Applying the Three Horizons to Agile Conferences

Relaxing after Agile2014, Eric Willeke made an off-hand comment about applying the Three Horizons Model to Agile practices. That struck me as interesting and got me wondering about how the concept could be applied to the Agile conference program.

ApplyingI have blogged about the model before as a way of thinking about value (although on reflection I’d now say its more about potential). To summarise:

  • H1 focusses on “extending and defending the core business”
  • H2 focusses on “building emerging businesses”
  • H3 focusses on “creating viable options”

The idea behind the model is to ensure a mix of investment across the horizons. Otherwise, if (or more likely when) the core business dies, it will not be ready with any new and alternative opportunities.

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If we take these definitions, but think in terms of Agile practices, rather than businesses we get:

  • H1 focusses on “extending and defending the core practices”
  • H2 focusses on “building emerging practices”
  • H3 focusses on “creating viable options”

In this case, the Agile community would be ensuring a mix of investments across the horizons so that when the current core practices are no longer appropriate or useful, there will be new and alternative ones ready to be used in their place. That leads to the idea of having a conference program which includes an “investment allocation” in the different horizons. For example a 5 track conference could have 3 tracks on H1 topics, 1 track on H2 topics and 1 track on H3 topics giving a 60%/20%/20% allocation. Or a program made up of more traditional role/discipline/interest based tracks could allocate content across the horizons within each track.

The challenge, of course, would be agreeing on what topics are in which horizon. As an example, I might say Scrum and XP are firmly Horizon 1 as tried and tested methods. The various approaches to agility at scale might be Horizon 2 as they are still being explored and refined. Ideas from Beyond Budgeting or Cynefin might be Horizon 3 as they still being understood and experimented with.

The goal would not be to try and suggest any practices or approaches are any better or worse than other. The value would be in ensuring the longevity and continuing success of the Agile movement.

Speaking at Agile2014

Agile 2014

I’m going to be at Agile2014 in Orlando this year – the first time for a few years – and I’m looking forward to reconnecting with lots of people I haven’t seen for a very long time. If you see me, make sure you say “hi!”.

This post is to highlight a couple of things I’ll be doing there, or at least one thing I hope to be doing, and one I’ll definitely be!

First the hope. I’ve submitted a Pecha Kucha on Heuristics for Kanban Thinking, with which I want to introduce the questions asked on the Kanban Canvas. Here’s the description:

This talk will explore how heuristics can be used to frame Kanban Thinking and enable a problem solving capability. I will introduce a set questions which can be used to encourage creative thinking from multiple perspectives, from understanding the problems, to imagining the desired impacts and then designing potential interventions.

Please vote this up to help it get chosen. Otherwise I’ll just have to find another way of talking about the canvas (although I’ll probably run an Open Jam session anyway!).

Secondly, the definite. I’m running a workshop on the Enterprise Agile stage with my friend and former Rally colleague Rachel Weston Rowell. (Its on Tuesday Jul 29, 14:00-15.15 in Osceola A). The topic is Getting the X-Factor: Corporate Planning for the Agile Business. Here’s the description:

The pace of change is accelerating as technology advances, the economy becomes more global and markets become increasingly disruptive. As a result organisations are surviving for dramatically shorter periods of times. For example the average lifespan of organisations on the Standard and Poors 500 index has reduced by over 50 years on the last century, from 67 to 15 years. To survive, businesses need to change the way they operate at a corporate level, as well as becoming more Agile in their delivery capability. This involves moving to a model of co-creating and deploying an evolving corporate strategy, rather than centrally selecting and defining its rigid implementation, in order to create clear alignment, transparency and adaptability.

Join Karl and Rachel as they share the latest learnings from Rally Software’s journey of evolving their quarterly planning and steering. They will introduce one tool they have recently discovered and had positive experiences with, the X-matrix, through which strategy deployment can be achieved. This is a simple, single A3 page format, which visualises the correlations and contributions between strategies, tactics, improvements, results and departments. In this session you will work through completing an X-matrix for an example organisation.

Please come along! We ran this at RallyON, got great feedback, and had a lot of fun.