Agendashift

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Definitely Maybe Agile with your hosts, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock. How are you today, Dave?

I'm doing fantastic, Peter. It's it's been a long time that we've actually uh taken the time out to record a conversation. I think we've had plenty of conversations, but actually taking the time to record something. We've certainly been r thinking about how we can um pull some ideas together. And I think the the the format that we'll be uh leaning towards uh will hopefully be even more valuable for our listeners.

Yes, yeah, exactly. And uh and we decided we would try and kick this off and uh see if people are interested in hearing us uh talk about some books and some content and or maybe bring some people in and have some other conversations. And these are the kind of things we're thinking of experimenting with a little. And uh and this week we've uh been busy reading. So uh we have a we have a book topic to talk about, right?

Well, I mean, we're always reading, of course. I mean, this is how you stay ahead as a any sort of coach or or or facilitator, um, consultant. But uh what was interesting as we pulled our list of of books together is trying to look at something that might be relevant to our readers when we're thinking about digital transformations or any sort of organizational transformation. So Mike Burroughs has been in this space for for many, many years. He's a obviously very well-recognized author and practitioner in this space, and I think his book, Agenda Shift, really gives us a great place to start.

I think so too. I mean, it's it's a book that and a practice that uh I I've known for many years, and I've used quite a lot of the exercises in it with many of the clients I've worked with uh quite effectively. And so I think it's a great place to start and have a conversation about it. Uh and then in this time we're reading the second edition, so the uh the updated new version with all the extra stuff in it.

Well, that's for sure. And so so maybe just to start off, I mean, uh agenda shift is is Mike Burroughs has has uh kind of consolidated uh many of the practices and the experiences that he's had working with many different clients and really spelled it out in a pretty short book. It's a it's a nice straightforward read. And one of the, I mean, dry right off the bat, what I found interesting is there's so many books that start at that high level of principles and you have to work hard to pull it down to actually apply it in your context. And I think what I really appreciated about uh agenda shift is that it's it's almost reads like a how-to guide for those of us facilitating these conversations. So it isn't, you know, it's not a framework that you're going to go and you know, cookie-cutter over what we're up to. It's how do you emerge the right approach in your organization?

Yeah, and it's nice the way that he's laid out each chapter in a like here's how it would go, and here's the method, here's the like the exercise. And then the second part of the chapter is like, here's some theories and principles and other exercises and things you might want to try, and what's what's underlying this, what the mechanics behind the reason we chose to do this at this point in the uh in the sequence.

And and I think uh when I think about the conversations that we've recorded over the last few years, as we've had these discussions, um, it's we're we're often walking that fine line between sort of consulting or guiding as a coach versus uh and and really trying to achieve some sort of significant steps forward uh in an organization, while at the same time uh being respectful of the human aspect, the people side. And what I really appreciate as a reminder to me, who's been in coaching organizations for many, many years, is the way I and I think it's just the way I've been reading and and consuming information in the last couple of years, is it brought back the almost like the basics, right? Of open space technologies, of of liberating structures, of the the the care to take with the language, with the questions that we use. And and I think, you know, in if we think of the many uh transformations that we've been involved with in the last few years, I think that reminder of you know really working with the human behavior side was it really kind of struck home to me. I thought that was a really great, just a reminder of get back into that headspace.

Yeah, there's definitely a lot of empathy in uh in the in the writing and in the model in the way that he uh that uh Mike puts the model across. It's about that generative uh concept, but with very much the the idea of focus on the people, focus on what they're bringing to the table, and uh uh bring out the most you you possibly can help people through that. So it's very, very powerful in that respect.

I love there's a there's a great quote in there that is just one of those tweetable quotes, which is the empathy is a change agent superpower. And so many times, you know, we're we're experienced, we've done this for a while, and you can step into an organization, a transformation, and anybody involved in that transformation, it's very easy to see a solution or see a path to go forward, and then try and bring people to that path, to that realization, to effectively take a me first approach. I know where we need to go, and I'm just trying to persuade people to see the same thing that I'm seeing. And that whole empathy piece is just, and so many of the exercises are a reminder. And this I think is important for us to recognize. Agenda shift doesn't give you the answers. It's not telling you this is the framework and this is what you have to do, and this is what you need to impose in your organization. It's giving you a generative, I'd almost say like a human-centric conversational, how do you emerge, identify where you need to spend time, how do you come to the right sort of outcome-based approaches there? And I think that's a it's if you're going in there for a framework that you can kind of cookie-cutter in, you're not going to come out with the framework that you were thinking you were going to come in for. If you're going there with how do I get buy-in, how do I bring people on that journey? Now I think you're talking. There's some really powerful, simple phrases. The thought given into the questions and the language is just tremendous.

It is. And uh I love some of the sort of the key pieces that he's bringing to the table. It's about, it's not about a specific set of obstacles or outcomes. It's about how do you create outcomes that are relevant to you and then how do you look at that for how do you start to analyze that, bring it together, how do you explore what those might be, how do you come up with your solutions, right? Which is essentially a coaching approach to looking at this, right? And the the person is whole and the uh they are who they are, they can uh discover this, right?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now, I think we we should also recognize, and it's probably worth us sticking in the in the footnotes for this particular um conversation, but there's an a range of different templates. And again, from a tools perspective, it's a really great resource, an explanation, not just of you know, here's a template, but how to use it. And there's there's templates, there's there's surveys, there's a number of different um references. There's also a very complete reading list and so on. So as a I was I was actually looking at this thinking, if I'm a an agile coach or a transformation agent, um, you know, building up that that experience, this is this would be one of those dog-eared books that you're using for a few years as you hone your skills in front of clients and you're trying to figure out exactly how to overcome some of the objections, the dynamics that we're we've all seen in those conversations, in those workshops.

Right, exactly. Yeah. And uh I I have found uh over the yeah, I've used quite a few of these exercises many times myself, and uh I I think the ones that I've used most are the ones at the the beginning, like the the opening ones, the discovery exercises, the uh the celebration 5W ones and um the the the good obstacle, bad obstacle is these is gutted in here. So it's taking taking the time to think about like what type of what type of obstacle, how have I defined what I'm looking to do? Um I I liked one of the ones there, going from good obstacle to bad obstacle, which was around uh going from saying instead of saying lack of quality is the obstacle, talking about uh quality expectations exceed our ability to deliver. So this thinking about things in more positive terms, essentially, um, as we before we go about thinking about well, what outcomes would we like instead? And how you got some.

Yeah, and I I I really liked there there's a a number of key things. I mean, uh have a look at the book and take a look at it and put some of those uh ideas in practice. Um if you're if you're familiar with a lot of the facilitation practices, you'll see a very, very deep understanding and very strong application of those as you come through. If you're not familiar, trust the wording in the page and follow through. That would be the the bit that I pick up. Uh interestingly, where I've used a lot of the practices where I was on the other end of the scale, if you like, I spend a lot of time with the leadership trying to help them explain some of the things that they're looking at. Um, I particularly uh I'm a huge fan of Dave Snowden, as anybody who's listened in, and and some of the ideas that have been brought up. So the option approach mapping piece is something that is is very much, you know, you just leads to some fantastic conversations. Yeah. I thought that the the way that was sort of extracted and and pulled through was really powerful. And it it's I'm I'm just thinking on a number of conversations I'm having right now where it this is becoming more and more and more urgent as an appreciation or understanding that you know organizations have to be, I believe, uh really begin understanding the problem space that they're working on, how they can translate that into actionable actions. Because of course, you know, I I just had a conversation this week about the risk of paralysis analysis, and it is a very real concern, and yet there's some great tools here to sort of help people appreciate that and change.

Yeah, it's funny, I was talking about that uh right before this, and uh it's a bit of a bit of a tangent from the book, but I think it's somewhat relevant. But this idea that uh um I was using the uh Potter's parable to explain the uh the the two potters sit down at the wheel and they've got a lun a bunch of clay, they've got to build the best part, and one of them spends like an hour and a half or the two hours planning out exactly what they're gonna do before trying to build the perfect part, the other person just starts building and they make as many pots as they possibly can. And so who do you think has the best part of this? Yes. And uh so the there's bits, it's really good. I mean, there's lots of now.

Um as I as I sort of think about it, there's a couple of things, and I I love that parable as well. I've said I've used it so many times in lots of different contexts. Um, here's here's one of the that there are two things like as you're getting to the end of the sort of two realizations that I thought were really powerful. And I want to focus specifically on one just for the moment, which is the left to right versus right to left. So um, broadly speaking, that is, if I if I'm going left to right, I'm starting off with you know planning things, understanding what the gap and is between where we want to go and where we are, putting that plan together. So it's it's what we're taught from school onwards, right? Sit down, think about things, plan it out left to right. Now, what's interesting there, there's a lot of security around that as you move from left to right. But of course, from an emergent perspective, from putting the customer need, the end user's objectives, the organization's objectives front and center, working from outcomes on the right hand side, and then looking to the left to see what are the areas that we need to improve, change, build some new capabilities, whatever that might be. That sort of right to left thinking, I thought that sort of description was a really powerful way of immediately understanding some of the friction that we get in any organization when we try and try and introduce complexity thinking, try and introduce outcome-based thinking. Just simple things like product versus project thinking, product being right to left, project being left to right as an example.

Yeah, I find that very powerful too. It's uh it's I I I I I found it most often, of course, and he uses it in the book in this way too, is when he's talking about Kanban and this, this like once you've got a Kanban model in place that we look at the board from right to left, we don't look at it from left to right, and uh they and then walking people through why that is, like what can we do to move the next thing across. Because if we don't, we're not freeing up capacity for the next things that need to come in. So understanding how that works from a system's perspective, what that's doing to the system and what it could the how that causes work to move forward. Uh I think it is a very powerful uh piece, yeah, I would agree. And he uses it here both in that sense and in the in that strategy sense, as you're saying, as a way of saying, here's my strategy, here are my outcomes. Now let's track back from that and see what that what that leads us to do.

No, I and I I it's it's a it's a really a thoughtful like that one is is something that I'll continue to noodle on because I don't, I mean, of course, there's no straightforward answers. We know there isn't. It's it's a complexity piece in it in and of itself. But what that led to is being able to reframe some of the challenges that we see in organizations. And I think there's a great sentence where he really kind of outlines that one and might just look is which is um just read the sentence straight out, which is legacy structures modeling legacy behaviors so strongly that they impede rather than support transformation. And it's really difficult. You can't call that out because people will fight back on it. They're gonna say, no, hold on, we understand where we're going, we'll adjust our legacy structures and adjust our legacy behaviors. Um, but what that I mean, that's a little bit of the we are always gonna do what we always know how to do. We feel safe, we feel comfortable with it. And it in it actively prevents the transformation happening.

I think the missing piece uh out of uh of that is the incentives. Yeah. So there's a so you need you need incentives and behaviors uh and structure as the support. And and this is uh this is actually, I mean John Smart put it that way, but it's also something I've been I've been thinking about this for a while. One of and incentives isn't just necessarily monetary incentives, incentives can also be power structures as well in your organization. Incentives can be all sorts lots of things, like what is causing the behavior that you see, like why am I incented to do that? And if um you see this a lot in uh in what we that the uh permafrost layer in that sort of frozen middle where the uh the the this top of the organization is saying, we're gonna go agile or we're gonna change and we're gonna be faster and better and customer focused and cloud first and la da-da-da-da. And they say all the right words. And uh the folks at the bottom go, yay! And the people in the middle go, uh, okay, but you're still asking me to hit those numbers. Yeah. What I did last year allows me to hit those numbers. So I'm gonna do the same thing I did last year, and nothing changes.

Well, and and you're still funding this and you're still funding that. So it's the that incentives, whether it's from where the the money sits and how it's being used, whether it's the hierarchies and how we're who we're reporting to and how that's structured. I mean, there's a lot of these different plays. Now, again, there's some great models uh in agenda shift for us to start investigating and reading about and understanding and applying. I think uh, and I think this is something that we've talked about a lot: emergent transformation. We need to start a transformation through emergent activities. We've got to get buy-in, we've got to co-create the understanding of where we are and what we need to change. There's no doubt that's really well defined in the book. I think uh as we think of you know accelerating that application and application in a broader context, there's a there's a sort of a pull nature of once that change has been set in motion, how do you accelerate it and that standardization and approach? Not particularly code. I see that sort of as as the next few chapters, if that makes sense, right? But there's that really, I and I think this is one of the key things is you need both. You need that co-creation, you need that, but you also need that how do you push the button, accelerate, and get standardize some of those changes in there. DevOps, for example, tends to do that really well because it lends itself to it. There's a lot of technology, a lot of automation, a lot of tools that allow you to consolidate some of those decisions and allow you to accelerate that change, harder to do in some of the other examples that we've shared around digital transformations, um, whether it's domains or business model and some of those other ones that we discussed.

Yeah, it's always always difficult. And especially as uh, and we as we always say, is you need to start with the people first and then get to what the the tooling is that's going to reinforce that set of behaviors. So having the right pieces in uh in place, but there's always this chicken and egg situation there where we it isn't either or we need both, uh, but we do need to get the people on board first with the idea of where we're going uh so that they're we're successful with the introduction of the other pieces, which is always a fun, yeah, fun game, to say the least.

Um, any other kind of standout pieces that you you drew from that uh reading?

Uh I think um some of the pieces that I I really liked. I like the um I like the option approach piece too, the the whole tie into Kinefin and uh the like how he presents that information. I've used that, I actually used it as a uh a reference in a recent um course I recorded uh so on value stream management for exactly uh that reason. It is a very powerful way of approaching uh that and understanding what it actually means and sort of internalizing and actually finding actually using it, I find. So I think it is a good way of communicating that. Um the relationship between option relationship mapping and wardly mapping is interesting to me as well, because I've used um wardly mapping, so value changing is over evolution in places and the but whereas he's using it here in a like an option, uh the relationships between options and visibility to the customer and the which is also interesting, right? It's uh so I found that one uh quite uh intriguing. Uh one of the models that I I feel I need more time to go away and digest that's also in that mapping section is that uh taste X matrix one around the like the four dimensions of strategy. Yeah, I kind I kind of read through that and went, oh yeah, I'm gonna have to come back to that because it's and think about that a little bit more about that is very true, yeah.

There is a lot of moving parts in that. And then and there even recognize some of the challenges with scaling it. Um but again, really I you know, I I think part of what we're talking about here, and this is something we've got to remember that sits behind uh agenda ship, but also a lot of Mike Burroughs' work and many of the people he he calls out in the discussion, which is the impact, I'd say the impact Kanban has on organizational change. Sometimes we come at agile from that view of teams and how teams behave and so on. And what I I think is, you know, we we've we've talked about it, we've maybe not name-checked it quite as well, but Kanban at an organizational change level is very, very powerful and and is underrated perhaps, or at least not talked about as much as it could be. And I think that underpins many of those conversations that we're we're hinting at here.

Yeah, I I would agree. I I think it's uh there's I mean, I had this conversation the other day um with uh with a client who uh a new client in there that the way they introduced their knowledge of agile was um the the you know that agile practice that we all know indicating that uh agile equals scrum and and then DevOps equals structure. And it was like Yeah, there's more to it than that, yeah. Yeah, for sure. A little bit more to it than that. But um, I I think one of the other pieces in there I quite liked was the uh 2 MBM piece as well, the just as a nice mnemonic around meaning before metric and measure before method. Yeah, uh that's clever.

Don't you hate it when somebody comes up with a a mnemonic like that that is just pretty solid? Yeah. Uh but but I mean, joking aside, again, more of that sort of right to left thinking of of um stop because we're we're in a world where everybody's talking about okay's, everyone's talking about some sort of metrics and so on and and delivery. And I think it's important. We need to start bringing that back into the conversation, but that meaning before metric or measure before method, absolutely. Think about what you're trying to look at and understand it before targeting the metrics, right? And uh and I I think if if I remember rightly, he uses the example of cycle time. And we've had this conversation many times where we'll talk about, you know, focus on cycle time, focus on cycle time, as uh another one that I'll often use is is frequency of release. This is just that reminder of it isn't ubiquitous. We need to sit and understand it. It reminds me of a great there's an article recently in Harvard Business Review about Toyota and how um they've actually built cues to manage uncertainty in the supply chain, which is is the opposite of what anybody who's trying to follow, you know, just in time thinking thinks, perhaps at that sort of you know, primary level or i introductory level. They're obviously they're they're experts, as in with capital EX extra, everything, right? And they're bringing they're using those things as they bring it in and do the right thing. It depends where you are, what problem is you're trying to solve.

I I uh I don't know if you uh have seen the same article, but uh they're the what they're doing there is they're they're utilizing the data that they know about how they consume within the system. And so if there's there's a hundred thousand parts that go into a car, they identify the two hundred or wherever it is that uh are the ones that, if they're not available, will slow down the entire system and they build the cues of those.

Yeah. And and what I've found. Well, I mean, uh you know, that's somewhat interesting. But what I found even better about that article was the way they said that it's seasonal as well. They adjust the cues based on the risk associated with bad weather, you know, and and the deliveries being impacted by that bad weather. That's a level of appreciation or understanding about what influences your ability to deliver, which is so far beyond at least the organization's eye with way beyond what we're often talking about.

And I'm totally making up the numbers there, but it's uh it was uh because it was a little while ago I read that article. Yeah, but uh yeah, I was uh impressed by the amount of attention to detail and knowledge about how your system works to be able to do that is incredible. Right.

So maybe in closing, just again, uh um Mike Burroughs' agenda shift, uh second edition is the one we we fortuitously both of us were reading at that time. Uh hopefully the some of the insights that we're pulling out really uh resonate with some of our listeners. Any questions, as always, any observations, comments that you might want to add, um please drop us an email and it's comments. No, we I've forgotten the email address, Pisa.

Feedback at definitely maybe agile, it's been so long. Uh feedback at definitely maybeagile.com. I've got to put my radio term voice on for that better looking.

Okay, and uh looking forward to well, we'll be picking up these conversations a little bit more regularly now going forward. So looking forward to a few more of these over the coming weeks. Um, again, feedback at definitely maybeagile.com. Also take a look because we've mentioned a couple of references and links and so on. We'll make sure they're all in the uh footer so you can get hold of those. Uh in the meantime, again, Peter, always a pleasure.

Yeah, always a pleasure, Dave. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and devil at scale.