Beyond KPIs and OKRs: Creating an environment for high-performing, innovative teams that leads to true effectiveness
Too often innovative people in medium to large organizations have the feeling of being in a box - with startling new ideas - and no one really listens. In essence, these innovators are trying to “measure performance upwards.” This upward voice intrinsically measures strategies and customer impact, and applying the concept can significantly improve the overall performance without relying on top down OKRs and KPIs. Moreover, “measuring from above,” tends to measure the output of production rather than the truly important outcome: what is really making a difference for our customers and therefore for our company.
Adding “measurement from below” to a company can create a mindset that empowers everyone to follow their passion and interest and nourish the company’s effectiveness. Implementing a “from below” approach to measurement involves a fundamental shift that asks the company to synthesize a variety of new approaches. One such synthesis is Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agile (BOSSA nova). This synthesis enables a company to “measure upwards” without jeopardizing the strengths of “leading downwards.” Fortunately, the implementation can be done in small steps that probe and demonstrate new measurement ideas on a small scale such that the proof cascades beyond the demonstration. This session will enable you to get started on your journey to spreading the idea of upwards measurement company-wide.
This workshop asks participants to start where they are, explains what it means to probe, and helps them develop strategies and experiments they can use in their own situation to create an environment for high performance that goes beyond what OKRs and KPIs can offer.
Outline/Structure of the Workshop
- Welcome and working agreements (20min)
- Set the stage - individual and common goals (30min)
- Defining the context (30min)
- Finding out what (in the participants context) has supported or hindered in creating an environment for high-performing, innovative teams (and how to measure its effectiveness) and what was difficult along the way using 1, 2, 4, all (60min)
- Individually: reflect on what has supported or hindered…. (5min)
- In pairs: share your findings, look for insights and common themes (15min)
- In fours: share the insights and common themes and come up with key challenges (20min)
- Share in plenary (20min)
- Sharing and understanding participants' challenges and decide in groups on the top ones (30min)
- Explanation of new possibilities by presenting key findings (e.g. from BOSSA nova as a whole and its ingredients - Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy & Agility) (60min)
- Presentation of values, principles, approaches, cases, and experiences about BOSSA nova
- Including Q&A where appropriate
- Understand in detail what these findings mean and how they can address the top challenges. (90min)
- In the former groups of 4, look at your key challenges and for each of them explore how the BOSSA nova values, principles, approaches, .. will address those
- Look at the challenge (10min)
- What’s the problem of the key challenge exactly?
- Who hinders the resolution?
- Look at the possible outcome (15min)
- What’s the benefit of solving it?
- Is it worth solving?
- Look at the solution (20min)
- What can be used from BOSSA nova to solve it?
- How can BOSSA nova help creating a culture for experimentation / probing that fosters continuous learning by focusing on the outcome and not on the output as OKRs and KPIs typically do?
- Explore how and why it is important to share results of experiments with other parts of the company and outwards to your industry.
- Look at the challenge (10min)
- Allow groups to visit each other and mentor each other (20min)
- The groups now incorporate the feedback from their peers (10min)
- De-brief in plenary (15min)
- What’s surprising, as expected, other comment..
- In the former groups of 4, look at your key challenges and for each of them explore how the BOSSA nova values, principles, approaches, .. will address those
- Share the new understanding (30min)
- Applicability in own environment (70min)
- Present the concept of probes (probes are defined by small, safe-to-fail experiments based on hypotheses derived from reflection on the current situation as well as on theory) in the context of organizational change. (10 min)
- Present examples from the participants’ environments demonstrate how two examples of probes that the participants could conduct themselves in their environments. (10 min)
- Have the participants work in pairs to develop probes that they could initiate in their own organizational context. Encourage them to go into such details as what is their hypothesis, how they will be sure the experiments are safe to try, how they will set up control groups or other standards for measurement, who they will publish their results to, and so forth. (30 min)
- Pairs share results with the class and discuss. (20 min)
- Discussion of possible next steps (30min)
- Debrief and Wrap-Up (30min)
Learning Outcome
- Using BOSSA nova for enabling people to use their full capacity with passion
- How trust unleashes a greater performance than control systems that use top-down measurement
- How you can get the full buy-in for necessary changes and thus faster delivery of the change
- Get top management buy-in by proving rather than asking!
Target Audience
Program Managers, Executives, Portfolio Managers, Project Leads, Coaches, Consultants
Prerequisites for Attendees
Familiar with agile concepts. Project and management experience at best with leading and going through change.
Video
Links
schedule Submitted 4 years ago
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21st century tech product development concepts and practice
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8 Reasons why taking this live online workshop is better
I’ll be honest with you. I used to hate online workshops. I always thought they were second best. But, thanks to living during a pandemic, I’ve started to realize all the advantages to them. Here’s a few:
- Low daily time commitment: I can participate a few hours a day and still have time to get other work done, or have a life outside of work.
- No travel: No time in a plane or car, just a short walk from one room to another.
- You’ve got a mute button: There are always interruptions in life, and they seem to stress me less in an online class. I can mute a mic, turn off video, and answer a question, or put the dog out.
- No pants: Speaking of less stress, it’s nice to sit down in shorts and a t-shirt to work. Some of you may already get to do that. In an online workshop, you can come as you are. But, if you’re not wearing pants (or trousers for the UK people) please avoid standing while on camera.
- More time to ask questions: When I teach an in-person workshop, there are usually too many people, and never enough time to speak with everyone. Participants often go home sad they didn’t get to ask the questions they wanted or have the conversation they wanted. Now, online, I can follow every class with an office-hours session. No agenda. Come, talk, dig into the tough questions you didn’t want to bring up with the whole group.
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- More interaction with other participants: Personally, I’m a bit of an introvert. So talking to more people isn’t usually a benefit for me. But, online it’s become one. Zoom breakout rooms help keep conversations small and quiet. During this workshop you’ll work with a couple different groups and have several one-on-one conversations with individual participants. I find talking with someone about a concept, and getting their perspective, deepens my understanding.
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You’ll use Zoom to connect with the class and your teammates. You’ll get good at muting and unmuting yourself and staging your background to impress other participants.
You’ll use Mural to support online collaborative work. You’ll get hands-on practice every day.
After every workshop day you’ll have time for deep-dive discussions during optional “office hours” sessions with me, your instructor.
Not just for product managers and owners
While one person in a team may hold a product manager or product ownership role, it takes a cross-functional team with strong product thinking to design and build the product. That’s why this class isn’t just for product owners.
- If you’re a product manager or product owner, this workshop is for you.
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- If you’re a Scrum master or agile coach, have you seen your organization struggle to apply product thinking using a Scrum and agile approach? If you’d like to better understand how to help your organization become a strong product organization, this workshop is for you.
- If you’re a business stakeholder, manager, or leader in your organization, do you understand how product thinking changes the way you’ll need to work with teams? If you’d like to better understand how to motivate teams and keep them focused on successful outcomes while being self-directed, this workshop is for you.
4 days, 4 hours per day
We’ve got a lot to cover, and it’ll take 4 half-days to do it.
We’ll meet daily via Zoom: 5:30 pm IST to 9:30 pm IST
We’ll take frequent short breaks every 60-90 minutes so you can stay hydrated and caffeinated.
We’ll keep the class size small: 30 people max. You’ll do teamwork in smaller groups of 4 or 5 people. You’ll work with two different groups during the class, and have several one-on-one conversations with other participants. Ideally, you’ll get to meet and speak with everyone in the workshop.
What you’ll get
Scrum Alliance Certification: This is a certified scrum product ownership course, so at the conclusion of the class you’ll receive certification with the Scrum Alliance along with 2 years membership in the Scrum Alliance.
Worksheets, articles, and a 120-page course guide: Supporting material will help you recall and practice everything we discuss in the workshop.
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Agile in Enterprise Resource Planning software development is more challenging when compared to full stack development. It is really challenging when the team has 80% detractors and 20% aggressive folks (transactional analysis nomenclature). As an agile transformation coach how would we bring in either the agile mindset or the trust over the process for teams who have worked on waterfall for ages? How would we break the cocoon or push them to come out of the easy zone by not preaching theories? we are inspired from Project Aristotle conducted at Google which speaks about the parameters of winning team which made us to introduce trust metric, the average time the team takes to trust the agile principles in practice. This trust metric directly correlates with the time it takes for the agile transformation in a project. From Modern Agile perspective, Trust metric /transformation time is influenced by major 5 parameters 1. Psychological safety 2. Dependability 3. Structure and Role 4. Meaning 5. Impact.
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