What happens in the workshop

Transforming Agile Management takes you through an organic sequence of four major steps that address the unique job of the Agile manager:

• Tending to Delivery Teams

  We start by examining the nature of self-organizing teams, the characteristics of the environment in which they operate, and how and when those environments support them, and when they constrain or undermine their success.

• Redesigning the Organization

  Seeing that our organizational culture, structures and policies thwart the efforts of self-organizing teams, we move to explore what new design principles might be needed to create the organization of the future. As we examine this new organization, we run up against the mental models -- in us and others -- that created the status quo in the first place.

• Upgrading Your Self

  To create a new organization, we must confront those mental models and upgrade them to a new model. Our inner "operating system" determines how we make sense of complex situations, and it is possible for us to generate an operating system "upgrade" to better deal with that complexity, and move towards our goal of organizational agility.

• Transforming Relationships

  The key locus for upgrading our own operating system -- perhaps ironically -- is in relationship with others, rather than merely looking inward. In designing a new kind of relationship -- based on feedback, authenticity, relationship intelligence, and surrender -- we create those relationships as transformative.

Specific features of the workshop bring these facets of your leadership agility to the foreground and assist you in your learning and development throughout the 2 days:

• Participants immerse themselves in a research-based framework of principles and practices which help them better understand the nature of organizational complexity; frameworks include the Integral Agile Framework, adult learning theory, and complex adaptive systems.
• Participants engage in a series of highly interactive activities and practices-in pairs, in triads, and in groups-that are designed to significantly deepen and expand their systems thinking, relationship intelligence, org design, and conversation mastery.
• Participants gain a deep understanding of the architecture of human development, both within themselves and in others; and how to be intentional in creating environments--at the level of team, program, or organization--in which that human development is deliberately cultivated in service of organizational agility.
• Participants will have a safe and courageous environment that encourages frank, open, and provocative interaction, conversation and feedback with each other, enhancing deep individual learning while also creating a profound sense of relationship, connection and community.

Who would benefit from this workshop

• Executive leaders (ideally, with their teams) who are seeking a clear methodology for how their leadership team can manage in a way consistent with Agile and their goals for organizational agility and transformation.
• Middle-tier Managers who are looking for ways to actually lead in a self-managed team environment, to increase their own capacity to deal with the complexity-mental and emotional-that they face in their challenging role, and to be able to bridge the gaps that stymie alignment between seemingly disparate stakeholder interests.
• HR professionals and Organizational Change Agents who wish to gain deeper insight, and develop greater skillfulness, in helping create the leadership and organizational culture needed to fully succeed with organizational agility.
• Agile Coaches who wish to understand new ways to think about management, in an Agile world that has tended to devalue management, rather than honestly rethinking it.

Outcomes you can expect from your participation in this workshop

• You will come away with new ways of relating to organizational obstacles that give you greater effectiveness in working with systemic organizational issues.
• You will have a powerful framework to help you catalyze broad organizational change in ways that build upon and leverage the qualities that are already present within the organization (though it may be invisible).
• You will have grown within yourself new tools that are key to helping groups and teams of all stripes build shared purpose, understanding, and commitment among themselves.
• You will be clearer about the inner assumptions, beliefs and personal stories which limit your leadership agility; and you will have a personal leadership development toolset to help you grow your ability to transcend those limitations.
• You will have a clear and simple conceptual framework that supports you in being able to facilitate the emergence of high-performance relationship systems, regardless of whether they are groups, teams, or programs or whether or not they are practicing some form of "Agile."
• You will have started within yourself a significant shift in how you are being as a leader. You will walk away with a plan of specific practices to speed the evolution of your capacity to lead and manage in an agile environment.