Tag: deliberately-adaptive

Meeting the context challenge

Posted on by Mike Burrows

(Comments are closed on this post but it is shared on LinkedIn here. Also, as of April 7th, Wholehearted is out!)

One of the great challenges of organisation is ensuring that people have the context they need in order to make great decisions. The challenge is universal: were we to divide the organisation into thinkers and doers (a truly terrible idea but bear with me a moment), the thinkers need to know what’s really happening out there, and the doers need to know where the thinkers are headed (there’s a pun there surely). Without that essential context, and to quote my first attempt at some blurb for book 5:

Decisions made in good faith become bad decisions, taxing the organisation’s already limited capacities for communication and decision-making.

Furthermore:

With profound implications for every level of organisation, your organisation’s ability to adapt depends on leaders engaging with that key challenge

Let me offer four ways forward:

  1. Optimise communication
  2. Distribute authority
  3. Build a more trusting and trustworthy organisation
  4. Optimise attention and presence

That list is by no means exhaustive. In a very real way, any decent attempt at process or organisational improvement can be seen as an attempt to increase the organisation’s capacities for meaningful communication and decision-making, but I will suggest that you need all four of these approaches. And if that’s not enough, I’ll mention three upcoming opportunities to discuss these ideas further.

1. Optimise communication

Even on its own, this is a big, big topic. It includes the content of communication, its language, its timing, its quantity, its structure, also the means, routes, and directions of transmission. Consideration of its sources and destinations brings in things like intelligence-gathering, sense-making, and strategising. That then leads to structural concerns: if everyone hearing every last bit of detail from every part and aspect of the organisation would result in overwhelm, who should concern themselves with what, and at what level of abstraction? Put like that, organisational structure might need to be less about functional capabilities and much more about information.

2. Distribute authority

This then follows. Turn the Ship Around! author L. David Marquet puts it well: instead of moving the information to the authority, move the authority to the information. Localised decision-making concentrates communication; what comes out (if it needs to come out) is more distilled.

There is more than one way to understand Marquet’s principle. You can interpret it as one of leadership style – i.e. a willingness to delegate – or you might take it as an invitation to design a more optimal organisation structure and information architecture. Those interpretations are fine as far as they go, but things get much more interesting when you see it as a principle for adaptation. Follow through on it over time, and your decision-making capacity will distribute itself to meet your organisation’s business context according to where its informational and decision-making requirements are the most challenging. What you get is fit, and with that the sense that the organisation’s structure expresses something of its understanding of its business environment. In the jargon, it models it.

3. Build a more trusting and trustworthy organisation

The above notwithstanding, I’ve been through enough reorganisations to get more than a little cynical about them. I will resolve that paradox in book 5 with Organising without Reorganising, a whole chapter on techniques for “organising at human scale”. Here, the advice to build a more trusting and trustworthy organisation follows in a different way from the preceding.

The more that different organisational scopes trust each other, the less they try to manage each other, and the less information they need therefore to exchange. The more confident we are that exceptional conditions will be raised to our attention, the less bandwidth we need to devote to monitoring. The less noise, the less wasteful drain on both of those critical capacities for communication and decision-making. So much opportunity there!

That may seem obvious enough, but preliminary results from Olivier Bertrand’s PhD research on our data suggest something intriguing: trust may need to precede trustworthiness. If I trust you, that increases your freedom to deliver, increasing your trustworthiness. If that sounds difficult, just reverse the roles! From whatever direction it comes, where you resent being over-managed, wouldn’t you rather be trusted?

4. Optimise attention and presence

Now for the bad news. If you thought that you could design the perfect organisation that made all these issues look after themselves, think again. The relationship between your organisation and its business context is an unequal one. There is no combination of formal structure and process that guarantees success; the numbers just don’t add up (it’s why Stafford Beer had to follow his famous book Brain of the Firm with The Heart of Enterprise, the latter to make that key admission). Bottom line, there is simply not enough communication and decision-making capacity to go round. Thankfully, the advice is not one of despair but of pragmatism. You can’t be everyone all at once, but at any given time, you can be somewhere, and you can make it count. Develop your instincts for what most needs your attention. Strive to be in the right place at the right time, even if that is only to be available and fully present to others. Calibrate your communication, focussing on intent and avoiding unnecessary prescription, creating space for competence and innovation. Nurture those same expectations in others, so that regardless of formal expectations and outside the normal routine, the right issues are engaged with at the right kind of level, the right conversations are had at the right times with the right people, and initiative can be rightfully celebrated, together with all of its accompanying learning.

You need all four

Don’t get me wrong: the formal stuff does matter. If organisation structures are getting in the way of doing the right thing, deal with that issue (which doesn’t necessarily mean dismantling them, rather that you take the issue seriously). If people are reluctant to make decisions on their own authority, you’ll need to deal with that issue too. If bad processes are consuming more decision-making capacity than they deserve, that’s typically a straightforward and highly rewarding issue to tackle. More tricky perhaps is a reluctance to let go, but nothing builds trust quite like delivery, and all of these measures help achieve that.

But don’t think that it will be enough. Your organisation needs attention and presence, yours and everyone else’s. Using those to the maximum is what organising is all about.

If you’d like to discuss these issues with me further, there are a couple of opportunities coming up shortly:

That first event (which is free) focuses on strategy, where the context challenge is most acute, strategising being constrained in ways it may not be aware of. TTT/F, which isn’t only for facilitators and trainers, explores deeply the deliberate avoidance of premature prescription by putting outcomes before solutions, to quote Agendashift principle #1. To Kanban Edge, it’s always a delight to be welcomed back into the Kanban community, where (as has been my assumed role for a long time) I try to complement its process perspective with an organisational one. And it’s where I’ll be launching Wholehearted! Last but not least, what is the fourth, i.e. LIKE? It’s the book, but in participatory form.

Also, if you know where to look – Agendashift Academy or the Agendashift Slack if you are a member of either – I am available for “office hours” on Zoom at 2pm UK time on Thursdays, except for the 27th when it clashes with TTT/F. Feel free to raise these topics or any other!

Related

(Comments are closed on this post but it is shared on LinkedIn here. Also, as of April 7th, Wholehearted is out!)

Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (April 2025)

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:

  1. Foundation module:
  2. Inside-out Strategy:
  3. Adaptive Organisation:
  4. Outside-in Strategy:

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.

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

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.

Verbing the nouns of business agility

Posted on by Mike Burrows

(This post is closed for comments but it is discussed on LinkedIn here)

Silke Noll, who is 1) the Agendashift community’s resident expert in all things intercultural, and 2) a member of book 5’s review team, said something interesting to me this weekend:

Are the findings about knowledge organisation simply due to the fact that Western language encourages the use of nouns, which results in categories of objects, and Eastern languages encourage the use of verbs, which the consequence that it is relationships that are emphasized?

Western languages force a preoccupation with focal objects as opposed to context. English is a “subject-prominent” language. … For Westerners, it is the self who does the acting; for Easterners, it is something that is undertaken in concert with others or is a consequence of the self operating in the field of forces.

Silke was quoting Richard Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently … and Why. I haven’t read it myself, but it’s next on my list! We went on to discuss book 5’s deliberate use of verbs in the present continuous tense, or “-ing” words, to you and me. I observed that the corresponding noun forms can be a trap. Organisations act as though it’s enough to have certain things – a strategy and an execution capability, for example. Having seen a former employer lose 50 billion dollars that way – a catastrophic loss from which it was fortunate to survive – I think I may be allowed a degree of scepticism.

So… how does this “verbing” thing work?

Execution or, if you prefer, delivery, becomes delivering, discovering, renewing – three verbs for the price of one or two nouns! It’s not enough just to deliver; you need to be discovering what you should be delivering, which includes but is not limited to discovering how well the things you deliver actually perform in the real world. And if you are going to be delivering new things, you’ll need new capabilities. I could have used “developing” for that, but because in relation to products and software it means something more specific, “renewing” it is.

Now that the value-creating work (sneaking an “ing” word into a noun phrase) of that delivering-discovering-renewing space is seen as something more present and continuous, yesterday’s strategy won’t do – at least not for long. It becomes adaptive strategising, and its job is to ensure that the organisation (or organisational scope – this model is beautifully fractal) never runs out of options in a game whose rules may be changing. Not just reactive, “responding to change”, but proactive, prospective, anticipatory, making things happen.

The team that strategises together stays together

For any organisational scope that is meaningful enough to its participants that they identify with it, some of that strategising will be devoted to maintaining and sometimes challenging and even changing that identity (on the change part, think of the pivot as an extreme example). “The team that strategises together stays together”, one might say. A self-governing scope that is serious about sticking around goes further: it manages the balances between thinking and doing, planning and executing, and so on, even the three-way balance between delivering, discovering, and renewing. Key to long-term sustainability is adjusting those balances as conditions change.

Balance is no less important in the delivering-discovering-renewing space. You might follow world-class practices in the value-creating work, but if multiple people are involved and you are not coordinating effectively, much of their effort will go to waste. Neither though do you want people serving best-of-breed coordination systems (tools, processes, etc) that don’t work for them. It’s much the same with organising, which is what connects the adaptive strategising space with the delivering-discovering-renewing space; it’s counterproductive to organise around goals and plans in ways incompatible with capability and capacity, or for that matter those coordination systems. In fact, between the value-creating work, coordinating, and organising there is a three-way balance to maintain, four if you include the customer. Small wonder that in a single endeavour there can be multiple, contradictory views on what actual progress is being made, how everything is performing, and what its most important issues might be (which is one reason why a clear customer focus can be transformative).

Between the two “spaces” I’ve mentioned – delivering-discovering-renewing and adaptive strategising – balance is mostly accounted for by self-governing (that’s its job), but that’s not quite the end of the story. The capacities that an organisation or scope has for communication and decision-making are finite. To assume perfect information flow is to risk bad decision-making and further taxing those limited capacities. Whether strategy-related or delivery-related, decisions need context. It’s crucial to escape the routine for contextualising – think going to the gemba, managing by walking around, and sense-making conversations of various kinds. That’s central to mutual trust-building; this third space is responsible for ensuring that the other two understand each other so that the more trustworthy organisation can use its precious capacities effectively.

I could go on! In the relationships between and across different scales of organisation there are several strands: structuring (the work, the organisation, and by implication, its business environment), translating (between the different levels of abstraction that apply up and down the organisation), reconciling (between the strategies of related scopes), and more – connecting, participating, identifying.

Verb forms aside for a moment, the deeper magic here is a relational model. Things have relationships, they relate to each other. For better and for worse they constrain each other’s behaviours. Over time, they co-evolve, perhaps becoming structurally coupled to the point that they can’t be changed independently. More even than the things that they relate, relationships can be described as being in healthy and productive balance, departures from which likely indicate some kind of dysfunction. That’s powerful: if you’re at a loss to work out what’s wrong with something by looking at what’s inside, now you have several more perspectives and your range of potential solutions is greatly expanded. You might not even need a definitive diagnosis; mere possibility may be enough motivation for change.

But those “ing” words do matter. Think less about what you have and more about what is happening – what must be happening, because in this descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive) model, everything I have described really must be there. They might not be all working as well as they could, their relationships might not be entirely healthy and productive, but if enough people identify with an organisational scope strongly enough to care, all of those things will be there. Start noticing them and their relationships. Talk about them. See what happens!

Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (aka book 5) is due in the coming months, i.e. soonish. Watch this space!

(This post is closed for comments but it is discussed on LinkedIn here)

Upcoming events

February

March

*TTT/F and (where shown) LIKE events include free one-year membership of the Leading with Outcomes Authorised Facilitator programme, upgradeable to Authorised Trainer at any time. Both of those include access to the video-based Leading with Outcomes training and the full range of Agendashift assessment tools.

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:

  1. Foundation module:
  2. Inside-out Strategy:
  3. Adaptive Organisation:
  4. Outside-in Strategy:

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.

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

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 (Wholehearted) Adaptive Organisation Assessment, 2025 edition

Posted on by Mike Burrows

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.

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:

  1. Foundation module:
  2. Inside-out Strategy:
  3. Adaptive Organisation:
  4. Outside-in Strategy:

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.

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

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.

Upcoming

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Happy New Year! Kicking off 2025 with news of:

  1. Office hours – weekly Zoom on Thursdays, beginning this week
  2. Adaptive Organisation assessment – beginning Friday, taking the opportunity to review it before book 5 comes out
  3. 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.

Adaptive Organisation assessment

A small group of us drawn mainly from the book 5 review circles and the Leading with Outcomes trainer/facilitator community will be meeting on Friday afternoon UK time this week to review the wording and coverage of the Adaptive Organisation Assessment. The timing is important – book 5 is very close to completion and the assessment features prominently in it! It also plays a big role in the Adaptive Organisation Workshop, the Leading in a Transforming Organisation training and the online Leading with Outcomes modules Adaptive Organisation (I): Business agility at every scale and Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes, and scales. In other words, it’s up there now with the classic Agendashift Delivery Assessment importance-wise and I have no doubt that we can benefit from the experience of improving that one.

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:

Those sessions are as follows:

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
  4. 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:

  1. Foundation module:
  2. Inside-out Strategy:
  3. Adaptive Organisation:
  4. Outside-in Strategy:

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.

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

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.

Assessment template tidyup and an update on book 5

Posted on by Mike Burrows

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”:

    1. Delivering, Discovering, Renewing – the value-adding work of the organisation and the systems that support it
    2. Adaptive Strategising – guiding that work and bringing a sense of identity
    3. 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:

    1. The Space Between – a window on the relationships between different levels of scale
    2. Organising without Reorganising – avoiding the big reorg, promoting self-organisation at scale

    It finishes with:

    1. 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!

    Upcoming events

    February

    March

    *TTT/F and (where shown) LIKE events include free one-year membership of the Leading with Outcomes Authorised Facilitator programme, upgradeable to Authorised Trainer at any time. Both of those include access to the video-based Leading with Outcomes training and the full range of Agendashift assessment tools.

    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:

    1. Foundation module:
    2. Inside-out Strategy:
    3. Adaptive Organisation:
    4. Outside-in Strategy:

    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.

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

    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.

    Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    [respond to this post to LinkedIn]

    You may remember that a little over six years ago I published Towards the wholehearted organisation, outside in, a blog post inspired by this quote:

    "A thing is whole according to how free it is of inner contradictions. When it is at war with itself, and gives rise to forces which act to tear it down, it is unwhole. The more free it is of its own inner contradictions, the more whole and healthy and wholehearted it becomes" Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (1979)

    I won’t retell all of the history of what followed, but wholehearted went on to become a key piece in both Agendashift and Leading with Outcomes. It lent its name to Agendashift’s mission statement, and in Leading with Outcomes it features in both the Foundation and Adaptive Organisation training modules. In short, it has legs! However, the way we introduce wholehearted as a model for leadership has evolved over the years, and it’s about time I shared a little of where we have got to with it.

    From the Alexander quote, we picked out three words: unwhole, whole, and wholehearted. Then we asked a question: In relation to those, what expectations or responsibilities might a wholehearted organisation place on its leaders? Alternatively: By what behaviours do we recognise the leaders among us? We need leaders to be:

    1. Engaging on the right challenges – attending to all that makes the organisation unwhole, i.e. to what makes it in any way disconnected, incomplete, unbalanced, incoherent, or otherwise dysfunctional; attending also to what might lead to a sense of unwholeness in the future – opportunities missed, for example
    2. Inviting people to participate – not only for their perspectives and ideas but for the integration (i.e. making whole) that happens when you bring people together 
    3. Celebrating their initiative – amplifying the organisation’s capacity to innovate, not only in terms of enhanced products and services but in terms of the organisation’s own development also

    Taking those first at face value, what word is better than ‘leader’ to describe people who demonstrate a commitment to engage, invite, and celebrate? Conversely, what would we think of a leader who isn’t engaging on the right issues? What would we think of a leader who is slow to invite people into the process? And what would we say of an organisation that has little progress to celebrate, or of a leader who keeps missing the opportunity?

    We must recognise that leaders are human, and the organisations they work within aren’t perfect, so what stops leaders from leading more wholeheartedly, i.e. in the ways suggested? Moreover, what stops you (or leaders around you) from leading like that? Could it be that the conversation your organisation needs is the one that 1) identifies those obstacles and 2) explores what might be made possible if ways can be found around or through them?

    The Foundation module of Leading with Outcomes starts with just such a conversation. Now, under the headings of Engage, Invite, and Celebrate, let’s explore how those ideas have developed.

    Engage

    What are the right challenges that leaders should be engaging on? Going back to the idea of unwholeness, there’s what is making the organisation unwhole now, and there’s what the organisation may come to regret if the opportunity isn’t grasped now. Bringing those together as “areas of opportunity” (actually the name of one of our exercises), Leading with Outcomes offers three main perspectives from which they can be identified:

    1. Inside-out Strategy – an approach to strategy that begins with the internal experience of the organisation or some smaller scope thereof and its delivery capabilities, moving on to the possible consequences internal and external of developing them
    2. Outside-in Strategy – complementary to the first perspective, this begins with customers, users, and other actors in the outside environment, considering those relationships, and works inwards to the implications for the organisation, its product, its underlying platform of technology, know-how, and so on, and its teams
    3. Adaptive Organisation – deeply integrating the preceding into the life of an organisation in a fundamentally relational, generative, and fundamentally complexity-aware way

    As my friend and collaborator Philippe Guenet observed at the London training a couple of weeks ago, Leading with Outcomes is unusual in how “three dimensional” it is, and he meant that not only about the three perspectives above. He appreciates the way we avoid letting the flow metaphor dominate to the exclusion of strategy and structure. Along with leadership, we see those not as things to roll out or to accept meekly as givens, but as aspects of organisation that interact in dynamic and complex ways with each other and the delivery flow, such that each can be seen as both products of and constraints on the others.

    Accordingly, a three-dimensional set of “right challenges” to engage on might look something like the following:

    1. Impediments to flow (it should not be taken from the preceding paragraphs that I believe flow and its impediments to be unimportant, only that other perspectives are vital too)
    2. Obstacles that lie in the way of the organisation being where it wants to be and who it wants to be – in healthy and productive relationships with its customers, users, suppliers, and so on, and well positioned with respect to its competitors
    3. Constraints of structure, policy, and habit that impact negatively on the organisation’s ability to deploy its decision-making, communication, and innovation capacities where they are most needed, and for those to self-organise as needed

    If you were ever at a loss to know what it means for leaders to be “creating the conditions” for an adaptive, innovative, and resilient organisation, we have here the basis of a leadership agenda. By keeping focus on these things (the process never stops), more of the “right challenges” will be engaged with at every level of organisation, for as long or short a time as might be needed. 

    Each type of challenge applies at every level of organisation, and at each level, no leader can hope to adequately address all of those by themselves. Even the task of framing the key challenges may best be done with other people, so let’s move on to the invitation to participate.

    Invite

    The idea that you can expect to succeed in a complex challenge with a rollout-based approach belongs in the 1990’s. If by the time you’re inviting people into the process you’re already talking about predetermined solutions, you’ve left it far too late. Even to be inviting solution ideas is too late if you’ve missed the opportunity to explore the “challenge space” together.

    Important aspects of the challenge space include 1) the obstacles that people bump up against every day, and 2) the possibilities they can envisage if only those obstacles could be dealt with in some way. If they are given the opportunity to identify and articulate those in their own words, you (together) not only obtain the raw material for a coherent strategy that is grounded in reality and contains its own measures of success, you greatly increase the strategy’s “surface area”. In it, more people at more levels of organisation will find more that they can engage with and contribute to.

    To be clear, and recalling that to integrate is to make whole, what I am describing is the integration through participation of the development and pursuit of strategy. Two of Leading with Outcomes’ three main patterns fit here:

    1. The IdOO (“I do”) pattern – Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes
    2. The 3M pattern – Meaning, Measure, Method
    Developing & pursuing strategy in the language of outcomes


    These patterns are the main focus of the Foundation module of Leading with Outcomes and much of the Agendashift1 and Organizing Conversations2 books. They translate coaching conversations to two different scales: everyday leadership routines and the structures of set-piece strategy events – workshops, training, and the like. In the latter, participants practice the former so that the experience “rubs off” to benefit of the everyday working experience.

    In its typical usage, the 3M pattern incorporates the IdOO pattern (I’ve highlighted the words “ideal”, “obstacles”, and outcomes” below), so I’ll expand here just on 3M:

    1. Meaning: for some focal challenge or outcome, what does this look like in the ideal and for whom (broadening and energising a conversation beyond the obvious), and what is the significance of the obstacles that impede the pursuit of that ideal?
    2. Measure: not only in terms of metrics, by what observable outcomes will we know that we are being successful – behaviours and other indications that obstacles have been overcome and that people are making meaningful progress, the contexts within which they operate changed in some beneficial way
    3. Method: generating multiple and diverse solution ideas, and for the most interesting of those, framing them as hypotheses

    These generative conversations need not take long – from moments to at most minutes. Why organisations instead commit so quickly to singular, monolithic, and oversized solutions seems a mystery! Perhaps it is partly human nature (a general overconfidence in planning) and partly a vestige of the 1990s change management and project management models that business schools and senior leaders have done far too little to challenge.

    Likewise, and stepping back to deeper conversations on strategy, it would seem highly sensible to invest just a few minutes or hours to avoid overcommitting to what might turn out to be many months of execution, but again, old habits die hard. There is cause for hope in modern notions of complexity and emergence, but if we are leaving leaders to interpret these rather abstract concepts in their organisational contexts and to join the dots themselves, this seems a very big ask.

    Let us move on then to celebration, which hides a serious message about learning. Without the means to support it – indeed for the organisation to expect it – an innovation process is very hard to sustain.

    Celebrate

    The third of Leading with Outcomes’ three main patterns is Right to Left (not uncoincidentally the title of another of my books3). It refers to working backwards from two key moments, moments of impact and learning otherwise known as done and really done:

    • done: someone’s need was met
    • really done: we’ve accounted for the learning

    As a coordination mechanism, the practice of reviewing work closest to completion first creates the foundations for flow. If work items are sufficiently granular, opportunities to celebrate getting them to meaningful states of done and really done should be frequent. Meaningfulness and alignment to purpose are enhanced greatly if “closest to completion” refers (as it should) to the work that is closest to making a customer impact. Add a delivery process that asks the right questions at the right time and in which everyone knows the boundaries of time and organisational scope within which the accounting will be done, a container for learning is formed.

    To maximise the conditions for learning, leaders make multiple contributions. They represent and thereby reinforce those boundaries; some of them span boundaries helpfully also. They care that the right questions are asked at the right time, and not only when they themselves are the ones doing the asking. They care that at every stage of the delivery process, people have the customer and organisational context they need to make good decisions and deliver great work.

    I could have added to that list, but that last responsibility says a lot about the distribution of decision-making capacity in the organisation. The need to make decisions and to find and create effective solutions does not fall only on leaders. It is characteristic of knowledge work that this is happening everywhere; the challenge for leaders is to help the combined effort keep its coherence and its senses of direction and purpose. Fortunately, they need not – and indeed cannot – do this on their own. Yes, they need to engage on the right challenges, but also they should be confident (or else working to build the confidence) that others around them are doing the same. Inviting more people into the process should be an early second step if it is not already part of the first. And let the celebrations begin! The sooner and more frequently those come, the faster the organisation delivers, learns, and adapts.

    Engage, Invite, Celebrate: The call to action

    Where will you start? Where is your greatest opportunity? Is it to engage on the right issues, to invite people into an integrated strategy process, or is it to celebrate their initiative, their successes, and their (everyone’s) learning? Or is it to help others around you to do the same? The choice really is yours, but you may find it helpful to work backwards – Right to Left if you like. Nothing builds trust like celebrating success. As you get better at it and learn to share the load, you create capacity. That capacity can be directed at identifying, framing, and prioritising your challenges. By the time you can anticipate celebrating your successes you will be well on your way.

    Coming soonish: Wholehearted, the book

    My fifth book, Wholehearted: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation will expand on many of the themes of this post. The Wholehearted of the title is of course a reference to the Engage, Invite, Celebrate model and the Christopher Alexander quote that inspired it. Its main focus is a deep dive into the kinds of challenges that leaders need to be engaged on, in particular to the dysfunctions that arise out of imbalances in the relationships between different aspects of the organisation. Healthy and productive relationships – for example between the work and how it is coordinated, or between delivery work and developmental work – are absolutely crucial to the effective deployment of the organisation’s decision-making capacity (and vice versa).

    The book’s central model is the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a complexity-friendly retelling of the Viable System Model, faithful to the structure of Stafford Beer’s classic model but taking a very different approach to its application. Gone is the top-down analysis; in its place is a participatory, “everywhere all at once” approach. Going out of its way to avoid privileging any singular perspective, the goal is not to document an agreed view of the current or future state of the organisation but to identify through dialogue its challenges, underlying constraints, and possible interventions. By continuing to intervene on those constraints, the organisation works on becoming a better version of itself with a healthier and more productive relationship with its environment.

    I use “constraints” here very much in the way understood in complexity science. Not just people and teams but other identifiable aspects of organisation affect each other’s behaviour not only by design but by their mere proximity. Too many and too interconnected for anyone to fully understand, let alone manage, these myriad relationships give rise to complexity, and do much to explain the poor track record of traditional approaches to organisational change. The approach here is to go with the grain of natural social processes, making it easier for desirable and ultimately rewarding interactions first to happen, and then to be repeated until they are normalised.

    Yes (I’ve been told this more than once), to attempt to bring the systems and complexity worlds together like this is ambitious. It works though! The key I think is not to approach it as a problem of modelling or execution but as the kind of strategy challenge in which its development and pursuit must proceed hand-in-hand through dialogue. Organisations don’t just do stuff, they are experienced, and every experience is different. Through dialogue, and with effective frameworks for making sense of those diverse experiences, common themes emerge, and new stories are told. And so a process of generative change begins, one in which solutions emerge where they are needed.

    I am not yet giving a timeframe for publication. Part I, Business Agility at Every Scale, is reviewing well, but work on Part II, Between Spaces, Scopes, and Scales, has only just begun. And majoring on the dialogic (i.e. dialogue-based) and generative aspects of organisation development (OD) I have alluded to, Organizing Conversations has only been out for a few weeks!

    1 Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2nd edition 2021)
    2 Organizing Conversations: Preparing Groups to Take on Adaptive Challenges (May 2024)
    3 Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020)

    [respond to this post to LinkedIn]

    Related posts

    And in relation to the recently-published Organizing Conversations:

    Learn more

    The abovementioned patterns – IdOO, 3M, and Right to Left – are introduced in the online self-paced training module Leading with Outcomes: Foundation, available on a subscription basis or delivered privately by an authorised trainer as a 1-day in-person or online class.

    After Foundation come the Leading with Outcomes modules listed below. Although may you prefer to bring Adaptive Organisation forward or even to begin with Outside-in Strategy, the default sequence is as follows:

    1. Inside-out Strategy:
    1. Adaptive Organisation:
    1. Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success (soon to split into two parts also)

    As with the Foundation module, all are available privately in both classroom training and online forms, also as shorter facilitated workshops. Publicly as well as privately, Leading for Innovation in the Knowledge Economy (formerly Leading in a Transforming Organisation) combines Foundation and Adaptive Organisation into a 3-day class, the next of which takes place in October. That and both online and in-person versions of Train-the-Trainer/Facilitator (TTT/F) are included in our calendar below:

    Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
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    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.

    [respond to this post to LinkedIn]

    Help our research: an “Organisational DNA test”

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    I spoke a few months ago with Olivier Bertrand and a couple of his colleagues who were looking into using phylogenetic techniques to analyse the results of organisational assessments. It seemed that Agendashift’s assessments were ideal for the purpose, and when we met for a second time, the team’s analysis of data captured via the classic Agendashift Delivery Assessment looked very, very promising (I exaggerate not – it was very exciting).

    The timing could not be better. I’m now working hard on book 5, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, and Olivier has been accepted as a PhD researcher at Université Paris-Saclay to conduct study in the field of Organisational Phylogenetics (PhylOrg). Together, we would like to focus on the new book’s assessment tool (also the assessment tool of the Adaptive Organisation workshop and the Leading in a Transforming Organisation Training). And we need your input!

    As explained in Olivier’s two blog posts (here and here), we propose to analyse the population of organisations the way a biologist would analyse organisms, using phylogenetic analysis. Just as biologists look at the evolutionary history of species, we aim to map the evolutionary journey of organisations, uncovering the key traits that determine their success or failure, and the order in which they appear. Our hope is that we can map an evolutionary tree of organisations, identifying both ancestral traits and more derived innovative adaptations that drive organisational resilience and agility. To do this, we need a lot of data – input ideally on a few hundred organisations.

    By filling in our survey, you will be contributing to a deeper understanding of organisational dynamics and helping us uncover patterns and trends that shape the evolutionary trajectory of organisations. Of course, once the results are in, and digested by Olivier’s algorithms, we will share the results with the community.

    In accordance with our longstanding privacy policies, the research team will receive no identifying information. A new metadata page does however ask for basic information on country, industry, etc, and gives you the option (on an entirely opt-in basis) to be kept in contact with this work.

    To join, follow the link below. Feel free to share this post – not so much with close colleagues, but with those you know in other organisations. Thank you! This could make a difference!

    (You can help us further by giving this post some love here on LinkedIn. Thank you!)

    Upcoming events

    February

    March

    *TTT/F and (where shown) LIKE events include free one-year membership of the Leading with Outcomes Authorised Facilitator programme, upgradeable to Authorised Trainer at any time. Both of those include access to the video-based Leading with Outcomes training and the full range of Agendashift assessment tools.

    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:

    1. Foundation module:
    2. Inside-out Strategy:
    3. Adaptive Organisation:
    4. Outside-in Strategy:

    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.

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

    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 May TTT/F begins in a week’s time

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    A quick reminder that the May Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator begins in a week’s time. It’s not too late to book your place:

    It covers:

    • Leading with Outcomes: Foundation – patterns for strategy conversations in the language of needs, obstacles, and outcomes
    • The Discovery and assessment-related parts of the Inside-out Strategy workshops and training – classic Agendashift with a leadership development twist, featuring favourite exercises including Celebration-5W, Obstacles Fast and Slow, 15-minute FOTO, and Option Relationship Mapping
    • In overview, of the remainder of the Leading with Outcomes curriculum

    TTT/F is one of two routes into becoming an authorised Leading with Outcomes facilitator or trainer (subscriptions required), through which you can get access to the full range of Agendashift assessments, materials for all of the Leading with Outcomes workshops, and for trainers, training materials also.

    Past participants can re-attend for free, a popular perk. Alternatively, if you have attended a past Leading in a Transforming Organisation event or are signed up to one of the upcoming events (see below), you can get 60% off. And for all of our paid events and subscriptions, there is a 40% discount for employees of public sector, healthcare, and non-profit organisations. Ping me for coupon codes if any of these apply.

    Together with a modest amount of additional self-study, the second route is via Leading in a Transforming Organisation:

    Most people attend Leading in a Transforming Organisation for its own sake rather than as a TTT/F alternative, but the option is there. Again, ping me for coupon codes if any of the usual discount reasons apply, including past participation at either kind of event.

    And sorry, yes, Berlin really is sold out! But check these out:

    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:

    1. Foundation module:
    2. Inside-out Strategy:
    3. Adaptive Organisation:
    4. Outside-in Strategy:

    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.

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

    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.

    Leading with Outcomes Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

    Agendashift roundup, April 2024

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    In this edition: Books in progress: 2; Two new videos; Upcoming: online, Berlin (SOLD OUT), London, and Southampton; Top posts

    Books in progress: 2

    I’m putting the final touches on Organising Conversations: Patterns of Dialog for the Transforming Organization and have a decent first draft of the first part (of two) of Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. Needless to say, they’re keeping me busy!

    With that workload in mind and the summer approaching, I’m pausing the monthly webinars and experience/practise sessions until the autumn.

    Encouragingly, an excerpt from Wholehearted is by a big margin the most-read blog post of the month (shared on LinkedIn here):

    Hot on the heels of January’s From Flow to Business Agility it looks set to feature high up in the top 10 for 2024. Like that post, organised on LinkedIn there was some community review of the post prior to publication, and the feedback has benefited the Wholehearted manuscript also. Thank you again Chris Combe, Sarah Whiteley, Kert D. Peterson, CST, AKT, Elle Anderson, FRSA, FBCS, Karen Beck, Daniel Walters, Ricardo Alvarez, Simon JAILLAIS, and Matthew White.

    Two new videos

    In the last (until the autumn) of our monthly webinars, we were joined this month by Karl Scotland. Here’s the recording of his excellent session, also the PDF of his slides, links, etc:

    Related to the still-to-be-written Part II of Wholehearted and with a fun Q&A session (always a good sign) here’s the latest version of one of my ever-evolving keynotes:

    Upcoming: online, Berlin (SOLD OUT), London, and Southampton

    Yes, Berlin has sold out, but there’s still the online TTT/F and then Leading in a Transforming Organisation (London) at the end of June and another in Southampton in October:

    Past (or booked) attendees of TTT/F can re-attend for free and/or attend Leading in a Transforming Organisation for less than half price. There are big discounts in the opposite direction also – ping me for coupon codes. Also significant discounts for government, healthcare, education (a number of university staff have attended in recent months), non-profits, etc. As was the case in Manchester last year, I know that London for one will have participants from outside of technology, which always makes for a more interesting experience.

    If you really can’t get to any of those, don’t forget the online self-paced option: Leading with Outcomes.

    Top posts

    1. Agile’s Great Rebalancing: My next book’s take on the Agile manifesto (April)
    2. From Flow to Business Agility (January)
    3. My favourite Clean Language question (January 2019)
    4. What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints) (October)
    5. Venue confirmed for Leading in a Transforming Organisation (London) (April)

    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:

    1. Foundation module:
    2. Inside-out Strategy:
    3. Adaptive Organisation:
    4. Outside-in Strategy:

    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.

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

    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.

    Agile’s Great Rebalancing: My next book’s take on the Agile manifesto

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    Some context: Measured in chapters (not time, alas) I’ve reached the halfway mark in the writing of my fifth book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, completing the first three of six chapters and with those, part I (Business agility at every scale) of two parts. I’ve adapted the article below from a passage in Chapter 1 in which we’re exploring a space I call Delivery-Discovery-Renewal (Figure 1). That space encompasses the productive activity of a team or other organisational scope at any scale of organisation – everything that’s done in the “here and now”, as opposed to, say, planning or retrospecting.

    Figure 1. The Delivery-Discovery-Renewal Space

    The Delivery-Discovery-Renewal Space comprises the following:

    1. The value-creating work – delivery-related work (obviously), discovery-related work (making sure that we will be delivering the right things, scouting for new opportunities), and renewal-related work (working on the organisation itself, building and improving the capabilities needed)
    2. How that work is coordinated – understood very broadly as all the constraints on that work that have any kind of coordinating effect
    3. How that work is organised – organising around commitments and managing towards goals, another set of constraints on the work

    …and their relationships:

    1. Mutual relationships between systems 1, 2, and 3 above, i.e. between the value-creating work, how its is coordinated, and how it is organised – how they constrain each other, how they inform each other, the effects they have on each other, and so on
    2. The relationship with the external environment – for the purposes of this article, relationships with customers and users most especially
    3. Relationships inside system 1 above (the value-creating work) – collaborations, process-defined interactions, structures, and so on

    You may recognise there a good chunk of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM), and with the mention of constraints, hints of something complexity-related also. The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation model and the forthcoming book cover three such spaces (Delivery-Discovery-Renewal, Adaptive Strategising, and Mutual Trust Building), the relationships between them, relationships internal to them, and the much-neglected relationships between different scales of organisation.

    It is very much a relational model, i.e. not a process model but complementary to those, providing them with some sorely-needed theory, particularly on matters of scale. It is easy to engage with, it provides a fresh perspective on familiar things, it translates straightforwardly to a complexity-based perspective, and it can be the basis of a participatory strategy process – all very different from the more analytical ways in which such models are typically used.

    In the lightly-adapted excerpt below, we are mid-chapter. You might find it worth giving the above introduction a second read therefore (I’ll refer to Figure 1 more than once). Somewhat in the vein of my January post From Flow to Business Agility (by a huge margin my most-read post of the year so far), we are exploring a key question for the Delivery-Discovery-Renewal space and for the other two spaces:

    How might we increase our decision-making capacity?

    The Great Rebalancing

    One important way to increase decision-making capacity in this Delivery-Discovery-Renewal space is to move away from people serving the process and toward the process serving those who do the work. Some clear signs of success:

    • Routine work can be done with negligible overhead
    • Coordination problems – contention, overburdening, starvation, and the rest – are seen not as facts of life that people must simply endure, but as symptoms of something systemic that can and should be addressed
    • In non-routine situations, appropriate courses of action are made no harder than necessary by, for example, bureaucracy or overly restrictive policies
    • Those doing the work have appropriate control over their working environments, and that agency is seen as a potential source of innovation

    Each of those reflects some change in the balance between the elements I identified in the introduction to this article, most especially between the value-creating work and how it is coordinated (systems 1 and 2 respectively in Figure 1 above). Taken together, they remind me of the Agile manifesto [1] and, in particular, the first and most famous of its four “this over that” declarations: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. The remaining three declarations can be understood in a similar way, i.e. as representing a sometimes radical rebalancing of relationships inside the Delivery-Discovery-Renewal space.

    “Working software over comprehensive documentation”: If we’re staying strictly within the Delivery-Discovery-Renewal space and focusing on the work rather than the thinking behind it, this declaration impacts mostly the balance between upstream and downstream activities. This idea has consequences in many spheres outside of technology development and the book will develop it further. Here though, let’s understand it in manifesto terms.

    The 1990s, the context in which Agile arose, saw the peak of the linear project model. Technology projects proceeded in a sequence of phases (see Figure 2 below for an example), and because activities were separated in time, those upstream-downstream relationships barely existed. And at such a cost! As projects moved from one documentation-heavy phase to the next, the emphasis was on demonstrating that the latest work conformed to expectations set in preceding stages, not on establishing whether those expectations were based on accurate assumptions. When those assumptions were about the behaviours of users and people-based systems, they would often prove unsafe, but by the time they were invalidated it was already too late.

    Figure 2. A linear project model

    The remedy: upstream and downstream activities no longer in separate phases but tightly integrated in an iterative or continuous process. With people from different disciplines working closely together, feedback could come in days or less, not the weeks, months, or longer that it took previously. In support of those collaborations, documentation would become much more granular, produced no earlier or later than needed (i.e. just in time), taking perhaps the minimalistic form of user stories [2] or job stories [3], describing not whole projects but very thin slices of functionality – specific usages of individual features. Given an appropriate sequencing of these small but still individually useful deliverables, an incomplete but still meaningfully useful product could emerge quickly. With more time, and perhaps over an indefinite period (funded not as a project but as a product line), it could evolve into something fitting.

    The genuine documentation needs of developers, customers, and end-users never completely went away, and there remains the responsibility of the Delivery-Discovery-Renewal space towards its future self. Pity the poor person who, a year from now, has to understand the design decision you made today or debug the code that you’re writing. Perhaps you owe it to them to leave at least some clues, not to mention that this poor person might turn out to be you! Working in the here and now, when the creation of those usually very small pieces of documentation is an integral part of the development process, a more maintainable system results. There remains a need, however, to keep that effort proportionate to its value, an issue outside the “here and now” and the province of the Adaptive Strategising space.

    “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”: The obvious rebalancing here is away from an adversarial relationship that makes change difficult and increasingly costly as it is delayed, and towards a partnership relationship in which risks and benefits are shared equitably and managed cooperatively. The benefits in terms of decision-making capacity alone are enormous, and I have first-hand experience of it working wonderfully in surprising settings.

    Before the launch of the UK’s Government Digital Service in 2011, who would have thought that working on a government project as part of a mixed team of staff and consultants could be a truly special experience? As the interim delivery manager on two of GDS’s ‘exemplar’ projects, I experienced exactly that. There were two customer relationships there: the supplier/government relationship and the government/citizen relationship. By far the more important relationship there was the second, and the abiding principle was “Start with needs: user needs not government needs”. That was more than a slogan. We lived by it, and projects that couldn’t demonstrate it would find themselves in trouble.

    Of course, beyond the neglect of user needs there are other ways in which the customer relationship can become dysfunctional. The rapid growth of the attention economy, the asymmetries involved in the handling of personal data, and the rise of AI have combined to create a new issue: the technology/user relationship becoming exploitative to the extent of causing real harm. Unlike the Agile revolution, I don’t see the technology industry solving this issue itself; it has become a matter for governments.

    One cause of these problems is that the customer and the user are often not the same person. A sponsor paying for a system they will never use isn’t as troubling as an advertiser paying for access to data the user regards as private, but their product teams ignore the user at their peril. Users have untapped expertise, and how they interact with the product has a lot to teach the product team. Even the bad guys know that they need to make their products usable! Again: software cannot be said to be “working” if it fails to meet user needs, and if that needs to be expressed contractually, so be it. Better still, get users as close to the team as you can manage, even part of the team where that’s possible.

    “Responding to change over following a plan”: This is the last of the Agile manifesto’s four “this over that” declarations. For the most part this one belongs with the Adaptive Strategising space, but – spoiler alert – the relationship between that space and Delivery-Discovery-Renewal works through what the two spaces share, the scope’s ability to organise (labelled 3 in Figure 1 above). In the “here and now” of this chapter, the relevant capacity-sapping dysfunction is over-commitment.

    Overcommitment is closely related to overburdening and one may contribute to the other, but they should not be confused. Overburdening, a coordination dysfunction (system 2 in Figure 1), leaves a team, activity, process, or other organisational scope in an unhealthy and poorly performing condition because it is trying to work on too many things at once. This multi-tasking incurs costs in context switching, quality issues, delays, and frustration. Compounding all of that, additional work in the form of rework. Overcommitment, a dysfunction in organising (system 3 in Figure 1), means that new commitments can’t be made without breaking commitments previously made. Whether that’s the result of taking on too much work, working to a planning horizon that’s too long, working in chunks too large, or working to plans that leave insufficient room for manoeuvre, that’s a different but similarly serious problem. The scope’s capacity for independent action – John Boyd’s definition of viability – is compromised.

    Taking those last three “this over that” declarations together, an Agile process matches its commitments to the short length of time it takes to generate useful information. Progress is made hypothesis by hypothesis, goal by goal. Out of an Agile process, products aren’t built fully formed to a design fixed in advance; they emerge.

    When I use ‘Agile’ capitalised like that, I’m describing things that can be traced back to the Agile manifesto. In that sense, the forthcoming book is an Agile book per se; its roots are elsewhere. You can see in the above discussion, however, both what’s at stake and what’s possible. This is not to say that all is rosy in the Agile world: my previous books all address the issue of the Agile industry imposing process and practice on people, to the extent that “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” can seem cruelly ironic at times. Nevertheless, I make the bold suggestion that Agile has been more successful – unreasonably successful – than perhaps its own community realises.

    Consider the effect of this Great Rebalancing (or if you prefer, a great shift in organisational constraints) not only on the decision-making and communication capacities of the teams involved but also on those around it. Capacity that previously was consumed by the need to manage teams from the outside has been relieved of much of that burden. Capacity thus freed can be applied to more interesting things. That improves the experience of leadership, increases the quality of leadership, and greatly increases the chances that self-organised innovation will occur not only within teams but at larger scales too. That is what the book will be about: identifying and dealing with dysfunctions at every scale, enabling other great rebalancings, and unleashing thereby other kinds of “unreasonable effectiveness”.

    Ping me if interested in tracking progress on the book; some have early access to the manuscript already, and with a view to getting multiple perspectives on it I will be setting up multiple review circles in the coming weeks covering tech, healthcare, education (i.e. universities), faith communities and other voluntary or not-for-profit organisations, and the systems and complexity communities.

    See also Leading in a Transforming Organisation in Berlin, London, and Southampton in the list below of upcoming events. Highly relevant! Days 2 and 3 have much the same structure as the book. Likewise, under the heading of Leading with Outcomes, the self-paced Adaptive Organisation parts I & II further down the page below.

    [1] More properly the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (2001), agilemanifesto.org

    [2] See my favourite Agile book: Jeff Patton and Peter Economy, User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product (2014, O’Reilly Media)

    [3] Another book that I recommend frequently: If interested in job stories and the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework, start here: Bob Moesta & Greg Engle, Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress (2020, Lioncrest Publishing)

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