Tag: models

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]

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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.

Upcoming events

Recent changes:

  • Leading in a Transforming Organisation (London) is brought forward a week to 25-27 June
  • Added Leading in Transforming Organisation (Southampton), October 8-10
  • Webinars and experience/practise sessions taking a break now until the autumn

May

June

October

*For TTT/F and Leading in a Transforming Organisation, ping me for coupon codes if any of the following apply:

  • Employees in public sector, education, and non-profit organisations get 40% off, as do authorised trainers and facilitators
  • There are subscription-specific discounts for Agendashift Academy subscribers
  • Members of the old partner programme get 30% off
  • Past participants of Leading in a Transforming Organisation can re-attend with 60% off (75% if you work for a public sector, education, or non-profit organisation)
  • Past TTT/F participants can re-attend online for free

QOTD: Rosen on Elsasser on reductionism

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Elsasser pointed out that in the phase space of any organism, considered as a purely physical system, is in general of very high dimension. He argued further that the states in this phase space which are compatible with life will generally tend to be sparsely distributed in such as phase space; specifically, they will form a set of zero volume. Hence “almost all” states, and “almost all” trajectories in this space, will be incompatible with life. Furthermore, any attempt to form averages over the entire phase space will inevitably discard the biologically relevant states. Consequently, Elsasser argued, insofar as physics must deal entirely with such averages at the macroscopic level, biology is in principle irreducible to physics. It further follows that the laws governing the behaviour of biological systems are not inferrable from physical laws although they are compatible with them.

Robert Rosen, Anticipatory Systems, second edition (2012), published posthumously, p. 236

To which I would add: as physics is to biology, so too biology (and also neurology and psychology) to social systems.

Related:

[Comment on this post on LinkedIn]

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

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

Upcoming events

Recent changes:

  • Leading in a Transforming Organisation (London) is brought forward a week to 25-27 June
  • Added Leading in Transforming Organisation (Southampton), October 8-10
  • Webinars and experience/practise sessions taking a break now until the autumn

May

June

October

*For TTT/F and Leading in a Transforming Organisation, ping me for coupon codes if any of the following apply:

  • Employees in public sector, education, and non-profit organisations get 40% off, as do authorised trainers and facilitators
  • There are subscription-specific discounts for Agendashift Academy subscribers
  • Members of the old partner programme get 30% off
  • Past participants of Leading in a Transforming Organisation can re-attend with 60% off (75% if you work for a public sector, education, or non-profit organisation)
  • Past TTT/F participants can re-attend online for free
Agendashift's models, sources, and inspirations
Agendashift’s models, sources, and inspirations

Up and Down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

Posted on by Mike Burrows

As mentioned in last week’s roundup, I was the guest speaker last night at a #bacommunity webinar hosted by Adrian Reed of Blackmetric Business Solutions. I am blown away by the response (still ongoing), and Adrian has kindly made the recording available already. You can watch it here (below, ad free), on YouTube, or on Adrian’s webinar page (blackmetric.com).

A modern take on a 70’s classic, we take some of the tools of modern product and organisation development and plug them into Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model, a model that (still) describes organisations of all sizes that have the drive to survive in a changing environment. The result of this exercise will feel remarkably familiar to Lean-Agile eyes, and yet it helps to reveal some of the serious dysfunctions too often experienced with current frameworks, both team-level and larger.

Mike Burrows

About the Speaker
Agendashift founder Mike Burrows is the author of Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2nd edition March 2021), Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020), and the Lean-Agile classic Kanban from the Inside (2104). Mike is recognised for his pioneering work in Lean, Agile, and Kanban and for his advocacy for participatory and outcome-oriented approaches to change, transformation, and strategy. Prior to his consulting career, he was global development manager and Executive Director at a top tier investment bank, CTO for an energy risk management startup, and interim delivery manager for two of the UK government’s digital ‘exemplar’ projects.

Links shared in the talk:

  • deliberately-adaptive.org
  • agendashift.com/changeban
  • agendashift.com/assessments
  • agendashift.com/a3-template
  • agendashift.com/book (the 2021 2nd edition of Agendashift) and its recommended reading page, looking out in particular for these authors:
    • Stafford Beer (VSM originator)
    • my friend Patrick Hoverstadt – for The Fractal Organisation, the second of two of his books I reference
    • Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey – here for An Everyone Culture.  Despite my oft-expressed aversion – alluded to in my talk – to staged development models, maturity models and the like, they impress hugely. The name ‘Deliberately Adaptive Organisation’ is totally inspired by their ‘Deliberately Developmental Organisation’, referenced towards the end of my talk. To integrate strategy, delivery, and development to the depth envisioned in Agendashift’s wholehearted mission, you need this stuff. Their Immunity to Change resonates too.
  • agendashift.com/subscribe – per the last slide, a ton of stuff still brewing and you don’t want to miss out 🙂

Enjoy!

What if we put authentic agreement on meaningful outcomes ahead of solutions?

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What the (Lean-)Agile scaling frameworks don’t give you

Posted on by Mike Burrows

[Minor edits 2020-12-11 and again 2021-01-08 with an updated title. It is now aligned to the final version of the manuscript that went to the publisher this week] 

Not a gratuitous provocation but putting it out there for review. The text below comes from the final chapter of the forthcoming 2nd edition of Agendashift; it’s a quick first draft (written today) and I want feedback! The chapter is new to the 2nd edition; it is titled Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation and the excerpt below comes at the end of a section called Scaling up.

For context, we have by this point reconciled Agendashift with a powerful diagnostic tool, the Viable System Model (VSM). Stafford Beer’s classic model has lessons for all organisations that have the desire to “meet the demands of surviving in the changing environment”.

What the (Lean-)Agile scaling frameworks don’t give you

I can’t help noting that not everything identified in this reconciliation exercise is addressed well by the scaling frameworks. If you’re looking to one of those as the basis of your Deliberately Adaptive Organisation or (somewhat equivalently) as a model of business agility, here are five things that you may need to attend to yourself:

1. Meaningful experimentation

A worthwhile proportion – perhaps even the majority – of your delivery capacity will need to be devoted to objective-aligned insight generation. There is nothing adaptive about ploughing through backlogs of requirements and hoping for a good outcome. Random experimentation isn’t adaptive either; whilst it flexes some important muscles and can be a useful source of innovation, unless the bulk of it is meaningfully aligned to shared objectives (and driven from them in a way that creates meaning for the people doing the work), it’s unlikely to take you very far.

2. Meaningful negotiation between levels based on trust and transparency

If you’re not careful, cascading hierarchies of objectives end up as backlogs of requirements to be ploughed through, and we know where that leads. Dressing up that hierarchy in Agile terms – saga, epic, feature, story, etc – doesn’t change that.

Remember that what’s asked for, what’s needed, what’s possible, and what’s sensible are four different things. Moreover, each level will have its own language, its own way of looking at things, and its own measures of success, and it’s not helpful when one level projects (or worse, imposes) theirs onto another. Instead: trust-building transparency, then mutual understanding, then alignment.

3. Containers for multi-level, multi-loop organisational learning

I’m referring of course to your framework’s equivalent of the Outside-in Service Delivery Review (OI-SDR) and VSM system 4 more generally. How does your framework help you build and evolve shared models of the system and the world outside? How strong are the expectations of learning that it creates? How does it challenge? How does it help you monitor progress towards objectives? How does it challenge? How does it ensure that intelligence and insights are shared quickly across the organisation?

4. Meaningful participation in strategy

Let me say it again: It’s a funny kind of autonomy when strategy is something that happens to you. Now let me add that it’s a funny kind of adaptive strategy if it doesn’t know how to listen. What we have here are two organisational antipatterns that Agile frameworks – scaled or otherwise – has done little to address. Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect that they would, but when they’re sold as transformative models of organisation I believe that some scepticism is entirely appropriate.

5. Meaningful self-organisation at every scale

Not just who does what (better described as self-management), but self-organisation as the interplay between structure and spontaneity – who collaborates with whom, at whatever scale, and with what potential. How does your framework both encourage that to happen and ensure that when it happens it is done well?

How well does your scaled (Lean-)Agile implementation demonstrate those five things? The most likely answers are “not very” or “not at all”. If you’re thinking of embarking on a framework-based scaling initiative, I would suggest that it may pay to attend to these issues first. You’ll then be in a much better position both to understand what the frameworks still have to offer and to make whatever further changes now seem necessary.

To be clear, I’m not anti-framework. To understand how a scaling framework really works is to appreciate how its patterns have been integrated, and there’s definitely value in that. But anyone thinking that it’s cool to roll out a large framework waterfall-style is living in the 1990s! Expert-driven ‘tailoring’ doesn’t fundamentally change that. Much better to use your expertise to help people experiment with combining patterns from the full range of sources at their disposal.

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A postscript to ‘How I Choose my Models’

Posted on by Mike Burrows

With a view to referencing it in the Agendashift 2nd edition I’ve been checking out the new Cynefin book Cynefin – Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World (Dave Snowden & friends). It’s a book with many contributors and I wasn’t 100% sure what to expect but I’m enjoying it! If you have any interest in Cynefin I would definitely recommend it.

Despite appearances, this post isn’t about Cynefin. One contribution by Anne Caspari and Johann Entz von Zerssen really resonated with me, especially these two paragraphs from Anne (quoted with her permission):

I (Anne) come from 15 years of critical engagement with integral theory, adult development, and all kinds of change theories. When I started working with these theories and frameworks, they helped me immensely. They opened up my thinking and gave me a means to counteract both gross and subtle reductionism in practical work. This was especially helpful to me in my project management work in environmental planning and sustainability contexts. Adult development theory also helped me understand some of the phenomena I encountered in coaching and leadership work.

Over time, however, I experienced a growing scepticism around a new kind of reductionism that crept into most applications of these theories that often went unobserved by the respective communities. Examples include developmental bias (“we need to develop people”) in large parts of the integral theory scene and some very formulaic and linear applications of change theories (“step 5: find deeper meaning and purpose”).  Since this kind of uneasiness is hard to pinpoint and address, I just noticed that I kept away. I settled at the fringes of these communities and did my own thing. 

Yes! This! Exactly!

Anne’s struggle is the same as the one that triggered (via an outburst over Zoom of which I am not proud) the How I choose my models post. And the really funny thing: Andrea Chiou, the target of my outburst agrees with me. Violent agreement is a strange beast! From our Slack channel #what-i-am-reading (I pasted the above quote there as soon as I read it):

It is the ‘we need to’ of the ‘we need to develop people’ that annoys me. It separates ‘us’ from them -> increasing the gap between the ‘experts’ and the underdeveloped others.

And yes, you are doing your own thing.

It has been in fact a very interesting few weeks, one of those times when you’re really glad to be part of a diverse and supportive community with knowledge in areas I’ll never be expert in. My gut instinct hasn’t changed, I stand by every every word I wrote in How I choose my models, and yet I’ll be referencing some of that developmental stuff (caveated of course) in the 2nd edition.

The title of a new 6th and final chapter, Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, is inspired by Robert Kegan & Lisa Lahey Laskow’s Deliberately Developmental Organisation (DDO), a model described in their interesting but slightly scary book An Everyone Culture. The surprise (not least to me) is that the DDO model comes from the same stable as Adult Development Theory, my “trigger”! I’m grateful to Jonathan Sibley for pointing me in that interesting direction, also to Teddy Zetterlund for some earlier seed-sowing.

I’ve learned that living by these three bullets of mine is harder than I thought:

  • Models that have withstood scrutiny over a length of time
  • Models that treat the individual’s agency, creativity, and problem-solving ability with the utmost respect
  • Models that help to scale up the preceding

If I’m not going to ignore a ton of potentially valuable and relevant work, there’ll be times when I will need to remind myself that the model, my reaction to it, and the reactions I observe in others or fear from them, are different things. What helps to win me – albeit cautiously – over to DDO is that this is part of the model itself. Not in an especially self-aware way methinks, but it’s a start.

A last word to Jonathan, which I apply first to myself:

A great challenge is to build a model and then hold it lightly. And sometimes, followers hold the model more tightly than the founder does!

Upcoming workshops

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

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How I choose my models

Posted on by Mike Burrows

As demonstrated by the models-sources-inspirations picture below, I like my models. If you’ve read my third book Right to Left, you’ll know also that I have little time for the idea that there is one best model – one best Agile framework, for example. And the fun isn’t in choosing between them, not even in recognising what each of them can bring, but in integrating them. And it doesn’t stop there: this is not a one-shot process design exercise, but a process of continuous transformation. In short, I’m a pluralist, and I love to see what happens when models and their underlying patterns are allowed to combine.

agendashift-inspiration-map-2020-06-29

Believe it or not, I am a picky though. In one of our weekly community Zoom sessions (see #community in Slack), that pickiness resulted in a conversation that was outside our usual norms (if the truth be told I was abrupt to the point of rudeness) and I reflected afterwards on what happened. Happily, we cleared things up quickly and had a much healthier conversation the following week after I had the chance to turn something heartfelt into something more articulate. What follows is a summary.

If Agendashift has taught me anything, it is to be very careful with assumptions. Credit for this goes to Clean Language, which turns the dial up to 11 on the discipline of its practitioners to minimise the influence of their private assumptions (which are SO not the point) on their conversations. This discipline applies most to their explicitly Clean conversations but it rubs off elsewhere in ways that need not mean “coachiness” when that is not called for. Practicing it subtly trains your brain to recognise when you are imposing yourself in ways that aren’t helpful.

You see that attention to assumptions in Agendashift’s outside-in strategy review. The way we make explicit its carefully minimal assumptions is of great help to the facilitator. See my recent Cutter paper for details (announcement included in my post last week); they’re also in Right to Left (chapter 5) and there will be brief coverage in the forthcoming 2nd edition of Agendashift also.

I tend to avoid models that encourage me to make assumptions about what is going in someone’s mind, how they will behave, how they will develop, and so on. The same at team level and organisation level, and I have come to be particularly sceptical of extrapolations from one of those levels to another. The replication crisis (en.wikipedia.org) gives me pause also.  For better or for worse therefore, you won’t see Agendashift depending on many “popular” models of psychology, development, or maturity. This is not to say that they are valueless, rather that they make potentially unreliable foundations.

What I do appreciate:

  • Challenges to my own assumptions
  • Ways to moderate the impact of unsafe assumptions
  • Ways to bring assumptions and misalignments to the surface at the right time
  • Ways to encourage people to find their own solutions in the pursuit of outcomes (authentically shared outcomes most especially)
  • Ways to sustain all of the above – engines of transformation

And supporting those:

  • Models that have withstood scrutiny over a length of time
  • Models that treat the individual’s agency, creativity, and problem-solving ability with the utmost respect (you’ll permit me some personal values and base assumptions there I trust)
  • Models that help to scale up the preceding

Thankfully, the list of helpful and reliable models compatible with my outlook of optimistic pluralism outlook is long, a fact to which my Models, Source, and Inspirations picture attests. And please do not take the omission of a favourite model of yours as a snub; if I don’t have time to throw yours into the Great Model Collider™ in the hope that something interesting will fly out, perhaps you (or someone else) will.

Opinions mine, strongly held it would seem. Thank you Andrea Chiou and Tom Ayerst for putting up with me – we got there in the end 🙂

What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?

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