With grateful thanks to Olivier Bertrand, Marika Gartelius, Philippe Guenet, Ivaylo (Ivo) Gueorguiev, Andrew Kidd, and Craig Lucia, I’m pleased to confirm that the Adaptive Organisation Assessment has completed its recently-announced refresh. This assessment has multiple applications:
As you may have guessed from my opening thanks to our review team, native English speakers were in the minority. That’s great! You may know from the Agendashift Delivery Assessment already that we take very seriously the accessibility of our assessments and seek to eliminate any language that gets in the way of engagement. That includes jargon and prescription; its goal is not to teach, preach, sell, or judge but to get people thinking and talking, not worrying about how it’s worded or what plans those facilitating it may have in store for them.
You can try it now (or revisit your previous input) at agendashift.com/assessments/wholehearted. Get in touch if you see a use for it at your organisation; as hinted at above, there are plenty of options we can discuss.
Quickly while we’re here…
For the most feeble of excuses (my 60th birthday), this week’s office hours moves from Thursday to Friday, 14:00 GMT, 15:00 CET, 9am ET as usual. If you’re an Agendashift Academy subscriber or supporter, you’ll find this week’s event in the Events calendar. Non-subscribers are welcome; you can find the Zoom link on Slack also.
Other upcoming events (the first one a new addition – thank you Morten Elvang for the invitation):
There is also the possibility of doing some or all of Leading in a Transforming Organisation in Malmö in November. I know that’s months away, but if that could be of interest, do please let me know.
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.
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.
Leading with Outcomes: Foundation – patterns for strategy conversations in the language of needs, obstacles, and outcomes
The Discovery and assessment-related parts of the Inside-out Strategy workshops and training – classic Agendashift with a leadership development twist, featuring favourite exercises including Celebration-5W, Obstacles Fast and Slow, 15-minute FOTO, and Option Relationship Mapping
In overview, of the remainder of the Leading with Outcomes curriculum
TTT/F is one of two routes into becoming an authorised Leading with Outcomes facilitator or trainer (subscriptions required), through which you can get access to the full range of Agendashift assessments, materials for all of the Leading with Outcomes workshops, and for trainers, training materials also.
Past participants can re-attend for free, a popular perk. Alternatively, if you have attended a past Leading in a Transforming Organisation event or are signed up to one of the upcoming events (see below), you can get 60% off. And for all of our paid events and subscriptions, there is a 40% discount for employees of public sector, healthcare, and non-profit organisations. Ping me for coupon codes if any of these apply.
Together with a modest amount of additional self-study, the second route is via Leading in a Transforming Organisation:
Most people attend Leading in a Transforming Organisation for its own sake rather than as a TTT/F alternative, but the option is there. Again, ping me for coupon codes if any of the usual discount reasons apply, including past participation at either kind of event.
And sorry, yes, Berlin really is sold out! But check these out:
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.
In this edition: Books in progress: 2; Two new videos; Upcoming: online, Berlin (SOLD OUT), London, and Southampton; Top posts
Books in progress: 2
I’m putting the final touches on Organising Conversations: Patterns of Dialog for the Transforming Organization and have a decent first draft of the first part (of two) of Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. Needless to say, they’re keeping me busy!
With that workload in mind and the summer approaching, I’m pausing the monthly webinars and experience/practise sessions until the autumn.
Encouragingly, an excerpt from Wholehearted is by a big margin the most-read blog post of the month (shared on LinkedIn here):
In the last (until the autumn) of our monthly webinars, we were joined this month by Karl Scotland. Here’s the recording of his excellent session, also the PDF of his slides, links, etc:
Related to the still-to-be-written Part II of Wholehearted and with a fun Q&A session (always a good sign) here’s the latest version of one of my ever-evolving keynotes:
Upcoming: online, Berlin (SOLD OUT), London, and Southampton
Yes, Berlin has sold out, but there’s still the online TTT/F and then Leading in a Transforming Organisation (London) at the end of June and another in Southampton in October:
Past (or booked) attendees of TTT/F can re-attend for free and/or attend Leading in a Transforming Organisation for less than half price. There are big discounts in the opposite direction also – ping me for coupon codes. Also significant discounts for government, healthcare, education (a number of university staff have attended in recent months), non-profits, etc. As was the case in Manchester last year, I know that London for one will have participants from outside of technology, which always makes for a more interesting experience.
If you really can’t get to any of those, don’t forget the online self-paced option: Leading with Outcomes.
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.
Some context: Measured in chapters (not time, alas) I’ve reached the halfway mark in the writing of my fifth book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, completing the first three of six chapters and with those, part I (Business agility at every scale) of two parts. I’ve adapted the article below from a passage in Chapter 1 in which we’re exploring a space I call Delivery-Discovery-Renewal (Figure 1). That space encompasses the productive activity of a team or other organisational scope at any scale of organisation – everything that’s done in the “here and now”, as opposed to, say, planning or retrospecting.
Figure 1. The Delivery-Discovery-Renewal Space
The Delivery-Discovery-Renewal Space comprises the following:
The value-creating work – delivery-related work (obviously), discovery-related work (making sure that we will be delivering the right things, scouting for new opportunities), and renewal-related work (working on the organisation itself, building and improving the capabilities needed)
How that work is coordinated – understood very broadly as all the constraints on that work that have any kind of coordinating effect
How that work is organised – organising around commitments and managing towards goals, another set of constraints on the work
…and their relationships:
Mutual relationships between systems 1, 2, and 3 above, i.e. between the value-creating work, how its is coordinated, and how it is organised – how they constrain each other, how they inform each other, the effects they have on each other, and so on
The relationship with the external environment – for the purposes of this article, relationships with customers and users most especially
Relationships inside system 1 above (the value-creating work) – collaborations, process-defined interactions, structures, and so on
You may recognise there a good chunk of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM), and with the mention of constraints, hints of something complexity-related also. The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation model and the forthcoming book cover three such spaces (Delivery-Discovery-Renewal, Adaptive Strategising, and Mutual Trust Building), the relationships between them, relationships internal to them, and the much-neglected relationships between different scales of organisation.
It is very much a relational model, i.e. not a process model but complementary to those, providing them with some sorely-needed theory, particularly on matters of scale. It is easy to engage with, it provides a fresh perspective on familiar things, it translates straightforwardly to a complexity-based perspective, and it can be the basis of a participatory strategy process – all very different from the more analytical ways in which such models are typically used.
In the lightly-adapted excerpt below, we are mid-chapter. You might find it worth giving the above introduction a second read therefore (I’ll refer to Figure 1 more than once). Somewhat in the vein of my January post From Flow to Business Agility (by a huge margin my most-read post of the year so far), we are exploring a key question for the Delivery-Discovery-Renewal space and for the other two spaces:
How might we increase our decision-making capacity?
The Great Rebalancing
One important way to increase decision-making capacity in this Delivery-Discovery-Renewal space is to move away from people serving the process and toward the process serving those who do the work. Some clear signs of success:
Routine work can be done with negligible overhead
Coordination problems – contention, overburdening, starvation, and the rest – are seen not as facts of life that people must simply endure, but as symptoms of something systemic that can and should be addressed
In non-routine situations, appropriate courses of action are made no harder than necessary by, for example, bureaucracy or overly restrictive policies
Those doing the work have appropriate control over their working environments, and that agency is seen as a potential source of innovation
Each of those reflects some change in the balance between the elements I identified in the introduction to this article, most especially between the value-creating work and how it is coordinated (systems 1 and 2 respectively in Figure 1 above). Taken together, they remind me of the Agile manifesto [1] and, in particular, the first and most famous of its four “this over that” declarations: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. The remaining three declarations can be understood in a similar way, i.e. as representing a sometimes radical rebalancing of relationships inside the Delivery-Discovery-Renewal space.
“Working software over comprehensive documentation”: If we’re staying strictly within the Delivery-Discovery-Renewal space and focusing on the work rather than the thinking behind it, this declaration impacts mostly the balance between upstream and downstream activities. This idea has consequences in many spheres outside of technology development and the book will develop it further. Here though, let’s understand it in manifesto terms.
The 1990s, the context in which Agile arose, saw the peak of the linear project model. Technology projects proceeded in a sequence of phases (see Figure 2 below for an example), and because activities were separated in time, those upstream-downstream relationships barely existed. And at such a cost! As projects moved from one documentation-heavy phase to the next, the emphasis was on demonstrating that the latest work conformed to expectations set in preceding stages, not on establishing whether those expectations were based on accurate assumptions. When those assumptions were about the behaviours of users and people-based systems, they would often prove unsafe, but by the time they were invalidated it was already too late.
Figure 2. A linear project model
The remedy: upstream and downstream activities no longer in separate phases but tightly integrated in an iterative or continuous process. With people from different disciplines working closely together, feedback could come in days or less, not the weeks, months, or longer that it took previously. In support of those collaborations, documentation would become much more granular, produced no earlier or later than needed (i.e. just in time), taking perhaps the minimalistic form of user stories[2] or job stories[3], describing not whole projects but very thin slices of functionality – specific usages of individual features. Given an appropriate sequencing of these small but still individually useful deliverables, an incomplete but still meaningfully useful product could emerge quickly. With more time, and perhaps over an indefinite period (funded not as a project but as a product line), it could evolve into something fitting.
The genuine documentation needs of developers, customers, and end-users never completely went away, and there remains the responsibility of the Delivery-Discovery-Renewal space towards its future self. Pity the poor person who, a year from now, has to understand the design decision you made today or debug the code that you’re writing. Perhaps you owe it to them to leave at least some clues, not to mention that this poor person might turn out to be you! Working in the here and now, when the creation of those usually very small pieces of documentation is an integral part of the development process, a more maintainable system results. There remains a need, however, to keep that effort proportionate to its value, an issue outside the “here and now” and the province of the Adaptive Strategising space.
“Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”: The obvious rebalancing here is away from an adversarial relationship that makes change difficult and increasingly costly as it is delayed, and towards a partnership relationship in which risks and benefits are shared equitably and managed cooperatively. The benefits in terms of decision-making capacity alone are enormous, and I have first-hand experience of it working wonderfully in surprising settings.
Before the launch of the UK’s Government Digital Service in 2011, who would have thought that working on a government project as part of a mixed team of staff and consultants could be a truly special experience? As the interim delivery manager on two of GDS’s ‘exemplar’ projects, I experienced exactly that. There were two customer relationships there: the supplier/government relationship and the government/citizen relationship. By far the more important relationship there was the second, and the abiding principle was “Start with needs: user needs not government needs”. That was more than a slogan. We lived by it, and projects that couldn’t demonstrate it would find themselves in trouble.
Of course, beyond the neglect of user needs there are other ways in which the customer relationship can become dysfunctional. The rapid growth of the attention economy, the asymmetries involved in the handling of personal data, and the rise of AI have combined to create a new issue: the technology/user relationship becoming exploitative to the extent of causing real harm. Unlike the Agile revolution, I don’t see the technology industry solving this issue itself; it has become a matter for governments.
One cause of these problems is that the customer and the user are often not the same person. A sponsor paying for a system they will never use isn’t as troubling as an advertiser paying for access to data the user regards as private, but their product teams ignore the user at their peril. Users have untapped expertise, and how they interact with the product has a lot to teach the product team. Even the bad guys know that they need to make their products usable! Again: software cannot be said to be “working” if it fails to meet user needs, and if that needs to be expressed contractually, so be it. Better still, get users as close to the team as you can manage, even part of the team where that’s possible.
“Responding to change over following a plan”: This is the last of the Agile manifesto’s four “this over that” declarations. For the most part this one belongs with the Adaptive Strategising space, but – spoiler alert – the relationship between that space and Delivery-Discovery-Renewal works through what the two spaces share, the scope’s ability to organise (labelled 3 in Figure 1 above). In the “here and now” of this chapter, the relevant capacity-sapping dysfunction is over-commitment.
Overcommitment is closely related to overburdening and one may contribute to the other, but they should not be confused. Overburdening, a coordination dysfunction (system 2 in Figure 1), leaves a team, activity, process, or other organisational scope in an unhealthy and poorly performing condition because it is trying to work on too many things at once. This multi-tasking incurs costs in context switching, quality issues, delays, and frustration. Compounding all of that, additional work in the form of rework. Overcommitment, a dysfunction in organising (system 3 in Figure 1), means that new commitments can’t be made without breaking commitments previously made. Whether that’s the result of taking on too much work, working to a planning horizon that’s too long, working in chunks too large, or working to plans that leave insufficient room for manoeuvre, that’s a different but similarly serious problem. The scope’s capacity for independent action – John Boyd’s definition of viability – is compromised.
Taking those last three “this over that” declarations together, an Agile process matches its commitments to the short length of time it takes to generate useful information. Progress is made hypothesis by hypothesis, goal by goal. Out of an Agile process, products aren’t built fully formed to a design fixed in advance; they emerge.
When I use ‘Agile’ capitalised like that, I’m describing things that can be traced back to the Agile manifesto. In that sense, the forthcoming book is an Agile book per se; its roots are elsewhere. You can see in the above discussion, however, both what’s at stake and what’s possible. This is not to say that all is rosy in the Agile world: my previous books all address the issue of the Agile industry imposing process and practice on people, to the extent that “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” can seem cruelly ironic at times. Nevertheless, I make the bold suggestion that Agile has been more successful – unreasonably successful – than perhaps its own community realises.
Consider the effect of this Great Rebalancing (or if you prefer, a great shift in organisational constraints) not only on the decision-making and communication capacities of the teams involved but also on those around it. Capacity that previously was consumed by the need to manage teams from the outside has been relieved of much of that burden. Capacity thus freed can be applied to more interesting things. That improves the experience of leadership, increases the quality of leadership, and greatly increases the chances that self-organised innovation will occur not only within teams but at larger scales too. That is what the book will be about: identifying and dealing with dysfunctions at every scale, enabling other great rebalancings, and unleashing thereby other kinds of “unreasonable effectiveness”.
Ping me if interested in tracking progress on the book; some have early access to the manuscript already, and with a view to getting multiple perspectives on it I will be setting up multiple review circles in the coming weeks covering tech, healthcare, education (i.e. universities), faith communities and other voluntary or not-for-profit organisations, and the systems and complexity communities.
See also Leading in a Transforming Organisation in Berlin, London, and Southampton in the list below of upcoming events. Highly relevant! Days 2 and 3 have much the same structure as the book. Likewise, under the heading of Leading with Outcomes, the self-paced Adaptive Organisation parts I & II further down the page below.
[1] More properly the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (2001), agilemanifesto.org
[2] See my favourite Agile book: Jeff Patton and Peter Economy, User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product (2014, O’Reilly Media)
[3] Another book that I recommend frequently: If interested in job stories and the jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) framework, start here: Bob Moesta & Greg Engle, Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress (2020, Lioncrest Publishing)
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.
In this edition: A big update to 15-minute FOTO; The Featureban Flow Experience; Coming in March: Obstacles Fast and Slow and more; Adaptive Organisation (Berlin & London); The Great Consolidation; Top Posts; Upcoming events
A big update to 15-minute FOTO
On Monday I released v13 of our Clean Language-inspired coaching game, 15-minute FOTO. This was the most significant release for a long time, making it easier for participants and facilitators alike to get things started. Read all about it here:
Also last Monday was the Featureban Flow Experience, a two-hour workshop which I co-hosted with Allan Kelly. Featureban is my open-source kanban simulation game, and we played it online using the KanbanZone tool. We had KanbanZone founder Dimitri Ponomareff in attendance also, and behind the scenes the three of us are working out how best make a Featureban template available to other KanbanZone users.
It was a lot fun, and given that this one sold out within 24 hours, I’ve no doubt that there will be more. The next one might see us use Changeban, a Lean Startup-flavoured and more gamified variant.
Speaking of kanban, my first book, Kanban from the Inside, has its 10th anniversary in September. I’m thinking of marking the occasion with a 1-day in-person event, most likely in London. It will be of interest to anyone looking for ways to introduce kanban in a manner more resonant with continuous improvement than the one most often taught. It could be described – at least to those in the know – as “Reverse STATIK meets Leading with Outcomes”, and it leaves you with not only a working kanban system but an organised agenda for change too. If you’re not sure what that all means (let alone what it might look like), watch this space.
Coming in March: Obstacles Fast and Slow and more
Hot on the heels of the 15-minute FOTO update comes Obstacles Fast Slow. This is a rename and an update to Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle, the exercise that typically precedes 15-minute FOTO. The exercise in short: How you frame obstacles matters, and the process of reframing them can an interesting challenge! The March webinar slot is given over to this exercise so that we can record a new video:
April’s by the way breaks from the usual format. See Upcoming events below.
Adaptive Organisation (Berlin & London)
I did my first 1-day Adaptive Organisation Workshop at MBDA last week and was very happy with how it went (“Massive thumbs-up to the whole workshop” was one response). I only do these privately (do get in touch if you’d like to hold one; within reason I am increasingly able to travel) but yesterday I added two public Leading in a Transforming Organisation events to the calendar:
There are substantial savings offered on the first few tickets so get in there! The Berlin venue may be confirmed as soon as tomorrow (update: it was!), so be in little doubt that it will happen. For London, I have a venue in mind but am very open to it being hosted by a sponsoring organisation (so to speak) in return for seats. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if that could be of interest.
Leading in a Transforming Organisation is the longer form of the Adaptive Organisation workshop; the latter was extracted from the former. Presented in workshop format, it integrates the following modules of Leading with Outcomes, which you can take self-paced online if you can’t get to do it in person:
Slowly but surely, the Agendashift Academy is moving off its old platform and onto the new one, relying less and less on the gubbins that held it all together, making for a much smoother experience. Subscriptions are now native to the new platform, and a number of people whose yearly subscriptions were approaching renewal moved theirs across this month.
Over the next few weeks while this process continues, both in recognition that two modules have yet to be transferred (I’ll be re-recording them) and as an incentive to move subscriptions across, a substantial discount of 25% applies. Visit the Academy’s Store page to take advantage.
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.
[2023-06-29 Updated the middle section to make the three approaches more visible] [2023-06-30 Added the proposed Manchester event (November) to the calendar]
My 3-day training Leading in a Transforming Organisation went really well last week, can’t wait to do it again1! Inevitably, the question of what relates Agendashift, Leading with Outcomes, The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, etc came up, and while my answers were reasonable enough, I realised I still had a bit of work to do. So here we are with not just one, but three ways of joining the dots:
Essentially the sequence of my books, this progression is the most historically accurate:
Values-based: For me this began with a system of nine values abstracted from the Kanban Method, identified first in a 2013 blog post3 and expanded on in my first book Kanban from the Inside (2014). Not needing to limit myself to writing about principles and practices, nor even only to Kanban, I enjoyed expanding on those values and demonstrating how other frameworks could – with that values-based perspective – be seen as complementary.
Outcome-oriented: Our big “What if”: What if we put agreement on outcomes before solutions? Followed by How do we keep outcomes in the foreground? and How do we connect the two in a learning process? Around that concept and via a lot of collaborative experimentation, we developed a real alternative to managed change, which the world knows is woeful for anything interesting – so no shortage of motivation there! Agendashift (2018, 2021) describes the engagement model; Right to Left (2019, audiobook 2020) takes that outcome-oriented perspective to the Lean-Agile landscape as a whole. A fourth book (a commission) written for the dialogic/generative OD audience is near completion.
Relational: In both Agendashift and Right to Left there are clues that I am beginning to think in terms of mutual relationships. And inspired by Weick, the perspective shifts from organisation (something easily regarded as static) to organising (something active). More recent than the books, the Leading with Outcomes training material goes on to describe organising as “Finding relationships between things; In and through those relationships, helping their participants realise their potential”. A fifth book is at the planning stage.
2. Curriculum: Patterns, Approaches, Tools
Informed this time by the sequence of the four Leading with Outcomes Modules:
As described recently in Picturing Foundation (May), Foundation’s job is to introduce these key patterns:
Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes – the IdOO (“I do”) pattern
Right to Left – working backwards from key moments of impact and learning
Meaning, Measure, Method – derived from the IdOO pattern, an ideation pattern
Foundation also introduces two complementary and long-established approaches to strategy:
Inside-out – starting with the internal experience and capability of the scope in question, working outwards to its external impact
Outside-in – starting with its customers, suppliers, competitors, and other aspects of its business environment and working through its internal implications
Leading with Outcomes includes a third approach, seen first in the Outside-in module and brought to the fore in Adaptive Organisation:
Relational – framing several crucial aspects of organisation primarily in terms of healthy, productive, and mutually beneficial relationships
Into the patterns plug the tools4, tool selection influenced by context and approach. Some tools are approach-specific; old favourites such as Celebration-5W, 15-minute FOTO, and so on appear in multiple modules. In Foundation meanwhile, we simplify the tools so as not to distract from the patterns.
3. Framework: Metaphor, Model, Method
More concretely: Wholehearted, The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, Agendashift, with the middle one of those taking a more central role.
Wholehearted – the metaphorical coming together of wholeness and “heartedness” as we think about organisation and leadership. In 2018, during the writing of Right to Left, this usage was inspired by the architect and father of the patterns movement, the late Christopher Alexander:
A thing is whole according to how free it is of inner contradictions. When it is at war with itself, and gives rise to forces which act to tear it down, it is unwhole. The more free it is of its own inner contradictions, the more whole and healthy and wholehearted it becomes.
The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander (1980, OUP USA)
Long story short, Wholehearted became the name of our mission statement and part of Agendashift’s branding (“the wholehearted engagement model”). Today, the concept appears in two of the four modules of the Leading with Outcomes training curriculum; Leading with Outcomes: Foundation opens with it. All that time, I have made a point of keeping wholehearted aspirational, exploring some of its implications but taking care not to ruin it by defining it as a process or some other model.
The role of organisational model (or should I say “model of organising”?) is taken by The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation5, which is roughly sketched out in the closing chapters of the 2021 second edition of Agendashift and much better developed in the final Leading with Outcomes module, Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale. It began as a Lean-Agile and outcome-oriented interpretation of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM), this providing the structure into which other favourite models could be plugged in. It has since become a radical “re-presentation” of VSM, taking care to minimise what could be regarded either as vestiges of implementation detail or part of the systems practitioner’s process, and to emphasise strongly meanwhile its relational aspects. Further, and in the interests of accessibility, we limit its scope to organisations (Beer’s original model is more abstract) and engage with it progressively (a high-level “top view” comprising just three “spaces”, more detailed “inside views” for each space, and a “side view” that exposes the relationships between organisational scales).
The model loses none of its diagnostic power, but method-wise, there’s a gap. Taking the place of typical systems practice (as-is modelling, diagnosis, and perhaps to-be modelling, etc), we have Agendashift, and it’s a fundamental change. Bypassing the modelling step and resisting the urge to scope things down, we integrate many organisational perspectives, participants bringing experiences from all of the organisational scopes and scales with which they identify, from whole organisation down to sub-team – “Everywhere all at once”, you might say6. While exploring the model situationally to the depth appropriate to the event (anything between a 2-hour assessment debrief and 2-3 days of in-depth training7), participants are developing organisational strategy in the language of outcomes, producing a form of strategy highly amenable to testing.
The Leading with Outcomes universe
To finish, let me draw attention to this post’s title: Three ways to understand the Leading with Outcomes universe. This could just as easily have identified Agendashift instead – it is after all the longest-established of the brands mentioned here! I’m not saying that I won’t continue to describe Leading with Outcomes as “Agendashift as leadership development”, or to use the two names interchangeably. Neither do I have any plans to rebrand the Agendashift Academy! But especially in relation to the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, Agendashift as the method to complement the model (replacing more traditional methods) seems important somehow. Funny how clarifying the relationship helps to clarify the things it relates. Who knew 😉
Notes
1Melbourne, Australia in October (see calendar below), and there are discussions about putting one on in Manchester in November or early 2024. It comprises one day of Foundation and two of Adaptive Organisation, making three in total. Ping me if interested, or in having one at a city near you.
2While I was planning this post, I initially called this first section Organising Concepts: Values, Outcomes, Relationships. I had forgotten just how important the -oriented of outcome-oriented is, and totally deserved the ensuing confusion! Our direction given by the outcomes we have chosen (for now) to pursue, solutions emerging from the people closest to the need and the opportunity. Outcome-driven (meaning target-driven or perhaps solution-driven in disguise) it is not. That way lies dysfunction. See Avoiding the disaster that is ‘solution-driven’(June 2023).
7Between those extremes there is room for a 1-day Adaptive Organisation workshop. If you’re based in the UK or not too far away and might be interested in having one at your organisation, the first one or two will be on favourable terms. Again, ping me if interested.
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.
I have a confession to make. I still haven’t delivered the revised manuscript for my fourth book, but in spare moments I have begun work on my fifth, working title Wholehearted: Inside the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, business agility at every scale. There’s nothing like writing to make you revisit things that you thought were settled, and here I am looking again at wholehearted, for five years now the title and theme of Agendashift’s mission. Perhaps you haven’t thought of it in quite these terms before, but if you want your organisation to grow in wholeheartedness, then we’re here to help.
Tentatively (as questions, not prescriptions), let’s take Lean’s¹ “eliminate impediments” and apply it not to flow, but to wholeheartedness. Viewed from two sides (as a system, if you like):
If we eliminate impediments to wholeness, does that improve “heartedness”? If, for example, we simplify lines of communication or address issues of trust or coherence, do we make it more likely that people will be more engaged, acting with purpose and energy?
And going the other way, if we eliminate impediments to “heartedness”, does that improve wholeness? If, for example, we can relieve overburden, might the capacity freed thereby be used to tackle deeper, more structural issues?
I think it’s fair to say that there’s a limit to how much progress you can make on one side of the wholeheartedness equation before the other side begins to dominate. If it’s wholeness you seek, you need heartedness also, and vice versa.
Note, however, the “more likely” and “might” in my examples. Be careful of men bearing virtuous circles! If there is a virtuous circle here, we must (as I have written before) ask what mechanisms sustain it. That’s not delivered by wholehearted on its own as described here, but we do have that covered. Keeping wholehearted doing what it does best, representing an ideal to pursue:
In Leading with Outcomes: Foundation, we begin by exploring what it means to lead in a wholehearted organisation (experience shows it to be a helpful way to think about leading in transforming organisations more generally)
But today’s exercise: if you want your organisation to grow in wholeheartedness, which of its two sides most need your attention? Wholeness or heartedness? And when you do that, then what happens?
¹Further to that Lean inspiration, Philippe Guenet tells me that there are encouraging resonances with The Flow System (Brian Rivera, John W. Turner, and Nigel Thurlow). I haven’t read that yet, but now I think about it, I’m not surprised. It’s on my list.
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.
For two Leading with Outcomes modules, the forthcoming Adaptive Organisation module and the next iteration of Leading with Outcomes: Foundation, I’ve been revisiting the wholehearted organisation, the one that defines Agendashift’s mission.
A wholehearted organisation is not a perfect organisation, but a transforming one:
An organisation characterised by the instinct to engage openly and authentically on its challenges, imbalances, and contradictions
An organisation committed to participation as both a catalyst for innovation and the path to integration and wholeness
An organisation that through the conversation, creativity, and leadership of those closest to the action renews itself purposefully from the inside
Honest about the need for change, inviting people into every dimension of that process (strategy, delivery, development), transformation energised and sustained from within.
Question:
When that’s working at its ideal best for us, what’s that like?
As you answer that question, consider the perspectives of different leadership roles before your own. What’s it like to be a sponsor of change in such an organisation, engaging openly and authentically, inviting participation? As a manager or team lead, what expectations are placed on you? What if your formal authority is limited – you’re some kind of practitioner or subject matter expert, for example?
Pulling all of those together, what does it mean to lead in such an organisation?
Back in your organisation, what stops you leading like that? What gets in the way? How might you do something about that?
18-26 April, Live online, 12pm-4pm EST Tuesdays and Wednesdays, April 18, 19, 25, 26 2023: Creating Generative Conversations by Leading with Outcomes – Part of the Cape Cod Institute’s BMI Series in dialogic organisation development
In the methods & frameworks world, I believe there is only one fight worth fighting, and it is not between frameworks. It is between those who would fit people and organisations to frameworks (branded or otherwise), and those who find that idea intolerable.
From a book I am taking the time to savour, here is acclaimed anthropologist and systems thinker Gregory Bateson, on the work of his former wife Dr Margaret Mead, another acclaimed anthropologist:
[If] we go on defining ends as separate from means and apply the social sciences as crudely instrumental means, using the recipes of science to manipulate people, we shall arrive at a totalitarian rather than a democratic system of life. The solution she offers is that we look for the “direction” and “values” implicit in the means, rather than looking ahead to a blueprinted goal and thinking of this goal as justifying or not justifying manipulated means. We have to find the value of a planned act implicit in and simultaneous with the act itself, not separate from it in the sense that the act would derive its value or from reference to a future end or goal.
Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972)
This passage resonated strongly with me. Translating from the social space to organisations, how, as leaders, do we make it easy for people to find meaning in work whilst still respecting their choice in the matter? And if it’s the job of leadership to take people to new places, can we make the process of change more meaningful, again without dictating what form that meaning should take for each individual concerned?
My biggest contribution in the frameworks space was a values model for the Kanban Method (2013). It explained why and how Kanban was meaningful to me, and it turned out to be helpful to other people too – to the extent that it become adopted as part of the method’s formal definition.
But I didn’t stop there. I was on a journey, and it wasn’t long after the publication of Kanban from the Inside (2014), that I found myself detaching myself from Kanban community. There was no big disagreement behind this move, and to be clear, I remain proud of that model and my first book. It was simply that there was a job to be done, and I felt that it would be easier done outside.
Bateson goes on:
This then is the type of discipline which has enabled Dr Mead to point out that a discrepancy – a basic and fundamental discrepancy – exists between “social engineering”, manipulating people in order to achieve a planned blueprint society, and the ideals of democracy, the “supreme worth and moral responsibility of the individual human person.” The two conflicting motifs have long been implicit in our culture, science has had instrumental leanings since before the Industrial Revolution, and emphasis on upon individual worth and responsibility is even older. The threat of conflict between the two motifs has only come recently, with increasing consciousness of, and emphasis upon, the democratic motif and simultaneous spread of the instrumental motif. … Are we to reserve the techniques and the right to manipulate people as the privilege of a few planning, goal-oriented, and power-hungry individuals, to whom the instrumentality of science makes a natural appeal? Now that we have the techniques, are we, in cold blood, going to treat people as things? Or what are we going to do with these techniques?
Again, parallels. In the methods & frameworks world, I believe there is only one fight worth fighting, and it is not between the frameworks. It is between those who would fit people and organisations to frameworks (branded or otherwise), and those who find that idea intolerable.
I am on that second side. My fight is against those so convinced of their rightness that they’re sure that the ends justify the manipulative or coercive means, or they lack the imagination, curiosity, or courage to consider that there might be alternative approaches to change. And there really are alternatives. Let no one tell you that change-by-imposition – legitimised the change management industry despite its repeated failures – is the only model. That wasn’t true even 20 years ago – Agilists take note – and it definitely isn’t true now.
That fight is what has energised me in the 8 years since my first book and I expect it to continue to sustain me for the rest of my career. It has taken me from method to values and then to outcomes, meaningfulness, wholeheartedness, leadership, and strategy. They’re integrated into a participatory approach to change and transformation, one that is more than capable of reconciling sophisticated thoughts on organisation design with utmost respect not only for the person but for the organisation that people create together.
It’s hard enough being a leader in a transforming organisation without your approach to change making things worse. If that could be you, check out the Agendashift Academy’s Leading with Outcomes self-paced training programme. And if your organisation is entering into a relationship with a process framework, make sure that the relationship is healthy one*.
Agendashift 