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In a viable, deliberately adaptive organisation, how do the relationships between different organisational scales work? Or the same question, but for the networked organisation? And what does that mean for me?
Drawn from the Agendashift Academy’s latest module “Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale”, this new talk accessibly integrates systems, complexity, and flow thinking (models such as the Viable System Model, the Cynefin framework, and Flight Levels) and shows how that with or without branded frameworks, many scale-related challenges reflect deep organisational imbalances that we can learn to recognise and address.

 

Package Options

This package is for each of the 3 days. 

Days	Package Options
1	Day 1 Day 2
2	Day 1 & 2 Day 2 & 3

 

 

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation

Developed for leaders at all levels – senior sponsor, manager, team lead, consultant, or coach – Leading with Outcomes: Foundation is your ideal introduction to the language of outcomes, its philosophy, its skills, and its role in your organisation's transformation.

1. Leading in a transforming organisation – introducing outcome-oriented change

Understanding the role of leadership in the transforming organisation and learning a powerful pattern for conversations in strategy

• Leading in a wholehearted organisation – what it means to lead where engagement, integration, and initiative are celebrated
• Leading with Outcomes – the concept and the curriculum
• Introducing the IdOO ("I do") pattern – Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes

2. Meaningfulness, significance, and direction?– two kinds of strategy and a virtuous circle

Applying the IdOO ("I do") pattern – Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes – in a strategy exercise for a scope of your choosing:

• Establishing context – Who and what are we dealing with? Being a keeper of context, on the lookout for failures of context
• Ideal: Envisioning a compelling future – reaching the right customers, meeting their strategic needs, achieving results in the way to which we aspire
• Obstacles: Identifying what's in the way of what we want; Outside-in and inside-out strategy; Framing obstacles for a productive conversation
• Outcomes: Looking beyond those obstacles to something better – signs of emergence, indicators of progress, measures of success, and on towards goals & aspirations
• Organise the strategy with Objectives and Key Results (OKR) – Where do we want to get to? How will we pace ourselves to see that we're getting there?

3. Moving into action – ideas, experiments, feedback, and learning

From developing strategy to pursuing it, patterns for outcome-oriented innovation. We begin right to left with two levels of done, then the ideation process Meaning, Measure, Method:

• Right to left, done and really done – working backwards from key moments of impact (someone's need met) and learning (all of it accounted for), making the most of every feedback opportunity
• Meaning – thoughtfully re-engaging with our Agenda for Change, focusing on what's important
• Measure – how we'll know that we're winning
• Method – new ideas and how we'll test them

 

Adaptive Organisation (I): Business agility at every scale

Take this day on its own, with days 1 or 3 (saving 20%), or all three days together (saving 30%).

What every leader needs to know about organising for adaptability:

• The three overlapping spaces of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation
• Integrating strategy, delivery, and mutual trust-building
• Finding balance in relationships; managing complexity

Prerequisites: Leading with Outcomes: Foundation is highly recommended. 

1. Delivery, Discovery, and Renewal:

• Inside value creation's inner learning loop
• Turning intent into progress and turning experiments into intelligence and insights
• Reconciling Agile and business agility

2. Adaptive Strategy:

• Making organising commitments, autonomy at every scope and scale
• Understanding self and environment, creating and managing options accordingly
• Actively maintaining coherent identity, purpose, and values

3. Mutual Trust Building:

• Models of trust-building leadership
• The systemic role of trust
• Sensemaking – making meaningful progress in the presence of ambiguity

Sources:

• Viable System Model, Stafford Beer’s classic model for all organisations that have the drive to “meet the demands of surviving in the changing environment”; here it is the framework within which the other models and tools are integrated
• Complexity science – Cynefin and more
• Agendashift, Leading with Outcomes, Right to Left, and Wholehearted – outcome-orientation, leadership and strategy
• Lean-Agile (“Lean and Agile celebrated both separately and together”) and friends

 

Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes, and scales

Take this day with day 2 (saving 20%), or all three days together (saving 30%).

See day 2 for prerequisites.

1. Between and across scales – what the scaling frameworks don't tell you:

• Understanding formal structure
• Your organisation in 5 networks
• Between and across scales: Structuring, connecting, translating, and reconciling

2. Organising at human scale

• Thinking in circles – organising without reorganising
• Teaming and re-teaming
• The developmental organisation

3. Possibility and purpose

• Developing organisational strategy with the IdOO ("I do") pattern: Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes
• Pursuing strategy with with Meaning, Measure, Method pattern

Sources

As day 2, plus:

• Sociocracy (aka Dynamic Governance, Circular Hierarchy) – purposeful collaboration and self-governance at every scale
• The Deliberately Developmental Organisation, Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey’s model for building organisations that align personal and organisational growth
• Objectives and Key Results (OKR) – the strategy deployment framework pioneered at Intel

 

Trainer - Mike Burrows

Mike works at the intersection of Lean-Agile, strategy, and organisation development in the pursuit of the ‘wholehearted’ organisation. He is the author of Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2nd edition 2021), Right to Left: the digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020), and the classic Kanban from the Inside (2014). He is recognised for his pioneering work in Lean, Agile, and Kanban and in recent years his advocacy for participatory and outcome-oriented approaches to change, transformation, and strategy. Prior to his consulting career, Mike was global development manager and Executive Director at a top tier investment bank, CTO for an energy risk management startup, and later served as interim delivery manager for two UK government digital ‘exemplar’ services.