Tag: leadership

What’s in store for 2024

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Welcome to 2024! Happy New Year!

2024 has already started of course, and with the valued help of over 20 contributors I iterated several times over the holiday period on this article posted on the blog here yesterday:

Also new is a section on the Agendashift Academy site for facilitated Leading with Outcomes workshops:

In the calendar (see Upcoming events below):

Regarding that last one, see Upcoming events below re discounts.

In the pipeline:

Most pressing is the re-recording of the Inside-out and Outside-in strategy modules. Like the Adaptive Organisation module, Inside-out will be split into two, likely titles:

  • Inside-out Strategy (I): On the same page, with purpose
  • Inside-out Strategy (II): Fit for maximum impact (keeping the title of the original one-part module)

Once Inside-out and Outside-in are on the new learning management system there will be significant opportunity for rationalisation. If you’re not already on board there, check these out:

  1. Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
  2. Adaptive Organisation, two parts:

Or get in touch about holding a Leading in a Transforming Organisation training workshop near you; this covers Foundation and Adaptive Organisation, with all the benefits of an in-person experience, and some unique features too. I’m not asking anyone to take responsibility for the event (though that can be arranged); just your interest would be good to know.

Upcoming events

Recent changes:

  • Leading in a Transforming Organisation (London) is brought forward a week to 25-27 June
  • Added Leading in Transforming Organisation (Southampton), October 8-10
  • Webinars and experience/practise sessions taking a break now until the autumn

May

June

October

*For TTT/F and Leading in a Transforming Organisation, ping me for coupon codes if any of the following apply:

  • Employees in public sector, education, and non-profit organisations get 40% off, as do authorised trainers and facilitators
  • There are subscription-specific discounts for Agendashift Academy subscribers
  • Members of the old partner programme get 30% off
  • Past participants of Leading in a Transforming Organisation can re-attend with 60% off (75% if you work for a public sector, education, or non-profit organisation)
  • Past TTT/F participants can re-attend online for free

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:

  1. Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
  2. Inside-out Strategy (I): On the same page, with purpose
  3. Inside-out Strategy (II): Fit for maximum impact
  4. Part I: Business agility at every scale
  5. Part II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales
  6. Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success

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. Our next TTT/F training takes place in May (online).

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Trainer and Facilitator Programmes | Store

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.

Confirming some changes to Leading with Outcomes

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Last week’s Leading with Outcomes trainer/facilitator Zoom [1] confirmed some changes. The first two relate to two of our favourite exercises:

  1. The exercise Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle has been renamed Obstacles Fast and Slow (yes, both names are indeed references to books). As time passes, the more we have learned to appreciate this exercise, and the latest slideware reflects its importance.
  2. The workshop and training decks now explicitly support 15-minute FOTO’s cheat mode.

In both cases, watch out for releases in the coming weeks of standalone versions of these tools. In relation to Obstacles Fast and Slow, the March edition of our monthly webinar series will be devoted to it, with the goal of replacing the old Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle video and related material.

The rest of this post relates to the agenda of February’s Leading with Outcomes Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F), which comes in four half-day sessions – Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons UK time, beginning on Tuesday, February 6th, finishing Wednesday 14th.

The old TTT/F agenda:

  1. Leading with Outcomes: Foundation, chapters 1 & 2 (of 3) – introducing and applying the IdOO (“I do”) pattern, Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes
  2. The Leading with Outcomes Discovery Workshop – a high-level application of the IdOO pattern, covering the classic exercises Celebration-5W, True North, Obstacles Fast and Slow, 15-minute FOTO, and Plan on a Page
  3. The Leading with Outcomes Assessment Debrief Workshop – the assessment, survey debrief, and Areas of Opportunity, then for a second time Obstacles Fast and Slow and 15-minute FOTO (both of those well worth the repeat), and finishing at Option Relationship Mapping, leaving the ideation part to session 4
  4. Beyond inside-out strategy – Leading with Outcomes: Foundation chapter 3, which covers the ideation part of the Assessment Debrief workshop left over from the previous session, followed by overviews of the Outside-in and Adaptive Organisation parts of the Leading with Outcomes curriculum and their related workshop offerings

That structure has worked well enough, but session 4 can feel a bit of mixed bag. The new agenda brings forward some of that content, achieved by seeing sessions 2 and 3 less exclusively in terms of inside-out strategy and more as representing two families of workshops:

  1. Leading with Outcomes: Foundation, chapters 1 & 2 (of 3) – as before
  2. Discovery-level workshops – not only the classic Leading with Outcomes Discovery Workshop and variations thereof, but the Outside-in Strategy Review (OI-SR), understood here as building on Discovery’s basic structure
  3. Assessment-based workshops – the generic survey debrief and other workshops, some of which incorporate additional training content, for example a Reverse STATIK workshop [2] and the Adaptive Organisation Workshop [3]
  4. Moving into action – completing (as before) Leading with Outcomes: Foundation chapter 3, then delving deeper into Adaptive Organisation, possibly including (this is under development) a look at narrative enquiry

Discovery workshops can now be seen as choosing from the following:

Assessment-based workshops similarly:

Details vary, but the IdOO and Meaning, Measure, Method patterns are shared, the former pattern bracketed by establishing context and organising the strategy. The new TTT/F structure should build the confidence not only to make use of these workshop designs, but to innovate new ones.

Not that TTT/F is only about workshops – doing this under the Leading with Outcomes banner means a strong emphasis on leadership development, for which the Foundation training module sets the tone very effectively. Furthermore, I’ll be re-recording the Inside-out and Outside-in training modules in the new year, and to the extent possible within the time available, sessions 2 & 3 will use those latest materials.

You can book your place at the February TTT/F here. Ping me for coupon codes if any of the following apply:

  • Past TTT/F participants can join again for free (quite a popular option)
  • Leading in a Transforming Organisation participants get 60% off
  • Employees in public sector, education, and non-profit organisations get 40% off
  • Members of the old partner programme get 30% off
  • Last but not least, Agendashift Academy subscribers get subscription-specific discounts also

For an overview of Leading with Outcomes in general and the Trainer / Facilitator programmes specifically, the store page is a good place to start.

Notes

[1] I haven’t published the recording and notes but they’re available on request. Intended audience: trainers, facilitators, members of the old partner programme, participants in a past TTT/F or Leading in a Transforming Organisation, or anyone curious about any of these

[2] The Reverse STATIK workshop is how I like to introduce Kanban. It is not officially part of Leading with Outcomes but that might change. The point here is that much of it can be recreated from parts already available to Leading with Outcomes trainers and facilitators.

[3] About the new 1-day Adaptive Organisation workshop, introductory pricing remains available if you’d like to book one for your organisation. In-person very strongly preferred, which means UK and European destinations easily reachable from Manchester unless a longer trip can be made worthwhile. That’s less of an issue for the 3-day Leading in a Transforming Organisation – I have done that as far away as Australia, albeit with a conference keynote and a family visit also!

Upcoming events

Recent changes:

  • Leading in a Transforming Organisation (London) is brought forward a week to 25-27 June
  • Added Leading in Transforming Organisation (Southampton), October 8-10
  • Webinars and experience/practise sessions taking a break now until the autumn

May

June

October

*For TTT/F and Leading in a Transforming Organisation, ping me for coupon codes if any of the following apply:

  • Employees in public sector, education, and non-profit organisations get 40% off, as do authorised trainers and facilitators
  • There are subscription-specific discounts for Agendashift Academy subscribers
  • Members of the old partner programme get 30% off
  • Past participants of Leading in a Transforming Organisation can re-attend with 60% off (75% if you work for a public sector, education, or non-profit organisation)
  • Past TTT/F participants can re-attend online for free

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:

  1. Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
  2. Inside-out Strategy (I): On the same page, with purpose
  3. Inside-out Strategy (II): Fit for maximum impact
  4. Part I: Business agility at every scale
  5. Part II: Between spaces, scopes, and scales
  6. Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success

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. Our next TTT/F training takes place in May (online).

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Trainer and Facilitator Programmes | Store

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.

Start where you are

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.

Arthur Ashe

“Start where you are” doesn’t have to be about process! Try this exercise:

  1. Disregarding organisational boundaries, and in relation to the work you are already committed to (your “organising commitments”), who do you interact with? Then reflexively: who interacts with you regarding their organising commitments? And transitively: who do they interact with, who interacts with them, and so on outwards?
  2. Again disregarding organisational boundaries, and whether as an act of planning or of response to something unexpected, who do you consult with when your organising commitments need to change? And again reflexively and transitively: Who consults with you, who do they consult with, and so on outwards?
  3. Now reflect on the relationships you have identified in those two networks. Whose relationships don’t you understand as well as you might? To the extent that it affects your own work, what context do you lack that others might be able to provide? Who else might be struggling for lack of context that you or someone closer to you might be able to provide? Is it time then for some trust-building conversations?

Now you know where you are, start!

Related posts:

While we’re here, a couple of updates to upcoming events (see below):

  • The next TTT/F begins in just over a week on Wednesday 15th – ping me for a coupon code if you need one
  • I’ve added the April edition of our monthly free webinar/AMA series

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Trainer and Facilitator Programmes | Store

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.

Upcoming events

Recent changes:

  • Leading in a Transforming Organisation (London) is brought forward a week to 25-27 June
  • Added Leading in Transforming Organisation (Southampton), October 8-10
  • Webinars and experience/practise sessions taking a break now until the autumn

May

June

October

*For TTT/F and Leading in a Transforming Organisation, ping me for coupon codes if any of the following apply:

  • Employees in public sector, education, and non-profit organisations get 40% off, as do authorised trainers and facilitators
  • There are subscription-specific discounts for Agendashift Academy subscribers
  • Members of the old partner programme get 30% off
  • Past participants of Leading in a Transforming Organisation can re-attend with 60% off (75% if you work for a public sector, education, or non-profit organisation)
  • Past TTT/F participants can re-attend online for free
Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can. ~Arthur Ashe

It’s 10 years since the post that changed my career

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Happy New Year! For me it’s a big anniversary: this time in 2013 I had spent the New Year’s break taking the principles and practices of the Kanban Method, and from them abstracting a system of nine values. Then on January 3rd, I published Introducing Kanban through its values. Kanban’s values model was born.

Nine values are quite a lot to hold in one’s head at once, so I soon learned to present them in groups:

  • An initial six, or two groups of three: transparency, balance, and collaboration, then customer focus, flow, and leadership
  • Then understanding, agreement, and respect, which for reasons of brevity are often subsumed under leadership

In most of the decade since, it has been my most-read post each year. And it led to my first book, Kanban from the Inside (2014), which remains a Lean-Agile classic. Great! Now what?

I had no interest in making Kanban any more technical than it already was; if anything, the values model would always draw me in the opposite direction. Neither was I drawn to the emerging Kanban Maturity Model (or any other such model). What I did instead was to allow a common problem to bother me: why do so many people arrive at the training class not knowing why they are there? Tempting as it might have been to see that as a failure of administration or marketing, I saw it instead as a symptom that there were important organisational conversations that simply weren’t happening.

I realised quickly that this problem was far from unique to Kanban. To those that resent having had Scrum or (later) SAFe thrust upon them, the Agile manifesto’s “People and interactions over processes and tools” must ring rather hollow.

That took me away from Kanban into the realms of organisation, leadership, and strategy, to the development of Agendashift, and then sort of full circle, not back to Kanban and Lean-Agile specifically, but to business agility. Ten years on, as practice gets refined through use, as its message gets refined through the telling, and as we dig ever-deeper roots into the available theory, three main topic areas co-evolve together:

  1. As described now in two editions of the Agendashift book (2nd ed 2021), Agendashift the engagement model (thank you Daniel Mezick for describing Agendashift as such) and dialogic/generative organisation development approach (thank you Gervase Bushe & Bob Marshak), a way for practitioners to approach organisations without prejudging what solutions they will employ(/impose/inflict) and instead to help them have those missing conversations – engaging in participatory strategy, as it turns out
  2. The wholehearted organisation, a deliberately minimalistic values-based model of organisation and leadership, a spinoff from my third book, Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020) that unexpectedly gained a life of its own
  3. The leadership development curriculum Leading with Outcomes, which compared to Agendashift minimises detail relevant mainly to practitioners, and instead distils some easily-learned patterns, strategies, and organisational models relevant to leaders at all levels, leaders in transforming organisations most especially

Explicitly in both Agendashift and Leading with Outcomes and implicitly in wholehearted, we have doubled down on the eighth value of that initial nine-value model, namely agreement. What if we put agreement on outcomes before solutions? One way or another, I’ve been asking that question for most of the past ten years, and I have no doubt that it will keep me going for a good while yet.

I no longer identify as a Kanban guy. That separation was necessary to what followed, but all these years later I remain proud of the work I did there, of that first book, and of the blog post that started it all. Not that I’m planning on retiring anytime soon, but I have long seen it as marking the beginning of the rest of my career.

[Comment on this post on LinkedIn]

Related:

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Media | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Trainer and Facilitator Programmes | Store

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.

Upcoming events

Recent changes:

  • Leading in a Transforming Organisation (London) is brought forward a week to 25-27 June
  • Added Leading in Transforming Organisation (Southampton), October 8-10
  • Webinars and experience/practise sessions taking a break now until the autumn

May

June

October

*For TTT/F and Leading in a Transforming Organisation, ping me for coupon codes if any of the following apply:

  • Employees in public sector, education, and non-profit organisations get 40% off, as do authorised trainers and facilitators
  • There are subscription-specific discounts for Agendashift Academy subscribers
  • Members of the old partner programme get 30% off
  • Past participants of Leading in a Transforming Organisation can re-attend with 60% off (75% if you work for a public sector, education, or non-profit organisation)
  • Past TTT/F participants can re-attend online for free

Sell the pain, not the solution, the theory, or the blame

Posted on by Mike Burrows

A strategy that ignores the obstacles is liable to fall at the first hurdle. That’s if it even gets that far – who will take seriously a strategy that ignores the issues? Turn those obstacles into outcomes Agendashift-style, and organise them so that you can establish a sense of direction, identify places to focus your efforts, and measure progress and success, well you’re in much better shape.

Most things Agendashift-related come with leadership lessons too, hence Leading with Outcomes. Here, in a psychologically safe environment, it must be ok to talk about obstacles. As a leader, you have a responsibility to encourage that to happen. But we can take that basic lesson further: how we talk about obstacles matters too.

Ever since a workshop in Berlin in 2019*, we’ve paid closer attention to how obstacles are framed. What started out as an effort to debug one breakout group’s frustrating experience turned into a new exercise, Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle (yes there’s a nod to Rumelt in the name there).

Ostensibly, the exercise’s job is to frame obstacles such that the conversations to turn them into outcomes will be productive and satisfying, even enjoyable. What we repeatedly find though is that it helps us get to deeper issues and at the same time puts a spotlight on the organisation’s discourse. A bugfix becomes a key feature!

The exercise’s goal is to produce obstacles that are real, relevant, and representative – describing things that colleagues would quickly recognise, that affect their everyday work, and worded as they might word them. As per the title of this post, the trick (if “trick” is the right word – it can take real effort) is to sell the pain, not the solution, the theory, or the blame.

Some examples of “bad” obstacles:

  • Lack of a knowledge management system
  • Lack of people, money, or time
  • Lack of WIP limits
  • Lack of the Agile mindset
  • Lack of leadership
  • Lack of quality

The problem isn’t the “lack of” language (or “scarcity language”, as I sometimes call it), though that’s a strong smell. The problem is what those obstacles are selling: solutions, theories, or blame (or a combination), all of which get in the way of agreement. They’re easily dismissed (they may exclude better solutions or theories, for example), they call for things that everyone knows are unlikely to be forthcoming, or people feel judged by them.

Instead of those “lack ofs”, tell the more interesting side of the story. Sell the pain. Identify the real issue. That way lies the path to agreement on outcomes, a more coherent and robust strategy, and a more purposeful innovation process. And if you want your organisation’s discourse to improve, try paying attention to how obstacles are articulated. The conversation to turn a bad obstacle into a good one (in your next retro, perhaps) might be more important than you might think.

*See Events below – I’ll be back in Berlin in February, my first trip outside the UK since Covid!

Image: anonymous, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18101954

Thoughts? Discuss this post on LinkedIn

Updates

  • Events: Added Berlin, 7-8 February
  • Media: interviewed by Jeff Keyes of Atlassian, December 11th

Events

Self-paced training

The four modules of Leading with Outcomes:

  1. Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
  2. Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact
  3. Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success
  4. Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale (from early 2023)

Media

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Links: Home | Subscribe | Events | Contact | Mike
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Facilitator and Trainer Programmes

We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.

Your organisation in 5 networks

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Updates: Renamed network #2, minor edits elsewhere. This model is now included in the Agendashift Academy module Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes, and scales and the in-person training Leading in a Transforming Organisation. Video of my SEACON keynote here.

Expanding slightly on yesterday’s LinkedIn post (linkedin.com), your organisation in 5 networks:

Network #1: Your reporting network. This is just your formal structure – typically a hierarchy, perhaps with the occasional bit of dual reporting thrown in – seen here as lines of communication. Because sideways communication has to be implemented indirectly via upward and downward communication, it can be highly inefficient.

Network #2: Your delivery operations network. I am referring not to material flows or to the knowledge work equivalent, but to the interactions between people that make those flows what they are, performing as they do. In siloed organisations, the delivery operations network cuts across the reporting network, sometimes uncomfortably.

Network #3: Your strategy network. Typically richer than the reporting network, this connects everyone involved in anybody else’s strategic decision-making – any decision-making at any level of organisation that impacts on things like identity, purpose, objectives, learning, and adaptation. A more abstract and less messy version of this network connects not people but domains of responsibility at varying levels of granularity (see circular organisation).

Network #4: Your trust-building network. This is the network of all connections that are enhanced by meaningful efforts to build or maintain mutual trust. In a high-trust organisation, this can be expected to overlap significantly with the preceding three networks.

Network #5: Your social network: All the above and more – the totality of your organisation’s network of interaction and influence, covering all the conversations that contribute to making your organisation what it is and what it is becoming.

And two hypotheses (with caveats):

Hypothesis 1. The more that networks 2, 3, and 4 are healthy, the more that networks 1 and 5 look after themselves.

Hypothesis 2. The richer you can make them, the more likely is the serendipitous conversation, increasing the rate of innovation.

As rightly observed in some of the questions and comments on the first version of this post, these hypotheses are slightly in tension. Rich is good, richer would be better for many if not most organisations, and​ leaders within them would do well to pay attention to those networks. You can however have too much of a good thing, not to mention that some innovation happens in the darker corners, so to speak. In my use of the word “healthy” in hypothesis 1 I did intend a sense of balance, and I should have worked that sense into hypothesis 2 also. Instead though, this paragraph’s caveats 🙂

Some questions for you:

  1. In your organisation, which network or networks dominate?
  2. At what cost?
  3. Given where you sit in each of these networks and the reach that they afford you, what might you do?

Your answers, questions, or feedback can go on the original post (linkedin.com).

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Agendashift  Academy: Leading with Outcomes | Facilitator and Trainer Programmes
Links: Subscribe | Events | Contact | Mike

We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.

PS The slide below is adapted from the talk I gave last week at SEACON (the Studies in Enterprise Agility Conference).

Meaningfulness, significance, and direction

Posted on by Mike Burrows

As I mentioned last week, I’m busy working on a leaner, fitter version of Leading with Outcomes: Foundation. This updates the first self-paced study module at the Agendashift Academy and also makes it available in the form of interactive training, productised for use by other trainers.

Since last week’s announcement, I have renamed the middle session (of three). On reflection, “Aspiring to performance” seemed a bit generic – clichéd even. Its replacement, “Meaningfulness, significance, and direction” emerges quite naturally from the content – not summarising it exactly, but those three qualities do correspond nicely to the Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes model – the IdOO (“I do”) pattern that is introduced (through hands-on practice) in session 1 and further developed in chapter 2 (again through practice).

The core of the model goes like this:

  • Ideal – envision a compelling future
  • Obstacles – identify what’s in the way of what we want
  • Outcomes – look beyond those obstacles to something better

As you learn to move easily between those elements, properly contextualise those conversations, and organise what they produce into something coherent, you’re getting better at strategy. This can be “everyday” strategy – quick conversations to clarify the thinking around everyday bits of work – or as the overall arc of the “set piece” strategy occasion – participatory strategy reviews and the like. It’s even a model for leadership!

And so to meaningfulness, significance, and direction. Not a new model, but capturing some of the intent behind the IdOO pattern and Agendashift more broadly:

  • Meaningfulness – outcomes not as metrics or targets, but things meaningful to us, identified and articulated through authentic dialogue. Often, we set this up in the Ideal part with stories of people making meaningful progress.
  • Significance – instead of falling into the trap of solving problems just because they are there, choosing our obstacles for what they represent and taking the trouble to frame them carefully
  • Direction – our direction is set by the outcomes we’re choosing to pursue, not by monolithic solutions (perhaps sold to us with outcomes), or by plans whose all-consuming execution comes at the expense of what’s meaningful and significant. Outcome-orientation, in other words.

As well as re-recording the self-paced study version of Foundation, I’m also hosting it in the form of participatory online training over the 23rd, 24th, and 25th of November. All sessions 14:00-16:00GMT, over Zoom, and highly hands-on. Price: just £195 + VAT. Ping us for a discount code if:

  • You have an Academy subscription
  • You’re an Agendashift partner
  • You’re an employee of a government, educational, or non-profit organisation, or are currently unemployed – we’re glad to offer significant discounts here
  • You completed September’s TTT/F or are booked on December’s – for you it’s free

Book here:

And if interested in teaching it yourself or in facilitating the related workshops:

Upcoming

Anytime:

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Leaders as keepers of context

Posted on by Mike Burrows

[Updated 2023-04-23: Improved the image (borrowed from the latest iteration of Leading with Outcomes: Foundation; minor changes to the text]

Be a keeper of context

What if all failures were failures of context? OK, that’s an exaggeration, but as a working default assumption, it sure beats assuming failures of competence or character. Moreover, it can be the beginning of a generative line of thinking, one that puts you in the role of keeper of context.

Suppose that you’re a leader in a transforming organisation [1] and you witness an unproductive conversation. What is the shared context that this conversation is missing? You might intervene and provide some, but that’s not the point here. Work backwards. What was the conversation that didn’t take place, the one in which that context would have been established? Look not only at formal meetings but at how activities are sequenced, how their respective conversations happen, and their quality. What opportunities for context-creating conversations are we missing?

Looking at your organisation’s processes, it’s easy to focus on just the formal sequence of activities and overlook the interactions that happen (or need to happen) between them, and in particular, their conversations. When each activity involves different people and the chain of activities is long, it’s not hard to see how context gets lost.

Going deeper into organisation design and questions of meaningfulness, suppose now that you come across some work that failed to delight the customer. What went wrong? Lack of skill? Lack of commitment? These are easy conclusions to reach, but let’s try a different kind of assumption. Could this again be a failure of context? Was that work done with a deep enough appreciation of the context into which that work would be delivered? Where was the opportunity to appreciate the customer’s struggles? Where was the opportunity to explore their needs, to identify measures of customer progress, and so on? And suppose that the work had instead been successful, what kind of feedback would those involved have received? Could it be that our role definitions and process designs keep the people closest to the work insulated from the context they need?

Finally, suppose now that you suspect you’re seeing people lose their sense of what’s important, who they are, and what their team is about. Not so surprising in a transforming organisation! When you see confusion, it doesn’t usually help to ask what people are doing or what they are thinking. Instead, go back to the beginning and let them tell the story. If it turns out that the one who was confused was you, don’t be surprised. Context really is everything.

My perspective on these issues of context has evolved. In my first book, I suggested that you might begin with the assumption that any failures of process you encountered were rooted in failures of collaboration. If you’re looking for systemic causes – making it easier to adopt this perspective non-judgementally ­– I’ve found that this perspective can be highly productive.

Going back a few more years to when I was a global manager of managers, I would see failures of leadership. Confrontational perhaps, but again productive when the failing collaboration involved an imbalance of power or experience, and the more senior party involved needed to understand their additional responsibility in the relationship.

Failures of context, collaboration, or leadership: three closely related perspectives yet quite different in tone. When you’re a manager dealing with these issues daily or an external practitioner sensing one for the first time, which perspective do you choose? I remain comfortable with all three; the right one on the day is the one that leads to the insights needed via a safe and productive conversation. And if you’re not sure, you can always ask!

[1] Leaders in transforming organisations are the Agendashift Academy’s focus; this post expands on two end-of-section reflections from Leading with Outcomes: Foundation and Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact. We return to the topic as a sensemaking and scaling issue in the final module, Adaptive Strategy: Business agility at every scale.

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If you want to understand scaling… (part 2 of 2)

Posted on by Mike Burrows

If you want to understand scaling:

  1. Start with what must be true at each scale of organisation (part 1)
  2. Then with what happens between scales (this post)

Where we got to last time (and from there to what a healthy relationship with the process frameworks looks like):

  • A structure that makes sense – not just tidy on paper, but purposeful at every scale – allowing each unit at every scale to self-manage effectively (structuring itself to minimise dependencies, for example)
  • Each unit at every scale able to express its own strategy in its own words, in terms appropriate to its domain and its customers, aligning it with other units and other scales according to both structure and opportunity
  • Each unit at every scale able to identify what it must manage at that scale – no more and no less – with protocols to deal with what should be managed elsewhere

We reached those conclusions via a route that made it very obvious that each of them apply at every scale, and that the consequences can be serious if there’s a problem with any of them. But it doesn’t stop there. Whilst it’s possible for a scale to be badly designed in its own right – awkward structure, missing capabilities, or poor coordination to name but a few – it’s not hard to see that the relationships between scales are no less important. If anything, they’re more troubling.

Consider these:

  • One unit doing the coordination work of another – micromanaging, or interfering in other ways
  • One unit doing the strategy work of another – imposing it downwards (directly, via an overly-top-down or centralised plan), second-guessing upwards, etc
  • Units taking on responsibility for outcomes over which they have insufficient control
  • Units providing insufficient transparency about strategy, progress, or risks for related others to make good decisions
  • Units failing to share useful intelligence
  • Or conversely, units not listening (or worse, punishing unwelcome news)

These describe dysfunctional relationships even when they’re between peers, but when there’s any kind of power imbalance involved, those at the receiving end may feel powerless to fix them.

The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

Let’s recast those challenging but still fixable problems more positively, as principles. These are table stakes I believe for any serious approach to scaling. With minor caveats they apply to every identifiable scope or scale:

  1. Each responsible for its own strategy and accountable for its own performance
  2. Respectful of the autonomy of others, each responsible for its next level of internal structure and its self-management across it
  3. Each committed to building mutual trust in every direction

Choosing its models carefully to maintain that “at every scope or scale” vibe, the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (deliberately-adaptive.org) integrates the following:

  • From Agendashift: rapid strategy development and alignment between scopes and scales through generative conversations, multi-level participation, and outcome-orientation
  • From Lean and Agile, patterns for collaboration and coordination, and the deep integration of delivery and learning
  • From Sociocracy (known to some as dynamic governance and to Akoff fans as circular hierarchy), consent and purpose as the basis for effective self-organisation and governance
  • From the Deliberately Developmental Organisation (as described in An Everyone Culture by developmental psychologists Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow-Lahey), attention to the human side of development

What holds it all together is one of the crowning achievements of Systems Thinking, Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM), perhaps the most powerfully “at every scale” organisational model in existence. We take the management consultant’s Swiss Army knife and give it some 21st-century attitude in an innovative and accessible presentation.

Given that most of the popular approaches to scaling focus mainly on process, it is important for me to stress that the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation is not a process framework. Neither is it prescriptive. Instead, it is two kinds of model in one:

  1. Diagnostic, but only in the everyday sense that it helps with the identification of dysfunctions and opportunities (building on strengths as well as mitigating weaknesses), not in the sense that those dysfunctions become the excuse for heavy-handed prescription
  2. Generative in the sense that it helps organisations engage constructively with themselves, generate a wealth of ideas, and find their own way forward

If you know Agendashift (mostly generative, with the diagnostic part done generatively), you will recognise that winning combination. In fact, the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation is introduced in the closing chapters of the Agendashift 2nd edition (2021), my previous book Right to Left (2020) doing some of the setup.

And development continues. After I release this month the final instalment of Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success, production work begins on Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale, the fourth and last module in the Agendashift Academy’s Leading with Outcomes curriculum. Then sometime next year I hope, a book (my fifth – I have a fourth book close to completion, more on that another time).

As that roadmap indicates, the earliest access to the next iteration of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation will be via the Academy, and you can be part of it. Join one of our regular Ask Me Anything sessions and even before the content is released I’ll be only too happy to explore it with you. Subscribe now:

Take me to Leading with Outcomes

If you want to understand scaling:

  1. Start with what must be true at each scale of organisation (part 1)
  2. Then with what happens between scales (this post)

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
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If you want to understand scaling… (part 1 of 2)

Posted on by Mike Burrows

If you want to understand scaling:

  1. Start with what must be true at each scale of organisation (this post)
  2. Then with what happens between scales (part 2)

Let’s begin with teams, or more specifically with its members, people. Even allowing for diversity, there are a number of near-universal things you can say about the members of any well-established team:

  • They each know who they are; many will also have a sense of who they’d like to be
  • They each know what they want to contribute; many will also have identified capabilities they’d like to develop
  • They each have a sense of what they can manage on their own and what should be managed more collectively

There are some boundaries there. They may be fuzzy and there may be room for negotiation in the short term and for development in the longer term, but cross them – insist that people do things that “aren’t them”, aren’t what they signed up for, or take away their ability to self-manage to the level they expect – and you have unhappy people in an unhappy team. For example, most people don’t like to be micro-managed; neither do they want to see important things left unattended.

Now to the team itself. You’d be hard-pressed to find a high-performing team for which these aren’t true:

  • There are collective senses of identity, purpose, and of what it aspires to
  • It knows what it’s there to do, what it is capable of, and ways in which those capabilities might be developed
  • It knows what it can manage for itself as a team, and (conversely) what needs to be managed more collectively, ie with (and perhaps by) other teams – potentially even with others outside the organisation

Again, there are some boundaries there. Fuzzy and negotiable no doubt, but only a fool would think they could cross them without negative consequences.

Jump now to the organisation as a whole. I almost don’t need to write these points down, but I will:

  • It has a sense of identity, a sense of purpose, and a sense of what it aspires to
  • It knows what it’s there to do, what it is capable of, and ways in which those capabilities might be developed
  • It knows what it can manage for itself as an organisation, and (conversely) what needs to be managed with others – suppliers, customers, industry groups, and so on

You can be pretty sure that if there are significant issues with any of those points, you’re looking at an organisation that has problems – big problems. At the extreme: identity crises, or working catastrophically beyond its capabilities or its remit.

Starting again at the level of the individual, on the topic of what makes the work meaningful, the answers may vary hugely. Moreover, you never know until you ask, and perhaps not even then until you get to know them well enough. At higher levels, diversity of purpose and capability is essential to meeting the complexities of the business environment. The successful organisation has them distributed effectively whilst maintaining some coherence of its own, not an easy balance to maintain when the environment is changing.

What does all that mean for teams-of-teams? Does this repeating pattern – a pattern that already works at three levels – the levels of individuals, teams, and the whole organisation – apply at other scales? Pretty much!

If your team-of-teams doesn’t have its own sense of identity and purpose – meaningful to the people in it, not just its designers – it is unlikely to amount to anything more than an aggregation of its parts. What is it for? What is it capable of? What does it add, other than overhead? If this problem is widespread, you have a structure that is hard to navigate, a direct cost to the organisation and potentially a problem for customers too.

What if it has those senses of identity and purpose but not a sense of where it would like to get to, what it would like to become, and so on? In that case, what holds it all together as its component parts continue to develop?

And what does it manage? If it’s trying to manage what its constituent parts are capable of managing on their own – interfering, in other words – it does both them and itself a serious disservice.

All that said, what does good look like?

  • A structure that makes sense – not just tidy on paper, but purposeful at every scale – allowing each unit at every scale to self-manage effectively (structuring itself to minimise dependencies, for example)
  • Each unit at every scale able to express its own strategy in its own words, in terms appropriate to its domain and its customers, aligning it with other units and other scales according to both structure and opportunity
  • Each unit at every scale able to identify what it must manage at that scale – no more and no less – with protocols to deal with what should be managed elsewhere

Any problems here I would characterise as organisational problems first (the organisation getting in the way of doing the right thing), problems of the strategy process second, and problems of the delivery process third – a distant third if the first two are in any way significant. And as leadership problems? It is hard work for leaders when these problems aren’t dealt with, so let’s be careful not to personalise problems that may not be of their own making. Neither should we underestimate the power of participation, self-management, and self-organisation. But if as a leader you’re getting in the way of the organisation fixing its problems or are complacent about them, well that’s on you.

Neither should you expect your problems of organisation, strategy, and leadership to go away by rolling out a process framework. Why would they? I don’t know if we have got to “peak process framework” yet – I don’t suppose we can know until some time afterwards and I’m not ready to call it – but in the meantime let’s be realistic about what they can and can’t do. And while we’re at it, let’s not pretend that a framework rollout is an easy and risk-free thing.

Much as I detest the rollout, this is not an anti-framework rant. If you find the opportunity to borrow from a framework as you address those more fundamental problems, that’s totally sensible – there’s no point in reinventing the wheel. You are still are in control of your own destiny, free to pursue what really matters.

Before part 2, more on the topic of maintaining healthy relationships with frameworks in these two articles:

On some of the leading frameworks themselves:

And to those bigger themes:

Watch those last two come together in the coming months. At the Agendashift Academy, the final Leading with Outcomes module, Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale is due in the autumn. You can get ready meanwhile with the first three modules:

  1. Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
  2. Inside-out strategy: Fit for maximum impact
  3. Outside-in strategy: Positioned for success
Take me to Leading with Outcomes

If you want to understand scaling:

  1. Start with what must be true at each scale of organisation (this post)
  2. Then with what happens between scales (part 2)

Agendashift™: Serving the transforming organisation
Agendashift  Academy: 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