The book AgendaShift explores how to apply lean and agile principles for lasting change in organizations. Mike Burrows defined Agendashift which is an inclusive, non-prescriptive, values-based, and outcome-centric approach to continuous transformation supported by online, workshop, and coaching tools.
I did an interview with Mike Burrows about how to apply Agendashift in a lean or agile transformation, using Clean Language and Clean Questions in discovery, the Agendashift Values-based delivery assessment, visualizing a possible transformation, finding solutions to do the wanted changes in the organization, and experimenting with change in organizations. You can read it on InfoQ: Q&A on the Book Agendashift Part I.
15 quotes from Agendashift
Here’s a set of 15 quotes from the book Agendashift. I’m tweeting these quotes with #AgendaShift. Note that some of the quotes are too long to tweet, but you can still share them on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google plus and many other social media channels.
What would it be like if everyone were able to work at their best, individually, within teams, and across teams?
Specific obstacles are much easier to overcome than overgeneralised ones
Practising Clean Language heightens your awareness of your personal tendencies to judge or to advise long before you’ve properly listened
“Right conversations, right people, right time” is one important sign that Agile is going well
Overburdened systems – systems whose workloads are out of balance with their capacity – don’t perform well
The goal isn’t to arrive at a single agreed score but to build a shared sense of how really thing are
Too many organisations are full of smart people who can tell you what’s wrong and can give you a long list of sure-fire fixes, but nothing changes
Hypothesis-driven change isn’t just about how we frame our big ideas, it’s also about how we make progress
If you can document and track your changes with nothing more sophisticated than marker pens and sticky notes, do it!
Thing go wrong when change is not treated like real work
With fewer experiments running in parallel, it’s easier to isolate their impact, making it easier to work out which change caused which effect
Keep your changes small enough that the nasties have less room in which to hide
If you really must start work on changes known to have unresolved dependencies, make them visible
Whether or not you are ready for continuous transformation, isn’t that a good place to start?
Begin to change with the end in mind
Applying Agile and Lean to change organizations
You can use Agile and Lean principles and techniques not only to develop software, but also to change the way that you are doing it. It’s a kind of eating your own dog food for agile coaches, where you use agile to increase your agility.
It’s not being, but becoming Agile and Lean that brings you benefits. The journey, where you learn and improve continuously is more important than reaching the destination.
The Agile Self-assessment Game is a card game that teams and organizations can use to see how agile they are and agree where to go next on their agile journey.
Recommended books on Agile and Lean Change
Here’s some recommended reading on applying Agile and Lean practices for organizational change:
