Tag: training

TTT/F, LIKE, and the next instalment in the “Leadership as…” series

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Three things:

1 .Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

The next online Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) begins on Monday 16th (ten days away):

And in case you think that its title implies that it’s not for you, a reminder:

Not everyone joins TTT/F with the aim of becoming a Facilitator or Trainer. Some join for the challenge to existing ways of doing things that Leading with Outcomes brings. Some join for the conversation. Some join to hone their coaching skills, to add a strategy dimension to those, or, conversely perhaps, to bring a coaching dimension to their work as manager or consultant. Whatever your role, if you’re looking for participatory, outcome-oriented, and generative alternatives to managed change and the solution-driven rollout, you’ll be in the right place.

*Coupon code BLOG15 will get you 15% off this training and also LIKE below. For the latter, that’s further to any early bird discounts that remain available.

2. Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE)

Meanwhile, the Spring cohort of Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) is nearly finished – only one session remaining! Following a class discussion this week, the Autumn one will gain an additional session. This is to allow “Organising without Organising, aka “Organising at Human Scale” to get its own session, not (as now) relegated to homework. Book your place here:

3. The next instalment in the “Leadership as…” series

The fourth article in the “Leadership as…” series came out on LinkedIn earlier this week. Including that one, the series so far:

  1. Leadership as structuring
  2. Leadership as translating
  3. Leadership as reconciling
  4. Leadership as connecting

Breaking slightly from the naming convention, the next two will be as follows:

  1. Leadership and participation
  2. Leadership and identity

That’s all for now! Have a great weekend!

Agendashift roundup, May 2025

Posted on by Mike Burrows

In this edition: The wholehearted, deliberately adaptive organisation; Leading with Outcomes; Top posts

The wholehearted, deliberately adaptive organisation

Given that it’s the month after the full release of Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, it’s hardly surprising that I’ve been busy promoting the new book!

This week I was the guest at the Blackmetrics #BAcommunity webinar (thank you Adrian Reed for the invitation), and the recording, slides, references, and other links are already available here:

I overran a bit, so there was less time than usual for Q&A. I’ll be more careful with the level of detail in future versions! I’m giving it again next week, but in person:

Thank you Sergio Seelochan and Agile Nottingham for that one.

I have also been blogging on LinkedIn, and it’s turning into a series:

  1. Leadership as structuring
  2. Leadership as translating
  3. Leadership as reconciling

To come:

  1. Leadership as connecting
  2. Leadership and participation
  3. Leadership and identity

Further ahead, there’s the Autumn LIKE (the Spring one is past its halfway point now):

Not yet in the calendar, I will do a 2-day in-person one of these in Bangalore in December, and possibly one in Sweden or Denmark in November if I’m accepted to speak at Øredev. I’m also very open to doing one again in Manchester – I have both university and NHS interest there, and it might be very cool to do one for both groups together.

Last but not least, and as previously announced, on the Media page you’ll find an interview released earlier this month with Rohit Gautam for his Curiosulus Chronicles podcast, and below that one, interviews released in April with Mike Jones and Laksh Raghavan for their Strategy Meets Reality and Cyb3rSyn Labs podcasts respectively.

Leading with Outcomes

All of the above comes very much under the Leading with Outcomes umbrella. Other news there:

And the next TTT/F begins on the 16th:

Top posts

Blog:

  1. (Pre)released today – Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (March)
  2. Agendashift roundup of the year 2024 (December)
  3. What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints) (October 2023)
  4. Leading with Outcomes Cheat Sheet v2.1 (May)
  5. My favourite Clean Language question (January 2019)

LinkedIn articles:

  1. Leadership as structuring
  2. Mid-month update: Wholehearted Leadership in a Complex World and more
  3. Prescriptive vs descriptive
  4. Leadership as translating
  5. Leadership as reconciling

Leading with Outcomes Cheat Sheet v2.1

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve done a couple of iterations on the Leading with Outcomes cheat sheet. In addition to several cosmetic improvements, the latest includes a version of the graphic we use in our training for the IdOO (“I do”) pattern: Ideal, Obstacles Outcomes:


Grab yours here (it’s free!):

This resource concentrates on what OD folks might describe as the inquiry aspect [1] of Leading with Outcomes. I hope in due course to produce similar cheat sheets for its context-capturing aspects and its generative/ideation conversations, but for now, let’s see how this existing cheat sheet relates to the Leading with Outcomes curriculum.

Starting (as one should) with Leading with Outcomes: Foundation, the IdOO pattern shown in the cheat sheet’s centre is this module’s most important topic, dominating three out of four sessions and making its presence felt in the last one too. In exercise form, the pattern is most often used with the setup questions shown middle left; as a leadership routine, it allows plenty of room for personalisation. Foundation uses a somewhat simplified version of Obstacles Fast and Slow (bottom middle, formerly Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle) and a much-simplified version of 15-minute FOTO (bottom right).

As workshop activities and coaching patterns, and with leadership takeaways, those simplified exercises are covered in more depth in the Inside-out Strategy module, whose structure is given by the now-familiar IdOO pattern. This module also covers the Challenge Mapping questions (bottom left), of which “Why is that important?” appears on its own in Foundation. We like to sneak it into the otherwise Clean Language-based coaching game 15-minute FOTO also – see [2] for a writeup.

Combined with the IdOO pattern, the Outside-in Strategy Review questions (top right) feature heavily in the Outside-in Strategy module. There is plenty in them to unpack!

Notice the section top centre of the cheat sheet, Starting points: generative images and challenge questions. That’s starting points plural, so where do you start? Now we are in workshop/intervention design territory, and that is covered in the fourth and final session of Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F). The next one takes place in a month’s time:

Still unaccounted for module-wise is the Adaptive Organisation. Rather than focusing on the abovementioned patterns, routines, and exercises, this more advanced module assumes at least some passing exposure to them. Accordingly, in various packages of public and private training held both in person and online, the Adaptive Organisation and Foundation modules are often combined. With the spring cohort of LIKE already underway, your next scheduled opportunity comes in the autumn:

If that seems too far away, there is the recent book Wholehearted for you to read and further whet your appetite, and also the self-paced training option, which you could begin today! For the latter, Foundation is the place to start, and a cheaper Foundation-only subscription is now available. You can upgrade this to cover the whole Leading with Outcomes in your own time. So what’s stopping you?

Further reading

[1] See my 2024 book Organizing Conversations for a distinction between inquiry and generative conversations that I didn’t make in the 2021 Agendashift 2nd edition. Both come under the umbrella of dialogic organisation development (dialogic OD).

[2] 15-minute FOTO’s cheat mode (October 2023)

Agendashift roundup, April 2025

Posted on by Mike Burrows
Mike's new book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation


Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Spring 2025 cohort begins today*, so I’m getting this out early. In this edition: Wholehearted is released in print and on Kindle; Podcasts, meetups, webinars, and Office hours / AMA; Further ahead

Wholehearted is released in print and on Kindle

This month saw the print and Kindle releases of my new book Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. In relation to that, I’ve been blogging more than usual, experimenting with a LinkedIn-first approach. The first two of those posts were perhaps a little dry (I had some things to get off my chest perhaps):

Then I found my stride:

Beginning with “Trust-building leadership” (chapter 3) I have a series on leadership planned; expect the first of those early May.

To the book itself, you can find both print and Kindle editions on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de and other Amazon sites around the world. The e-book is also available on LeanPub, Kobo, Apple Books, and Google Play Books.

Podcasts, meetups, webinars, and Office hours / AMA

Two podcast interviews were released this month:

Thank you Mike Jones and Laksh Raghavan. Another is recorded and awaiting release, I’ll be recording another on Friday, and two more in the pipeline also!

Upcoming in May, two different formats – meetup and webinar – but essentially the same talk:

Both of those are online (don’t be put off by the “Berlin”), and I know at least one person who plans to attend both. There for the Q&A I guess! To be fair, that can be the most fun part – certainly the most unpredictable, perhaps because I ask for the hard questions!

Finally, a reminder that “Office hours” / Ask Mike Anything (AMA) sessions take place on Thursdays at 2pm UK time – 14:00 BST, 15:00 CEST, 9am EDT. Invitations are published weekly to Academy and Slack subscribers. You can also book a 30-minute Zoom via my Calendly.

Further ahead

The next TTT/F will be in June, and if the spring cohort of LIKE comes too early for you, there’ll be another in the autumn:

That’s it for April – bring on May!

*LIKE begins 2pm UK time – 14:00 BST, 15:00 CEST, 9am EDT today. If you’d like to join, best get in touch with me directly, and quickly! All the usual discounts available.

It gets complicated…

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Think about which part of your organisation you identify with most strongly. Then the parts it relates to – peer units, subunits formal and informal, higher-level units, and so on – and the nature of those relationships – relationships of flow, service, accountability, belonging, strategic interest, and so on.

It gets complicated pretty quickly, doesn’t it! Now think about how you experience those relationships, and how that experience changes with each new priority, each new challenge, and with the passing of time and the deepening of your understanding. So not just complicated, but ever-changing.

Now begin to imagine how different colleagues new and old would answer those same questions. Especially as organisations get larger, no single person’s perspective can hope to describe it adequately. However you try to represent it, it’s at best a compromise, and a static one at that. Your organisation is not just complicated, it is by any useful definition of the word, complex, and we’ve hardly begun to identify all the relationships involved.

Beginning Wednesday 30th – just a week away now – the spring cohort of Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) will help you, with others, to make new sense of your organisation, and better understand its challenges and how to engage with them. At its heart is the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a descriptive, relational, and complexity-friendly model, a lens on your organisation and framework for organisational inquiry and generative change. It’s the same model that’s explored in my new book Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation and you’ll get a free copy of the e-book edition of that too. Join us!

Save 15% with coupon code BLOG15, and contact me for other codes (government, healthcare, education, non-profits, NGOs – that kind of thing, also bulk discounts). Don’t stress over your ability to make all 7 sessions – that issue affects one participant already, and there are ways to catch up.

Today and further ahead

Every Thursday, at 14:00 BST, 15:00 CEST, 9am EDT it’s Office Hours, aka Ask Mike Anything (AMA), all welcome. Zoom details:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85069940421?pwd=7KSsYrub7wUx9EXe1JpGbeo6qyXDsY.1
Meeting ID: 850 6994 0421
Passcode: 864206

Further ahead:

The BLOG15 coupon code (etc) applies to TTT/F and the Autumn cohort also.

Agendashift roundup, March 2025

Posted on by Mike Burrows

So that was March – Wholehearted pre-released on LeanPub, spring and autumn cohorts announced, and the release of a new version of Leading with Outcomes: Foundation. Intense! Normal blogging service will be resumed shortly, but expect more activity around the first two shortly.

Wholehearted is due out in print and on other platforms on April 16th, a date which I may bring forward. You can find the relevant links to Amazon, Kobo, Apple, Google, and LeanPub here, and the e-book formats are available for preorder. For the print edition, Amazon is making it unnecessarily difficult to preorder, but I’ll save any write-up on the publishing process until later.

So far the reception has been super encouraging; I’ve shared some of it here, including a video interview by LeanPub founder Len Epp. Mike Jones interviewed me last week for what I believe will become multiple podcast episodes, and Laksh Raghaven will have me on his podcast soon too. Per the calendar below, Adrian Reed has invited me back to Blackmetric’s BA community webinar series also. Similar invitations welcome!

To experience Wholehearted in a very different way, Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) begins April 30th, which is four weeks on Wednesday. At the time of writing, there are still a couple of early bird tickets available, and there are public sector / non-profit / NGO discounts available also (ping me for coupon codes if that’s you). Details in the blog posts and calendar below.

Finally, a reminder that “Office hours” / Ask Mike Anything (AMA) sessions take place on Thursdays at 2pm UK time. Our clocks changed yesterday, so that’s 14:00 BST, 15:00 CEST, 9am EDT. Invitations are published weekly to Academy and Slack subscribers. You can also book a 30-minute Zoom via my Calendly.

March’s top posts

  1. (Pre)released today – Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (March)
  2. Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE): 7-week cohort-based training (March)
  3. Wholehearted: How it’s going and who it’s for (March)
  4. Leading with Outcomes: Foundation v3.1.2 (March)
  5. Meeting the context challenge (February)

Upcoming

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation v3.1.2

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Yes, it’s the third of the three announcements I promised for this month.

The first was this:

The summer cohort begins on April 30th and we have Easter before that, so check it out now.

And the second:

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.

Pattern-based rather than prescriptive, Leading with Outcomes: Foundation covers four key patterns:

  1. Engage, Invite, Celebrate, a leadership model that features prominently in Wholehearted
  2. 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)
  3. Meaning, Measure, Method, our outcome-oriented ideation pattern
  4. 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!

Related

Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE): 7-week cohort-based training

Posted on by Mike Burrows

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that there would be three things coming to fruition this month, and here’s the first. Beginning Wednesday, April 30th and running for seven 2-hour sessions, I’ve adapted the 3-day classroom training Leading in a Transforming Organisation for a cohort-based format, renaming it to Leading in the Knowledge Economy, or LIKE. If you’re wondering how three days fits into 14 hours, here’s how: as well as the Zoom sessions, we’ll be making use of the Agendashift Academy’s video-based material also for some light between-sessions study also.

What is it? Well, from the booking page:

We’ll be answering some important questions about leadership and organisation, questions that become increasingly critical as our organisations become more and more information-dependent. In a nutshell: What does it mean to be creating the conditions for business agility when the critical resources are communication capacity, decision-making capacity, and the context everyone needs to make good decisions?

This course will change two things for you: how you think about organisations, and how you engage with their challenges. Our main focus will be the digital-age (though not necessarily technology-centric) organisation, in which product development, customer-focused service delivery, and organisational improvement are becoming increasingly integrated. With that come challenges of context and scale which process-based approaches are ill-equipped to meet.

At its heart is the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a fresh, complexity-aware, and ground-up reconstruction of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model. The diagnostic power of this classic model remains unrivalled, and to it we bring a truly 21st century approach. We work with rather than against the grain of two key realities: that everyone’s experience of the organisation is different, and that they see different possibilities emerging for it, possibilities they may already be motivated to help bring about. We’ll be turning the traditional change management paradigm on its head!

Training participants are typically a mixture of leaders and practitioners, all with an interest in going beyond process-centric approaches to organisation and improvement.

I’ve actually scheduled two of these; there’s one for each of the summer and autumn terms. Take your pick! And between those, the next online TTT/F:

There are some early bird tickets available, so grab those while you can.

For a 30% discount on block bookings of three or more places, ping me. For government, public health (eg NHS), and NGO employees, discounts are available from the first seat and increase to 50% for three or more.

I’m also open to doing this privately, and for organisations considering adding LIKE or other Leading with Outcomes trainings to their internal leadership development curriculum, we even provide a path to self-sufficiency via our Authorised Trainer and Facilitator programmes.

That’s it for now – watch out for announcement #2 later in the week!

Agendashift roundup, February 2025

Posted on by Mike Burrows

In short: it has been a busy week, and an exciting March in store!

This week was Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) week. Intense in a good way, with lots to discuss – not just the Leading with Outcomes material and how to use it, but the real-world organisational challenges it inevitably surfaces and how they might be approached differently. Per my recent messaging of “not everyone attends with the aim of becoming a Facilitator or Trainer”, half the attendees came just to participate and learn.

The next one will be in June:

Next week is Kanban Edge 2025, which I’m told is officially sold out. Congratulations Helen, David, and Glaudia! Watch out next week though for the first two of three exciting announcements; the third will come later in the month.

Finally, last week I was in brain dump mode at Morten Elvang’s Agile Strategy Meetup, squeezing way more than I should into a 30-minute speaking slot, plus another 30 minutes for questions. It’s not as polished as my keynotes, but the recording can be found here along with PDF, links, references, etc:

Top posts

February’s most-read posts:

  1. Meeting the context challenge (February 2025)
  2. Help our research: an “Organisational DNA test” (May 2024)
  3. From Flow to Business Agility (January 2024)
  4. What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints) (October 2023)
  5. I’m really enjoying Challenge Mapping (June 2020)

Upcoming

This week, next week, next month

Posted on by Mike Burrows
February TTT/F

This week

Tomorrow, at the kind invitation of Morten Elvang, I’m speaking at the Agile Strategy meetup:

My brief is to answer two questions:

  1. What is your view on strategy and its role and importance in an organisation. Any new trends or developments?
  2. What advice do you have for people on how to best engage in the topic of strategy in their organisation?

Strategy, organisation, and engagement – my kind of gig!

Then this Thursday at 14:00 UK time (that’s 13:00 CET and 9am ET) and every Thursday except for the following two Thursdays when it clashes with other things, it’s “Office hours”, aka AMA, for “Ask Mike Anything”. The Zoom link is available via the Academy, via Slack, and for mailing list subscribers, I’ll include it in today’s email.

Next week

The next online Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator – the first since the one I did in person in India last December – begins a week on Monday on February 24th, spanning four consecutive afternoons UK time, beginning at 13:00 GMT, 14:00 CET, 8am ET, each session lasting no more than four hours.

As the weeks have counted down I’ve blogged about it a couple of times:

I won’t repeat what I said there except to say that please use coupon code BLOG15 for 15% off any of the ticket options – Facilitator, Trainer, or TTT/F Only. Book here:

We currently have a cozy quorum, definitely room for more!

March

The reason that there’ll be no office hours the following week is that I’ll be in London for Kanban Edge, where I’m speaking:

I’d love to see you there! That won’t be it for March though – there are three things coming to fruition which I’ll announce separately in due course. Watch this space!