Leading in a Transforming Organisation (Berlin)

What they said:

“I wish I'd had this training years ago!”

“A language for exploring and discussing organisational issues – issues that aren't only process-related”

“Found the ideas of context and awareness tied well into managing different relationships”

“This rounds out organisational change aspects any serious practitioner should know”

“Really related to Organising at Human Scale; Energised by the mapping exercises before and after it”

Three modules of Leading with Outcomes as an integrated, workshop-style training experience:

Day 1. Leading with Outcomes: Foundation

Day 2. Adaptive Organisation (I): Business agility at every scale

Day 3. Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes, and scales

We'll be exploring what it means to lead in an organisation where change is happening wherever it's needed, at the pace it's needed, and engaging the people who are needed – everyone whose energy, insights, and innovations you'll need.

On day 1 (Foundation) we look at how to develop and pursue strategy in the language of outcomes, introducing some key conversational and organisational patterns and tools. You'll be developing skills you can not only bring to set-piece strategy events such as reviews and workshops but apply in everyday settings too.

On days 2 and 3 (Adaptive Organisation parts I and II), we will be exercising those skills further as we get to grips with a classic and powerful model of organisation that we've made accessible and brought up to date, applicable to organisations of all shapes and sizes.

For any given organisational scale (day 2), what are the preconditions for business agility, and what gets in the way of that? Similarly, in what practical ways can we help the relationships between organisational scales (day 3) to be more healthy and productive? You'll be learning some of the “deep magic” of organising – how to understand it in terms of relationships and constraints – and you won't look at organisations in quite the same way again!

Audience

You can approach Leading in a Transforming Organisation in complementary ways:

• As a workshop, an opportunity to explore how your organisation (or your client organisation) works and how you might influence that
• As leadership development, participants invited for their growth potential
• As technical training, participants attending out of interest in the models covered
• Per the final section below, as a near-alternative to Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator

If any of those speak to you, you're invited!

Venue

The event will be held in Berlin, at Lenovate's offices. Their address: Leanovate GmbH, Blücherstr. 22, Hof V, Aufgang 5, 2. Stock, 10961 Berlin. Lunches will be provided.

Trainer

Your trainer will be Agendashift founder Mike Burrows, creator of Leading with Outcomes, and three-time (and soon five-time) author:

• 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)
• Kanban from the Inside (2014)

Forthcoming:

• Organizing Conversations: Patterns of Dialog for the Transforming Organization (2024, BMI series in Dialogic Organization Development)
• Wholehearted: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (2025)

Day 1 (Tuesday, June 4th): 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

• Engaging with 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. Conversations in strategy – two strategy approaches and 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

Day 2 (Wednesday, June 5th): Adaptive Organisation (I): Business agility at every scale

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

For any given organisational scale – beginning with the scale and scope you most easily identify with and scaling up and down from there – what are the preconditions for business agility, and what gets in the way of that? Looking at your organisation (or any other), what constraints and freedoms operate? What elements should we expect to see? Between those many elements – people, teams, other organisational units of all sizes, the systems that exist at each scale, and so on – what relationships must be in place? How can we help those relationships become more balanced, more healthy, and more productive for all who participate in them?

1. Delivery-Discovery-Renewal

• The relationships and constraints of any organisation's inner learning loop
• Turning intent into progress and turning experiments into intelligence and insights
• Creating space for emergence

2. Adaptive Strategising:

• 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

Interlude (I)

Two classic exercises:

• Obstacles Fast and Slow, framing obstacles for a productive conversation
• 15-minute FOTO, our Clean Language-inspired coaching game

3. Mutual Trust Building:

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

Sources

• The Viable System Model, Stafford Beer’s classic model for all organisations that have the drive to “maintain their capacity for independent action”; here it is the framework within which the other models and tools are integrated
• Complexity science and anthro-complexity – 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

Day 3 (Thursday, June 6th): Adaptive Organisation (II): Between spaces, scopes, and scales

What every leader needs to know about scale:

• The relationships between different organisational scales
• Navigating, reinterpreting, and developing structure
• Organising without reorganising

Extending the approach of part I, and providing insights that are mostly absent from process-based frameworks (the Agile scaling frameworks for example), in what practical ways can we help the relationships between organisational scales to be more healthy and productive? And again, we scale down as well as up. What about our networks? And other kinds of relationship – people to business challenges, to business domains, and to their own and others' development, for example? And we finish very much in Leading with Outcomes style, developing and pursuing organisational strategy in the language of needs, obstacles, and outcomes.

4. The space between

What the scaling frameworks don't tell you:

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

Interlude (II)

As Interlude (I), plus:

• Option Relationship Mapping – organising outcomes visually

5. Organising at human scale

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

6. What lies beneath

• What made it that way? What keeps it that way? Out of what does that emerge?
• Engaging more deeply with constraints
• Revisting the the Meaning, Measure, Method pattern – generating solution ideas and their corresponding hypotheses

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
• Dave Snowden’s Estuarine Framework – references here

Upgrade path to Authorised Leading with Outcomes Facilitator or Trainer

Not included in Leading in a Transforming Organisation is the two-part Inside-out Strategy module:

• Inside-out Strategy (I): On the same page, with purpose
• Inside-out Strategy (II): Fit for maximum impact

Respectively, these build on two workshop designs that are in the repertoire of every Leading with Outcomes Facilitator or Trainer:

• The Leading with Outcomes Discovery Workshop
• The Leading with Outcomes Assessment Debrief Workshop

Both parts of Inside-out Strategy are available as self-paced, video-based training. See the Agendashift Academy's Store page for further information about all aspects of Leading with Outcomes, including the Trainer and Faciliator programmes.