Agendashift roundup, June 2022

Posted on June 30, 2022March 24, 2023 by Mike Burrows

In this edition: Outside-in Strategy (I) and (II); Lean Agile London 2022; 15-minute FOTO; Top posts

Outside-in Strategy (I): Positioned for success

New at the Agendashift Academy, Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success is the third of four planned Leading with Outcomes training modules. In its video-based self-paced incarnation (other formats are available) it began its rollout this month. I have enough recorded now to be confident of the release schedule:

Monday, June 20th: Customer
– “What’s happening when we’re reaching the right customers, meeting their strategic needs?” (their needs, our strategy)
Friday, July 1st: Organisation
– “When we’re meeting those strategic needs, what kind of organisation are we?”
Friday, July 8th: Product
– “Through what products and services are we meeting those strategic needs?”
Friday, July 15th: Platform
– “What are the defining/critical capabilities that make it all possible?”
Friday, July 29th: Team(s)
– “When we’re achieving all of the above, what kind of team(s) are we?”

Here’s a quick introductory video (05:33):

This leaves the Leading with Outcomes curriculum nicely on track to complete its rollout this year:

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation – already live (take this one first)
Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact – already live
Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success – rolling out now
Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale – due in the autumn

All four self-paced modules are included in your Agendashift Academy subscription. Beginning from as little as €29 per month, there are affordable plans for both businesses and individuals, yearly and monthly options in both cases, and a 7-day risk-free trial period for all card-based plans. If you’re a leader in a transforming organisation, you aspire to that role, or you support others in that journey, you’ll find plenty there for you and your colleagues.

Take me to Leading with Outcomes

While we’re here, a Zoom-based Train-the-Trainer (and Facilitator) event isn’t far away, probably September. Details should be ready in time for next month’s roundup.

Outside-in Strategy (II), the new assessment tool

This was developed for the training, but as I’m keen to see how it applies elsewhere I’m making it available in the form of a free (registration required) public survey. It’s a super-short (15-prompt) Agendashift-style assessment tool, three prompts for each of the five layers of Agendashift’s outside-in strategy review. Like all the Agendashift assessment tools it can be used as the template for an organisational survey too; if you’re an Agendashift partner, you’ll find it on the templates dropdown.

Take me to the Outside-in Strategy Readiness Assessment

Lean Agile London 2022

Last month I spoke to a packed room at Lean Agile London 2022, the first time I have taken the new 3 strategies model (see the Agendashift home page) to an in-person conference.

You’ll the recording and slides here and listed on our media page. To access all the rest of the conference videos (which I encourage you to do – it’s one of my favourite conferences) you can register here:

Sign me for the LALDN2022 Videos (actineo.xyz)

15-minute FOTO

I announced version 12 of our Clean Language-inspired coaching game 15-minute FOTO a few weeks ago (see Top posts below). It has since gone through a couple of minor revisions (12a and 12b) announced so far only in the #cleanlanguage channel on Slack; they’re worth picking up if you have an older version. Re-download if you have the Dropbox link in your inbox still, or subscribe here:

Take me to the 15-minute FOTO page

Spot the difference – version 12b (the newest) first:

15-minute FOTO, version 12

Posted on May 12, 2022July 16, 2022 by Mike Burrows

The facilitation deck for our Clean Language-inspired coaching game 15-minute FOTO is now at version 12. Just one change: for the Lite format of the game, what previously were announced under a heading of “Tips:” are now announced as follows:

Help your colleagues enjoy a productive time:
Start small: 5% and 15% outcomes, bullet point answers
Be generous in the outcomes you accept (and write down)
If a minute passes without an outcome being captured, something is wrong

A renamed heading might seem a trivial change, but in the debrief after the game we will introduce (retrospectively) the three roles of Client, Coach, and Host, which in the Lite format any player can adopt at any time. Client and Coach correspond very obviously to the tasks of answering and asking the questions from the cue card, but until this version, it didn’t seem that we had done enough to set up the Host role.

Bonus

Emphasising the “leading” in Leading with Outcomes (the Agendashift Academy’s core curriculum), this discussion question comes from the Academy version of the 15-minute FOTO debrief:

Reflecting some more on the Client, Coach, and Host roles, which one is the leader?

There it’s pre-recorded; I have tested it “live” also.

For some background on prior changes that led up to this one:

The three roles (previously four): Announcing 15-minute FOTO version 11 (November 2011)
The Lite and Classic formats: 15-minute FOTO, latest v9 deck (September 2020)

As ever go to agendashift.com/15-minute-foto for tips, download instructions, and an ancient but still fun video.

What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?

Agendashift roundup, November 2021

Posted on November 30, 2021March 24, 2023 by Mike Burrows

In this edition: Leading with Outcomes: Foundation; 15-minute FOTO, version 11; New video on Agendashift assessments; Top posts

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation

As announced this morning to current and existing students, the “old” Leading with Outcomes will be retired soon, and its replacement will look and feel strikingly different.

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation goes into limited private beta this week, to be launched in full around the end of the year. We’re aiming for a much broader audience – all “leaders in transforming organisations” – and as the name suggests, it’s also the starting point for more. Henceforth, the name “Leading with Outcomes” covers a whole curriculum that reorganises the Agendashift Academy’s existing offerings (both self-paced and interactive) into three parallel tracks, for which the highly accessible Foundation module will be a prerequisite.

For more detail than that, you’ll have to wait for the announcements. Remember meanwhile our guiding principle: Agreement on outcomes before solutions – literally, leading with outcomes! If you share our desire to see more of that, up and down transforming organisations everywhere, then you understand the level of our ambition. We’re going to make it easier for more people to participate in the realisation of that vision, so if you’re with us, get ready.

15-minute FOTO, version 11

The latest version of our Clean Language-inspired coaching game 15-minute FOTO was announced this week, and the announcement drew a lot of interest. Read it here:

Announcing 15-minute FOTO version 11

New video on Agendashift assessments

Added this month to our media page:

The Agendashift Delivery Assessment – starting conversations in business agility

Announcing 15-minute FOTO version 11

Posted on November 17, 2021July 16, 2022 by Mike Burrows

The facilitation deck for our Clean Language-inspired coaching game 15-minute FOTO is now at version 11. Minor tweaks aside, the two main changes:

The tip to “start small” with 5% and 15% outcomes
The four roles of the Classic edition of the game have been reduced to three (the Lite edition doesn’t mention roles until the debrief)

You can read some background to the “start small” advice in the recent post Get unstuck and get going: Starting small with 5% and 15% outcomes. Thinking about it more tactically, if the objective of the game is to produce a quantity of outcomes, jumping straight to “world peace” leaves a lot of space unexplored! So start small, see where “Then what happens?” takes you, and in the process uncover not just meaningful objectives to pursue, but places to start, outcomes to organise around, outcomes that tell us when we’re winning, outcomes that (at the right time) will lead to solutions, and so on.

The change to the roles in the Classic edition takes us from the four of Client, Coach, Scribe, and Observer to the three of Client, Coach, and Host. The host’s job subsumes scribe and observer but goes further: it is to ensure that within the deliberate constraints of the game, everyone has an enjoyable and productive time. It covers things like:

Making sure the client and coach who they are and what they are meant to be doing
Making sure the client has chosen the obstacle that will be the focus of the next conversation
Making sure that outcomes get captured – whether or not that means performing the scribing task themselves
Safety officer (noting that whatever the coach might think, “I can’t answer that” is a valid answer)
Referee – keeping the conversation to the rules (it is a game after all)
Time-keeper – it takes some time discipline to ensure that everyone gets to play every role within the game’s 15 minutes
Intervening when a conversation hasn’t got started (distracted by meta conversations perhaps) or is running out of steam (perhaps it’s time to choose another obstacle)
Observer – from a perspective outside the conversation, noticing things that might be useful to recall later in the debrief

As per the 2014 book Host by Mark McKergow and Helen Bailey, hosting is a powerful metaphor for leadership. If ever you’ve struggled with the notion of servant leadership or feel that the leader’s responsibility to “create the environment” is never properly explained, then host leadership is for you. It’s worth noting also that Mark McKergow is also a co-author of one of the references / inspirations for 5% outcomes – see the abovementioned post for details.

As ever go to agendashift.com/15-minute-foto for tips, download instruction, and an ancient but still fun video.

What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?

Agendashift roundup, October 2021

Posted on October 29, 2021November 30, 2021 by Mike Burrows

In this edition: Agendashift Academy update; The 1967 manifesto for the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation; Get unstuck and get going; Upcoming; Top posts

Agendashift Academy update

What really happened: on the brink of releasing a new intermediate-level self-paced training module Outside-in Strategy with Outcomes, we decided that it would be much better to revisit Leading with Outcomes, our first self-paced training module. A big decision not taken lightly! As part of a significant pivot for the Academy itself, we’re now re-recording it, repositioning it for a much broader audience.

We’re adding, not taking away, and if you’re a practitioner of some kind (the main audience for the first version) there’s still plenty to be had from the second version. Still the familiar and well-tested exercises, but every session now connecting with leadership, speaking to a specific leadership theme, and with practical takeaways for leaders at all levels of experience. We think of it now as doing something foundational for transformational leadership, the Academy aimed squarely at “leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”.

What to expect:

We’ll release each session of the new Leading with Outcomes as it becomes available, the first one mid-November and the remaining three sessions at intervals of a couple of weeks (ish). While it remains incomplete (we know that some of you like to binge on these things) we’ll offer it at a discount.
As a thank you and in the hope of fresh feedback, past purchasers of the old one – even those whose purchases have now expired – will be granted access to the new one up to the end of January 2022
We’ll announce the next interactive workshop Coaching with Outcomes soon, conducted now over four sessions to match Leading with Outcomes – you can take them in either order but you’ll be encouraged to take them together as cohort-based training, publicly or privately
The two in combination effectively replace the first half of the old Agendashift Deep Dive; its eventual replacement will go quite a bit further, covering the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation also
A re-recorded Outside-in Strategy with Outcomes (intermediate) and a new Transforming with Outcomes (advanced) will follow in the early months of 2022; complementing them will be more interactive workshops both old and new

As allowed by the quantity and growth rate of the content – soon if we hit our stride as we expect – we plan to move to a subscription model, covering what will be an ever-growing portfolio of self-paced material and offering substantial discounts on interactive workshops. Meanwhile, we’re putting in place the infrastructure to better support corporate purchasers also.

Let me finish this update with a massive thank you to everyone who gave feedback on LwO version 1. Highly encouraging for the most part, and we took to heart your ideas for improvement. We think you’ll love version 2 – not just a refinement but a bold step!

The 1967 manifesto for the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

The first of two more-than-usually successful blog posts this month:

The 1967 Manifesto for The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

It has provoked some interesting conversations and no doubt I’ll be returning to the topic soon.

Get unstuck and get going

The second of those posts was this one:

Get unstuck and get going: Starting small with 5% and 15% outcomes

For “Practice Outcomes” (the name of a warmup exercise), now think “5% Outcomes, 15% Outcomes”. Typically we do it just before doing 15-minute FOTO for the first time, and an updated 15-minute FOTO will make reference to it. There’s another change in the wings to come on top of that, so watch out for version 11 soon.

Upcoming

Per my Academy update above, there are still no workshops in the calendar but we’ll be addressing that soon. Other events:

09 November, online meetup, Smidig group:
The Agendashift Delivery Assessment – starting conversations in business agility
Mike Burrows, Kjell Tore Guttormsen
17 November, Online meetup – Tight-Loose-Tight group:
Tight-Loose-Tight － an evolution of OKR
Mike Burrows, Kjell Tore Guttormsen, Kumar Dattatreyan
1-3 December, online, ProjeXplorer Virtual Summit, PMI Bulgaria Chapter:
Keynote: Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation
Mike Burrows
14 December, online meetup, Agile Brigade group:
Leading and Transforming with Outcomes
Mike Burrows

Get unstuck and get going: Starting small with 5% and 15% outcomes

Posted on October 8, 2021December 26, 2022 by Mike Burrows

In chapter 1 of Agendashift (2nd edition 2021) you’ll find a crucial but awkwardly-named exercise, Practice Outcomes. It’s there because the main event, the Clean Language-inspired coaching game 15-minute FOTO, goes so much better if players have been primed to start small. If your first outcome is a small one, the chain of consequences that follows – “Then what happens? Then what happens?” – is so much more productive.

5% outcomes, getting unstuck

I’ve been working on making not just the exercise of Practice Outcomes but its outputs and its rationale easier to reference. Hence “5% outcomes”, the kind of teeny-tiny outcomes you get from the miracle question (source: Solutions-focused brief therapy, via the 2006 Jackson and McKergow book The Solutions Focus). The version of the miracle question we use in Practice Outcomes isn’t exactly canonical but it’s close enough:

If that obstacle disappeared overnight (it doesn’t matter how), what would be the first thing you would notice? (something positive)

The rationale? Make your outcomes small enough, and perhaps they’re there already if only you knew where to look. And if they’re there, so are what causes them – solutions! A great way to get unstuck.

If you find yourself not wanting to explain the miracle question, something simpler:

What first, tiniest signs of success might we see?
And before that, even tinier?

Context for those questions might be a some kind of obstacle, an outcome (a larger one, obviously), or even our overall objective. Here I’ve visualised it in terms of the IdOO (“I do”) pattern:

5-percent-outcomes

15% outcomes, getting going

If we get unstuck with 5% outcomes and their corresponding 5% solutions, then 15% outcomes and their corresponding 15% solutions are how we make faster progress. I’m riffing on the Liberating Structures pattern 15% Solutions, whose rationale speaks to the stuckness issue but invites us to think a little bigger. If our attitude is that “15% is always there for the taking”, then we’re primed to iterate towards our goals. Faced with an adaptive challenge, the sooner we embrace that kind of approach, the better. Here, 100% solution are worse than unlikely, they’re a route to failure.

15% is always there for the taking

15% Solutions: Discover and Focus on What Each Person Has the Freedom and Resources to Do Now (liberatingstructures.com)

The questions here:

“How will we know that we’ve made a small but significant step in the right direction?”
“And then what happens?”

Anticipating one of the three most important questions in 15-minute FOTO, the “And then what happens?” is already getting us to think more iteratively. Visualised:

15-percent-outcomes

5% and 15% outcomes, yes outcomes

You might be wondering why I start with Solutions Focus and 15% Solutions and invite participants to capture not solutions but outcomes. Is this some strange insult to my sources? Not a bit of it!

Think of Agendashift as a two-pronged approach to adaptive strategy:

its formation through an ongoing process of meaningful participation
integrated with innovation and learning processes

In the context of an adaptive challenge in a changing environment (one we’re actively changing, no less), if we take the attitude that solutions are always there for the taking – a core premise of both our sources – the right time for solutions is just in time. To solutionise sooner is to invite solutions that may be beyond their shelf life by the time they’re really needed. Worse, having them designed only by the people who happen to be in the room at the time is another recipe for failure.

We are not merely counting on but institutionalising the emergence of solutions “from the people closest to the problem”, to quote my friend Karl Scotland. Keeping that innovation process well fed, appropriately oriented, and with room to breathe, strategy is developed in the language of outcomes.

Going as far as mostly as avoiding the term change management for fear of being associated with it, this is the very antithesis of 1990’s-style managed change. Great for upgrading your email server, but completely the wrong paradigm for anything transformational. Catch yourself thinking that a preconceived solution – worse, a borrowed one – should be your main response to your adaptive challenge? Tempting, but think again. You’d be making a category error, already a terrible place to start. Rolling it out, overcoming resistance to change and all that? Well that would be doubling down, compounding the mistake, and the consequences will be yours to own.

So solutions come well after outcomes, not before. But if you hear a solution prematurely – even a 5% or 15% solution – don’t worry. They’re easy to deal with:

Then what happens?

Get unstuck and get going with 5% and 15% outcomes. Small – tiny even – but powerful!

What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?

Agendashift roundup, September 2021

Posted on September 30, 2021March 24, 2023 by Mike Burrows

In this edition: Academy update; Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation; Celebration-5W version 6; Upcoming events; Top posts

Academy update

Time to come clean: our next public workshops (there are still private workshops taking place) won’t happen until the new year. Honestly, the desire was there, but with all the behind-the-scenes work we’re currently doing, it just got too complicated.

For a taste of things to come, Coaching with Outcomes will return in the format of four 2-hour online sessions over four weeks. Although (like the current one) you will be able to take it standalone, it will also:

bring together cohorts of students taking Leading with Outcomes, and
form part of a modular replacement for what was the Deep Dive workshop (actually we’re up to something more ambitious than that, but more than that I can’t say at this stage)

Outside-in Strategy with Outcomes (originally planned to be out by now) and the advanced modules based on the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (more on that below) are similarly postponed. We’re confident though that the delay will be well worth it.

Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

This month’s big event was the webinar Up and Down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. Read about it and watch the video!

Meanwhile, the Deliberately Adaptive assessment pilots are going strong – three have their debrief workshops scheduled for October.

Celebration-5W version 6

Also this month, an update to our context-creating workshop kickoff exercise Celebration-5W. Read about that here:

Celebration-5W version 6, “your next big breakthrough”

I am also testing some changes to 15-minute FOTO, our Clean Language-inspired coaching game. More on that next month I hope, and in the #cleanlanguage channel in the Agendashift Slack meanwhile.

Upcoming events

07 October, Online meetup – Heart of Agile Scotland group:
Yes I do Heart of Agile
27 October, online meetup, Smidig group:
The Agendashift Delivery Assessment
Mike Burrows, Kjell Tore Guttormsen
14 December, online meetup, Agile Brigade group:
Leading and Transforming with Outcomes

Leading with Outcomes: a cheat sheet

Posted on March 16, 2021July 16, 2022 by Mike Burrows

To whet the appetite, a cheat sheet for:

The Leading with Outcomes workshop – there are two interactive workshops upcoming (see below) and watch this space for news of new online self-paced training
The first half of the Core, Deep Dive, and Outside-in strategy workshops; we’ll shortly be adding a Deep Dive at an Americas-friendly time
Last but very definitely not least, the first two chapters of the book, Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2nd edition March 2021)

Yes, you read that right: March 2021. Publication imminent!

Go to agendashift.com/leading-with-outcomes-cheat-sheet or click on the image below for download information, references, etc. It’s Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA); by subscribing you’ll get not just the PDF but the original .pptx file too – translations and other adaptations welcome. Enjoy!

What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?

15-minute FOTO version 10

Posted on March 12, 2021March 12, 2021 by Mike Burrows

Quick one: the facilitation deck for our Clean Language-inspired coaching game 15-minute FOTO is now at version 10. Changes:

Added a slide for a quick practice: the two and three most important questions (the questions in bold on the card, the ones that do most of the work in the game) on your most concrete and most abstract obstacles, respectively without and with the What kind of… question (my favourite). You can do it as a facilitator-led demonstration and/or a short breakout (doing both isn’t overkill in my experience).
Removed a slide titled Essential: Launch from a clear challenge, go deep. Essential it might be, but it’s smoother to cover the point while on the preceding slide.
Moved the And when X... slide to improve the flow.
Updated the reference material at the back to mention the now-imminent 2nd edition of the book.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve recorded myself using this version and am much happier with the flow now.

More: Go to agendashift.com/15-minute-foto for tips, download instruction, and an ancient but still fun video.

Agendashift roundup, October 2020

Posted on October 30, 2020December 4, 2020 by Mike Burrows

In this edition: Media – recordings, articles, etc; November Deep Dive; Updates to Celebration-5W; Progress on the 2nd edition; Top posts

Media – recordings, articles, etc

Released this month:

Webinar recording: Good obstacle, bad obstacle: The recording
Podcast: Agile Uprising Podcast: Right to Left with Mike Burrows (agileuprising.libsyn.com)
Article: Outside-in and Right-to-Left: 2 Perspectives on Strategy Deployment(cutter.com)

I’ve taken the opportunity to gather these and similar resources from the past year or more on a new media page, agendashift.com/media. Over time I’ll add dig out some Agendashift-era conference recordings etc also. If you have any favourites you think I should add, let me know!

Thanks for those I’ve added so far go to the Cutter Consortium, Jay Hrcsko (Agile Uprising podcast), Martin Aziz & team (SquirrelNorth), Joe Auslander & Jakub Jurkiewicz (Joekub podcast), Ben Linders (InfoQ), Rahul Bhattacharya (Agile Atelier podcast), Mo Hagar (Agile on the Edge podcast), John Rouda (A Geek Leader podcast), Paul Klipp & Justyna Pindel (Agile Book Club podcast).

November Deep Dive

17th-20th November: Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and leading continuous transformation – eight 2-hour sessions over four days, EMEA-friendly timing. A practical, hands-on experience of Agendashift, the wholehearted outcome-oriented, engagement model.

All the usual discounts apply: repeat visits (not uncommon), partners, gov, edu, non-profit, country, un- or under-employment, bulk orders. If you think that one might apply to you, do please ask. We have a quorum already but the more the merrier.

Updates to Celebration-5W

There is a new version 4 deck for our workshop kickoff exercise, Celebration-5W. Like most of our exercises, games, templates etc it is Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA) and you can obtain it via its resource page agendashift.com/celebration-5w.

The main changes:

I’ve tweaked a key slide – see the image below – to suggest some initial iteration between When and What; the discussion (if not its later presentation) begins here
Unhiding the initial slides for facilitators – they weren’t showing up in Dropbox
In those initial slides for facilitators, the quote from Agendashift is now from the pending 2nd edition (more on that in a moment)

celebration-5w-2020-10-30

Progress on the 2nd edition

A couple of blog posts this month flow from (among other things) work on the 2nd edition of Agendashift:

From the second of those, nearly 3 weeks old now:

I’ll be pulling out all the stops, integrating (as Agendashift has done consistently for a long time) ideas and experience from Lean-Agile, organisation development, and strategy

Glad to report that this work on the 5th and final chapter is not only well underway, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now! Just a few more sections and I’ll have a first complete draft and I’ll be at the “90% done and still half the work to do” stage. I’m not quoting dates yet but quarter 1 of 2021 seems very doable.