Tag: leadership

Meeting the context challenge

Posted on by Mike Burrows

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

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

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

Furthermore:

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

Let me offer four ways forward:

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

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

1. Optimise communication

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

2. Distribute authority

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

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

3. Build a more trusting and trustworthy organisation

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

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

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

4. Optimise attention and presence

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

You need all four

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

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

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

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

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

Related

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

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

Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy
“Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”

Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:

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

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

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

At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.

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

Posted on by Mike Burrows

[respond to this post to LinkedIn]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Engage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Invite

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

Celebrate

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

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

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

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

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

Engage, Invite, Celebrate: The call to action

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

Coming soonish: Wholehearted, the book

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

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

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

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

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

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

[respond to this post to LinkedIn]

Related posts

And in relation to the recently-published Organizing Conversations:

Learn more

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

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

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

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

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

At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.

[respond to this post to LinkedIn]

A taste of my own medicine: Why “Organizing Conversations” took two and a half years to write

Posted on by Mike Burrows

My fourth book, Organizing Conversations: Preparing Groups to Take on Adaptive Challenges is now out, and it’s time to spill the beans on why a relatively short book took me so long. It wasn’t because I was working on book five at the time (hard as it was, I resisted that urge), but because my first conception of it was quite different to how it turned out.

My initial attempt was essentially a condensed version of the 2021 Agendashift 2nd edition. Series editor Gervase Bushe wasn’t satisfied with that, and to be honest, I shouldn’t have been either. What’s the point? Gervase insisted repeatedly that I had to be more up-front with my theory of action – i.e. the Why not only of the approach described in the book but that of each step in the process it describes and of the tools and techniques it employs. To do that justice, we re-framed and restructured it more than once, and I ended up adding a whole new chapter. To achieve that within the word count budget (30,000 words), swathes of less interesting material were cut. A couple of times I came close to giving up, but it is a much, much better book now.

I should have seen it coming! Here’s the beginning of an email conversation that I reproduce in the book’s introduction almost verbatim:

Gervase: I’d like to get a statement of your theory of action for creating generative conversations. Complete this sentence: In order to design events that produce generative conversations among a group of people you have to…

Mike: In order to design events that produce generative conversations among a group of people you have to sustain their motivation to ask and answer questions not previously considered in their context, and to which the answers may be both many and potentially surprising (including to the event’s designer, who neither mediates in every conversation nor prescribes their conclusions). The strength of that motivation comes from a combination of purpose, context, trust in the process on the day, and confidence (or at least hope) for what will follow.

Gervase: Interesting. Now, to sustain their motivation to ask and answer questions not previously considered in their context, you have to…

That conversation was how the book was born, and in the end I properly embraced the process. The irony is how slow I was to see that I was getting a taste of my own medicine! As well as the title of my third book, Right to Left is one of Agendashift’s and Leading with Outcomes’ core patterns. It means “working backwards from key moments of impact and learning”, where done is “someone’s need was met”, and really done is “we’ve accounted for the learning”. That learning is maximised by the way the work is framed and discussed, right from the beginning and all the way through the delivery process. In short, making explicit the theory of action of both the work and how it will be carried out is very much part of the approach.

In a similar vein, coincident with the book’s publication I’ve been fortunate to have done multiple runs of facilitation and training in quick succession. Between a private Adaptive Organisation workshop, two runs of Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F), and two runs of Leading in a Transforming Organisation, by the end of next week I will have done Foundation four times and different forms of the Adaptive Organisation material three times in the space of just a few weeks. What an opportunity for experimentation! Accordingly, next week’s training in London (see below) won’t just incorporate the usual round of small improvements I make before and after every training, it has been reworked quite substantially. Not just streamlining and mistake-proofing it, but repeatedly reinforcing the sense of where we are headed and why. Less “trust the process before we deconstruct it”, more a sense of engaging purposefully together.

Of course there’s always an element of risk when you make changes, but somehow I doubt that I will come to regret these. And let me say that just as I am grateful to Gervase for helping to make Organizing Conversations what it eventually became, I’m grateful also to Markus Hippeli, my host earlier this month in Berlin, whose thoughts prompted the latest rework. Markus, I shall let you know how we get on 🙂

Related:

Book: Organizing Conversations by Mike Burrows

Agendashift roundup, May 2024

Posted on by Mike Burrows

In this edition: Organising Conversations; Olivier’s PhD research; Leading in a Transforming Organisation; Featureban on Kanban Zone; Top posts

Organizing Conversations

As announced on Wednesday (linkedin.com), I’m thrilled to announce that my fourth book, Organizing Conversations: Preparing Groups to Take on Adaptive Challenges is now out – first on Kindle and now in print too.

This book was a commission for the Bushe-Barshak Insitute’s BMI Series in Dialogic Organization Development. Watch a short conversation with series editor Gervase Bushe recorded earlier this week:

Read the announcement in full here, and here are the links for the Kindle edition on amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, and amazon.de.

Olivier’s PhD research

Without wishing to take anything away from book 4, Olivier Bertrand’s PhD research into phylogenetic approaches to understanding organisational evolution is making use of Agendashift’s Adaptive Organisation assessment. This is the assessment tool that powers the 1-day Adaptive Organisation workshop and days two and three of Leading in a Transforming Organisation. In due course, it will feature in book 5, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation also.

You can help! By participating in the survey – thereby getting an early sight of the full version of the assessment tool – you’ll provide valuable input to Olivier’s research, which will, in turn, feed into the book. Exciting stuff!

To participate, visit Survey: Phylogenetic research study: Adaptive Organisation Assessment. Be assured that no personally identifying information will be shared without permission, and any subsequent communication will be on an opt-in basis. You can read a more detailed announcement here: Help our research: an “Organisational DNA test”.

Leading in a Transforming Organisation

All three events in the calendar currently are for Leading in a Transforming Organisation – Berlin, London, and Southampton (June, June, and October, respectively):

Berlin is sold out, but Silke Noll has organised something informal over food for Monday evening. If you can make it, you can sign up here. For London and Southampton, I won’t reiterate all the usual reasons for discount codes, but ping me if you think you might qualify.

Notable by their absence are Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and the monthly webinars and experience/practice sessions. I’ll add an autumn TTT/F to the calendar soonish, and I’ll think about the rest when I have a bit more headroom. June in particular will be very busy.

Featureban on Kanban Zone

One of the best ways to introduce Kanban is by running a simulation using Featureban. It’s a much more effective way to learn by doing.

So said Kanban Zone founder Dimitri Ponomareff recently in a follow-up to the the online session I ran with Allan Kelly a few weeks ago. Read his announcement: Featureban is now available inside Kanban Zone! (linkedin.com).

Allan is running another session himself. Use coupon code Agendashift20 for an 20% saving here: Featureban public online game.

As ever, you can request the original Creative Commons materials here. When I get a moment I will replace the broken video there with this one.

Top posts

  1. Help our research: an “Organisational DNA test” (May)
  2. “Organizing Conversations” is out on Kindle (May)
  3. Agile’s Great Rebalancing: My next book’s take on the Agile manifesto (April)
  4. From Flow to Business Agility (January)
  5. My favourite Clean Language question (January 2019)

Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy
“Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”

Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:

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

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
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At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.

“Organizing Conversations” is now out

Posted on by Mike Burrows

I’m thrilled to announce that my fourth book, Organizing Conversations: Preparing Groups to Take on Adaptive Challenges is out on Kindle. Fingers crossed, the print version will be out in time for Friday’s monthly roundup. [Update: it was 🙂]

This shortish book (at a little over 100 pages and a shade under 30,000 words, half the length of my other books) was a commission for the Bushe-Marshak Institute’s BMI Series in Dialogic Organization Development and represents something of an endorsement by the OD community for Agendashift and Leading with Outcomes. Despite the length constraint (or was it because of it?) it took me nearly two and half years to complete, but it was worth it. More than ever before I was challenged to clarify the thinking behind the practice in a way that deepened existing commitments to participatory and generative change. Neither do I regret the delay to book 5, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, but that’s for another day. Except to say that organising (a verb, and with British spelling) will be central to Wholehearted, the star of the show today is Organizing Conversations.

In OD terms, what this book does is to bridge two kinds of dialogue, inquiry and generative conversations, the latter referring to conversations in which people generate ideas on which they are motivated to act. In Leading with Outcomes terms, they correspond to the left and right sides of the picture that appears on the front cover. Inside those are Ideal, Outcomes, Outcomes – the IdOO (“I do”) pattern – and Meaning, Measure, Method, two outcome-oriented conversation patterns. Bridging them are Organise the Strategy (mapping, mostly) and Right to Left (the pattern, also the title of one of my previous books).

It might be described as combining the spirit of dialogic and generative OD with some Lean-Agile rigour, and that is what I believe prompted Gervase Bushe and Bob Marshak to invite me to write it. I started out writing a condensed version of an Agendashift 3rd edition, but with Gervase’s editorial input it ended up being much better than that, and for that I am grateful.

Watch a short conversation with Gervase recorded yesterday evening:

You can buy the Kindle version today – here are links for amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, and amazon.de – and watch this space for the print version.

Upcoming events

February

March

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

Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy
“Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”

Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:

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

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

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

At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.

What’s in store for 2024

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Welcome to 2024! Happy New Year!

2024 has already started of course, and with the valued help of over 20 contributors I iterated several times over the holiday period on this article posted on the blog here yesterday:

Also new is a section on the Agendashift Academy site for facilitated Leading with Outcomes workshops:

In the calendar (see Upcoming events below):

Regarding that last one, see Upcoming events below re discounts.

In the pipeline:

Most pressing is the re-recording of the Inside-out and Outside-in strategy modules. Like the Adaptive Organisation module, Inside-out will be split into two, likely titles:

  • Inside-out Strategy (I): On the same page, with purpose
  • Inside-out Strategy (II): Fit for maximum impact (keeping the title of the original one-part module)

Once Inside-out and Outside-in are on the new learning management system there will be significant opportunity for rationalisation. If you’re not already on board there, check these out:

  1. Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
  2. Adaptive Organisation, two parts:

Or get in touch about holding a Leading in a Transforming Organisation training workshop near you; this covers Foundation and Adaptive Organisation, with all the benefits of an in-person experience, and some unique features too. I’m not asking anyone to take responsibility for the event (though that can be arranged); just your interest would be good to know.

Upcoming events

February

March

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

Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy
“Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”

Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:

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

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

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

At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.

Confirming some changes to Leading with Outcomes

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Last week’s Leading with Outcomes trainer/facilitator Zoom [1] confirmed some changes. The first two relate to two of our favourite exercises:

  1. The exercise Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle has been renamed Obstacles Fast and Slow (yes, both names are indeed references to books). As time passes, the more we have learned to appreciate this exercise, and the latest slideware reflects its importance.
  2. The workshop and training decks now explicitly support 15-minute FOTO’s cheat mode.

In both cases, watch out for releases in the coming weeks of standalone versions of these tools. In relation to Obstacles Fast and Slow, the March edition of our monthly webinar series will be devoted to it, with the goal of replacing the old Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle video and related material.

The rest of this post relates to the agenda of February’s Leading with Outcomes Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F), which comes in four half-day sessions – Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons UK time, beginning on Tuesday, February 6th, finishing Wednesday 14th.

The old TTT/F agenda:

  1. Leading with Outcomes: Foundation, chapters 1 & 2 (of 3) – introducing and applying the IdOO (“I do”) pattern, Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes
  2. The Leading with Outcomes Discovery Workshop – a high-level application of the IdOO pattern, covering the classic exercises Celebration-5W, True North, Obstacles Fast and Slow, 15-minute FOTO, and Plan on a Page
  3. The Leading with Outcomes Assessment Debrief Workshop – the assessment, survey debrief, and Areas of Opportunity, then for a second time Obstacles Fast and Slow and 15-minute FOTO (both of those well worth the repeat), and finishing at Option Relationship Mapping, leaving the ideation part to session 4
  4. Beyond inside-out strategy – Leading with Outcomes: Foundation chapter 3, which covers the ideation part of the Assessment Debrief workshop left over from the previous session, followed by overviews of the Outside-in and Adaptive Organisation parts of the Leading with Outcomes curriculum and their related workshop offerings

That structure has worked well enough, but session 4 can feel a bit of mixed bag. The new agenda brings forward some of that content, achieved by seeing sessions 2 and 3 less exclusively in terms of inside-out strategy and more as representing two families of workshops:

  1. Leading with Outcomes: Foundation, chapters 1 & 2 (of 3) – as before
  2. Discovery-level workshops – not only the classic Leading with Outcomes Discovery Workshop and variations thereof, but the Outside-in Strategy Review (OI-SR), understood here as building on Discovery’s basic structure
  3. Assessment-based workshops – the generic survey debrief and other workshops, some of which incorporate additional training content, for example a Reverse STATIK workshop [2] and the Adaptive Organisation Workshop [3]
  4. Moving into action – completing (as before) Leading with Outcomes: Foundation chapter 3, then delving deeper into Adaptive Organisation, possibly including (this is under development) a look at narrative enquiry

Discovery workshops can now be seen as choosing from the following:

Assessment-based workshops similarly:

Details vary, but the IdOO and Meaning, Measure, Method patterns are shared, the former pattern bracketed by establishing context and organising the strategy. The new TTT/F structure should build the confidence not only to make use of these workshop designs, but to innovate new ones.

Not that TTT/F is only about workshops – doing this under the Leading with Outcomes banner means a strong emphasis on leadership development, for which the Foundation training module sets the tone very effectively. Furthermore, I’ll be re-recording the Inside-out and Outside-in training modules in the new year, and to the extent possible within the time available, sessions 2 & 3 will use those latest materials.

You can book your place at the February TTT/F here. Ping me for coupon codes if any of the following apply:

  • Past TTT/F participants can join again for free (quite a popular option)
  • Leading in a Transforming Organisation participants get 60% off
  • Employees in public sector, education, and non-profit organisations get 40% off
  • Members of the old partner programme get 30% off
  • Last but not least, Agendashift Academy subscribers get subscription-specific discounts also

For an overview of Leading with Outcomes in general and the Trainer / Facilitator programmes specifically, the store page is a good place to start.

Notes

[1] I haven’t published the recording and notes but they’re available on request. Intended audience: trainers, facilitators, members of the old partner programme, participants in a past TTT/F or Leading in a Transforming Organisation, or anyone curious about any of these

[2] The Reverse STATIK workshop is how I like to introduce Kanban. It is not officially part of Leading with Outcomes but that might change. The point here is that much of it can be recreated from parts already available to Leading with Outcomes trainers and facilitators.

[3] About the new 1-day Adaptive Organisation workshop, introductory pricing remains available if you’d like to book one for your organisation. In-person very strongly preferred, which means UK and European destinations easily reachable from Manchester unless a longer trip can be made worthwhile. That’s less of an issue for the 3-day Leading in a Transforming Organisation – I have done that as far away as Australia, albeit with a conference keynote and a family visit also!

Upcoming events

February

March

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

Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy
“Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”

Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:

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

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

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

At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.

Start where you are

Posted on by Mike Burrows

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:

  1. 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?
  2. 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?
  3. 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?

Now you know where you are, start!

Related posts:

While we’re here, a couple of updates to upcoming events:

  • The next TTT/F begins in just over a week on Wednesday 15th – ping me for a coupon code if you need one
  • I’ve added the April edition of our monthly free webinar/AMA series

Upcoming events

February

March

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

Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy
“Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”

Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:

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

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

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

At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. ~Arthur Ashe

It’s 10 years since the post that changed my career

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Happy New Year! For me it’s a big anniversary: this time in 2013 I had spent the New Year’s break taking the principles and practices of the Kanban Method, and from them abstracting a system of nine values. Then on January 3rd, I published Introducing Kanban through its values. Kanban’s values model was born.

Nine values are quite a lot to hold in one’s head at once, so I soon learned to present them in groups:

  • An initial six, or two groups of three: transparency, balance, and collaboration, then customer focus, flow, and leadership
  • Then understanding, agreement, and respect, which for reasons of brevity are often subsumed under leadership

In most of the decade since, it has been my most-read post each year. And it led to my first book, Kanban from the Inside (2014), which remains a Lean-Agile classic. Great! Now what?

I had no interest in making Kanban any more technical than it already was; if anything, the values model would always draw me in the opposite direction. Neither was I drawn to the emerging Kanban Maturity Model (or any other such model). What I did instead was to allow a common problem to bother me: why do so many people arrive at the training class not knowing why they are there? Tempting as it might have been to see that as a failure of administration or marketing, I saw it instead as a symptom that there were important organisational conversations that simply weren’t happening.

I realised quickly that this problem was far from unique to Kanban. To those that resent having had Scrum or (later) SAFe thrust upon them, the Agile manifesto’s “People and interactions over processes and tools” must ring rather hollow.

That took me away from Kanban into the realms of organisation, leadership, and strategy, to the development of Agendashift, and then sort of full circle, not back to Kanban and Lean-Agile specifically, but to business agility. Ten years on, as practice gets refined through use, as its message gets refined through the telling, and as we dig ever-deeper roots into the available theory, three main topic areas co-evolve together:

  1. As described now in two editions of the Agendashift book (2nd ed 2021), Agendashift the engagement model (thank you Daniel Mezick for describing Agendashift as such) and dialogic/generative organisation development approach (thank you Gervase Bushe & Bob Marshak), a way for practitioners to approach organisations without prejudging what solutions they will employ(/impose/inflict) and instead to help them have those missing conversations – engaging in participatory strategy, as it turns out
  2. The wholehearted organisation, a deliberately minimalistic values-based model of organisation and leadership, a spinoff from my third book, Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020) that unexpectedly gained a life of its own
  3. The leadership development curriculum Leading with Outcomes, which compared to Agendashift minimises detail relevant mainly to practitioners, and instead distils some easily-learned patterns, strategies, and organisational models relevant to leaders at all levels, leaders in transforming organisations most especially

Explicitly in both Agendashift and Leading with Outcomes and implicitly in wholehearted, we have doubled down on the eighth value of that initial nine-value model, namely agreement. What if we put agreement on outcomes before solutions? One way or another, I’ve been asking that question for most of the past ten years, and I have no doubt that it will keep me going for a good while yet.

I no longer identify as a Kanban guy. That separation was necessary to what followed, but all these years later I remain proud of the work I did there, of that first book, and of the blog post that started it all. Not that I’m planning on retiring anytime soon, but I have long seen it as marking the beginning of the rest of my career.

[Comment on this post on LinkedIn]

Related:

Upcoming events

February

March

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

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

At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.

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

Posted on by Mike Burrows

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

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

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

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

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

Some examples of “bad” obstacles:

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts? Discuss this post on LinkedIn

Upcoming events

February

March

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

Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy
“Leadership and strategy in the transforming organisation”

Leading with Outcomes is our modular curriculum in leadership and organisation development. Each module is available as self-paced online training or as private, instructor-led training (online or in-person). Certificates of completion or participation according to format. Its modules in the recommended order:

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

Individual subscriptions from £24.50 £18.40 per month after a 7-day free trial, with discounts available for employees and employers in the government, healthcare, education, and non-profit sectors. For bulk subscriptions, ask for our Agendashift for Business brochure.

To deliver Leading with Outcomes training or workshops yourself, see our Authorised Trainer and Authorised Facilitator programmes. See our events calendar for Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) and Leading in a Transforming Organisation trainings.

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

At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.