Lean

Agendashift, Cynefin and the Butterfly Stamped

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The butterfly who stamped

I’ve recently become an Agendashift partner and have enjoyed exploring how this inclusive, contextual, fulfilling, open approach fits with how I use Strategy Deployment.

Specifically, I find that the Agendashift values-based  assessment can be a form of diagnosis of a team or organisation’s critical challenges, in order to agree guiding policy for change and focus coherent action. I use those italicised terms deliberately as they come from Richard Rumelt’s book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy in which he defines a good strategy kernel as containing those key elements. I love this definition as it maps beautifully onto how I understand Strategy Deployment, and I intent to blog more about this soon.

In an early conversation with Mike when I was first experimenting with the assessment, we were exploring how Cynefin relates to the approach, and in particular the fact that not everything needs to be an experiment. This led to the idea of using the Agendashift assessment prompts as part of a Cynefin contextualisation exercise, which in turn led to the session we ran together at Lean Agile Scotland this year (also including elements of Clean Language).

My original thought had been to try something even more basic though, using the assessment prompts directly in a method that Dave Snowden calls “and the butterfly stamped“, and I got the chance to give that a go last week at Agile Northants.

The exercise – sometimes called simply Butterfly Stamping – is essentially a Four Points Contextualisation in which the items being contextualised are provided by the facilitator rather than generated by the participants. In this case those items were the prompts used in the Agendashift mini assessment, which you can see by completing the 2016 Agendashift global survey.

This meant that as well as learning about Cynefin and Sensemaking, participants were able to have rich conversations about their contexts and how well they were working, without getting stuck on what they were doing and what tools, techniques and practices they were using. Feedback was very positive, and you can see some of the output in this tweet:

I hope we can turn this into something that can be easily shared and reused. Let me know if you’re interested in running at your event. And watch this space!