Are you experiencing vexing ambiguities around “what actually is Agile?” - is it the values and principles or the diagrams and processes? Have you hit a wall in your Agile adoption/implementation because of power games, ongoing tensions between top management’s focus on maximizing profit and Agile’s customer focus, management vs engineering, incompatibility with existing structures and mindsets, how to prove that agile actually works? ;~(

Perhaps the deeper issues that Agile surfaces are haunting you. The challenge with these deeper issues is that everyone assumes there is a solution to them. But actually you can’t know that. There may or may not be solutions - all you can do is probe to see what you can do, to try “uncovering better ways of developing software.” (Agile Manifesto). And that’s the adventure.

Yet another consultant or another certification offering ways to simplify complexity won’t solve your deeper issues; it’s just some more of the same snake oil disguised as a cure.

Don’t let your head spin. In this workshop, we’ll offer some very practical ways for you to approach your deeper than Agile challenges, based on our synthesis of complexity thinking (Cynefin and beyond) and an approach to company-wide agility. Prepare to be surprised.

Often in agile working environments, people aim for failing fast. Yet failure is not the goal - learning is. Failure can lead to learning and so can other approaches. It can lead beyond continuous improvement to transformative learning: seeing your situation from a whole new framework in a way that lets you learn by leaps of insight.

In this workshop we present specific ways to probe, using hypothesis, and experiments will help you and your team to learn fast. This approach provides a way to get into the mindset of learning and thus always developing.

Usually a failure is to do nothing… or to do anything (blindly). The key even for big issues is to make small bets (hypothesis) and learn through experiments what's the impact. So, gain insights by (in)validating the bet. In summary it's about thinking big but acting small (and safely). Note, that every great idea, every innovation is at first a guess or rather a hypothesis and only experiments allow us to find out if our idea is really as great as we thought at first.

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.

There are many suggestions dealing with Agile-friendly performance appraisals, which promise to rely on trust, honesty, respect, safety, and servant leadership. The Agile Manifesto does not address performance appraisal although it does generally mention regular and frequent feedback, which can also be applied to performance evaluation. Two related methods, Beyond Budgeting and Sociocracy, offer interesting approaches to agile performance review. In this session we want to present these two different performance appraisal approaches, how they're are supported by the values of BOSSA nova (short for Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy & Agile) and want to invite the participants of this workshop to discuss the synthesis of the two approaches.

This session looks at several real-world examples from actual companies including Accenture, Equinor, and Google.

The first principle of Beyond Budgeting asks to “engage and inspire people around bold and noble causes; not around short-term financial targets,” the eleventh principle advocates: “Evaluate performance holistically and with peer feedback for learning and development; not based on measurement only and not for rewards only.” Thus, the main strategy of Beyond Budgeting is to separate (financial) bonuses from performance evaluation and to use relative and not fixed targets as a foundation for the evaluation.

Sociocracy suggests holding 360 degree in-person meetings. The person being reviewed should request it when needed, not just on a rigid annual basis, and perhaps not just once in the year. In the 360 degree meeting, the organization itself can be critiqued in the review - “the way we organize is causing performance problems.” Similar to Beyond Budgeting there is a focus on the vision and mission of the specific department as well as the overall company as a source of inspiration and motivation. The output of the performance review meeting should be a development plan that the immediate group of supervision, peers, and subordinates consent to.

Based on BOSSA nova, we invite participants to dive into what Beyond Budgeting and Sociocracy combined offer for performance appraisals. Participants will take away insights that they can use in their organizations.

Agile beyond IT and beyond just doing it, but rather being it requires experimenting continuously in order to learn continuously. Thus more important than failing fast is learning fast.

In this workshop we will learn what learning fast means for every individual and the organization as a whole and we will define experiments for you to use in your company for becoming agile truly. This will allow you to create an environment for continuous innovations.

In this workshop we will also make use of examples that make:

• the organizational structure (hierarchy?) more agile
• the organizational processes faster so that they enable innovation
• the organizational strategy better aligned with current needs so that your organization is able to drive the market instead of being driven by the market

The challenges companies face today in the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world call for Agile throughout the company. There are two challenges: companies in general are trying to survive intense disruption and companies with successful software departments are trying to expand Agile methods to the whole company, including the board and the legal structure of the enterprise. Both the VUCA challenge and the pressure to implement Agile beyond IT, demand guidelines for implementing company-wide Agility.

We discovered these needed guidelines in Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agile. Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Human Systems Dynamics, and Cynefin provide additional insights.

However, in talking with various experts about how to address the challenges companies face , we got answers from within that expert’s framework. For example,

• A Beyond Budgeting expert said, “Stop fixing the budget annually, because otherwise you won't have the flexibility to react to frequent market changes.”
• An Open Space expert said, “You need to make space for what you don’t know and can’t control, for totally new things to emerge. If people can follow their passion, you will be able to implement company-wide Agility, otherwise people will just do what they are asked.”
• A Sociocracy expert said, “You first need to resolve the power structure, because as long as you have a hierarchy defined as top-down you will not become agile.”
• An Agile expert said, “You need to start inspecting and adapting by using regular retrospectives in order to react flexibly, otherwise you will neither be able to learn from the market nor from within your company.”

All of these perspectives are true, but each perspective was always from within the discipline. We synthesized the approach into a wider perspective dubbed BOSSA nova: B = Beyond Budgeting, OS = Open Space, S = Sociocracy, A = Agile.

The synthesis leads to a new organigram that reflects all the sources of guidance to a value center. The new organigram focuses board/CEO, inspiration, and resource and legal considerations on the value center. The value center is thereby free to focus on the customer.

We discuss how to use Cynefin-type probes that enable everyone to apply this new strategy for implementing company-wide Agility in their own organization.

Today companies are expected to be flexible and both rapidly responsive and resilient to change, which basically asks them to be Agile. Yet, doing Agile (the mechanics) is different from being Agile (the mindset). The mindset lets you apply flexible Agile patterns not only for software development teams but for whole company. In this workshop, we will examine what being Agile really means and how it can be implemented by combining principles from the Agile Manifesto, Sociocracy, Beyond Budgeting, and Open Space. We’ll draw on everyone’s experiences to show the path to transforming our companies into agile enterprises - from Board to janitor, offering concrete tools and methods that participants can apply right away.

Agile teams meet constantly. For some teams some of the time, decisions seem to emerge like magic - more nuanced and complete than any individual team member could have done. 

Too often, however, the meeting process feels like walking through deep mud. The team struggles with minor wording issues, or dominant personalities control the conversation while others feel bored and frustrated, or participants try to control the outcome of the meeting by scheming beforehand, and so forth. 

The factors that make a team effective are not particularly clear. Level of education of the team members, gender balance, age mixture, experience and expertise, venue, and other usual demographic factors don't seem to correlate. The only factors that seem to matter are equal voice and "framework intelligence," a combination of "emotional intelligence" and "perceptive intelligence." The latter refers to the ability to be aware of and manage the way assumptions and partial information influence and limit one's understanding of reality - and therefore limit one's ability to collaborate. Good listeners typically have good perceptive intelligence. 

Several of the elements of an egalitarian governance system called sociocracy support equal voice and framework intelligence. In this way, they support agile decision making. This session will interactively demonstrate several of those methods:

• Awareness of blind spots
• Both-and thinking
• Rapid prototyping
• Consent with your body
• Learning to estimate
• Use silence
• Be a super-organism - like an octopus
• Do rounds

Participants will have an opportunity to practice these methods by electing someone to a role and responsibilities using the consent election process.