Agendashift

By Mike Burrows

“An impressive piece of culture technology – facilitates clear thinking and communication while encouraging real agreement at scale across the whole enterprise.”

Part framework and part engagement model, Agendashift represents a way to naturally engage every employee, at every level, in the process of change. Building from agreement on outcomes, Agendashift facilitates rapid, experiment-based evolution of process, practice, and organisation. Instead of transformation by imposition – usually contradictory and self-defeating – it helps you keep your business vision and transformation strategy aligned with and energised by a culture of meaningful participation.

“If you are a business leader looking for tools that facilitate real change in real organisations, this is your book.”

“For exquisite listening and thinking tools – used by your teams and informing your strategy up and down the organisation – look no further than this book.”

“It’s like an invitation to pair coach with Mike and see how he uses the tools to implement a culture of continuous improvement in organisations.”

Mike Burrows is recognised for his pioneering work in Lean, Agile, and Kanban, his ground-breaking first book Kanban from the Inside (Blue Hole Press, 2014), and for championing participatory and outcome-oriented approaches to change, transformation, and strategy. Before embarking on his consulting career, he was global development manager and Executive Director at a top tier investment bank, and CTO for an energy risk management startup.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legend Press
• Release date: Apr 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781787197657

Book preview

Agendashift:

Outcome-oriented change and

continuous transformation

Mike Burrows

Foreword by Daniel Mezick

Published by New Generation Publishing in 2018

Copyright © Mike Burrows 2018

First Edition

The author asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior consent of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN: 1-78719-726-8

ISBN-13: 978-1-78719-726-8

www.newgeneration-publishing.com

To Sharon

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Background and audience

Improvement, change, and continuous transformation

Navigating Agendashift

Chapter 1. Discovery

The Celebration (5W)

The True North exercise: Everyone able to work consistently at their best

15-minute FOTO

Review, revise, and organise

Behind the scenes

Key points – 1. Discovery

Chapter 2. Exploration

The Agendashift delivery assessment, mini edition

Debriefing a survey

Agreement on action areas

Organise your outcomes with the Four Points exercise

Agreement on scope

Behind the scenes

Key points – 2. Exploration

Chapter 3. Mapping

The spine of our plan: A transformation journey

Visualising your transformation map

Review and reconcile

Choose what’s next

Behind the scenes

Key points – 3. Mapping

Chapter 4. Elaboration

Options thinking

Hypothesis-driven change

Alternative approaches

Allow your thinking to be tested

Behind the scenes

Key points – 4. Elaboration

Chapter 5. Operation

Five principles of 21st century change leadership

A change of focus

Managing your experiments

Towards continuous transformation (prompts 13-18)

Where to start?

Behind the scenes

Key points – 5. Operation

Epilogue: The Full Circle exercise

Resources

Resources mentioned in this book

The Agendashift partner programme

Other resources

Acknowledgements

About the author

Index

Foreword

It’s a good thing Agendashift is now here. The pace of change, driven by software technology, is transforming the world of work in a rather abrupt way. Businesses that cannot adapt quickly find themselves under pressure from those who actually can. Progressive business leaders now need innovative new tools: methods for navigating and coping with continuous change.

Agendashift is such a tool. A deep integration of many useful elements in a clear, 5-step process, Agendashift is an impressive piece of culture technology. Culture tech includes designed meeting formats, designed workflow frameworks, and designed interaction protocols. These elements facilitate clear thinking and communication while encouraging real agreement at scale across the whole enterprise. Tools like these help teams, divisions and entire enterprises to thrive, by increasing the quality of interactions, in service to great outcomes. Agendashift is an excellent example of one of these tools.

One striking aspect of Agendashift is the inherently engaging nature of the process. Employee engagement is absolutely essential for rapid and lasting change. This is so important that a new type of culture technology called Engagement Models is now emerging. Agendashift is kind of engagement model. It represents a way to naturally engage every employee, at every level, in the process of change. Part framework and part engagement model, Agendashift is a rich composition of culture technology tools, a composition that forms a complete system. A system that facilitates real improvement - not just quick fixes, but changes of a more challenging kind, brought to life by people engaged in the process and invested in outcomes that they helped to articulate.

If you are a business leader looking for tools that facilitate real change in real organizations, this is your book. As you read it, realize that Agendashift represents a new kind of tool for a new kind of executive leader. In the new world of work, executives create the conditions for employee engagement and innovation, in service to great business outcomes. To make this happen, pioneering leaders will use new tools. Culture technology tools.

Tools like Agendashift.

Daniel Mezick

www.DanielMezick.com

Author, The Culture Game

Co-Author, The OpenSpace Agility Handbook

Guilford, CT, USA

March 14, 2018

Introduction

If the line "a humane, start with what you do now approach to change" sounds familiar, chances are you’ve read my first book, Kanban from the Inside. In case you haven’t read it (don’t worry, it’s not a prerequisite for this one), you should know that I devoted several chapters to techniques for understanding what you do now from a range of different perspectives. Clearly, I was very attached to the start with what you do now principle. I still am!

Contrast that with another well-known principle, habit #2 of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits: Begin with the end in mind. The funny thing? That’s a great principle to hold too.

The apparent tension between start with what you do now and begin with the end in mind isn’t hard to resolve: we just have to accept that the latter isn’t about the design of solutions but is instead about the outcomes we want to achieve. This acceptance can be liberating:

•   It’s ok not to have all the answers right away

•   It’s ok to allow your solutions to evolve in response to or in anticipation of changing conditions and needs

•   It’s ok to be sceptical of people who – with no respect for your particular context – show little interest in understanding but are still quick with their prescriptions

•   It’s ok to end up with solutions that you wouldn’t read in any textbook

With this kind of interpretation, the two principles complement each other well:

1.    Start with what you do now is about the present – the realities staff and customers experience each working day, what makes those experiences good, bad, or indifferent, and the extent to which people’s needs are met

2.    Begin with the end in mind is about the future – encouraging us to engage the imagination and find some clarity of purpose

This book is designed to help you help your organisation bring these two perspectives together in ways that help bring about lasting change. It describes a set of interconnected tools and a participatory process that invites people to dig deep together to discover shared ambitions, identify obstacles to those ambitions, find agreement on meaningful outcomes, and follow through systematically.

Over the course of its evolution we have variously described Agendashift as values-based, inclusive, non-prescriptive, and framework-agnostic. We have since found better ways to describe it, but to begin to understand what makes it different, here are a few things that it is not:

•   It is not what I would call a 20th century change management approach, which is to say one that concerns itself with overcoming resistance to predetermined changes

•   It is not tied to a single delivery framework (Agile or otherwise), concerned with adherence to a prescribed set of practices

•   It is not over-reliant on mechanistic, process-based views of how organisations work

Agendashift is indeed a change management approach, but instead of expecting and dealing with resistance, it helps practitioners and sponsors alike to proceed with genuine openness and to include people in a process of co-creation. Instead of prescription, Agendashift is generative in nature, stimulating people to generate a range of appropriate options in context, and then to collaborate on their implementation. And whilst we fully appreciate the importance of process, we’re as likely to focus on the quality and timing of conversations and the values that drive decision making as we are on formal process design.

These are all good differentiators, but most important is outcome-oriented, outcomes and agreement on outcomes being absolutely central to Agendashift. I’m not referring to generalised claims about the benefits of using Agendashift. Rather, outcomes are Agendashift’s main currency. Every exercise you will encounter in this book in some way elicits or works with outcomes of several kinds:

•   Ambitions, aspirations, strategic goals

•   Intermediate objectives – elements of strategy, milestones, and other signs of significant progress

•   The impact (hoped-for or observed) of experiments and other forms of action

•   The end result when needs are met

Outcomes such as these are everywhere of course, but it’s very easy to lose sight of them. We fall in love not only with solutions, but their delivery vehicles! Our hope is that Agendashift’s deliberate attention to outcomes will help organisations and practitioners achieve their goals more effectively.

Background and audience

Broadly, Agendashift should be seen as a product of the Lean-Agile community. Almost by definition, this is a community that likes to celebrate Lean and Agile both separately and together, recognising both the individual contributions and the mutual synergies of these two great movements. Respect for the principles and values that underpin both bodies of knowledge allows a diverse community rich in specific expertise to avoid descending into factionalism (well, most of the time, anyway).

Agendashift’s conscious avoidance of prescription might resonate with many members of the Lean-Agile community, but the unfortunate truth is that too many Lean, Agile, and even Lean-Agile initiatives still demonstrate a decidedly 20th century approach to change. Sometimes we are left wondering what happened to Lean and Agile values, respect for people and People and interactions over processes and tools falling by the wayside in the blinkered pursuit of framework adoption, imposed top-down.

We are just as disheartened when transformation efforts are timid or directionless, lacking in meaningful engagement, over-relying on change happening bottom-up, more out of hope than realistic expectation or deliberate action. Whether it’s too much of the wrong kind of ambition or too little, some of Agendashift’s outcome-orientation is sorely needed.

Some might worry that our stance of non-prescription implies that we’re against the use of frameworks. Let me put minds at rest: Frameworks – Scrum being the best-known example of an Agile process framework – are vital sources not just of tried-and-tested tools but of knowledge, experience, passion, and inspiration. If you are familiar with a framework and that framework offers a path beyond a current organisational obstacle, then of course you should take advantage. If Agendashift is what helps you seize that opportunity, then both are working precisely as they should. We hope also that you feel helped rather than threatened when Agendashift encourages people to step outside comfort zones and consider alternative or novel solutions.

Whatever your background, read this book if any of the following apply:

•   You’d like to see a model for 21st century change leadership, and how that might inform your work as coach, consultant, or some other kind of change agent

•   You’ve a more specific interest – whether as a practitioner or potential sponsor – in Lean-Agile change (perhaps under a banner of Agile transformation, Agile adoption, or similar)

•   You’d love to see a model for Lean-Agile change that reflects Lean-Agile values and demonstrates Lean-Agile process and thinking in operation

Whilst it’s hard to separate Agendashift from Lean-Agile thinking, it is very much a change management framework and engagement model rather than a delivery process, and there’s nothing particularly IT-specific or development-specific about it. It has been used outside of IT, with participants as diverse as event planners, training material designers, C-suite executives, and new joiners. It has been used at organisations in