That was last Thursday, and today it sits at #3 on LeanPub. Can we get it to #1 before tomorrow?
Before the third announcement, a reminder: “Office hours” / AMA (Ask Mike Anything) restarts tomorrow after a two-week break. Join me on Zoom most Thursdays at 2pm UK time, i.e. 14:00 GMT, 15:00 CST. If you’re based outside of Europe, check times carefully; here, daylight savings time hasn’t kicked in yet. Call details will be published tomorrow morning on Slack and (for subscribers) at the Agendashift Academy.
Leading with Outcomes: Foundation 3.1.2
So to that third announcement, the release at the Agendashift Academy of the latest version of our Foundation module. Already well-tested in the classroom, it runs more smoothly than its predecessors, and now it’s available in self-paced video-based form.
Engage, Invite, Celebrate, a leadership model that features prominently in Wholehearted
Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes, aka the IdOO (“I do”) pattern, the strategy-related conversation pattern that’s at the heart of Organising Conversations (2024) and Agendashift (2nd edition 2021)
Right to Left, all about impact and learning, it’s the pattern that gave its name to my 2019 book and 2020 audiobook
This third announcement also relates to the first one. How do we squeeze 3 days of Leading in a Transforming Organisation into 14 hours of cohort-based training? We cheat, that’s how! Join Leading in the Knowledge Economy and get free access to the video-based material, Foundation included.
As you can imagine, it has been an intense few weeks. Not that it stops! Next week I have a private Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (yes that’s a thing; the next public one is in June). And I need to get Wholehearted onto Amazon. I can’t wait to have a print copy in my hands!
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:
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
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
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:
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
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
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:
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)
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
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:
The IdOO (“I do”) pattern – Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes
The 3M pattern – Meaning, Measure, Method
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:
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?
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
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!
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:
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:
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.
Organisations live with the status quo (old or new) or with failing or disappointing solutions because they let solutions replace strategy. Whatever goals they might have had, implementing the solution became the thing. Solution-driven, change-managed – call it what you like, it’s a disaster. And because a generation of leaders has been taught that this is “doing it properly”, they can’t see it!
In the following, solution refers to anything we’d like to implement (or at least try to implement) in pursuit of our goals. Products, tools, technologies, practices, frameworks – they all apply. With that broad definition in mind, what does progress look like? Framed as a series of questions, it looks something like this:
Are there solutions that might work for us here?
Is that solution feasible here?
Now that we’re implementing that solution, does it seem to work, at least on its own terms?
Does that solution deliver the outcomes we expected?
Are we making the progress we expected on our wider goals?
There are hazards at every step:
Moving on from a “solved problem” (solved only in your head, that is)
Abandoning the strategy, because the one solution you thought of (or were sold) isn’t feasible
Abandoning the strategy, living with a failing solution
Abandoning the strategy, living with a disappointing solution
Abandoning the strategy, when it seemed to be going so well
Organisations live with the status quo (old or new) or with failing or disappointing solutions because they let solutions replace strategy. Whatever goals they might have had, implementing the solution became the thing. Solution-driven, change-managed – call it what you like, it’s a disaster. And because a generation of leaders has been taught that this is “doing it properly”, they can’t see it!
To be fair to them, taught to think one way, most people won’t immediately see that the answer is to flip things around, to turn them on their head. Paradigm shifts are hard! But let’s try. Working backwards, or right to left, as we call it:
What are our goals and measures of success (outcomes both)?
What are our progress indicators (more outcomes) telling us?
On what particular areas of opportunity (outcomes again) are we currently focussing, and where do we think they will lead?
What have we learned from recent experiments (prototype solutions or smaller probes)?
What are we learning from current experiments?
What do we hope to learn (and to gain – outcomes again) from our next experiments?
Not solution-driven, strategic thinking quickly abandoned in the implementation of monolithic, ill-fitting solutions, but (quite literally) outcome-oriented, our direction given by the outcomes we have chosen to pursue. Outcomes before solutions, strategy both developed and pursued in the language of meaningful outcomes. No solution too big to fail, solutions of appropriate granularity emerging at the right time from the people closest to the problem, engaged people finding solutions they are motivated to implement. The strategy process and the innovation process properly wired up, working backwards from impact and learning.
There is some skill to be learned in the practice of outcome-orientation. Mostly though it’s a language that leaders at every level of experience and responsibility can easily learn. Acquire that language (it’s not hard) and practice it a bit (it’s an everyday thing, not only for set piece events) and the thinking quickly follows.
For a more organisational perspective, optional pre-reading for the upcoming Leading in a Transforming Organisation is a draft white paper with the long but quite descriptive title Everywhere all at once: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, an accessible, situational, and complexity-aware presentation of the Viable System Model. Mailing list subscribers will be offered the PDF to download today; alternatively you can request your copy here. Agendashift Academy subscribers have access to the source Google Doc for comment (see the Adaptive Organisation space); your access can be arranged if you have constructive comments to make. Or just send them to me!
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.
“At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, (agreement on) outcomes before solutions”
Last week I shared a picture (above), around which I built a new talk on Right to Left (the title of my 2019 book and 2020 audiobook). Not only did I enjoy bringing Right to Left up to date, I have now incorporated the picture into the deck for Leading with Outcomes: Foundation. I had the chance to test it today in session 1 of Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F).
[Update: A recording of that talk is available on the keynotes page]
Beginning with those words again, expanded slightly for emphasis, here is Foundation in overview:
“At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions – agreement on outcomes before solutions” – all of which we’ll be practising today.
In Chapter 1, we’ll be getting familiar with the conversational pattern central to Leading with Outcomes, namely the IdOO (“I do”) pattern. We’ll be using it to begin our exploration of leadership and strategy, and afterwards we’ll take the pattern apart and put it back together again. What does each part do? What if we skipped them? What if we overdid them?
Don’t take Chapter 2’s rather cryptic title too seriously (Update: it is now “Conversations in strategy”); what we’ll be doing here is to develop some strategy. Using that IdOO pattern again of course, but this time establishing context beforehand (establishing some common ground for our conversation) and organising the results of our conversations afterwards (it would be a shame to let it all go to waste).
In Chapter 3 we’ll move into pursuing strategy. We’ll learn another pattern – Meaning, Measure, Method, a great way to generate the solution ideas our strategy needs – and we’ll look at how we sustain the process. Often that is the hardest part, and we’ll begin with that. Lack of confidence in the process can be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, so we’ll be nipping that one in the bud right away.
So that’s Foundation, and it’s aptly named. You’ll see those patterns in every module and every workshop we do. The principles of outcome-orientation that we make explicit all the way through Foundation underpin all our other work. And they’re highly effective! Whatever their level of experience or scope, any leader can learn to lead with outcomes. You can learn to lead with outcomes!
Once again now: “At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, (agreement on) outcomes before solutions“
While we’re here, some quick updates:
In chronological order:
Although the recording of last week’s Right to Left session isn’t yet available, the one for my webinar session yesterday with special guest Klaus Leopold already is. Together with references, slides (unused, but hey, why waste them), and other goodies, find it here. The next webinar/AMA in the series will be on June 6th.
It’s not in the calendar yet, but late afternoon (UK time) on June 8th I’ll be giving the next iteration of the rapidly-evolving talk Between spaces, scopes, and scales: What the scaling frameworks don’t tell you. Also not yet in the calendar, the same talk on July 6th, this time in person in Nottingham, UK.
Too often known as “The June event”, the thing happening June 20th-22nd and also in Melbourne in October badly needs a snappier name! Answers on a postcard please (actually LinkedIn), discount coupons for all contributors
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.
It turns out that I haven’t spoken on Right to Left (the title of my third book) for quite some time and I have taken the opportunity to draw a new picture that shows Right to Left as one of three main patterns of Leading with Outcomes. It, the IdOO (“I do”) pattern, and Meaning, Measure, Method all feature in all four modules. Expect to see this picture or one very much like it appearing in future material!
“At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, (agreement on) outcomes before solutions“
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.
Go for it! If the main purpose of your standup is to make sure that everyone is keeping themselves properly busy, then the questions “What did you do yesterday?” and “What will you do today?” are without doubt the basis of a great meeting format.
But be careful what you wish for. If your goals involve 1) the team meeting needs, and 2) learning from the process, those questions can hurt a lot more than they help. Honestly, I’m not a fan at all.
You could try these instead. Understand the pattern, and with practice, it runs itself:
What are we learning from what we recently completed? And is it staying completed? Whose needs did we meet, and how do we know we met them?
What can we get over the line?
What is and isn’t making the expected progress? Are we clear about whose needs we’re meeting, what needs, how we’ll know, and what’s our approach?
Do we have the capacity to look at what’s next, or is that enough until we next meet?
You probably won’t get to that overnight, so some things to try:
Instead of reviewing activities (what you did, what you’re doing, etc), try to focus the things that you as a team are trying to produce, in the context of the goals you’re pursuing
All else being equal (in bigger meetings, this pattern can work within other interesting ways to structure the work), try reviewing your work most-complete work first, not forgetting to start with celebrating and enquiring into work recently completed
Make a point of noticing how the conversations change as you work backwards, and develop your repertoire accordingly – by this stage you’ll likely be noticing not only a performance difference but a language change and changes to people’s expectations and behaviour, and you can build on that until they become habits
In all of the above, try keep in your mind and everyone else’s what you’re working backwards from: “someone’s need met” and “all the available learning fully accounted for” (my definitions of done and really done)
I’ve used this “right to left” technique in a range of settings, often supercharging something that really wasn’t working before – standup meetings, risk & issue review meetings, service delivery review meetings to name just three. Right to left is named after Kanban’s board review pattern (you start on the right-hand side of the board with work at or nearest completion) but it’s not hard to apply in other settings.
And it’s more than just a productivity hack. In my third book Right to Left (2019, audiobook 2020), I take that philosophy of working backwards from impact and learning and use it as a lens on the whole Lean-Agile landscape (and more). Further to it not being just a Kanban thing, the book shows how right to left fits very well with the best of Scrum. Contrast that with an all too prevalent left to right kind of Scrum that does the reputations of Scrum and Agile no favours at all, and that scales up in the worst possible way. Fortunately it’s fixable.
This post started out as a LinkedIn post, then a second:
You can also take any questions you may have to one of the upcoming webinars – the first three (December 8th, January 12th, February 2nd) all finish with an AMA (Ask Mike Anything) session. Series link: The questions that drive us (eventbrite.co.uk).
We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.
The Delivery Assessment and its several variants have been translated into 12 languages but this is a first for the Right to Left and Deliberately Adaptive Organisation templates. Thank you Seungbin for breaking some new ground 🙂
Try the mini version of the Delivery assessment in any of the supported languages for free:
It has been a couple of years since I first read John Doerr’s OKR classic Measure what Matters. You may remember my blog post at the time: There will be caveats: Warming cautiously to OKR. What I might not have mentioned then was that I very nearly didn’t read the book – I found the title quite off-putting!
My discomfort with Doerr’s title – misplaced as it turns out – is explained by a catchphrase I later coined: Meaning Before Method, one of two MBM’s which as a pair actually map very well to OKR. In recent weeks I’ve read (or rather listened to) the book once more and enjoyed it. As for the title, more accurate but less catchy would be Measure things predictive of success in your clear and audacious objectives, taking care to preserve meaning. No issue with that!
I took the trouble this time to follow up on one of Doerr’s few references, in particular Dov Seidman’s How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything (another being former Intel chief Andy Grove’s High Output Management, which I am still to read). This early quote grabbed me, emphasis mine:
Think of it as a shift from valuing size to valuing significance. Conversations about “how much” constantly echo throughout business, politics, and our personal lives: How much revenue can we squeeze into this quarter? How much debt can we tolerate? How much growth can we generate? How big should government be? But “How much?” and “How big?” aren’t the right questions. Instead we should be asking how we can create organizations and societies that mirror our deepest values.
The expanded edition did feel a little long but I was rewarded for holding on until the end (emphasis his this time):
Before we part company, I want to leave you with one more paradox, the paradox of success, and it’s a corollary to the paradox of happiness. You cannot do success; you cannot achieve it by pursuing it directly. Success is something you get when you pursue something greater than yourself, and the word I use to describe that something is significance. All measures of success share one commonality: They signify the value of your passage through life. You can go on a journey of significance—a journey to do, make, extend, create, and support value in the world; and I believe, in the spirit of the Johnson & Johnson Credo, it is this journey that should bring you success, however you measure it.
Pursuing significance, in the end, is the ultimate how.
I talk quite a bit about meaning in work and I am resolved now to do the same with significance. Noting that close colleagues can vary hugely on the meaning they draw from their work (for some the craft, for some the challenge, for others the meeting of needs, for example), I should say that I don’t believe that anyone has the right to dictate how others draw meaning from their work. Helping them find it though, that’s another matter – it’s one bullet of my three-bullet summary definition of Servant Leadership (see the last chapter of my book Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile). Moreover, if leaders aren’t articulating credibly the significance of the work and encouraging others to explore and even challenge it – well that’s definitely a problem.
If optimising for value is a dead end (I can’t be alone in finding much of what is said in Agile circles about value delivery to be empty or even dysfunctional), perhaps we should be optimising instead for significance, expecting meaning (and other good things) to follow. I have a hunch that it’s going to be fun finding out what that really means.
What if we put authentic agreement on meaningful outcomes ahead of solutions?
Welcome to Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model
What happened since 2018 and the 1st edition? Quite a lot actually!
Engagement models happened
It may seem a bit daft to say that one of the things that happened was the foreword to the 1st edition, but it’s true! Daniel Mezick’s use of the term engagement model (a term I hadn’t used) was a gift. It gives us a constructive and generative name for “change through means other than imposition”, it creates an identity for a category distinct from those linear models of change management, and I’ve come to appreciate the distance and differentiation that this affords. To quote from the book:
You can’t upgrade your organisation like you’re upgrading your email server!
The 2nd edition gains a foreword from Pia-Maria Thorén. So glad to make that connection with HR community! Time will tell where that will lead, somewhere good I’m sure.
Lots of small and not-so-small improvements happened
To name just a few:
Mike Haber’s template for our trusty kickoff exercise, Celebration-5W (chapter 1)
The “Agendashift as a river” poster is gone (hands up on that one, it was a mistake). In its place, the figure-of-8 framework picture, with Agendashift’s two main patterns for each loop and the Agenda for Change at their intersection:
Chapters 1 & 2 each provide a demonstration of the Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes (IdOO) pattern. The pattern is discussed in relation to other coaching models and leadership routines – GROW, Toyota Kata etc, and it creates the opportunity for the now much more developed Outside-in Strategy Review (OI-SR) to be introduced much earlier in the book.
By chapter 3 (the Mapping chapter), the Agenda for Change is already well established and much better defined than it was in the 1st edition. It is one of the most-changed chapters, now describing the well-tested string of three mapping exercises practiced since early 2019:
Option Approach Mapping – Cynefin Four Points with outcomes and under a pseudonym (it’s better that way)
Option Relationship Mapping – Karl Scotland and Liz Keogh’s Cynefin-inspired brilliant reworking of Wardley Mapping designed to work with outcomes
Pathway Mapping – ‘Transformation Mapping’ in the 1st edition, Story Mapping with outcomes
I wouldn’t describe either Mapping or the Agenda for Change as patterns but certainly there are patterns in that chapter – describing the three exercises together really helped me see those and I think they will be helpful to facilitators of these and similar exercises.
Chapter 3 is also the launchpad for the Right to Left Strategy Deployment pattern, making it the pivotal chapter. It changes the perspective of chapter 4 (Elaboration) quite noticeably, and chapter 5 (Operation) is completely rewritten. Before that, a smaller pattern, Meaning before Metric, Measure before Method (2MBM), which goes with improvements to the ideation part of chapter 4 (Elaboration).
Covid-19 happened
Let me just quote the Introduction (like chapter 5 this was rewritten from scratch):
Finally, Covid-19 happened. I have a vulnerable family member, and by the time lockdown was formalised in the UK I was already in self-imposed quarantine after a trip abroad. I realised very quickly that my globetrotting days were done and that I had to make a strategic shift online. I found that the change of platform helped me see the material through fresh eyes, and I have been glad of the opportunity to collaborate and experiment rapidly with others. We’re determined to deliver the best possible online experience and this new 2nd edition benefits significantly from what we’ve learned through this extraordinary time.
Stepping back from those technical improvements and personal challenges, it has never been clearer that strategy and ways of working are matters of urgency, and that they need to be tackled in an integrated and, dare I say, wholehearted, way. As the world shifts online, so customer relationships change (and as I observed in Right to Left, so increases the opportunity to learn from them). Meanwhile, the need for individuals and teams to connect both to purpose and to each other becomes critical. The alternative – irrelevance, fragmentation, and alienation – hardly bears thinking about. If instead I could bottle some of the best experiences in our progress since the 1st edition – special moments in workshops, client engagements, community and cross-community events, and smaller, purposeful collaborations – well I’d be a happy man indeed.
Right to Left happened, and Dialogic/Generative OD happened
Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile, my 2019 book and 2020 audiobook gave rise to the 1-liner for our mission, “We’re in the business of building wholehearted organisations”.
Right from the earliest days of wholehearted I’ve taken great care not to spoil the generative quality of the word by over-defining it. Nevertheless, chapter 5 does give some shape to the wholehearted organisation via Bushe & Marshak’s Dialogic Organisation Development (2015) (see this 2019 post on my initial encounter with it), the Generative Change Model as described in Bushe’s The Dynamics of Generative Change (2019), and – continuing a journey started in Right to Left – Stafford Beer’s classic Viable System Model (VSM). Two strikingly different bodies of knowledge there but they work wonderfully well together in a vision of the organisation in which strategy, organisation development, and delivery are integrated through participation. Key quote:
It’s a funny kind of autonomy when strategy is something that happens to you
Right to Left is the also the source of two key elements of chapter 5, the Outside-in Service Delivery Review (OI-SDR) and the Outside-in Strategy Review (OI-SR), the latter introduced in chapter 2 as previously mentioned. In the 1st edition they were only hinted at; I developed them properly in Right to Left. For the 2nd edition I didn’t want to just rehash that material though and so it extracts from them a number of lessons of organisation design and leadership. Clue: the Who’s invited? question is asked three times in chapter 5 alone.
And so to the new chapter 6, Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. This was very nearly just an appendix – a reconciliation between Agendashift and VSM – but it grew! Its name is inspired by Kegan & Lahey’s Deliberately Developmental Organisation (see An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization, 2016), which despite my sometimes outspoken aversion to staged development models, maturity models, etc integrates really nicely.
The lines between Agendashift and the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation are perhaps a little blurry but I don’t mind that. If now we’re in the business of building wholehearted and deliberately adaptive organisations, Agendashift is how that happens, ‘wholehearted and deliberately adaptive’ describes what we’re aiming for, and any blurriness is a function of that mission’s internal consistency. I find that rather satisfying.
Update: The webinar recording is now live – see here
Happening: Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle; Agendashift Deep Dive. Just happened: Agile Uprising podcast; Cutter Consortium paper
Tomorrow’s free webinar is sailing close to the 100 participant limit (to the point that I’ve asked anyone who can’t attend to cancel) but there are at the time of writing a single-digit number of tickets available. Get yours here:
Re that one, don’t hesitate to ask for a discount if you think you might qualify on grounds of country, non-profit, government, educational, etc. Also if you’d be a repeat participant, of which there have been a good number!
Meanwhile, Jay Hrcsko interviewed me the other day for the Agile Uprising podcast and you can listen to the recording at the link below. Thanks Jay, that was a lot of fun!
Also in the “just happened” category, Cutter Consortium has just published an article of mine in the form of an Executive Update. It’s a little dense compared to my books but it was fun rehearsing that particular chain of thought for the Agendashift 2nd edition. Grab it here:
Agendashift 