Tag: workshops

15-minute FOTO, latest v9 deck

Posted on by Mike Burrows

In the latest v9 deck for our Clean Language-inspired coaching game 15-minute FOTO, I’ve done a better job of integrating its Lite and Classic formats, reflecting how I’ve been facilitating both over recent weeks.

The word ‘formats’ is a big part of the change; after extracting what differs between the two and tidying up a bit, I’ve been able to combine the two sets of slides and remove the duplication. A refactoring!

So what is the same? Objectives, rules, and tips, two of each:

Overall objectives:

  1. To grow a list of outcomes, as many as you can in the time allowed
  2. Familiarisation with a curated subset of Clean Language questions

Rules:

  1. With an obstacle in play, ask only questions from the cue card
  2. For the placeholder X’s, use words captured previously, verbatim – your initial obstacles, responses, or fragments thereof

Tips:

  1. Be generous in the outcomes you accept – if it sounds like it might be an outcome, write it down
  2. If a minute passes without an outcome being captured, something is wrong  – fishing for solutions, digging into obstacles, meta conversations

To give a little emphasis to that last tip: the “no wrong answers” principle applies, but mind your intent in your questioning. In this game, fishing for solutions and digging deep into obstacles are to be avoided.

The Lite and Classic formats, online and offline

In several workshops – notably Leading with Outcomes, Deep Dive (November!), Wholehearted:OKR, and Core –  we play the game twice, and in this order:

  1. Lite format:  Exploratory familiarisation in an inclusive, minimally-structured table group exercise
  2. Classic format: Structured exercise, rotating the roles of client, coach, scribe, observer in rounds of 3-5 minutes

Both formats work both offline (in room) and online. Some tips:

  • Offline (in room): Always give everyone their own printed cue card (A5 size works well) and never show the full set of questions on screen.
  • Online, and especially if you’re running multiple breakout rooms, everyone will need online access to everything they might need. I use a Google Doc workbook per breakout room; partners have access to my master copies for each online workshop.

Some slides in the deck apply to one format &/or medium only. Hide those you don’t need.

The debrief

For both formats, the post-exercise debrief is the same. We start with what worked well:

  • When the outcomes are flowing well and you’re the client – answering the questions – what’s that like?
  • When the outcomes are flowing well and you’re the  – asking the questions – what’s that like?
  • When the outcomes are flowing well and you’re the scribe or an observer – watching and listening to the conversation from the outside – what’s that like? And what do you notice?

15-minute FOTO debrief slide

Afterwards: What went less well? What was difficult? Any other observations?

Customisation

15-minute FOTO is released under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA licence and customisations, adaptations, translations etc are warmly encouraged. The deck includes some notes on how to do that and remain in compliance with the licence, thereby encouraging others to experiment and contribute too.

More…

Check out the 15-minute FOTO page, agendashift.com/15-minute-foto, where you’ll find:

  • A video
  • How to obtain the materials
  • Facilitation tips

Upcoming events

Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model
Links: Home | About | Our mission: Wholehearted | Become an Agendashift partner | Assessments | Books | Resources | Events | Contact | Mike | Subscribe
Workshops: Transformation strategy | Transformation strategy | Short training
Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter

0

The quality that now has a name

Posted on by Mike Burrows

The term quality without a name comes from a favourite book of mine, Christopher Alexander’s The Timeless Way of Building [1]. I discovered only today in my research for this article that 20 years after writing that wonderful book he did in fact give this intriguing thing a name: wholeness [2].

My ignorance aside, that’s almost spooky! Wholehearted is the concept in my book Right to Left [3] that was directly inspired by Alexander. It was quickly embraced by the Agendashift community, and later it gave its name to our mission statement [4].

What prompted today’s post was the realisation that repeatedly, people have cited wholehearted as the thing that attracted them to Agendashift. Fascinatingly, many of them were members of the community even before wholehearted was a thing! In other words, it seems to give a name to something that people somehow perceived already.

I’m working now on the 2nd edition of the Agendashift book [5] and it affords me a valuable opportunity say more about wholehearted than I could at the time of Right to Left. I am determined however not to over-specify it. Much of its power comes from the way that it resonates with different people in different ways, and while that’s happening, it’s a source of both creativity and energy. I make a point therefore of starting not with a definition, but with the word itself and what it tends to evoke.

As written here previously [6], it evokes two clusters of qualities:

  1. Engagement, commitment, and purposefulness
  2. Alignment, integration, integrity, and wholeness

(And yes, that’s Alexander’s wholeness again.)

Beyond that almost gut reaction, it’s fair to ask what it means to me personally, and in more concrete and perhaps practical terms. Inevitably, I relate it to things that interest, influence, and motivate me:

  1. Generativity – generative conversations [7], generative patterns [8] and so on, energisers of emergent and adaptive thinking and the focus of much that is exciting in modern organisation development
  2. Viability – the science of how organisations (at every level) maintain their independence and integrity, explaining much about their vulnerabilities and dysfunctions also
  3. Outcome-orientation ­– ends before means, outcomes before solutions – both as a deliberate stance, and as demonstrated in Right to Left, a way to understand and integrate – a way to approach Lean, Agile, and Lean-Agile for example

Across all three of those: purpose, participation, and pluralism, making it all very human when done well.

The later chapters of the significantly updated Agendashift will put a little flesh on those bones, enough to make it practical in a non-prescriptive way, prescription bringing only contradiction in a book that describes an engagement model [9]. Wholehearted meanwhile is not a process or a framework. It’s barely even a model, and I’m happy to keep it that way!

References

[1] The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander, (OUP USA, 1980)
[2] Quality Without a Name (wiki.c2.com)
[3] Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile, Mike Burrows  (New Generation Publishing, 2019; audiobook 2020)
[4] Our mission: Wholehearted (agendashift.com)
[5] Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation, Mike Burrows  (New Generation Publishing, 2018)
[6] Revisiting ‘wholehearted’ (blog.agendashift.com)
[7] See for example our Clean Language-inspired coaching game, 15-minute FOTO (agendashift.com)
[8] Agendashift’s Generative Patterns (agendashift.com)
[9] Engagement model (agendashift.com)

Upcoming events

Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model
Links: Home | About | Our mission: Wholehearted | Become an Agendashift partner | Assessments | Books | Resources | Events | Contact | Mike | Subscribe
Workshops: Transformation strategy | Transformation strategy | Short training
Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter

Wholehearted
0

Good obstacle, bad obstacle

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Some important diary updates since last month’s end-of-month roundup:

  • Free webinar: Good obstacle, bad obstacle (EMEA)
  • Agendashift Deep Dive workshop (EMEA)
  • 5 hours for the price of 4 at the next Leading with Outcomes workshop (Americas)

Free webinar: Good obstacle, bad obstacle

If, as the old saying goes, “what stands in the way becomes the way”, it pays to choose the right obstacles! And we’ve found it to be true: with agreement on outcomes as the most powerful basis for change that we know, it’s important to start with obstacles that are real, relevant, and that don’t constrain solutions unduly.

Book your place here:

It will be recorded, but if I sense enough demand to run this for other timezones I will add future dates in due course.

Agendashift Deep Dive workshop (EMEA)

By the power of Zoom we last held our Deep Dive workshop – our flagship – for the Americas; it returns to the EMEA timezone in November. Details here:

Although scheduled for EMEA it will be early enough in the day for some folks from APAC to attend. Ping me for discounts based on country, non-profit, educational, government, etc. Also bulk discounts – I’ve had enquiries already!

5 hours for the price of 4

As of the next Leading with Outcomes workshop, it’s now two sessions of 2½ hours each. It was already in the calendar as two sessions  of 2 hours each, so it’s now 5 hours for the price of 4! More here:

And a big thank you to the healthy quorum of participants already booked onto this workshop for kindly agreeing to the change.

Upcoming workshops

The full list, the next one as soon as next week:

workshop 2x1

Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model
Links: Home | About | Our mission: Wholehearted | Become an Agendashift partner | Assessments | Books | Resources | Events | Contact | Mike | Subscribe
Workshops: Transformation strategy | Transformation strategy | Short training
Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter

0

Agendashift roundup, August 2020

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Here in the UK we have a bank holiday on Monday, so I’m getting this out before the weekend. Long or short, have a great one!

In this edition: What I really think about Scrum; Short workshops restart September 8th; Book-related updates; Upcoming workshops; Top posts

What I really think about Scrum

Within 24 hours of publication this was already my #1 post for the year. That means you’ve probably read it already, but in case you missed it:

This one set it up:

Short workshops restart September 8th

The title kinda says it all and they’re listed later in this post, but here I lay out options in terms of timezones and so on:

Also, and as per Slack, I’m looking at putting on the next 8-session Deep Dive in early November, ostensibly for Europe but early enough in the day for folks from much of APAC to join. Watch out for announcements and ping me if you want to influence my choice of dates!

Book-related updates

I’ve assembled a review team for the 2nd edition of Agendashift and I’m about to send out a first draft of chapter 1, Discovery. As I work on the book, I’m taking the opportunity to tighten up various bits of the materials. A couple of examples here:

It’s taking several weeks per chapter, so don’t hold your breath. Got to say though that I’m super happy with how it’s shaping up – developments such as the patterns, wholehearted, and its positioning as an engagement model and so on helping immensely.

Upcoming workshops

workshop 2x1

Top posts

Recent:

  1. What I really think about Scrum
  2. My inverse square law of framework scaling
  3. #2MBM: Meaning before Metric, Measure before Method (July)
  4. Short workshops restart September 8th
  5. True North, tweaked

Classic:

  1. What I really think about SAFe (October 2019)
  2. ‘Right to Left’ works for Scrum too (July 2018)
  3. Engagement: more than a two-way street (September 2018)
  4. I’m really enjoying Challenge Mapping (June)
  5. What kind of Organisational Development (OD)? (And a book recommendation) (May 2019)

Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model
Links: Home | About | Our mission: Wholehearted | Become an Agendashift partner | Assessments | Books | Resources | Events | Contact | Mike | Subscribe
Workshops: Transformation strategy | Transformation strategy | Short training
Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter

0

Short workshops restart September 8th

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Coming to a timezone near you, the short Agendashift workshops restart after the summer break in less than 3 weeks, and still at lockdown prices!

To help you make sense of what’s on the calendar (below):

  • Take whichever appeals to you in whichever order, but the most natural sequence goes as follows:
    • Leading with outcomes (aka the IdOO! workshop), 2 sessions
    • Strategic mapping with outcomes, 1 session
    • Probe! Stories, hypotheses, challenges, and experiments, 1 session
  • “By the book” that’s Discovery & Exploration (together), Mapping, and Elaboration. If you’re wondering what happened to Operation, there’s more in the longer Deep Dive and Wholehearted:OKR workshops (more on those in a moment) and an outside-in service delivery review workshop is available privately (ping me for details).
  • The APAC workshop begins 7am UK time, 8am CEST – afternoon/evening for most of APAC and open to folks from EMEA if you don’t mind an early start
  • Likewise, the Americas workshop begins at 16:00 UK time, which is 11:00 EDT
  • “EMEA” means daytime UK; start times vary
  • All sessions 2 hours with a short break around the 1-hour mark

In recent weeks we’ve done the Agendashift Deep Dive and and Wholehearted:OKR as solid 2-day workshops for Europe and Deep Dive as 8 sessions over 4 days for the Americas. Anyone interested in either of those workshops in the more online-friendly 8-session format for Europe or APAC please get in touch.

Upcoming workshops

workshop 2x1

Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model
Links: Home | About | Our mission: Wholehearted | Become an Agendashift partner | Assessments | Books | Resources | Events | Contact | Mike | Subscribe
Workshops: Transformation strategy | Transformation strategy | Short training
Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter

3

Yes IdOO! Leading with Outcomes

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Leading with Outcomes – aka the IdOO! workshop – is the new name for the short (2-session) training workshop Learning the Language of Outcomes.

Why Leading with Outcomes? It can be understood two ways, and both apply here:

  1. Putting outcomes before solutions, being outcome-oriented
  2. The language of outcomes as an essential leadership discipline

Any why IdOO!? That’s a reference to the IdOO pattern, so good we use it twice!

idoo-2020-03-25

Whatever your role, if you’re in the business of encouraging innovation, change, and transformation – helping people engage meaningfully in change-related work – then this workshop is for you.  Among its sources and inspirations are Clean Language, Solutions Focus, Challenge Mapping, Lean, and Agile. The Agendashift delivery assessment is included in the second session.

I’m giving this workshop twice in September:

But you don’t have to wait that long!  Julia Wester does it in August (whether that’s with the old branding or the new is to be confirmed):

The single-session Mapping and Probe! workshops complement the IdOO! workshop and each other:

Agendashift™, the wholehearted engagement model
Links: Home | About | Our mission: Wholehearted | Become an Agendashift partner | Assessments | Books | Resources | Events | Contact | Mike | Subscribe
Workshops: Transformation strategy | Transformation strategy | Short training
Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter

0

I’m really enjoying Challenge Mapping

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Over the past few weeks I’ve taken every opportunity to play with Challenge Mapping and I’m really enjoying it. I even sneaked it into my ‘Outcomes all the way down’ webinar appearance the other week!

For the uninitiated (and also for the seemingly many who have seen it without knowing it by name), it’s a great way to generate those How might we…? (HMW) questions often associated now with the Design Sprint movement. Challenge Mapping and HMW have a much longer history than that however, and I’ve included some references in the page for the Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes (IdOO) pattern.

One of Challenge Mapping’s pioneers was Min Basadur, and here from him is a tweet showing some example output:

How Challenge Mapping works, very briefly: From an initial, anchoring challenge – something we’d like to achieve or solve – variations on these two questions:

  1. Why is this important?
  2. What’s stopping us? 

Answers can be re-framed in HMW form as required.

Visually, the Why and What questions respectively take us up and down. As well as that vertical axis – typically showing increasing levels of abstraction going up – “Why else..” and “What else…” allow for some sideways expansion also.

Try it! Here’s a little example suggested by my Challenge Mapping buddy Andreas Wittler:

  • Assuming for the purposes of this exercise that any legal barriers are now behind us, start by naming a key challenge (work-related or otherwise) around returning from lockdown.
  • Why is this important?
  • And perhaps: Why is that important?
  • What stops us?
  • Why is that important?
  • What else stops us?
  • etc
  • Note down your answers and after you have finished, try reframing them HMW-style

My first opportunity to experiment came about a few weeks ago thanks to our weekly Agendashift #community Zoom (named after the #community channel in the Agendashift Slack). In a hastily-arranged practice session with Andreas, we tried Challenge Mapping as a simpler, 2-question alternative to 15-minute FOTO, Agendashift’s Clean Language-inspired coaching game and our go-to tool for generating outcomes. We then trialled it as the opening exercise for a Strategic Mapping with Outcomes workshop.

It was a very interesting trial and let me say a big thank you to all my workshop participants! It borderline failed but with some great learning: it was more involved than I wanted for a kick-off exercise and it requires some extra work to generate outcomes, but still it does the job it was designed to do extremely well. We now use it not as a FOTO alternative (whew!) but either side of it in these two places:

  1. To explore the vicinity of an obstacle, adding some extra depth to the first O of the abovementioned IdOO pattern
  2. To refamiliarise ourselves with an outcome – IdOO’s second O – as we begin to action it – moving into ideation, solutionising etc

Its next outing comes as soon as this Thursday, where we’ll be using it for the second of those two purposes. The Probe! workshop is a short (2-hour), standalone version of the our longer workshops’ Elaboration, with some fun new material borrowed from Impact! and Wholehearted:OKR. Join us if you can!

What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Home | Store
Links: Home | Subscribe | Become an Agendashift partner | Events | Contact | Mike
Resources: Tools & Materials | Media | Books | Assessments
Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter

0

Outcomes all the way down

Posted on by Mike Burrows

“Outcomes all the way down” is an Agendashift catchphrase that my friends at SquirrelNorth (squirrelnorth.com) picked out as the title of a webinar we gave together last week. Here’s the recording:

Overview:

  1. (3:00) What Agendashift is – the wholehearted, outcome-oriented engagement model – unpacking those terms in reverse order
  2. (17:40) Me interviewing members of the SquirrelNorth team – Martin Aziz, Fernando Cuenca, James Steele, and Alexei Zheglov
    1. “What’s happening when you’re reaching the right customers, meeting their strategic needs?” (the beginning of the Outside-in Strategy Review as described in Right to Left, chapter 5)
    2. How they each respond to an Agendashift assessment prompt of their choice
  3. (48:15) What Agendashift provides – framework, tools, models, workshops (more on that last one in a moment)
  4. (55:30) Q&A

Parts 1 & 3 above follow a structure that’s easy enough to remember / follow and I did it without a slide deck. See the recent post Revisiting ‘wholehearted’ for a stepping stone to that structure; in the process of developing the talk (mostly in my head with a few sticky notes around my screen just in case) the Home and About pages went through a couple more iterations too.

The webinar is part of our preparations for an upcoming Deep Dive workshop. It’s timed for the Americas (SquirrelNorth are based in Canada) and scheduled in manageable chunks spread over 4 days:

It’s already well subscribed but at the time of writing there are still places available. We’d love to see you there!

Related:

Upcoming workshops

With yours truly unless otherwise indicated:

And for the latest, check the Agendashift events calendar.

Agendashift, the wholehearted engagement model
Links: Home | About | Our mission: Wholehearted | Become an Agendashift partner | Assessments | Books | Resources | Events | Contact | Mike | Subscribe
Workshops: Transformation strategy | Transformation strategy | Short training
Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter

0

Probe!

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Quick one…

The name “Stories, Hypotheses, and A3” was proving ironically unwieldy for a short training workshop. It now goes by the handle of the Probe! workshop; full title and details of its first outing on June 25th (EMEA-friendly timing) here:

That is all!

Related

experiment-a3-2020-04-18

Upcoming workshops

With yours truly unless otherwise indicated:

For some brief commentary:

And for the latest, check the Agendashift events calendar.

Agendashift, the wholehearted engagement model
Links: Home | About | Our mission: Wholehearted | Become an Agendashift partner | Assessments | Books | Resources | Events | Contact | Mike | Subscribe
Workshops: Transformation strategy | Transformation strategy | Short training
Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter

0

Workshops in June

Posted on by Mike Burrows

But first, some of what they said about this week’s 2-day Wholehearted:OKR workshop:

  • Loved the focus on outcomes
  • Insights on end-to-end strategy for Agile implementation
  • Learned how to design the process in practice
  • Great new facilitation exercises
  • Lots of new things to try
  • Strategy deployment for Agile ways of working
  • Highly interactive, great mix of presentation and activities

To our surprise, the majority of participants (albeit a self-selected and possibly unrepresentative group) would choose the 2-day online format again – that’s two full days online. We thought that the long-arranged Deep Dive workshop (June 8-9 below) would be last time we would offer this format but we may have to reconsider!

And so to June…

June 4th (2 hours from 10:00BST) Strategic Mapping with Outcomes

This standalone workshop is based on the string of three exercises from the Mapping session of the Deep Dive workshop. There are no prerequisites, but it’s one of two natural followups to the popular Learning the Language of Outcomes workshop. Also, if you’ve attended Agendashift workshops before January last year, it’s your chance to try Option Approach Mapping (the exercise formerly referred to as Reverse Wardley Mapping). No quadrants or clusters will be (ab)used in this workshop!

Limited spaces left.

June 8-9 (2 days, 09-00-17:00CET), Agendashift Deep Dive: Coaching and Leading Continuous transformation

They said a 2-day online workshop couldn’t be done, but (as demonstrated above) it can! We will of course be offering other online formats for our flagship workshop – 8 sessions over 4 days for example – but this way it is at least easy to schedule. Either way, it’s with new content designed especially for online.

For this one and the one below, the Agendashift Delivery Assessment is given as prework so you’d be advised to book at least a week in advance.

June 17 & 18 (Two 2-hour sessions from 16:00BST/11EST): Learning the Language of Outcomes

These are happening with increasing frequency, enough that we can put them on at different times to suit participants in different time zones. June’s will be for the Americas, here meaning that it will be late afternoon UK time – I won’t be checking passports!

June 25th (2 hours from 10:00BST): Stories, hypotheses, and A3

Another short standalone workshop and a natural followup to Learning the Language of outcomes.

This workshop is a standalone Elaboration session from the Core and Deep Dive workshops kicked off with a fun new exercise taken from the Impact! and Wholehearted:OKR workshops. As per Right to Left (of which the audiobook edition came out only last weekend), we move easily between stories of various kinds – including but not limited to user stories and job stories – and hypotheses, then develop them Agendashift-style with our Experiment A3.

Hope to see you at one (or more!) of these, and keep an eye on the events calendar for July and August, a couple of exciting things in store for Asia and the Americas.

agendashift-banner-2019-12-17
Links: Home | About | Our mission: Wholehearted | Become an Agendashift partner | Assessments | Books | Resources | Events | Contact | Mike | Subscribe
Workshops: Transformation strategy | Transformation strategy | Short training
Blog: Monthly roundups | Classic posts
Community: Slack | LinkedIn group | Twitter

 

0