Tag: classic

Sell the pain, not the solution, the theory, or the blame

Posted on by Mike Burrows

A strategy that ignores the obstacles is liable to fall at the first hurdle. That’s if it even gets that far – who will take seriously a strategy that ignores the issues? Turn those obstacles into outcomes Agendashift-style, and organise them so that you can establish a sense of direction, identify places to focus your efforts, and measure progress and success, well you’re in much better shape.

Most things Agendashift-related come with leadership lessons too, hence Leading with Outcomes. Here, in a psychologically safe environment, it must be ok to talk about obstacles. As a leader, you have a responsibility to encourage that to happen. But we can take that basic lesson further: how we talk about obstacles matters too.

Ever since a workshop in Berlin in 2019*, we’ve paid closer attention to how obstacles are framed. What started out as an effort to debug one breakout group’s frustrating experience turned into a new exercise, Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle (yes there’s a nod to Rumelt in the name there).

Ostensibly, the exercise’s job is to frame obstacles such that the conversations to turn them into outcomes will be productive and satisfying, even enjoyable. What we repeatedly find though is that it helps us get to deeper issues and at the same time puts a spotlight on the organisation’s discourse. A bugfix becomes a key feature!

The exercise’s goal is to produce obstacles that are real, relevant, and representative – describing things that colleagues would quickly recognise, that affect their everyday work, and worded as they might word them. As per the title of this post, the trick (if “trick” is the right word – it can take real effort) is to sell the pain, not the solution, the theory, or the blame.

Some examples of “bad” obstacles:

  • Lack of a knowledge management system
  • Lack of people, money, or time
  • Lack of WIP limits
  • Lack of the Agile mindset
  • Lack of leadership
  • Lack of quality

The problem isn’t the “lack of” language (or “scarcity language”, as I sometimes call it), though that’s a strong smell. The problem is what those obstacles are selling: solutions, theories, or blame (or a combination), all of which get in the way of agreement. They’re easily dismissed (they may exclude better solutions or theories, for example), they call for things that everyone knows are unlikely to be forthcoming, or people feel judged by them.

Instead of those “lack ofs”, tell the more interesting side of the story. Sell the pain. Identify the real issue. That way lies the path to agreement on outcomes, a more coherent and robust strategy, and a more purposeful innovation process. And if you want your organisation’s discourse to improve, try paying attention to how obstacles are articulated. The conversation to turn a bad obstacle into a good one (in your next retro, perhaps) might be more important than you might think.

*See Events below – I’ll be back in Berlin in February, my first trip outside the UK since Covid!

Image: anonymous, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18101954

Thoughts? Discuss this post on LinkedIn

Updates

  • Events: Added Berlin, 7-8 February
  • Media: interviewed by Jeff Keyes of Atlassian, December 11th

Events

Self-paced training

The four modules of Leading with Outcomes:

  1. Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
  2. Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact
  3. Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success
  4. Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale (from early 2023)

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From “What did you do yesterday?” to something better

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Go for it! If the main purpose of your standup is to make sure that everyone is keeping themselves properly busy, then the questions “What did you do yesterday?” and “What will you do today?” are without doubt the basis of a great meeting format.

But be careful what you wish for. If your goals involve 1) the team meeting needs, and 2) learning from the process, those questions can hurt a lot more than they help. Honestly, I’m not a fan at all.

You could try these instead. Understand the pattern, and with practice, it runs itself:

  1. What are we learning from what we recently completed? And is it staying completed? Whose needs did we meet, and how do we know we met them?
  2. What can we get over the line?
  3. What is and isn’t making the expected progress? Are we clear about whose needs we’re meeting, what needs, how we’ll know, and what’s our approach?
  4. Do we have the capacity to look at what’s next, or is that enough until we next meet?

You probably won’t get to that overnight, so some things to try:

  • Instead of reviewing activities (what you did, what you’re doing, etc), try to focus the things that you as a team are trying to produce, in the context of the goals you’re pursuing
  • All else being equal (in bigger meetings, this pattern can work within other interesting ways to structure the work), try reviewing your work most-complete work first, not forgetting to start with celebrating and enquiring into work recently completed
  • Make a point of noticing how the conversations change as you work backwards, and develop your repertoire accordingly – by this stage you’ll likely be noticing not only a performance difference but a language change and changes to people’s expectations and behaviour, and you can build on that until they become habits
  • In all of the above, try keep in your mind and everyone else’s what you’re working backwards from: “someone’s need met” and “all the available learning fully accounted for” (my definitions of done and really done)

I’ve used this “right to left” technique in a range of settings, often supercharging something that really wasn’t working before – standup meetings, risk & issue review meetings, service delivery review meetings to name just three. Right to left is named after Kanban’s board review pattern (you start on the right-hand side of the board with work at or nearest completion) but it’s not hard to apply in other settings.

And it’s more than just a productivity hack. In my third book Right to Left (2019, audiobook 2020), I take that philosophy of working backwards from impact and learning and use it as a lens on the whole Lean-Agile landscape (and more). Further to it not being just a Kanban thing, the book shows how right to left fits very well with the best of Scrum. Contrast that with an all too prevalent left to right kind of Scrum that does the reputations of Scrum and Agile no favours at all, and that scales up in the worst possible way. Fortunately it’s fixable.

This post started out as a LinkedIn post, then a second:

  1. Go for it! (linkedin.com)
  2. Building on that last one… (linkedin.com)

And now a third:

    Like, comment, share!

    You can also take any questions you may have to one of the upcoming webinars – the first three (December 8th, January 12th, February 2nd) all finish with an AMA (Ask Mike Anything) session. Series link: The questions that drive us (eventbrite.co.uk).

    Related:

    Upcoming:

    Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
    Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Facilitator and Trainer Programmes
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    We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.

    Your organisation in 5 networks

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    Updated 2022-11-17: Renamed network #2, minor edits elsewhere

    Expanding slightly on yesterday’s LinkedIn post (linkedin.com), your organisation in 5 networks:

    Network #1: Your reporting network. This is just your formal structure – typically a hierarchy, perhaps with the occasional bit of dual reporting thrown in – seen here as lines of communication. Because sideways communication has to be implemented indirectly via upward and downward communication, it can be highly inefficient.

    Network #2: Your delivery operations network. I am referring not to material flows or to the knowledge work equivalent, but to the interactions between people that make those flows what they are, performing as they do. In siloed organisations, the delivery operations network cuts across the reporting network, sometimes uncomfortably.

    Network #3: Your strategy network. Typically richer than the reporting network, this connects everyone involved in anybody else’s strategic decision-making – any decision-making at any level of organisation that impacts on things like identity, purpose, objectives, learning, and adaptation. A more abstract and less messy version of this network connects not people but domains of responsibility at varying levels of granularity (see circular organisation).

    Network #4: Your trust-building network. This is the network of all connections that are enhanced by meaningful efforts to build or maintain mutual trust. In a high-trust organisation, this can be expected to overlap significantly with the preceding three networks.

    Network #5: Your social network: All the above and more – the totality of your organisation’s network of interaction and influence, covering all the conversations that contribute to making your organisation what it is and what it is becoming.

    And two hypotheses (with caveats):

    Hypothesis 1. The more that networks 2, 3, and 4 are healthy, the more that networks 1 and 5 look after themselves.

    Hypothesis 2. The richer you can make them, the more likely is the serendipitous conversation, increasing the rate of innovation.

    As rightly observed in some of the questions and comments on the first version of this post, these hypotheses are slightly in tension. Rich is good, richer would be better for many if not most organisations, and​ leaders within them would do well to pay attention to those networks. You can however have too much of a good thing, not to mention that some innovation happens in the darker corners, so to speak. In my use of the word “healthy” in hypothesis 1 I did intend a sense of balance, and I should have worked that sense into hypothesis 2 also. Instead though, this paragraph’s caveats 🙂

    Some questions for you:

    1. In your organisation, which network or networks dominate?
    2. At what cost?
    3. Given where you sit in each of these networks and the reach that they afford you, what might you do?

    Your answers, questions, or feedback can go on the original post (linkedin.com).

    You can also take them to one of the upcoming webinars – the first three (December 8th, January 12th, February 2nd) finish with an AMA (Ask Mike Anything) session. Including that webinar series, The questions that drive us (eventbrite.co.uk), all our upcoming events:

    Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
    Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Facilitator and Trainer Programmes
    Links: Subscribe | Events | Contact | Mike

    We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.

    PS The slide below is adapted from the talk I gave last week at SEACON (the Studies in Enterprise Agility Conference). Video to follow.

    Leaders as keepers of context

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    [Updated 2023-04-23: Improved the image (borrowed from the latest iteration of Leading with Outcomes: Foundation; minor changes to the text]

    Be a keeper of context

    What if all failures were failures of context? OK, that’s an exaggeration, but as a working default assumption, it sure beats assuming failures of competence or character. Moreover, it can be the beginning of a generative line of thinking, one that puts you in the role of keeper of context.

    Suppose that you’re a leader in a transforming organisation [1] and you witness an unproductive conversation. What is the shared context that this conversation is missing? You might intervene and provide some, but that’s not the point here. Work backwards. What was the conversation that didn’t take place, the one in which that context would have been established? Look not only at formal meetings but at how activities are sequenced, how their respective conversations happen, and their quality. What opportunities for context-creating conversations are we missing?

    Looking at your organisation’s processes, it’s easy to focus on just the formal sequence of activities and overlook the interactions that happen (or need to happen) between them, and in particular, their conversations. When each activity involves different people and the chain of activities is long, it’s not hard to see how context gets lost.

    Going deeper into organisation design and questions of meaningfulness, suppose now that you come across some work that failed to delight the customer. What went wrong? Lack of skill? Lack of commitment? These are easy conclusions to reach, but let’s try a different kind of assumption. Could this again be a failure of context? Was that work done with a deep enough appreciation of the context into which that work would be delivered? Where was the opportunity to appreciate the customer’s struggles? Where was the opportunity to explore their needs, to identify measures of customer progress, and so on? And suppose that the work had instead been successful, what kind of feedback would those involved have received? Could it be that our role definitions and process designs keep the people closest to the work insulated from the context they need?

    Finally, suppose now that you suspect you’re seeing people lose their sense of what’s important, who they are, and what their team is about. Not so surprising in a transforming organisation! When you see confusion, it doesn’t usually help to ask what people are doing or what they are thinking. Instead, go back to the beginning and let them tell the story. If it turns out that the one who was confused was you, don’t be surprised. Context really is everything.

    My perspective on these issues of context has evolved. In my first book, I suggested that you might begin with the assumption that any failures of process you encountered were rooted in failures of collaboration. If you’re looking for systemic causes – making it easier to adopt this perspective non-judgementally ­– I’ve found that this perspective can be highly productive.

    Going back a few more years to when I was a global manager of managers, I would see failures of leadership. Confrontational perhaps, but again productive when the failing collaboration involved an imbalance of power or experience, and the more senior party involved needed to understand their additional responsibility in the relationship.

    Failures of context, collaboration, or leadership: three closely related perspectives yet quite different in tone. When you’re a manager dealing with these issues daily or an external practitioner sensing one for the first time, which perspective do you choose? I remain comfortable with all three; the right one on the day is the one that leads to the insights needed via a safe and productive conversation. And if you’re not sure, you can always ask!

    [1] Leaders in transforming organisations are the Agendashift Academy’s focus; this post expands on two end-of-section reflections from Leading with Outcomes: Foundation and Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact. We return to the topic as a sensemaking and scaling issue in the final module, Adaptive Strategy: Business agility at every scale.

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    Six commitments: Putting the ‘Deliberate’ into the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (part 1 of 2)

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    Somewhat in the style of what is easily my most popular post of all time – Introducing Kanban through its values (2013) – here is the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (“business agility at every scale”) [1, 2] introduced through a set of six commitments. If this post turns out to be half as successful (and career-changing) as that one, I’d be a happy man indeed 🙂

    The six commitments come in two groups. The first group is covered in this post:

    1. Co-creation ­– To keep finding better options, together
    2. Sensemaking – To make the best sense we can of every new challenge
    3. Trust Building – To build trust in every direction

    The second group will be covered in a later post:

    1. Curiosity: To ask better questions
    2. Generativity: To create more ideas than we consume
    3. Consent: To celebrate the agency and ingenuity of others

    What separates the two groups is that the first three commitments correspond respectively to the three top-level components of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. These are the overlapping and deeply-connected “supersystems” of Adaptive Strategy, Production (Delivery, Discovery, and Renewal), and Mutual Trust Building. Commitments in the second group apply everywhere. Together, the six quickly convey some of the model’s true character.

    The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation’s three “supersystems”

    The model works at every scale – teams, teams of teams, bigger structures, smaller structures, structures outside of any hierarchy, whole organisations. Mapping it to some part of the actual organisation, its power lies not only in what each supersystem represents, but also in the relationships between supersystems and between scales.

    So to the first three commitments, co-creation, sensemaking, and trust building…

    Commitment 1. Co-creation ­– To keep finding better options, together

    This might easily have been called the participation commitment. Its inspiration comes directly from Agendashift [3]; indirectly it draws in the Generative Change Model [4] and Dialogic Organisation Development [5] more generally.

    Co-creation starts with making sure you have the right people in the room when you’re doing any of the following:

    • Generating and organising options (outcomes primarily, solutions later)
    • Evaluating and re-evaluating options in the light of progress, intelligence, and insights
    • Updating the group’s shared understanding more broadly
    • Expressing intent
    • Making commitments
    • Revisiting its shared sense of identity and purpose or engaging with any challenges to those

    Relative to the organisational scope in question, “the right people in the room” means people highly if not maximally representative of the following:

    • Those with direct, first-hand knowledge
    • Those with strategic context
    • Those best positioned to hold the detail and the whole together
    • Those impacted by whatever decisions might be made

    The commitment to co-creation is key to the authenticity of this participation; co-created options aren’t prescribed or otherwise prejudged.

    Commitment 2. Sensemaking – To make the best sense we can of every new challenge

    At whatever scale we’re considering, the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation must be engaged in some kind of productive work. This includes the work of renewing the organisation; in terms of both mechanics and importance, there is enough in common between delivery and change for them to be treated the same – as “real work”. (Keeping the two in balance is an important responsibility of Adaptive Strategy.)

    When we’re doing that work, let’s not underestimate the opportunity to expect the unexpected, to notice what we didn’t notice before, and to interpret what we notice in different ways. In an organisation that’s continuously transforming, those opportunities should be plentiful: often we’re doing new things or experimenting with doing old things in new ways. To miss those opportunities would be a tragic waste!

    Adaptive Strategy on its own isn’t enough for the organisation to be learning. The progress, intelligence, and insights it requires all come from doing the work – engaging with the real world, not just the group’s model of it. The sensemaking [6, 7] commitment is a reminder to frame and conduct that work for maximum learning, doing that appropriately according to context and the task in hand. As any student of Cynefin [8] will tell you, there are category errors and other risks be avoided here.

    Undoubtedly, to truly maximise learning over time, you need an effective process too. But this is not yet another Agile process framework! For the following reasons and more, I choose not to lead with process:

    1. It’s table stakes. While there are enough organisations out there whose terrible processes and coordination systems compromise their viability (let alone their agility), there are multiple, complementary approaches to improving them whose effectiveness is well-proven. Moreover, the best of those aren’t prescriptive.
    2. It’s implied. The model that underpins the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation – the Viable System Model [9] – has certain expectations about process but it too manages to avoid prescription
    3. If you’re interested in what really scales, process is about the worst place to start

    Commitment 3. Trust Building – To build trust in every direction

    Organisations are built on trust. It might not always seem that way, but no organisation can afford for every task to be micro-managed, inspected, duplicated, and so on. Without at least some level of trust, very little would get done.

    The trust-building commitment is however about more than reducing that delivery overhead. Even when relying heavily on participation, the Adaptive Strategy part simply does not have the cognitive or communication capacity to be into everything everywhere all the time. It has no choice but to be selective with its attention, and to use it effectively. It builds trust through a combination of where, where not, and how it chooses to direct its attention, what it communicates in those choices, and how it describes its underlying motives.

    Trust-building works in other directions too. It’s a problem if commitments between peers can’t be relied upon, a problem that only gets worse if it’s hard to say no to additional commitments. It’s a problem if issues or risks aren’t shared, whether it’s because people don’t feel safe to do so, or that the need to share never occurred to them. It is wasteful to be constantly second-guessing the intentions of others. And it’s a problem if doing the right thing consumes more effort and attention than it should; trust isn’t only a question of psychology or economics – it’s an infrastructure question also.

    Those first three commitments again:

    1. Co-creation ­– To keep finding better options, together
    2. Sensemaking – To make the best sense we can of every new challenge
    3. Trust Building – To build trust in every direction

    In a second post, I’ll expand on the second set of commitments, commitments that apply to every supersystem at every scale:

    1. Curiosity: To ask better questions
    2. Generativity: To create more ideas than we consume
    3. Consent: To celebrate the agency and ingenuity of others

    Read part 2:

    References

    [1] Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale (academy.agendashift.com)
    [2] Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, business agility at every scale (deliberately-adaptive.org)
    [3] Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation, Mike Burrows (2nd ed 2021)
    [4] The Dynamics of Generative Change, Gervase R. Bushe (BMI Publishing, 2020)
    [5] Dialogic Organization Development: The Theory and Practice of Transformational Change, Gervase R. Bushe & Robert J. Marshak (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2015)
    [6] Sensemaking in Organizations, Karl E. Weick (1995, Sage Publications)
    [7] Sense, make-sense, decide, act, Tom Graves (2016, weblog.tetradian.com)
    [8] Cynefin (cynefin.io)
    [9] By Stafford Beer, all published by John Wiley & Sons: Brain of the Firm (2nd ed 1981, reprinted 1995), The Heart of Enterprise (1979, reprinted 1995), Diagnosing the System for Organisations (1985, reprinted 1995). I must confess that Diagnosing did not click for me until I made a second attempt after completing the longest of the three, Heart, which remains my favourite. A thousand or so pages in total (more if you count the re-reads) and well worth the effort. For a more modern and accessible treatment I highly recommend The Fractal Organization: Creating Sustainable Organizations with the Viable System Model, Patrick Hoverstadt (John Wiley & Sons, 2008)

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    If you want to understand scaling… (part 1 of 2)

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    If you want to understand scaling:

    1. Start with what must be true at each scale of organisation (this post)
    2. Then with what happens between scales (part 2)

    Let’s begin with teams, or more specifically with its members, people. Even allowing for diversity, there are a number of near-universal things you can say about the members of any well-established team:

    • They each know who they are; many will also have a sense of who they’d like to be
    • They each know what they want to contribute; many will also have identified capabilities they’d like to develop
    • They each have a sense of what they can manage on their own and what should be managed more collectively

    There are some boundaries there. They may be fuzzy and there may be room for negotiation in the short term and for development in the longer term, but cross them – insist that people do things that “aren’t them”, aren’t what they signed up for, or take away their ability to self-manage to the level they expect – and you have unhappy people in an unhappy team. For example, most people don’t like to be micro-managed; neither do they want to see important things left unattended.

    Now to the team itself. You’d be hard-pressed to find a high-performing team for which these aren’t true:

    • There are collective senses of identity, purpose, and of what it aspires to
    • It knows what it’s there to do, what it is capable of, and ways in which those capabilities might be developed
    • It knows what it can manage for itself as a team, and (conversely) what needs to be managed more collectively, ie with (and perhaps by) other teams – potentially even with others outside the organisation

    Again, there are some boundaries there. Fuzzy and negotiable no doubt, but only a fool would think they could cross them without negative consequences.

    Jump now to the organisation as a whole. I almost don’t need to write these points down, but I will:

    • It has a sense of identity, a sense of purpose, and a sense of what it aspires to
    • It knows what it’s there to do, what it is capable of, and ways in which those capabilities might be developed
    • It knows what it can manage for itself as an organisation, and (conversely) what needs to be managed with others – suppliers, customers, industry groups, and so on

    You can be pretty sure that if there are significant issues with any of those points, you’re looking at an organisation that has problems – big problems. At the extreme: identity crises, or working catastrophically beyond its capabilities or its remit.

    Starting again at the level of the individual, on the topic of what makes the work meaningful, the answers may vary hugely. Moreover, you never know until you ask, and perhaps not even then until you get to know them well enough. At higher levels, diversity of purpose and capability is essential to meeting the complexities of the business environment. The successful organisation has them distributed effectively whilst maintaining some coherence of its own, not an easy balance to maintain when the environment is changing.

    What does all that mean for teams-of-teams? Does this repeating pattern – a pattern that already works at three levels – the levels of individuals, teams, and the whole organisation – apply at other scales? Pretty much!

    If your team-of-teams doesn’t have its own sense of identity and purpose – meaningful to the people in it, not just its designers – it is unlikely to amount to anything more than an aggregation of its parts. What is it for? What is it capable of? What does it add, other than overhead? If this problem is widespread, you have a structure that is hard to navigate, a direct cost to the organisation and potentially a problem for customers too.

    What if it has those senses of identity and purpose but not a sense of where it would like to get to, what it would like to become, and so on? In that case, what holds it all together as its component parts continue to develop?

    And what does it manage? If it’s trying to manage what its constituent parts are capable of managing on their own – interfering, in other words – it does both them and itself a serious disservice.

    All that said, what does good look like?

    • A structure that makes sense – not just tidy on paper, but purposeful at every scale – allowing each unit at every scale to self-manage effectively (structuring itself to minimise dependencies, for example)
    • Each unit at every scale able to express its own strategy in its own words, in terms appropriate to its domain and its customers, aligning it with other units and other scales according to both structure and opportunity
    • Each unit at every scale able to identify what it must manage at that scale – no more and no less – with protocols to deal with what should be managed elsewhere

    Any problems here I would characterise as organisational problems first (the organisation getting in the way of doing the right thing), problems of the strategy process second, and problems of the delivery process third – a distant third if the first two are in any way significant. And as leadership problems? It is hard work for leaders when these problems aren’t dealt with, so let’s be careful not to personalise problems that may not be of their own making. Neither should we underestimate the power of participation, self-management, and self-organisation. But if as a leader you’re getting in the way of the organisation fixing its problems or are complacent about them, well that’s on you.

    Neither should you expect your problems of organisation, strategy, and leadership to go away by rolling out a process framework. Why would they? I don’t know if we have got to “peak process framework” yet – I don’t suppose we can know until some time afterwards and I’m not ready to call it – but in the meantime let’s be realistic about what they can and can’t do. And while we’re at it, let’s not pretend that a framework rollout is an easy and risk-free thing.

    Much as I detest the rollout, this is not an anti-framework rant. If you find the opportunity to borrow from a framework as you address those more fundamental problems, that’s totally sensible – there’s no point in reinventing the wheel. You are still are in control of your own destiny, free to pursue what really matters.

    Before part 2, more on the topic of maintaining healthy relationships with frameworks in these two articles:

    On some of the leading frameworks themselves:

    And to those bigger themes:

    Watch those last two come together in the coming months. At the Agendashift Academy, the final Leading with Outcomes module, Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale is due in the autumn. You can get ready meanwhile with the first three modules:

    1. Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
    2. Inside-out strategy: Fit for maximum impact
    3. Outside-in strategy: Positioned for success
    Take me to Leading with Outcomes

    If you want to understand scaling:

    1. Start with what must be true at each scale of organisation (this post)
    2. Then with what happens between scales (part 2)

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    On values, meaningfulness, and change – parallels with Bateson and Mead

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    Punchline first:

    In the methods & frameworks world, I believe there is only one fight worth fighting, and it is not between frameworks. It is between those who would fit people and organisations to frameworks (branded or otherwise), and those who find that idea intolerable.

    From a book I am taking the time to savour, here is acclaimed anthropologist and systems thinker Gregory Bateson, on the work of his former wife Dr Margaret Mead, another acclaimed anthropologist:

    [If] we go on defining ends as separate from means and apply the social sciences as crudely instrumental means, using the recipes of science to manipulate people, we shall arrive at a totalitarian rather than a democratic system of life. The solution she offers is that we look for the “direction” and “values” implicit in the means, rather than looking ahead to a blueprinted goal and thinking of this goal as justifying or not justifying manipulated means. We have to find the value of a planned act implicit in and simultaneous with the act itself, not separate from it in the sense that the act would derive its value or from reference to a future end or goal.

    Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)

    This passage resonated strongly with me. Translating from the social space to organisations, how, as leaders, do we make it easy for people to find meaning in work whilst still respecting their choice in the matter? And if it’s the job of leadership to take people to new places, can we make the process of change more meaningful, again without dictating what form that meaning should take for each individual concerned?

    My biggest contribution in the frameworks space was a values model for the Kanban Method (2013). It explained why and how Kanban was meaningful to me, and it turned out to be helpful to other people too – to the extent that it become adopted as part of the method’s formal definition.

    But I didn’t stop there. I was on a journey, and it wasn’t long after the publication of Kanban from the Inside (2014), that I found myself detaching myself from Kanban community. There was no big disagreement behind this move, and to be clear, I remain proud of that model and my first book. It was simply that there was a job to be done, and I felt that it would be easier done outside.

    Bateson goes on:

    This then is the type of discipline which has enabled Dr Mead to point out that a discrepancy – a basic and fundamental discrepancy – exists between “social engineering”, manipulating people in order to achieve a planned blueprint society, and the ideals of democracy, the “supreme worth and moral responsibility of the individual human person.” The two conflicting motifs have long been implicit in our culture, science has had instrumental leanings since before the Industrial Revolution, and emphasis on upon individual worth and responsibility is even older. The threat of conflict between the two motifs has only come recently, with increasing consciousness of, and emphasis upon, the democratic motif and simultaneous spread of the instrumental motif. … Are we to reserve the techniques and the right to manipulate people as the privilege of a few planning, goal-oriented, and power-hungry individuals, to whom the instrumentality of science makes a natural appeal? Now that we have the techniques, are we, in cold blood, going to treat people as things? Or what are we going to do with these techniques?

    Again, parallels. In the methods & frameworks world, I believe there is only one fight worth fighting, and it is not between the frameworks. It is between those who would fit people and organisations to frameworks (branded or otherwise), and those who find that idea intolerable.

    I am on that second side. My fight is against those so convinced of their rightness that they’re sure that the ends justify the manipulative or coercive means, or they lack the imagination, curiosity, or courage to consider that there might be alternative approaches to change. And there really are alternatives. Let no one tell you that change-by-imposition – legitimised the change management industry despite its repeated failures – is the only model. That wasn’t true even 20 years ago – Agilists take note – and it definitely isn’t true now.

    That fight is what has energised me in the 8 years since my first book and I expect it to continue to sustain me for the rest of my career. It has taken me from method to values and then to outcomes, meaningfulness, wholeheartedness, leadership, and strategy. They’re integrated into a participatory approach to change and transformation, one that is more than capable of reconciling sophisticated thoughts on organisation design with utmost respect not only for the person but for the organisation that people create together.

    It’s hard enough being a leader in a transforming organisation without your approach to change making things worse. If that could be you, check out the Agendashift Academy’s Leading with Outcomes self-paced training programme. And if your organisation is entering into a relationship with a process framework, make sure that the relationship is healthy one*.

    *That’s my recent article on InfoQ: Adaptability by Agreement: Valuing Outcomes over Imposed Solutions. It’s the most complete written treatment yet of Agendashift’s three strategies model. Watch out for videos too, in particular from last week’s Lean Agile London (#LALDN22).

    What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?

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    What I really think about Kanban

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    Previously on this blog:

    My first book, Kanban from the Inside (2014), remains a top book for Kanban so I really ought to complete that list.

    Earlier this week I was interviewed by Michael Leber. The hour (livestreamed) flew by very quickly and I’m very pleased with how it came out, so thank you very much Mike! If you’re on LinkedIn, this is the better link to the recording:

    Otherwise this one:

    It was a wide-ranging talk but we started with Kanban (the method as well as the tool) and I said a few things about it I haven’t really said before. A couple of key quotes:

    I don’t find that [evolutionary change] principle exciting. I don’t get excited about evolutionary change – it’s like the wrong metaphor for a great tool.

    If you’re serious about it, it has got to be with some intent. If you’re just fixing problems just because you see them, it doesn’t actually meet needs, it doesn’t get you to where you want to get to. And if you’re going to get to where you want to get to, you’ve got to have a conversation about where that is, what that looks like, what direction it’s in. … If you’re serious about the outcomes and their obstacles, serious about where you’re going to focus your efforts, serious about understanding the relationships between outcomes, you’re actually doing strategy.

    To be fair to Kanban (the method), it tries harder than most Agile frameworks to get to that, but it doesn’t really get there, and nor will it so long as a tool (the kanban system and its supporting structure) is the predetermined answer. That’s why I am where I am now, non-aligned framework-wise, developing Agendashift as a way to help organisations and their leaders approach change and transformation strategically. If you want change, learn to have the strategy conversations around it. Don’t start with a solution (an Agile framework, say); start with agreement on outcomes. Done authentically – the right people in the room, the results of the conversation not prejudged – the rest follows so much more easily.

    Leading with Outcomes. Breaking free from the Solution-driven Paradigm! (linkedin.com)

    Finally, some of the links mentioned:

    And my books (all of them now available also in German):

    • Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2nd edition 2021)
    • Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020)
    • Kanban from the Inside (2014)

    What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?

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    Updated: Agendashift’s three meta strategies

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    [Updated March 10th: tweaked the headings, replaced the image]

    Or if you prefer:

    • After Rumelt, three guiding policies – thank you Oren Golan for the reminder
    • Less grandly, three things to keep working at if you’re doing anything strategy-related (which, if you think about it, should be a lot of the time)

    For now at least (this is a work in progress) I’ll go with meta strategies. They’re strategies for getting better at strategy, in particular the kinds of strategy that tends to motivate transformation. And forgive me if I drop the meta once in a while.

    Meta strategy 1. Keep asking the “agreement on outcomes” question

    Which is to say, keep asking this question and learn to really mean it:

    What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?

    Authentic agreement on meaningful outcomes. “Authentic agreement” meaning the right people in the room, agreeing on things that matter, expressed in their own words. “Meaningful outcomes” meaning not just numbers, not just targets, but needs met, happy endings to stories, the world changed for people in meaningful ways.

    Solutions second, outcomes leading the way – literally “leading with outcomes” [1] – solutions emerging from the people closest to the problem [2], people already motivated to find them.

    All of that is a 180 degree turnaround from those 1990’s models of managed change, a different paradigm entirely. Instead of using outcomes to sell solutions (and very often solutions of the wrong kid of scale), we use outcomes to find solutions. Not just game-changing for engagement, a completely different game.

    Meta strategy 2. Change the game’s objectives to keep outcomes in the foreground

    The trick here is to change the meaning of ‘done’:

    • You’re ‘done’ only when needs have been met
    • You’re ‘really done’ only when you have fully accounted for all the learning

    Outcomes don’t go away once we start thinking about solutions – quite the opposite. Outcomes change what ‘done’ and ‘really done’ mean. When we account properly for learning, it creates certain expections, helping to keep ‘done’, ‘really done’, and all the outcomes they represent in the foreground. Solutions are kept in their proper place, just a means to an end, held much more lightly.

    We’re done when “someone’s need was met” [3], the outcome demonstrably achieved. This implies that we know whose need we’re trying to meet, what need, and how we’d know that we have indeed met it.

    We’re really done when we’ve fully accounted for all the learning that goes with achieving the outcome. To be sure of not missing any, work is framed in the right way (as hypotheses and experiments, whenever that’s appropriate), the right things are monitored, and regular reviews are in place. The regular rhythm of review and the shared understanding of what each review entails creates containers for learning. If you know that the learning will need to be accounted for, it really changes how you work.

    Meta strategy 3. Keep developing your understanding of where all this happens

    Where rather than how, because the third meta strategy of the three is not about practice or process, but organisation [4]. It’s about working to eliminate a common organisational dysfunction, also working to develop a kind of organsational agility that’s about so much more than mere speed.

    If instead of keeping outcomes in the foreground you allow yourself to be distracted by solutions and how you’re rolling them out, you are managing for progress (or worse, activity), not impact. Compounding the error, one group manages things that people closer to the work could easily be managing for themselves. And it works in the opposite direction too: one group second-guessing the needs, priorities, and strategies of another. In short: the wrong people managing for the wrong things. Totally dysfunctional, so common, and don’t be so sure that your branded process framework or your PMO will fix it for you either!

    Often this dysfunction happens between levels of organisation (up and/or down), but the trick is to think less in terms of hierarchy or process and more in terms of identity and purpose. For an outcome, what’s the group of people most closely identified with it or that you would want to see organising around it? Conversely, for any group of people with an identity of its own and the apparent will to develop itself – team, team of teams, something bigger, something cross-cutting, whatever – what are the outcomes that it is pursuing? What, in other words, is its strategy, and has it been afforded the opportunity to develop it for itself and in its own words?

    That way of looking at organisation has a dynamism that’s simply not there in the org chart or the process diagram. People participating in multiple circles, circles that overlap and rapidly share learning, insights, and intelligence because they also share people. For as long as they’re needed, circles that have lives of their own. Structures that by themselves and in their relationships support both the development of people and the development of the organisation. Structures rich and dynamic enough to meet the ever-changing complexities of the business environment.

    With this third meta strategy, the preceding two don’t just have a home, they have many homes. Strategy becomes something fractal and emergent, living in the conversations not just within circles, but between them.

    3 meta strategies

    [1] This section drawn from the first video in Leading with Outcomes: Foundation (academy.agendashift.com)
    [2] Thank you Karl Scotland for that wording
    [3] See Done (agendashift.com/done)
    [4] See the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (deliberately-adaptive.org)

    For further reading, my two most recent books:

    1. Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2nd ed 2021)
    2. Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020)

    What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?

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    Video: Leading and Transforming with Outcomes

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    Recorded yesterday at Agile Hartford, thank you Larry Bock for hosting!

    Our media page has several meetup talks with this same title, but as I mention in near the beginning, I spent the day yesterday doing a complete rewrite. The recent blog post that sowed the seeds for that rewrite is this one: Agendashift’s three meta strategies and I’m very pleased with how it came out.

    Most of the links mentioned in the video you’ll find at the bottom of this (and every) blog post. Apart from this one:

    Enjoy!

    What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?

    Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
    Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Home | Store
    Links: Home | Subscribe | Become an Agendashift partner | Events | Contact | Mike
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