Tag: workshops

Agendashift roundup, May 2022

Posted on by Mike Burrows

In this edition: June workshop; Academy Update; A fight worth fighting; New podcast interview; 15-minute FOTO version 12; Upcoming; Top posts

June workshop

Plenty of reasons to put this one first: It’s less than 3 weeks away, there’s a 10% discount on offer, and it’s my first public workshop in quite a while:

Academy update

For Agendashift Academy subscribers, the fifth and final chapter of Inside-out strategy: Fit for maximum impact was released last Friday and already we’ve issued the first certificate of completion for this self-paced training.

Currently live:

  • Leading with Outcomes: Foundation (do this one first)
  • Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact

In production, chapter 1 due for release in June, announcement to follow:

  • Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success

In development:

  • Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale

Not only are we on track for releasing the whole of the planned Leading with Outcomes curriculum this year, we have plans for some ‘bitesize’ content that we’ll be able to drip out on a weekly basis.

A reminder of our intended audience:

  1. Leaders in transforming organisations – at whatever level of experience and in whatever role
  2. Those that aspire to that – whether that’s aspiring to leadership or to be a leader in an organisation that’s transforming healthily
  3. Those who support the above

Check out our subscription plans for both businesses and individuals; both have monthly and yearly options. And talk to us if you might be interested in the trainer or facilitator programmes which we’ll be announcing soon.

A fight worth fighting

As featured on the Agendashift and Agendashift Academy homepages, the three strategies thing is brewing nicely. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means – all is explained in my latest article on InfoQ:

That’s pretty definitive, well worth the read if you want to understand where Agendashift is right now. And inspired by my current reading (Bateson):

Read both and the connection between the two will be obvious enough. The punchline to the second one:

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.

New podcast interview

Last month’s roundup went out early, and it missed a podcast interview that went out on the 30th. It was with Shahin Sheidaei of the Elevate Change podcast, and you can find it here and on the usual podcast platforms:

15-minute FOTO version 12

A small tweak to our Clean Language-inspired coaching game 15-minute FOTO, further emphasising the Host role:

Upcoming

Top posts

  1. 15-minute FOTO, version 12
  2. On values, meaningfulness, and change – parallels with Bateson and Mead
  3. You can’t deliver a task (August 2018)
  4. My favourite Clean Language question (January 2019)
  5. Big changes for the Agendashift Academy (April 2022)

What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
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Celebration-5W version 7

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Spot the difference:

The v7 deck of our context-capturing kickoff exercise Celebration-5W now has two sets of slides, one (left) with the What as “Key accomplishments, objectives, goals, your next breakthrough”, the other (right) with the newer “Your next big breakthrough and all that it makes possible”.

OK, if there are two variants, why not more?

Celebration-5W is actually pretty easy to change, even while you’re doing it! And it’s Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA); with appropriate attribution and under the same licence, you can even publish your version.

Some possible tweaks:

  • What: You’re celebrating the end of the project (not a variation I ever plan to try, but it’s easily done)
  • When: The earliest you dare celebrate the breakthrough upon which this upcoming period most depends (a good one for January, and I have done this one twice already this month)
  • Where: At which Prime Ministerial residence are you celebrating? Kidding, though I do say “have some fun with this one” – practicality isn’t the point here

What’s with the breakthough thing?

See Celebration-5W version 6, “your next big breakthrough” (September 2021).

Beyond that, I am actively exploring this kind of progression, which works as an extended kickoff or even a whole discovery workshop:

  1. Breakthrough – from Celebration-5W
  2. Adaptive challenge – the adaptive challenge that makes the breakthrough important
  3. Purpose – the purpose that makes the challenge meaningful and worth pursuing
  4. Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes – ie the IdOO (“I do”) pattern:
    1. envisioning a compelling future
    2. identifying what gets in the way of what we want
    3. looking beyond those to what’s better
  5. Organise the strategy* – from the preceding conversations, representing impactfully our understanding/expectation/theory of:
    1. what impacts what, and
    2. where to focus our efforts first

*Language not from the book but familiar if you’re participating in the private beta of Leading with Outcomes: Foundation. Think Mapping, OKR, Theory of Change, etc.

Compared to a typical Agendashift discovery workshop, stages 2 and 3 above replace Agendashift’s True North or similar generative image, minimising the amount of foreign material introduced and any biases that they may bring. True North is great – cathartic even – when you’re about to do something that’s mainly about internal experience and capability, but when you’re about to do some kind of outside-in strategy (say), it may set up the wrong expectations.

Inspiration: Gervase Bushe’s Generative Change Model, as featured in his book (highly recommended) The Dynamics of Generative Change (2020). You may remember that I reconciled this model with Agendashift in the 2nd edition of Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2021). Not only did I find a remarkable correspondence between the two, the thinking didn’t stop there.

Bottom line: Celebration-5W is a fun and highly reliable kickoff exercise. I never regret using it, and when I didn’t use it but could have done, that was usually a mistake. To make it even better, consider it as more than just a standalone exercise.

What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
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Not quite ready for the big reveal

Posted on by Mike Burrows

You wouldn’t necessarily know it from the blog, but we’ve been busy over the summer months. We’re not quite ready for the big reveal but I can say that it will bring some changes to our programme of public workshops. Unfortunately, it necessitates the rescheduling or withdrawal of events previously in the calendar, and in the interests of simplicity, we’ve done a complete clear-out. If you were about to make a booking, our apologies.

Some things don’t change: our self-paced online training Leading with Outcomes is still available. It will help you in the following areas:

  • Building shared understanding of context
  • Framing obstacles for maximum engagement
  • Holding meaningful conversations about outcomes
  • Approaching outcomes strategically

For leaders of all kinds – managers, business architects, coaches, consultants, facilitators, etc – there are some valuable skills there. And as the foundation for everything else the Agendashift Academy will offer its role remains secure, so don’t hesitate! Book here:

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

Welcome to Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model

Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model
Links: Home | About | Our mission: Wholehearted | Become an Agendashift partner | Assessments | Books | Resources | Media | Events | Contact | Mike | Subscribe
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Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation

Latest media and calendar updates

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Quick one – already some changes since last week’s roundup!

New on Agendashift’s media page, a followup interview with John Coleman:

With workshops, meetups & webinars, here’s how the events calendar looks for the next few weeks:

And always the self-paced option – time and pace convenient to you:

Hope to see you at at least one of those!

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

Welcome to Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model

Links: Home | About | Our mission: Wholehearted | Become an Agendashift partner | Assessments | Books | Resources | Media | Events | Contact | Mike | Subscribe
Workshops: Transformation strategy | Outside-in strategy | Short training
Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
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workshop 2x1

The IdOO pattern as leadership model

Posted on by Mike Burrows

The IdOO pattern (below) is integral to the first two chapters of the Agendashift 2nd edition (March 2021) and also to our Leading with Outcomes and Coaching with Outcomes training (self-paced and interactive workshop respectively). It hardly seems possible that the pattern is only a year old, but this post from April last year really does seem to be my first mention of it.

agendashift-framework-overview-16x10-2020-12-07-idoo

So what is it? Well, it’s at least four things in one, demonstrating its considerable “stretchiness” in terms of the timescales involved:

  • It’s a leadership routine – three or four quick questions, some quick answers, taking just moments
  • It’s a coaching pattern – a higher-level structure to wrap around your favourite coaching tools to bring some strategic perspective – less emphasis on getting to the next commitment, more on the strategic landscape in which options will be developed
  • For facilitators, it’s the overall arc for a string of workshop exercises, whether that’s an hour’s worth or a day’s
  • For consultants, it’s a way to frame a client engagement – as helping them understand where they’d like to get to, what’s in the way of that, and what they might achieve along the way

When taken slowly enough it’s fractal: there may be obstacles in the way of any outcome, and there is always the opportunity to bootstrap the process and identify new ideals at different levels of detail.

This post relates most closely to the first of those uses, IdOO as leadership routine. Here is the IdOO mnemonic not as the structure of a conversation but as an easily-remembered leadership model:

  • Ideal – sustaining a sense of overall direction, connecting people to purpose, helping people find meaning in their work
  • Obstacles – building trust and empathy by recognising the obstacles that people face – their everyday frustrations, the “struggling moments” of actual and potential customers – everything that stands in the way of performance and success; real, relevant, and representative problems that better-designed organisations or products would alleviate
  • Outcomes – keeping at the forefront the goals around which work is organised and to which streams of work are aligned; remembering to celebrate their achievement and to focus the associated learning (both organisational and individual) to the maximum

It’s not a million miles away from my 3-point summary of Servant Leadership. Here in the last chapter of Right to Left I’m channeling Greenleaf, noting what I describe as his “masterful systems thinking”:

  1. The first responsibility of the Servant Leader is to help others to be successful – removing impediments, ensuring that basic needs are met
  2. For people to remain engaged, the Servant Leader must help others find autonomy and meaning in their work, together discovering, developing, and pursuing the organisation’s values, mission, and purpose in society
  3. For this process of transformation to be sustained indefinitely, Servant Leaders must help develop Servant Leadership in others

Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile, Mike Burrows (2019, audiobook 2020)

I wouldn’t for a moment suggest that IdOO supersedes any of that (IdOO only scratches the surface of point 3, for example), but it could be a good starting point if you find Servant Leadership hard to grapple with.

Sources

I’ve mentioned my Agendashift (2021) and Right to Left (2019) already; let me mention some other books I’ve referenced in one or both of those:

  • Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness, Robert K. Greenleaf (Paulist Press, 25th Anniversary edition, 2002) – decades ahead of its time and still an inspiration; I re-read it every few years
  • The Serving Leader: Five powerful actions to transform your team, business, and community, Kenneth R. Jennings & John Stahl-Wert (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2nd edition, 2016) – a recent take on servant leadership and a tweak on the language that some will welcome; I’m grateful to Agendashift partner and Servant Leadership champion Angie Main for finding that one
  • Host: Six new roles of engagement, Mark McKergow & Helen Bailey (Solutions Books, 2014) – a change of metaphor and one that brings new insights
  • Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders, L. David Marquet (Portfolio, 2013) – another great book all round; helpful advice here with regard both to obstacles (when and when not to take them away, for example) and to the learning and development aspects of the model

Not referenced but worthy additions to that list:

  • Speed of Trust: The One Thing that Changes Everything, Stephen M.R. Covey (Free Press, 2006)
  • Demand-side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress, Bob Moesta (Lioncrest Publishing, 2020)

I’m currently listening to the audiobook of Covey’s Speed of Trust, good stuff so far. Bob Moesta’s book fits here better than you might guess from the title; it’s a great book on Jobs to be Done, and it’s my source for the the phrase “struggling moments”.

IdOO at the the conferences

Don’t forget the Agendashift 2021 conference on May 18th – not long now! The IdOO pattern will certainly get a mention in my opening introduction (not keynote – that honour goes to Pia-Mia Thorén). And I’m thrilled that Gervase Bushe will be speaking on leadership in the closing keynote. He is the author or co-author of two of the 2nd edition’s key references, The Dynamics of Generative Change and Dialogic Organisation Development.  

Possibly a mention of IdOO in one form or another in my LAG21 talk on the 25th, trust-building being a key element of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (see the last couple of chapters of the Agendashift 2nd edition). Agendashift Academy is proud to sponsor that conference too.

Upcoming

Listed now on the Agendashift Academy’s Store page are our scheduled workshops:

And always now the self-paced option:

Selected appearances by Agendashift partners, me where unspecified:

Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model
Links: Home | About | Our mission: Wholehearted | Become an Agendashift partner | Assessments | Books | Resources | Media | Events | Contact | Mike | Subscribe
Workshops: Transformation strategy | Outside-in strategy | Short training
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Agendashift roundup, April 2021

Posted on by Mike Burrows

In this edition: Leading with Outcomes launch offer; Agendashift 2021; LAG21; Featureban milestone; Upcoming; Top posts

Leading with Outcomes launch offer

academy-sharing

Our new (and first ever) self-paced training Leading with Outcomes is off to a flying start – a pleasing number of signups and excellent feedback so far. Our launch offer expires April 30th (tomorrow) so get in there quickly! Use coupon code LEADING-WITH-OUTCOMES-20 and join for €71.20 instead of €89. Our next self-paced offering (strategy-related) will have LwO as a prerequisite, so grab it now.

Agendashift 2021

Agendashift 2021 May 18th Page Image

Not long either to the Agendashift 2021 conference on May 18th. The programme is nearly complete, and already a great lineup, including:

  • Keynote speakers Pia-Maria Thorén (Agile People, contributor of the Agendashift 2nd edition’s foreword) and Professor Gervase Bushe (author or co-author of two of the 2nd edition’s most important references)
  • Daniel Mezick (Open Leadership Network, OpenSpace Agility), contributor of the 1st edition’s foreword which contained the gift of the term engagement model, two words that describe Agendashift so well
  • Caitlin Walker (Clean Language, Systemic Modelling), author of another key reference and a prime example of the generosity and support offered by the Clean Language community
  • Evan Leybourn (Business Agility Institute), who shares in our pursuit of better organisations
  • Karl Scotland, Dragan Jojic, and Kjell Tore Guttormsen – all of whom instrumental in Agendashift’s development
  • Andrew Jones, whose Agile Listening Project is powered by Agendashift

I could go on, and watch out for further announcements on speakers and sponsors! A massive thank you meanwhile to the organising team, Andrew Jones, Kjell Tore Guttormsen, Karl Scotland, and Russ Lewis.

LAG21

We’re also sponsoring another conference: Lean Agile Global 2021, organised by Agendashift partners Jose Casal & JP Bayley and their team. It takes not long after Agendashift 2021 on the 24th and 25th, and I’m a speaker on the 25th with first outing for a brand new talk based on the closing chapters of the 2nd edition. So sign up and join me for Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation – business agility at every scale.

If you’re very quick, you can join me also this evening (UK time) for a pre-conference meetup:

Featureban milestone

Via the #featureban-changeban channel on Slack, Kaiten founder and CEO Slava Tsyrulnik tells us that their online version of my Kanban simulation game Featureban has reached the impressive milestone of 5,000 games played. Moreover, the community has now contributed six language translations in addition to their two. Congratulations!

Upcoming

Listed now on the Academy’s Store page are our scheduled workshops, the next one only days away:

And always now the self-paced option: Leading with Outcomes.

Top posts

  1. Why the Agendashift 2nd edition? What happened?
  2. Announcing 1) our first self-paced training Leading with Outcomes (LwO) and 2) the Agendashift Academy
  3. What’s in a name? Coaching with Outcomes (CwO)
  4. Join us on May 18th for Agendashift 2021, our inaugural conference
  5. If Agendashift is the answer, what’s the question?

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Announcing 1) our first self-paced training Leading with Outcomes (LwO) and 2) the Agendashift Academy

Posted on by Mike Burrows

academy-sharing

Last week’s little announcement (a rename) paves the way for today’s, big enough that I’ll do it two parts:

  1. Leading with Outcomes (LwO) is our first self-paced training offering, and we’re very excited about it, seeing it as the foundation module for a powerful blend of self-paced and real-time/interactive/experiential learning. And it won’t be the last such module – recognising that some of the new material introduced in the Agendashift 2nd edition is well suited to that medium. We anticipate that by the end of the year it will be possible to do a “hybrid” Deep Dive equivalent over an extended period and multiple modules, both self-paced and interactive.
  2. Agendashift Academy (academy.agendashift.com) is both our new platform for self-paced training and the hub for our training workshops and other public events. It has been several months in the making, a collaboration with Agendashift partner Kjell Tore Guttormsen and Humanize, the Norway-based company of which he is a principal. My gratitude and respect for them is enormous.

The Academy has been hiding in plain sight for a while – among other things it hosts the landing page for our May 18th conference. Well done if you guessed what we were up to! Longer term it gives us a new platform for different kinds of participation: people from a range of backgrounds self-funding their (quite affordable) self-development; the ecosystem of Agendashift partners, their firms, and their clients; corporates using Agendashift in their learning & development programmes.

Before we go any further, a launch offer:

Listed now on the Academy’s Store page are our scheduled workshops, the next one only days away:

Coaching with Outcomes (April and July, for EMEA and APAC – hurry if you want to do the EMEA one) is the interactive version of Leading with Outcomes. They’re a great pairing, LwO doing the groundwork and CwO focussing on the experience, facilitation options, and so on. CwO will evolve this year to acknowledge its self-paced cousin but LwO is not yet a prerequisite. That will change.

Strategic Mapping with Outcomes (also soon – early May for EMEA) is our most popular single-session workshop. It is included in the Deep Dive and is a natural follow-on to CwO and LwO.

The Agendashift Deep Dive (June, Americas) still goes strong, and my feeling is that there will always be a place for something as intensive as this. Some however will prefer the hybrid model and take its equivalent over a period of months. And they’re not mutually exclusive – not so crazy when you know that there are people out there who have done multiple Deep Dives!

You may be relieved to hear that this completes the announcements and followups saved up pending the launch of the 2nd edition of the book. So to finish, let me bring them all together:

Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model
Links: Home | About | Our mission: Wholehearted | Become an Agendashift partner | Assessments | Books | Resources | Media | Events | Contact | Mike | Subscribe
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What’s in a name? Coaching with Outcomes (CwO)

Posted on by Mike Burrows

April seems to be for us a month of post book launch announcements. Today’s is smaller than the others but it creates some space for another next week.

A little over a year ago – mid lockdown #1 – we launched Agendashift online: Leading with Outcomes (LwO), a short online workshop of 2 sessions of 2 hours. Now it’s 2 sessions of 2½ but the idea stands: not just to learn about Celebration-5W, Good Obstacle / Bad Obstacle, 15-minute FOTO, the assessment tools, and the rest, but to experience them with other people and to understand how these and similar exercises can be facilitated online.

Today that workshop is renamed to Agendashift interactive: Coaching with Outcomes (CwO). The content remains the same but we need the name Leading with Outcomes for a related product that we’ll announce next week. I’ve left a few clues over the weeks already but watch this space!

We have two Coaching with Outcomes workshops in the calendar currently:

Should you attend this workshop? Agile Uprising’s Mike and Jay certainly think you should (agileuprising.libsyn.com)!

And notice that the list of other upcoming events has exploded. Not just workshops, there’s a sudden flurry of upcoming appearances – no less than four next week, beginning on Monday with my first Clubhouse session. And two conferences in May: our own Agendashift 2021 and then Lean Agile Global 2021 which we are proud to sponsor.

Hope to see you at at least one of these!

 

workshop 2x1

 

Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model
Links: Home | About | Our mission: Wholehearted | Become an Agendashift partner | Assessments | Books | Resources | Media | Events | Contact | Mike | Subscribe
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Leading with Outcomes: a cheat sheet

Posted on by Mike Burrows

To whet the appetite, a cheat sheet for:

Yes, you read that right: March 2021. Publication imminent!

Go to agendashift.com/leading-with-outcomes-cheat-sheet or click on the image below for download information, references, etc. It’s Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA); by subscribing you’ll get not just the PDF but the original .pptx file too – translations and other adaptations welcome. Enjoy!

leading-with-outcomes-cheat-sheet-2021-03-14-v1

What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Home | Store
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The Outside-in Service Delivery Review (OI-SDR)

Posted on by Mike Burrows

oi-sdr-slide-2020-11-07

It’s something of a work in progress but I have given the Outside-in Service Delivery Review (OI-SDR) its own page now, agendashift.com/oi-sdr, its content Creative Commons (CC-BY-SA). It’s long overdue – the OI-SDR was introduced in the 1st edition of Agendashift (2018), described more fully (with a case study) in chapter 5 of the  Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020) and it will be revisited big time in the Agendashift 2nd edition due early 2021.

I don’t want to give too much away just yet but you can expect the second edition to be a lot stronger on questions of organisation, leadership, and (self-)governance than the first, and the OI-SDR is a key part of that (moreso than might be obvious at first glance). Meanwhile, there’s plenty in Right to Left if you haven’t already read that or listened to it, and the Deep Dive workshop – see Upcoming workshops below.

Related

Upcoming workshops

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

Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model
Links: Home | About | Our mission: Wholehearted | Become an Agendashift partner | Assessments | Books | Resources | Media | Events | Contact | Mike | Subscribe
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Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
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