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How to Measure the Predictability of Agile

This post follows up on a Twitter thread I posted in November exploring ways of measuring the predictability of teams. I also discussed some of these ideas in a Drunk Agile episode. When I begin working with an organisation on the agile transformation, an early conversation is around successful outcomes. My work on Strategy Deployment is all about answering the …

Strategy Deployment and Idealised Design

This post introduces Idealised Design, as described in the book Idealized Design: How to Dissolve Tomorrow’s Crisis…Today by Russell L. Ackoff, Jason Magidson and Herber J. Addison, and explores how it relates to Strategy Deployment. The post is a continuation of the series on Strategy Deployment And other approaches. What is Idealised Design? The basic premise of Idealised Design is …

OKRs and Kanban – Working Perfectly Together

I have previously posted separately about Strategy Deployment and OKRs and Kanban. This is a guest post by Matt Roberts on OKRs and Kanban that brings the two together. With a degree of confidence, I am going to assume that you know what Objective and Key Results or OKRs are. As a goal-setting framework, it has become a favourite amongst …

Continuous Strategy is the new Strategy Deployment

I’ve been trying to come up with a better name for Strategy Deployment for a long time. One that has stuck with me recently is Continuous Strategy.

Time Capsules and Transformations

Time capsules can be a metaphor for transformation; a prediction of what we think people should know in the future, based on what we know today.

Backbriefing and the Curse of Knowledge

In a previous post on backbriefing, I described it as “a process with which people can check their understanding of the intent of their work and whether their plans will meet that intent”. On reflection, I realised I missed an important element. It is also leadership checking whether they have described their intent with enough clarity. Put another way, backbriefing …

Curiosity Theory and the Principle of Optimum Knowledge

When I talk about curiosity I usually talk about experimentation and the need for failure. When teaching experimentation with games such as Eleusis Expeditious, I inevitably end up talking about the Information Theory curve. I learned about Information Theory from Don Reinertsen in his book Principles of Product Development Flow – specifically Principle V4: “The Principle of Optimum Failure Rate. …

What is a True North?

The True North is the first element of my TASTE model and is in the middle of my X-Matrix template. It is the central piece which holds the other elements together. On the X-Matrix I define the True North as: The orientation which informs what we should do. That is a bit abstract and jargony, so lets unpack it a …

What is Backbriefing?

I talk about Backbriefing a lot in conference presentations and will have mentioned it in a number of blog posts. In particular I put together a Backbriefing A3. However, I don’t think I’ve ever really described what I mean by backbriefing or what it involves. Time to rectify that. Background I first learned about backbriefing in Stephen Bungay’s book The …

Strategy as Enabling Constraints

In one of my recent presentations, I talk about the 3 Cs of “Imposing” Agile; Coherence, Constraints and Curiosity. That idea, along with some of the content made it into a whitepaper I wrote last year. A key part of that, and one of the 3 Cs, is the idea of using constraints, and specifically of strategy as a form …