Karl Scotland – Using Agility Strategically
Karl Scotland – Using Agility Strategically
Browsing Category
I’ve blogged about my thoughts on Strategy Deployment and Agendashift (as well as how to use Agendashift with the X-Matrix) some time ago, and more recently I wrote about Strategy Deployment and the Four Disciplines of Execution. Over the last few months I have had the opportunity to combine the two models, and this post will give a high level overview …
This is another post comparing my views on Strategy Deployment and other approaches. This time the Four Disciplines of Execution (or 4DX), described in the book of the same name. I’d heard about 4DX from a few people over the last years; notably Hakan Forss and Matt Wynne. I finally got around to reading the book, found it immediately useful, …
While I don’t claim to have any expertise in strategy development, I do have ideas and opinions on what a good strategy looks like. One important aspect is that strategy is more about choices and decisions, and less about planning and execution. Richard Rumelt describes this in terms of Guiding Policies in his Strategy Kernel (which I described in a …
There has been much debate online, and in particular on Twitter recently, about the imposition of Agile and the Agile Industrial Complex. See Ron Jeffries’ recent blog for more context. It’s an important topic. I have seen plenty of imposed Agile which I would call Incoherent Agile. Agile processes imposed as Best Practice without any coherence or alignment with the …
As part of preparing material for the Agendashift and X-Matrix Masterclass I’m running with Mike Burrows next month, I started thinking about how the idea of Impact, Outcome and Output (that blog is from 2012) could be overlaid onto the TASTE approach. Back then I described the relationship between them as: Outputs create Outcomes which have Impact Give the outcome-oriented perspective of …
I’ve mentioned and alluded to the Strategy Deployment concept of Catchball in various posts but I’ve never really described what I mean by it. This post is an attempt to fix that. The Metaphor Catchball is a simple metaphor for a collaboration, where a ball is thrown between people in a way that everyone is involved in the game. As part …
I first blogged about my early thoughts on Strategy Deployment and Agendashift nearly two years ago after some early experiments with Mike Burrows’ approach. Since then I’ve learned more, become an Agendashift partner, and co-taught a couple of “Lean-Agile Strategy Days” with Mike in June and October last year. More recently I used some of the elements of Agendashift during an …
Dave Snowden recently posted a series of blog posts on A Sense of Direction, about the use of goals and targets with Cynefin. As the X-Matrix uses measures in two of its sections (Aspirations and Evidence) I found that useful in clarifying my thinking on how I generally approach those areas. Lets start by addressing Dave’s two primary concerns; the …
Before reading this post, I encourage you to have a go at this quick puzzle to test your problem solving. Go on, you won’t regret it! How did you do? I’ve used this challenge numerous times in various talks and workshops and I find that the majority of people follow the same pattern. They only test their hypotheses by guessing …
I’ve noticed a lot of conversation recently (mostly on Twitter) debating how prescriptive, or not, we should be when helping teams through an Agile Transformation (i.e. helping them use Agile approaches to be more Agile)? Do we tell teams exactly what to do initially, or allow them complete freedom to figure it out for themselves? Or something else? Worshipping False …