50 Quick Ideas To Improve Your Agile Transformation

50
50 by Jonathan Khoo

I saw a tweet recently from Ben Mosir (@HiredThought) about creating a “(card) deck of tactics to level up how you and your teams do strategy”. Unsurprising this piqued my interest, although it turned out that the focus was strategy itself, as opposed to strategy deployment. However, that then raised the question of what a strategy deployment card deck, which could be used in an agile transformation, might look like.

While starting to think about what the content might be, it also reminded me of Gjoko Adzic and David Evans’ book “50 Quick Ideas to Improve Your User Stories” and its sister books in the series. The obvious first step would be to see if I could come up with a list of 50 quick ideas for strategy deployment, and this is that initial list.

Some caveats first. It’s a very rough first version which I’m sure will change over time. In fact, it has already changed since I started to write this post. I expect some ideas to merge, and some to split out into multiple ideas. While some are quite specific, some may prove to be too abstract, and may not prove to be useful or relevant. Some others are almost certainly missing, or I just don’t know enough about them yet (e.g. Substrate-Independence Theory!)

I’ve tried to organise the list of ideas into similar themes and added some additional links or clarifying words where I can. I’ve also tried to give credit or provide links or references where there has been a clear influence (or appropriation!).

So without further ado, here is the list. I’m curious what feedback people have, and whether this is an idea that is worth pursuing in itself…

Invitation

  1. Engagement Models
  2. Clean Language (by David J. Grove)
  3. Curiosity
  4. Ladder of Inference (by Chris Argyris)
  5. Improvisation
  6. Agendashift (by Mike Burrows)
  7. Liberating Structures (by Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless)
  8. Vector Theory of Change (via Dave Snowden)
  9. Four Disciplines of Execution (by Chris McChesney, Jim Huling, Sean Covey)

TASTE

  1. True North
  2. Aspirations (as a vector)
  3. Strategy
  4. Playing to Win (by Roger L. Martin)
  5. Even Over Statements
  6. Tactics
  7. Evidence (as a vector)
  8. Correlations
  9. X-Matrix

Situational Awareness

  1. Cynefin (by Dave Snowden)
  2. Coherence
  3. Sensemaking (via Dave Snowden)
  4. Evolutionary Potential (sidecasting)
  5. Emergent Strategy (by Henry Mintzberg)
  6. Wardley Mapping (by Simon Wardley)
  7. Impact Mapping (by Gojko Adzic)
  8. Team Topologies (by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais)
  9. Strategy Kernel
  10. Idealised Design (by Russell L. Ackoff)
  11. Present Thinking (via Jabe Bloom and Ben Mosior)

Strategy Deployment

  1. Backbriefing
  2. Intent
  3. Constraints
  4. Directed Opportunism (by Stephen Bungay)
  5. Mission Command (alignment, autonomy, agency)
  6. Leader-Leader (by L. David Marquet)
  7. Catchball
  8. Toyota Kata (by Mike Rother)
  9. Real Options (by Chris Matts, Olav Maassen and Chris Geary)
  10. OKRs

Deliberate Discovery

  1. Experiments
  2. Failure
  3. Thinking in Bets (bu Annie Duke)
  4. Ritual Dissent (via Dave Snowden)
  5. PDSA
  6. Predictability (as an outcome)
  7. Responsiveness (as an outcome)
  8. Productivity (as an outcome)
  9. Quality (as an outcome)
  10. Sustainability (as an outcome)
  11. Value (as an outcome)
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