Agendashift as framework – principles, patterns, and activities

These pages describe Agendashift – the wholehearted engagement model – as an open framework for continuous, outcome-oriented transformation.

Agendashift is primarily for agents of strategic change, and it’s designed to be used with or without an explicit Lean-Agile agenda. In the Lean-Agile case it is intended neither as a replacement for the likes of Scrum, Kanban, or SAFe, nor as a way to choose between them. We’re not against such frameworks; as pluralists, we celebrate them as demonstrations of what’s possible and as sources of patterns that can be combined in interesting and innovative ways. What we’re against is their imposition – so contradictory as to invite failure.

We want to help you avoid yet another failed or utterly disappointing implementation, and we don’t pretend to be neutral. Outcome-orientation is not a neutral stance. Our commitment to participation and our opposition to imposition aren’t neutral either. If some of Agendashift’s principled approach to strategy and change rubs off in other areas too, we’d be delighted. Perhaps yours can be a wholehearted organisation too!

The framework’s main elements:

• Distilled essence of Agendashift in five principles:

  1. Start – and finish – with needs
  2. Agree on outcomes
  3. Make the agenda for change visible
  4. Manage options, testing assumptions
  5. Organise for leverage and learning

• Its core activities organised and explained by two key generative patterns:

  1. Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes (Idoo)
  2. Just-in-time Strategy Deployment

  Understand those two patterns, how they relate to each other, and how they challenge the status quo, and you’re a long way towards understanding both how Agendashift works and why it exists.

• Five core activities, described in the pages below as workshop sessions that prime the pump for the longer term:

  1. Discovery
  2. Exploration
  3. Mapping
  4. Elaboration
  5. Operation

• And running through those, a golden thread: the language of outcomes.

The Agendashift framework is open source, its definitions and many of its resources released under a CC-BY-SA license. At its github repository you can raise issues, contribute changes, even fork your own derived work. We are glad in turn to honour our sources:

• Models, sources, and inspirations

Agendashift™ is copyright © 2015-2020 Positive Incline Ltd. All rights reserved. The page Agendashift as framework – principles, patterns, and activities by Mike Burrows of Positive Incline Ltd is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

Source text maintained at github.com/asplake/agendashift-open/tree/master/framework.md (github.com)

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