Agile Leadership
Training Game Board
David Chilcott
Pat Reed
Agenda
• Introduction & Invitation
• Where Do We Start?
• Where Does The Game Board Fit?
• Pulling It All Together
• Q&A
What Leaders Really Do
“They don’t make plans; they don’t solve
problems; they don’t even organize
people. What leaders really do is prepare
organizations for change and help them
cope as they struggle through it.”
John P. Kotter
Execution
A systematic way of exposing reality……
acting on it ……and adaptively
learning (continuously)
Reality
• The challenges ahead of us will always be
outside of our repertoire
• All of us are smarter than any of us
• Learning, innovation, collaboration and
relationships are more important than
knowledge
Leading Adaptive Change
• Strategy for learning
• Rapidly assessing who needs to learn what? How?
• Leading: holding the people with the problem together
– Thinking
– Engaging conflicts and differences
– Learning from each other
– Managing disequilibrium and uncertainty
Creating a Learning Organization
• From “The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the
Learning Organization” (Peter Senge);
– Systems Thinking
– Personal Mastery
– Mental Models
– Building Shared Visions
– Team Learning
• From “Theory U: Leading From the Future as It Emerges”
(Dr. C. Otto Scharmer)
– Co-initiating
– Co-sensing
– Presencing
– Co-creating
– Co-evolving
Bottomline….
Every opportunity to create
value is an equal opportunity
to create waste.
o
Bottomline….
The critical differentiator is the
results we must consistently
deliver; the quality of every
interaction and the strength
of our adaptive relationships
o
The Good News….
• The more we change, the more prepared
we are for future change
• The more agile we are (i.e. behave
consistently with agile values and principles),
the more agile we become
• The stronger our collaborative networks, the
more opportunities we have for strengthening
and expanding those networks
We can’t think ourselves
into a new way of
acting…… we must act
ourselves into a new way
of thinking
Where Do We Start?
Introduction to Game Board
Where Do We Start?
Self-Organizing Exercise
Self-Organizing Exercise
Everyone stand up!
Answer the question by organizing yourselves into a line in order of
your response:
• Practice: How long have you worked here?
• How familiar are you with agile methods?
• Creativity: What proportion of your time at work is spent
innovating or being creative?
• Perception: How recently did you have a misunderstanding or
disagreement with someone because of different perceptions
(work or personal, small or large)?
• Change: How long ago was the most recent major change in
your life (employer, birth, death, marriage, move, promotion,
demotion)?
Self-Organizing Exercise
Debrief:
• What did you notice?
• Was this easier or harder than you expected?
• How did you determine where you belonged in the line?
17
Impact of Context Shifting Exercise
1 – 10 A–M I–X
What do Agile Executives & Leaders Do?
What do Agile Executives & Leaders Do?
From Jim Highsmith’s APLN Blog:
In some circles agile leaders & mangers are
admonished to buy pizza and get out of the way.
In others they are asked to be supportive of self-
organizing teams. But I think there are a range of
activities that an agile leader or executive must do
to grow agile organizations. Here is a start on my
list.
What do Agile Executives & Leaders Do?
• facilitating a decentralized, • helping teams understand and
empowered, collaborative deliver on business, product,
workplace and project objectives
• aligning agile transformation • creating an agile performance
efforts to business strategy management system
• fostering an adaptable product • creating an agile proficiency
line and product architecture framework
• creating both proactive and • creating guidelines, training;
reactive organizational and support for agile
adaptation processes processes, practices, and tools.
• understanding the agile
development process
Learning for YOU and YOURS?
• What do YOU and the
Executives & Leaders
in YOUR Organization
Most Need to Learn
about Agile?
Agile Clinic Session
Question & Answer Session
Session Evaluation:
• What worked well?
• What could be
improved? And how?
Closing Invitation
APLN Action Research Program is sponsoring:
A "clearinghouse" for materials and training to advance
knowledge and skills of Agile Organizations, Agile Leadership,
& Agile Management
Ongoing research and information-gathering to populate the
clearinghouse
A framework to support appropriate licensing, evaluation, and
structure for materials
Areas of focus include:
Agile Organization Models & Training
Agile Executive Models & Training
Agile Leadership Models & Training
Agile Manager Models & Training
Distributed Agile Team Models & Training
Agile Curriculum Development
Closing Invitation
We're compiling an inventory of Learning
Stories. Please contact us if you're
interested in contributing.
David Chilcott drc@outformations.com
Pat Reed Pat_Reed@gap.com
THANK YOU!