword by Benjamin Taylor which landed only this morning! For LeanPub fans, it will stay there indefinitely, and its publication in the coming weeks in print and Kindle formats won’t change that.
The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation made its first appearance in the final chapter of the Agendashift 2nd edition (2021). Although it drew some favourable comments at the time, I have to say that in Wholehearted, it has changed almost beyond recognition. You get to understand not only how organisations work (important if you want to understand their dysfunctions), you get to understand how they come to be what they are. There’s an idea there that can be taken further: how do organisations become what they are to each of their participants individually? If every experience of the organisation is different, how can we use that? Instead of glossing over those differences as the traditional modelling process must do, let’s recognise the vast untapped reserve of adaptive capability that they represent.
That has implications for leadership. What does it mean for leaders to “create the conditions”, in particular to create the conditions for everything we might associate with business agility? Too often, that question is answered either with platitudes or with the assumption that all that is needed is a better-designed process. The former is of little help of course; try to scale up that latter kind of thinking and what do you get? Bigger and more complicated processes. Ouch. With a better appreciation of 1) how organisations work at different scales, 2) the dynamics that operate between scales, and 3) ways to change the organisation at what I call “human scale”, leaders can do very much better than that, and that’s good news for everyone.
And so, despite the book being anchored in a classic model from the 70s and early 80s – Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model – its sensibilities are very much of this age. Not only the digital age (significant enough in itself, as readers will discover), but an age that appreciates complexity, conversation, and change very differently. This is not your grandfather’s VSM! To make it work, both how the model is presented and how it is applied must change. A natural enough process (with a ring of familiarity even, if you know Agendashift or Leading with Outcomes), but – and despite my deep respect for the model – radically different.
Hopefully, it won’t have escaped your notice that this is the second of three announcements planned for this month. Tuesday’s announcement anticipated this one; the booking pages for the new cohort-based trainings actually contained spoilers in the shape of links to the book! And here they are again, together with the June TTT/F:
There are some early bird tickets available, so grab those while you can. For a 30% discount on block bookings of three or more places, ping me. For government, public health (eg NHS), and NGO employees, discounts are available from the first seat and increase to 50% for three or more.
In what has been a relatively busy month for the blog, this roundup has updates in two main categories, Wholehearted (i.e. book 5 and related) and Leading with Outcomes (curriculum changes, TTT/F, etc).
Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation
One appendix aside, book 5 is all but complete. I’m happy with the main content, it’s being received well by reviewers, and I’m at the stage of reaching out to publishers. That last part could be a long process though! Two related posts meanwhile. First:
We still welcome new submissions to the global survey by the way. That means 1) you don’t need to wait for the book to see how the assessment is worded, and 2) that you can contribute to the research. Also, there are other ways in which it can be used; check out that post for details.
I won’t repeat it all here, but let me pull out this bit:
Not everyone joins TTT/F with the aim of becoming a Facilitator or Trainer. Some come for the challenge to existing ways of doing things that Leading with Outcomes brings. Some come for the conversation. Some come to hone their coaching skills, to add a strategy dimension to those, or, conversely perhaps, to bring a coaching dimension to their work as manager or consultant. Whatever your role, if you’re looking for participatory, outcome-oriented, and generative alternatives to managed change and the solution-driven rollout, you’ll be in the right place. Book now:
Similarly, three of this month’s top 5 most-read posts have been mentioned already. In positions 4 and 5 there are two popular classics, both of them Wholehearted-related:
Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy “Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”
Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:
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.
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.
From purchase, TTT/F now gives you a year’s free Leading with Outcomes: Authorised Facilitator subscription which you can upgrade at any time to Authorised Trainer. That’s quite a saving! On top of that, participants of the Bengaluru training who are based in India get special pricing too.
Content changes
I should probably have done it years ago, but the latest TTT/F and its materials anticipate a couple of changes that I’ll make to the recorded materials in the new year also. First, in Leading with Outcomes v3.0, I’m switching around parts I & II of the Inside-out Strategy module. In workshop terms (the training modules expand on those), the assessment debrief workshop (chapter 2 of the Agendashift book) now comes ahead of the Discovery workshop (chapter 1). I love the Discovery workshop – in TTT/F’s predecessor, the Agendashift Deep Dive workshop, I could make it last a whole day – but if you’re new to the outcome-oriented style, working at a higher level of abstraction compared to the Assessment Debrief workshop is definitely harder work. I should have listened to Steven Mackenzie, who has always done it this way round…
The second change is to the Discovery workshop itself and the Inside-out Strategy module that builds on it. Their v3.0 materials now include Karl Scotland’s TASTE and TASTE-T (“tasty”) X-Matrix tools. With practice, you can use these standalone, but if you’re new to them, they’re much easier to engage with as the climax of a string of Agendashift exercises, such that they organise what has previously been generated. It’s a great addition and I would like to thank Karl for the tool and Philippe Guenet for developing the integration – you may remember that Philippe took over part of day 1 of Leading in a Transforming Organisation in London a few months ago. Credit for “tasty” goes I think to Chris Combe, who was a participant there.
Templates tidyup
Existing facilitators and trainers will know that I have recently tidied up the menu of assessment templates, which, translations included, is getting quite long. The most-used and recommended templates are now at the top the of list. For more info on that, read the announcement.
Book 5 update
The abovementioned announcement also includes an update on book 5, Wholehearted: Engaging with the Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. I can now go a little further: after the latest round of comment (thank you Simon Rohrer and Teddy Zetterlund) and revision, I find myself suddenly and unexpectedly a lot happier with it. One comment could easily change that, and there’s still a lot of reaching out and so on to be done before I get to the publication part, but writing-wise at least, it feels like I’m on the home stretch now.
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.
Just a short one this month. “Real life intrudes”, as they say; our daughter just spent two weeks in the children’s hospital and was very unwell for longer than that, so it is just as well that I had done that clearing the decks exercise beforehand! Glad to report that’s she is better now than she has been for a while.
Top posts
On the 10th I did manage to record that webinar with my friends at Businessmap (formerly Kanbanize), in which we looked back on the 10 years since Kanban from the Inside was first published. The recording is now available and posted to the blog:
The Agendashift 2nd edition was published only three years ago. Still, that’s long enough ago that I can see how certain things have developed since. Also posted this month:
For the aforementioned reasons, I have no public engagements in November. I am however very much looking forward to visiting India again in December at the invitation of my friends at Innovation Roots:
That’s it for October! All being well, normal service will resume shortly.
Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy “Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”
Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:
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.
That’s the name of a webinar recorded last week in celebration (a couple of weeks late) of the 10th anniversary of the publication of my first book, Kanban from the Inside. The discussion ranged over all four books and the upcoming “book 5”. Many thanks to hosts Albena Georgieva and Nora Pavlova of Businessmap (formerly Kanbanize) and everyone who participated in the Q&A. Congrats also to Stuart Gibbons who won a copy of Organizing Conversations (his choice – he could have had any one of the four). Enjoy!
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.
In this edition: Into the fourth quarter; Ten years and more; Top posts (and book 5 clues)
Into the fourth quarter
Earlier this month I posted Clearing the decks and several people were kind enough to reach out in response. As I said at the time, nothing bad was happening, but I did feel the need to create some wiggle room, which I’m now enjoying.
Cancelling the upcoming LIKE and TTT/F trainings does have implications for the Leading with Outcomes Authorised Facilitator and Trainer programmes. For the time being, it is no longer a prerequisite to take one of these trainings; you can subscribe to those programmes directly from the Agendashift Academy’s Store page now. In fairness to those who have attended one of those trainings previously and didn’t take up a discounted subscription at the time, ping me for a discount code and you can have the first year of Facilitator for free or the equivalent amount off Trainer. For attendees of the in-person TTT/F in India – last years’s and the upcoming one – the same applies, and there is India-specific pricing also. Again, ping me.
I’m still doing speaking engagements (both of the October events are free, by the way), and there will likely be some additions. After those changes, my calendar now looks like this:
September saw a very nice milestone: it has been ten years since the publication of my first book, Kanban from the Inside (KFTI). There are of course some things I’d do differently were I to write it again (which I won’t!), but I remain very proud of it. Moreover, its approach of using some central perspective to integrate ideas from a diverse range of sources is one that I keep using. For KFTI that central perspective was that of a values model; later books developed an outcome-oriented perspective, and book 5 has a central, organising framework, the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation.
Thinking about this end of that ten-year period, I will add that although this year’s release Organizing Conversationstook two and a half years to write – a long time for a comparatively short book – I don’t regret the delay that this commission brought to what will now be my fifth book. Not only does the delay mean that its ideas are that much better developed, there are some important distinctions brought out in Organizing Conversations that I wouldn’t have thought much about otherwise.
I do now have a complete first draft of book 5, but it won’t be published until next year – sorry! Meanwhile, let me recommend Organizing Conversations and also Right to Left, the latter available also as an audiobook narrated by yours truly. Of my four past books (see my new Amazon Author page for the UK, the US, and Germany), those are the two that together best describe where I will be coming from. And for more clues, see the posts below that I’ve marked with an asterisk, and join me at one of those abovementioned events!
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.
Let me quickly mention that last week’s post, Clearing the decks, prompted some subscribers to get in touch. Thank you, I was touched! Sincerely, all is well here – I’m just glad of some extra headspace and flexibility. If I can be nerdy about it, it’s always good to open up options – to improve one’s capacity for independent action, one might say 🙂
Anyway… It’s ten years to the month since the publication of my first book, Kanban from the Inside, which I believe can fairly be described as a Lean-Agile classic. Since then, I’ve published two editions of Agendashift, then Right to Left in both written and audiobook form, and Organizing Conversations came out just a few weeks ago. That last one prompted me finally to ask Amazon to sort out my Amazon Author page so I have everything properly in one place at last! Here it is for the UK, the US, and Germany (three of the four books are available in translation).
In celebration of that 10-year milestone, I’m doing a webinar with my friends at Businessmap (formerly Kanbanize) the week after next:
In the past few days, I reached another milestone, the first complete draft of book 5, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. There’s still a long way to go on that (it won’t be published this year), but we have plenty to talk about. Join us! Bring your questions!
From my Amazon Author page – which only took me 10 years to get set up
At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.
Agendashift 