Resources: Agendashift True North

As featured in the book, our cheat sheet, the Leading with Outcomes Discovery Workshop, and the Leading with Outcomes module Inside-out Strategy (I): On the same page, with purpose, the Agendashift True North statement is released under a Creative Commons with-attribution (CC-BY-SA) licence to enable adaptations and its wider use:

As text (the "Imagine..." is optional):

The facilitation deck (see below) includes two sets of slides with setup questions, one set intended for workshop use, the other for meetups, conferences etc. For the workshop version, the questions are as follows:

1. When that’s working at its ideal best for us, what’s that like?
2. And when that’s happening, whose needs are we meeting? What new stories could they tell?
3. What stops that? What gets in the way?

The two-part exercise True North: Ideal (questions 1 & 2) and True North: Obstacles (question 3) may be followed by:

1. Obstacles Fast and Slow (formerly known as Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle)
2. 15-minute FOTO, our Clean Language-inspired coaching game

For workshop settings we recommend establishing some shared context first, preceding those exercises with the Celebration-5W kickoff exercise.

Influences:

• Agile and Lean – avoiding terms like “collaboration” and “just in time” (unhelpful in what is intended to be used as a generative image) but the concepts are there
• Caitlin Walker’s “working at your best”
• Russell L. Ackoff’s idealised design, but note that we are not so much designing the ideal here as enjoying it

See chapter 1 of Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2nd edition 2021) for more on this True North’s design and usage, and note that the overall flow described above follows a pattern – Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes (IdOO) – that is repeated elsewhere.

Relevant training modules:

• Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
• Inside-out Strategy: On the same page, with purpose

Blog posts:

• Updates to the Agendashift True North exercise (February 2021)
• True North, tweaked (August 2020)
• A True North for Lean-Agile? (May 2017)



Copyright © 2015-2025 Agendashift Ltd (formerly Positive Incline Ltd). All rights reserved. The Agendashift True North by Mike Burrows of Agendashift 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/.





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