Leading with Outcomes’ updated Foundation module is 26% shorter, much better paced, and today it leaves beta. Academy subscribers who joined before today will still have access to the old one for the next few weeks, but for most people, the new Foundation is where Leading with Outcomes starts.
What’s going live today comes in the format of self-paced training. There are live, instructor-led events too (it’s not unusual for people to take Leading with Outcomes multiple times and in multiple formats):
If you’re an Agendashift Academy subscriber, check the Welcome pages in your Academy library for your subscription plan’s coupon codes. If you’re not a subscriber, subscribe first and save some money!
Between those two paid events, this free taster event (the first of a monthly series) is open to all:
In this edition: November is Foundation month; December is TTT/F month; The questions that drive us (free webinar series); Coming to Berlin; A quick note from the department of administrative affairs; Upcoming; Top posts
The self-paced format first: Coming in at 1 hour 50 minutes in 25 short videos across three chapters, the next and greatly improved iteration of Foundation is 26% shorter, a year fresher, and much better structured than the one it replaces. It is currently in beta and goes fully live this coming Friday. If you plan to start your Academy subscription before then or you have one already don’t worry – we’d be glad to add you to the beta.
Later in the month, we’re running it as an online event. It is already well subscribed but there are still places available:
The later timing will be more convenient for the Americas this time round. Again, it is already well subscribed but there are still places available (3 at the last count).
The questions that drive us (free webinar series)
Starting December 9th, we’re starting a monthly series of free webinars, open to all. Initially at least, the format will be as follows:
A short presentation on one of the three questions that drive both Agendashift and Leading with Outcomes
Ask Mike Anything – in addition to the Academy-only AMA sessions (two of those per month), your chance to, erm, ask me anything
To that basic structure we will add guest appearances too in due course.
How do we keep bringing outcomes to the foreground?
Where – and where else – could we be developing and pursuing strategy?
Three questions, three principles, three ways in which leaders can help themselves be more effective in a transforming organisation.
For the big strategy occasions, for those everyday interactions, and for everything in between, we help leaders at all levels put those principles into practice:
Having the kinds of conversations that too often get missed, fostering authentic engagement on the issues and the opportunities
Helping their teams work backwards from key moments of impact and learning, innovation focussed on the right objectives, pursued in the right way
Engaging with their organisations in all of their complexity and potential
Coming to Berlin
For my first trip outside the UK since covid, I need to be in Berlin on February 9th. Thanks to my friend Markus Hipelli at Leanovate, we have a venue for a 1-day Foundation or 2-day TTT/F on the day or two immediately beforehand. If interested, let me know, and let me know which of those you’d prefer!
A quick note from the department of administrative affairs
Positive Incline Ltd has officially changed its name to Agendashift Ltd. The old company name is most prominent to mailing list subscribers (for annoying technical reasons it remains so for now); other details such as company number, VAT number, bank account, etc stay the same. The changes will take a while to fully work through but still it’s another nice milestone.
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
And as mentioned above, watch this space for a Berlin-based event in February.
As I mentioned last week, I’m busy working on a leaner, fitter version of Leading with Outcomes: Foundation. This updates the first self-paced study module at the Agendashift Academy and also makes it available in the form of interactive training, productised for use by other trainers.
Since last week’s announcement, I have renamed the middle session (of three). On reflection, “Aspiring to performance” seemed a bit generic – clichéd even. Its replacement, “Meaningfulness, significance, and direction” emerges quite naturally from the content – not summarising it exactly, but those three qualities do correspond nicely to the Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes model – the IdOO (“I do”) pattern that is introduced (through hands-on practice) in session 1 and further developed in chapter 2 (again through practice).
The core of the model goes like this:
Ideal – envision a compelling future
Obstacles – identify what’s in the way of what we want
Outcomes – look beyond those obstacles to something better
As you learn to move easily between those elements, properly contextualise those conversations, and organise what they produce into something coherent, you’re getting better at strategy. This can be “everyday” strategy – quick conversations to clarify the thinking around everyday bits of work – or as the overall arc of the “set piece” strategy occasion – participatory strategy reviews and the like. It’s even a model for leadership!
And so to meaningfulness, significance, and direction. Not a new model, but capturing some of the intent behind the IdOO pattern and Agendashift more broadly:
Meaningfulness – outcomes not as metrics or targets, but things meaningful to us, identified and articulated through authentic dialogue. Often, we set this up in the Ideal part with stories of people making meaningful progress.
Significance – instead of falling into the trap of solving problems just because they are there, choosing our obstacles for what they represent and taking the trouble to frame them carefully
Direction – our direction is set by the outcomes we’re choosing to pursue, not by monolithic solutions (perhaps sold to us with outcomes), or by plans whose all-consuming execution comes at the expense of what’s meaningful and significant. Outcome-orientation, in other words.
As well as re-recording the self-paced study version of Foundation, I’m also hosting it in the form of participatory online training over the 23rd, 24th, and 25th of November. All sessions 14:00-16:00GMT, over Zoom, and highly hands-on. Price: just £195 + VAT. Ping us for a discount code if:
You have an Academy subscription
You’re an Agendashift partner
You’re an employee of a government, educational, or non-profit organisation, or are currently unemployed – we’re glad to offer significant discounts here
You completed September’s TTT/F or are booked on December’s – for you it’s free
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
Tuesday 22nd: Leading in a transforming organisation – introducing outcome-oriented change
Wednesday 23rd: Aspiring to performance – two kinds of strategy and a virtuous circle
Thursday 24th: Moving into action – ideas, experiments, feedback, and learning
All sessions 14:00-16:00GMT, over Zoom, and highly hands-on.
Compared to the self-paced study version, there is of course the experience of working with others in a participatory process. What makes this new version very much leaner and fitter:
We engage with the IdOO (“I do”) pattern (Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes) much sooner, reducing the number of new concepts that need to be introduced as part of the bigger strategy conversations
We introduce inside-out and outside-in strategy together – one chapter instead of two
We lose the Adaptive Organisation chapter altogether; it gets a mention when the rest of the Leading with Outcomes curriculum is covered at the end
Compared to the self-paced study version, there is the experience of working with others in a participatory process.
The three sessions (or chapters, in the self-paced version):
Leading in a transforming organisation – introducing outcome-oriented change
Aspiring to performance – two kinds of strategy and a virtuous circle
Moving into action – ideas, experiments, feedback, and learning
If you can identify in any way with the Agendashift Academy’s strapline “leadership and strategy in a transforming organisation”, then this is for you. And don’t worry if you’re not sure what that means! If you can imagine making a contribution to a strategy process that invites participation – whether that’s for your first-hand experience of your organisation’s challenges, your domain expertise, your sponsorship, your ownership of the change process, or your interest in the process as a facilitator, coach, consultant, or host – you’ll fit right in. And for prospective trainers, Foundation is where Leading with Outcomes begins; it’s your chance to experience it outside of the more trainer-focussed atmosphere of TTT/F.
Price: just £195 + VAT. Ping us for a discount code if:
You have an Academy subscription
You’re an Agendashift partner
You’re an employee of a government, educational, or non-profit organisation, or are currently unemployed – we’re glad to offer significant discounts here
You completed September’s TTT/F or are booked on December’s – for you it’s free
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
The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation Assessment was tested in a beta programme with multiple organisations a few months ago and will feature in the forthcoming Leading with Outcomes module Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale. Recording begins next week!
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
[Updated 2023-04-23: Improved the image (borrowed from the latest iteration of Leading with Outcomes: Foundation; minor changes to the text]
What if all failures were failures of context? OK, that’s an exaggeration, but as a working default assumption, it sure beats assuming failures of competence or character. Moreover, it can be the beginning of a generative line of thinking, one that puts you in the role of keeper of context.
Suppose that you’re a leader in a transforming organisation [1] and you witness an unproductive conversation. What is the shared context that this conversation is missing? You might intervene and provide some, but that’s not the point here. Work backwards. What was the conversation that didn’t take place, the one in which that context would have been established? Look not only at formal meetings but at how activities are sequenced, how their respective conversations happen, and their quality. What opportunities for context-creating conversations are we missing?
Looking at your organisation’s processes, it’s easy to focus on just the formal sequence of activities and overlook the interactions that happen (or need to happen) between them, and in particular, their conversations. When each activity involves different people and the chain of activities is long, it’s not hard to see how context gets lost.
Going deeper into organisation design and questions of meaningfulness, suppose now that you come across some work that failed to delight the customer. What went wrong? Lack of skill? Lack of commitment? These are easy conclusions to reach, but let’s try a different kind of assumption. Could this again be a failure of context? Was that work done with a deep enough appreciation of the context into which that work would be delivered? Where was the opportunity to appreciate the customer’s struggles? Where was the opportunity to explore their needs, to identify measures of customer progress, and so on? And suppose that the work had instead been successful, what kind of feedback would those involved have received? Could it be that our role definitions and process designs keep the people closest to the work insulated from the context they need?
Finally, suppose now that you suspect you’re seeing people lose their sense of what’s important, who they are, and what their team is about. Not so surprising in a transforming organisation! When you see confusion, it doesn’t usually help to ask what people are doing or what they are thinking. Instead, go back to the beginning and let them tell the story. If it turns out that the one who was confused was you, don’t be surprised. Context really is everything.
My perspective on these issues of context has evolved. In my first book, I suggested that you might begin with the assumption that any failures of process you encountered were rooted in failures of collaboration. If you’re looking for systemic causes – making it easier to adopt this perspective non-judgementally – I’ve found that this perspective can be highly productive.
Going back a few more years to when I was a global manager of managers, I would see failures of leadership. Confrontational perhaps, but again productive when the failing collaboration involved an imbalance of power or experience, and the more senior party involved needed to understand their additional responsibility in the relationship.
Failures of context, collaboration, or leadership: three closely related perspectives yet quite different in tone. When you’re a manager dealing with these issues daily or an external practitioner sensing one for the first time, which perspective do you choose? I remain comfortable with all three; the right one on the day is the one that leads to the insights needed via a safe and productive conversation. And if you’re not sure, you can always ask!
Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy “Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”
Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:
Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.
To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.
At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.
We have a quorum for September’s Leading with Outcomes TTT/F 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.
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
For two Leading with Outcomes modules, the forthcoming Adaptive Organisation module and the next iteration of Leading with Outcomes: Foundation, I’ve been revisiting the wholehearted organisation, the one that defines Agendashift’s mission.
A wholehearted organisation is not a perfect organisation, but a transforming one:
An organisation characterised by the instinct to engage openly and authentically on its challenges, imbalances, and contradictions
An organisation committed to participation as both a catalyst for innovation and the path to integration and wholeness
An organisation that through the conversation, creativity, and leadership of those closest to the action renews itself purposefully from the inside
Honest about the need for change, inviting people into every dimension of that process (strategy, delivery, development), transformation energised and sustained from within.
Question:
When that’s working at its ideal best for us, what’s that like?
As you answer that question, consider the perspectives of different leadership roles before your own. What’s it like to be a sponsor of change in such an organisation, engaging openly and authentically, inviting participation? As a manager or team lead, what expectations are placed on you? What if your formal authority is limited – you’re some kind of practitioner or subject matter expert, for example?
Pulling all of those together, what does it mean to lead in such an organisation?
Back in your organisation, what stops you leading like that? What gets in the way? How might you do something about that?
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 