Announcing Adaptive Organisation part I (00:01:53)
Out now: chapter 3 of Adaptive Organisation, the fourth and final module of Leading with Outcomes. This latest chapter, Mutual Trust Building, completes part I, for which a certificate of completion applies.
Part I, Business agility at every scale covers the three overlapping “spaces” of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, an accessible, “start where you are”, and complexity-conscious rendition of the Viable System Model:
Delivery, Discovery, and Renewal:
Inside value creation’s inner learning loop
Turning intent into progress, and experiments into intelligence and insights
Reconciling Agile and business agility
Adaptive Strategy:
Making organising commitments, autonomy at every scope and scale
Understanding self and environment, creating and managing options accordingly
Actively maintaining coherent identity, purpose, and values
Mutual Trust Building:
Models of trust-building leadership
The systemic role of trust
Sensemaking – making meaningful progress in the presence of ambiguity
The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation as described in part I is already a fractal, “every scale” model. Nevertheless, when it comes to challenges of scale, there is still plenty to talk about that is not well covered elsewhere. What should be happening between scales? How can we think less statically about structure and process? How do we get the organisation engaged on all of this?
With all of that on the agenda, Part II, Between spaces, scopes, and scales should begin its rollout in the coming days, one chapter at a time:
Between and across scales:
Navigating formal structure
Your organisation in 5 networks
Between and across scales: Structuring, connecting, translating, and reconciling
Organising at human scale
Thinking in circles – organising without reorganising
Teaming and re-teaming
The developmental organisation
Possibility and purpose
Conversations on organisation in the language of outcomes
Developing and pursuing strategy
Read on to find out how to access Adaptive Organisation!
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 four modules in the recommended order:
Individual subscriptions from £24.50 per month, business subscriptions from £269 per month, with discounts available on both kinds of plan for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors.
See below for public training events, discounted for subscribers.
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.
What prompted Ryan’s comment was a talk I gave last week at the abovementioned meetup – see below for the recording. It draws from chapter 4 of beta 1, which remains available to subscribers until beta 2 gets that far, which shortly it will. Thanks in no small part to the conversations that my talk spawned, I’ll be updating both the talk and the training module – the talk iterating towards a keynote I’ll be giving later in the year, the training material benefiting in the process.
The theme of “balance, constraint, and freedom” comes up both in the video and in a short interlude that follows chapter 2 and is released with it today. The module and its underlying model draw on two perspectives on organisation, namely complexity and systems, and it’s nice to bring the two together:
What does it mean to have things in balance with each other – in healthy and productive relationship? (In the talk I expand both what might be meant by “things” and what gets in the way of that kind of balance)
What does it mean to have the right constraints – constraints of various kinds that in combination keep us away from unhealthy and unproductive states and steer us towards more desirable states, maintaining our organisation’s coherence all the while?
And both the flip side of constraint and the product of those healthy relationships: what does it mean when we have freedom – freedom to do the right thing, freedom to collaborate creatively, freedom to find innovative solutions, freedom to reimagine who we are, freedom to redefine ourselves?
The complexity and systems perspectives each bring their own ranges of tools, but before we get technical, what does that right balance, constraint, and freedom feel like? Already, that’s a starting point for an interesting conversation. A more detailed and theory-informed conversation might be the next step, but don’t neglect the informal opportunities either – sometimes they’re the most revealing.
To the recorded talk specifically, if you detected the hint of a health warning in my mention above of updates and iteration, it is only that in this version I risk getting into more detail than I would want in a keynote. Not that it was a problem here – in fact the feedback was very encouraging. Not for the first time, I’m being told that I’m describing something that is both needed and timely – something that others have been grasping at but didn’t quite have the words for.
Watch to the end for a special offer, and watch out for later versions. I have a good idea already of what the next one will look like.
Stop press: see Upcoming events below, 27th April.
Between spaces, scopes, and scales: What the scaling frameworks don’t tell you
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 four modules in the recommended order:
Individual subscriptions from £24.50 per month, business subscriptions from £269 per month, with discounts available on both kinds of plan for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors.
See below for public training events, discounted for subscribers.
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.
[Updated 2022-03-20 – dates changed to accommodate block bookings!]
London, UK, venue TBC. Three days, each available separately, each certified. Buy two consecutive days and save 20%. Buy all three together and save 30%:
Day 1. Tuesday, June 20th: Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
Day 2. Wednesday, June 21st: Adaptive Organisation (I): Business agility at every scale
Day 3. Thursday, June 22nd: Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes, and scales
Save a further 10-40% with the discount code shown on your Agendashift Academy subscription – see the What’s included page of your Welcome course in your Academy library.
Just in the last few days, I’ve had some capacity free up in April; please get in touch if interested in hosting any of the above privately. I will throw in a free 3-month Agendashift for Business subscription for up to 25 people, and as mentioned in last month’s roundup, while the self-paced version of Adaptive Organisation remains in beta (see below) I will be glad to discount the in-person version substantially. Please note that my ability to travel outside the UK remains somewhat limited.
Happening this week:
I’m excited also to announce that beta 2 of the self-paced version of Adaptive Organisation (parts I and II) begins its chapter-by-chapter release today; if you’re an Academy subscriber, you’ll be notified in the usual way. If you’re not yet a subscriber, start here!
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.
I have had covid for most of the past week, and though I don’t feel seriously ill, coupled with the facts 1) that with my wife I’m part of a 24*7 care team for a vulnerable family member, and 2) that I’ve been called to jury service next month, I’ve had to make some changes.
So, in calendar order:
Next week’s Foundation is unfortunately cancelled
Next week’s webinar (with guests) and meetup are still going ahead – and I’m greatly looking forward to both
If you’re in India next month, don’t miss Karl Scotland’s Foundation
My next public workshop is in April, by the kind invitation of Gervase Bushe and hosted by the Cape Code Institute, details here
The May Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) is now open for bookings – UK mornings, relatively APAC-friendly timings (less convenient for the Americas this time round)
If you’re wondering meanwhile how this month’s TTT/F went, check this out.
Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale
There has been some impact on the not-quite-finished Adaptive Organisation module too, but I’m seeing it very much as a blessing in disguise. As agreed at a Zoom call yesterday with trainers participating in its beta programme, I will:
Release the existing videos to Academy subscribers as-is as “Beta 1” – without captions, workbook, or the final chapter
Release a greatly improved Beta 2 chapter by chapter
I gave a preview of Beta 2 at this month’s TTT/F, where one participant described it as “all I hoped it would be”. Yesterday’s Zoom was similarly encouraging, and I’m confident that it will be worth the wait.
From April onwards I will have capacity for private training. While Adaptive Organisation remains in beta it will be available in multiple formats at preferential pricing – so shout now if it could be of interest.
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.
Perhaps you’ve been wondering where I’ve been going with posts like Your organisation in 5 networks and Start where you are. Well, just in the last few days the Systemic Agility community have given me the perfect opportunity for the big reveal. I’ll be speaking at their meetup at 17:30 GMT on Thursday, March 9th:
To set some expectations: Networks will of course play a role, but it’s not only about those. No, I won’t be ranting against any particular framework or against frameworks in general. Much more constructively, it’s about accessing some of the deep magic of organisation. Or should I say organising?
The previous day but in the UK morning for the sake of our Australia-based guests, it’s the next in our monthly webinar/AMA series The questions that drive us:
Note that 09:30 GMT is not 10am ET as previously advertised. Apologies to our friends in the US if you were misled – 4:30am is early indeed!
It will be a busy week – there’s more! The next interactive Leading with Outcomes: Foundation begins on the Tuesday. Three sessions of two and a half hours each on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons (UK time) 7th-9th March, 14:00-16:30 GMT:
Session 1. (Tuesday 7th) Leading in a transforming organisation – introducing outcome-oriented change
Session 2. (Wednesday 8th) Meaningfulness, significance, and direction – two kinds of strategy and a virtuous circle
Session 3. (Thursday 9th) Moving into action – ideas, experiments, feedback, and learning
We’re having a lot of fun with Foundation right now in the February Train-the-Trainer/Facilitator and I’m already looking forward to doing it again. Join us! And don’t hesitate to ping me for a discount code – public or non-profit sectors, un/under-employed, participants in previous events, yada, yada, they all count, and that goes for the self-paced version of Foundation too.
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.
Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
Arthur Ashe
“Start where you are” doesn’t have to be about process! Try this exercise:
Disregarding organisational boundaries, and in relation to the work you are already committed to (your “organising commitments”), who do you interact with? Then reflexively: who interacts with you regarding their organising commitments? And transitively: who do they interact with, who interacts with them, and so on outwards?
Again disregarding organisational boundaries, and whether as an act of planning or of response to something unexpected, who do you consult with when your organising commitments need to change? And again reflexively and transitively: Who consults with you, who do they consult with, and so on outwards?
Now reflect on the relationships you have identified in those two networks. Whose relationships don’t you understand as well as you might? To the extent that it affects your own work, what context do you lack that others might be able to provide? Who else might be struggling for lack of context that you or someone closer to you might be able to provide? Is it time then for some trust-building conversations?
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.
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:
In your organisation, which network or networks dominate?
At what cost?
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:
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.
In this edition: Patterns of generative conversations; December TTT/F; (The Deliberately) Adaptive Organisation; Upcoming; Top posts
Patterns of generative conversations
Something to celebrate: This morning I delivered the manuscript for my fourth book, working title Patterns of Generative Conversations, a shortish (100-page) commission for Gervase Bushe and Bob Marshak’s BMI series in dialogic organisation development. If you’ve read the Agendashift 2nd edition, it expands on the “one model to the tune of another” reconciliation I did between Agendashift and Gervase’s Generative Change Model. If you haven’t, it will be an accessible and (I’m told) energetic introduction to both. As soon as I have a publication schedule I will of course announce it here.
December TTT/F
We have a quorum for September’s Leading with Outcomes Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator, so December’s is now open. It will take place over Zoom in the evenings UK time, beginning 17:30 GMT, 12:30 ET, 09:30 PT. If that’s too late for you, the September one begins 13:00 BST (places still available), and the February one (to be opened in due course) will take place in the morning, UK time.
And don’t forget to use your discount code! 30% off for partners, 25-40% off for most Academy subscribers (according to your subscription plan), 40% off for government, non-profit, education, etc also. If you don’t have your code already, ping me.
(The Deliberately) Adaptive Organisation
August has been a strangely productive month – that’s what a diary mostly empty of meetings does for you! Over September I’ll start recording the fourth module of Leading with Outcomes, Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale, and as part of my preparations, some blog posts:
18-26 April, Live online, 12pm-4pm EST Tuesdays and Wednesdays, April 18, 19, 25, 26 2023: Creating Generative Conversations by Leading with Outcomes – Part of the Cape Cod Institute’s BMI Series in dialogic organisation development
Recap: Somewhat in the style of my 2013 breakthrough post Introducing Kanban through its values, here is the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (“business agility at every scale”) introduced through a set of six commitments.
Co-creation – To keep finding better options, together
Sensemaking – To make the best sense we can of every new challenge
Trust Building – To build trust in every direction
Those first three commitments correspond respectively to the three top-level components of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation [1, 2]. These are the overlapping and deeply-connected “supersystems” of Adaptive Strategy, Production (Delivery, Discovery, and Renewal), and Mutual Trust Building.
The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation’s three “supersystems”
For this concluding part, a second group of commitments that apply right across the model:
Curiosity: To ask better questions
Generativity: To create more ideas than we consume
Consent: To celebrate the agency and ingenuity of others
As with the first three, they apply at every scale – teams, teams of teams, bigger structures, smaller structures, structures outside of any hierarchy, whole organisations. As commitments, they’re made by people, leaders taking the lead.
Commitment 4. Curiosity: To ask better questions
Much of Agendashift [3] could be described bottom-up as follows:
Questions to ask
How to recognise a good question when you see one, learning to develop your repertoire, finding and integrating relevant bodies of knowledge (Clean Language and Solutions Focus, to name two)
Patterns to organise those questions – Agendashift’s two most important being the IdOO (“I do”) pattern [4] –Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes – and Right to Left [5], working backwards from key moments of impact and learning
The (meta-)strategies / leadership principles [6] that motivate those questions
It could also be described as the product of a question, one that has served it well over the years:
What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?
That takes us to the role of curiosity and questioning in Adaptive Strategy. Barely scratching the surface, just a few examples:
What’s it like to be an employee of ours?
What’s it like to be a customer of ours?
What’s it like not being a customer of ours?
What’s happening when we’re reaching the right customers, meeting their strategic needs1?
Whose needs would we be meeting? What new stories could they tell?
1Strategic needs: their needs, our strategy
In Delivery too it pays to explore needs [7]. Far from being redundant, it establishes the context necessary to do a good job and sets the scene for later learning. Stepping back from individual pieces of work to the current workload as a whole, there is a whole new set of questions that apply (here’s where Right to Left really shines). And feeding back into strategy, there’s curiosity into how the work is done, the experience of doing it, and the level of capability demonstrated.
And then there’s Mutual Trust Building. Being careful with one’s assumptions is a great lesson from Clean Language (see [8]). Especially for leaders, it’s also important to remember that there are at least two sides to every conversation, and that every participant has the right to be curious. Respect for that that might be the difference between a conversation fruitful to all sides and one that generates more anxiety than insight [9].
Commitment 5. Generativity – To create more ideas than we consume
This commitment is perhaps the Why to the previous commitment’s How. We ask more and better questions because we need more and better answers – answers we didn’t already know. More and better answers means more and better intelligence, more and better insights, more and better ideas for innovation.
In a forthcoming book [10] for the BMI series on dialogic organisation development I suggest that a good working definition of generative process is one that creates more ideas than it consumes. And it’s not only about dialogic styles of strategy development – what I had in mind were the improvement cycles that so quickly run out of steam or the Lean Startup cycles that serve only to optimise the life out of once-great products.
There are technical reasons why the Delivery supersystem has a Discovery aspect to it (Adaptive Strategy relies on it for real-world intelligence), but that aside, the best delivery processes I’ve seen generated new ideas at every stage of the process. Two things enable that: they are designed for it, and their respective strategy activities make room for it, producing not plans and specifications but vision, outcomes, and the kind of challenges that people are well motivated to overcome.
Commitment 6. Consent – To celebrate the agency and ingenuity of others
It’s time to mention the two more models that the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation uses to flesh out the skeleton that the Viable System Model (VSM) provides. In the intersection between Mutual Trust Building and Delivery, Discovery, and Renewal (bottom middle in the diagram), is where the magic of production (and if you like, reproduction) happens.
Whether it’s the product of a strategy process or self-organised, if the organisation is large enough, it will have some structure. One highly flexible model – well capable of modelling dynamic, ad-hoc, and non-hierarchical structures – is given by Sociocracy [11] (aka Dynamic Governance, known also to Ackoff fans as Circular Hierarchy). It is purposeful collaboration and self-governance at every scale, and it is based on principles of consent. Each circle has its domain of responsibility over which it has authority; people join circles by mutual consent; circles make decisions by consent. People can join multiple circles; alignment across what could be called a strategy network is achieved through a combination of consent and participation, and it’s a dynamic process.
Things get interesting when there are multiple people in the intersections between circles. Having two people there gives you double linking – not only a mechanism for coordination, trust building, and resilience, but often a developmental (eg mentoring) opportunity also. As numbers there increase, so increases the possibility of a new circle, and with it a new, mini-scale Deliberately Adaptive Organisation with an identity, strategy, and purpose of its own.
The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation is also a Deliberately Developmental Organisation [12] (the naming is no coincidence), and it’s a very elegant combination. People have their own aspirations, plans, and strategies, and they’re adaptable! They’re capable of trusting and being trusted. Not only are they productive, most are interested in both their own self-development and in the renewal of the organisation. That symmetry is thanks to VSM again, and the Deliberately Developmental Organisation’s holistic and dare I say wholehearted [13] integration of personal and organisation development helps us make the most of it.
What next?
The Agendashift Academy’s self-paced training module on Adaptive Organisation [1] is in development and comes out over the autumn (probably in instalments), and after that I want to produce the next iteration of the first module, Leading with Outcomes: Foundation [14], whose slideware exists already in good time for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator [15] next month. This year should also see the publication of my aforementioned fourth book, working title Patterns of generative conversations [10].
With all of that going on I’m having to restrain myself from starting my fifth book, working title Wholehearted: Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, business agility at every scale. It lives rent-free in my head meanwhile, but never mind! My hopes for it are threefold:
It will help leaders at all levels better understand the relationship between organisation and business agility, and help them to identify organisational dysfunctions and impediments to business agility that they will want to address
It will give practitioners the knowledge and skills to approach the challenges of scale in ways that are both more humane and more effective than the process rollout
And for both audiences, it will be the most relevant and accessible introduction to VSM they are ever likely to read
18-26 April, Live online, 12pm-4pm EST Tuesdays and Wednesdays, April 18, 19, 25, 26 2023: Creating Generative Conversations by Leading with Outcomes – Part of the Cape Cod Institute’s BMI Series in dialogic organisation development
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:
Co-creation – To keep finding better options, together
Sensemaking – To make the best sense we can of every new challenge
Trust Building – To build trust in every direction
The second group will be covered in a later post:
Curiosity: To ask better questions
Generativity: To create more ideas than we consume
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:
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.
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
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:
Co-creation – To keep finding better options, together
Sensemaking – To make the best sense we can of every new challenge
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:
Curiosity: To ask better questions
Generativity: To create more ideas than we consume
Consent: To celebrate the agency and ingenuity of others
[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)
18-26 April, Live online, 12pm-4pm EST Tuesdays and Wednesdays, April 18, 19, 25, 26 2023: Creating Generative Conversations by Leading with Outcomes – Part of the Cape Cod Institute’s BMI Series in dialogic organisation development
Agendashift 