Leadership occurs as conscious choice carried out as actions.

Everyone has the capacity to carry out acts leadership. Therefore, everyone is a potential leader.

For leadership to be appropriate and effective, acts of leadership need to be tuned to the receptivity of those whose behaviour the aspiring leader seeks to influence. Tuning leadership requires the ability to perceive and discern meaningful signals from people and more importantly, the system and environment in which they work.

As leaders, the choices we make and the actions we carry out are organic with our environment. That is, leaders are often influenced by their environments in ways that are not easily perceived, and on the other hand influence their environments in ways that can have a powerful impact on business performance, organizational structures and the well-being of people. Leaders who are conscious of this twofold dynamic can greatly improve their ability to sense and respond to the needs of their customers, their organizations and the people with whom they interact in their work. The following list is one way of describing the set of capabilities that such leaders can develop over time. During the session, we will explore each in more detail, including pragmatic activities that you can start to introduce immediately into your own context.

1. Create Identity: Real leaders understand that identity rules. They work with the reality that "Who?" comes first ("Who are we?"), then "Why?" ("Why we do what we do?").
2. Focus on Customers: Real leaders help everyone in their organization focus on understanding and fulfilling the needs of customers. This is, ultimately, how "Why?" is answered.
3. Cultivate a Service Orientation: Real leaders design and evolve transparent systems for serving the needs of customers. A leader's effectiveness in this dimension can be gauged both by the degree of customer satisfaction with deliverables and to the extent which those working in the system are able to self-organize around the work.
4. Limit Work-In-Progress: Real leaders know the limits of the capacity of systems and never allow them to become overburdened. They understand that overburdened systems also mean overburdened people and dissatisfied customers.
5. Manage Flow: Real leaders leverage transparency and sustainability to manage the flow of customer-recognizable value through the stages of knowledge discovery of their services. The services facilitated by such leaders is populated with work items whose value is easily recognizable by its customers and the delivery capability of the service is timely and predictable (trustworthy).
6. Let People Self-Organize: As per #3 above, when people doing the work of providing value to customers can be observed as self-organizing, this is a strong indication that there is a real leader doing actions 1-5 (above).
7. Measure the Fitness of Services (Never People): Real leaders never measure the performance of people, whether individuals, teams or any other organization structure. Rather, real leaders, practicing actions 1-6 (above) understand that the only true metrics are those that provide signals about customers' purposes and the fitness of services for such purposes. Performance evaluation of people is a management disease that real leaders avoid like the plague.
8. Foster a Culture of Learning: Once a real leader has established all of the above, people involved in the work no longer need be concerned with "safe boundaries". They understand the nature of the enterprise and the risks it takes in order to pursue certain rewards. With this understanding and the transparency and clear limits of the system in which they work, they are able to take initiative, run experiments and carry out their own acts of leadership for the benefit of customers, the organization and the people working in it. Fear of failure finds no place in environments cultivated by real leaders. Rather, systematic cycles of learning take shape in which all can participate and contribute. Feedback loop cadences enable organic organizational structures to evolve naturally towards continuous improvement of fitness for purpose.
9. Encourage Others to Act as Leaders: Perhaps the highest degree of leadership is when other people working with the "real leader" begin to emerge as real leaders themselves. At this level, it can be said that the culture of learning has naturally evolved into a culture of leadership.
10. Stay Humble: Real leaders never think that they have it all figured out or that they have reached some higher state of consciousness that somehow makes them superior to others in any way. They are open and receptive to the contributions of others and always seek ways to improve themselves. Such humility also protects them from the inevitable manipulations of charlatans who will, form time to time, present them with mechanical formulas, magic potions, palm readings and crystal ball predictions. Real leaders keep both feet on the ground and are not susceptible to the stroking of their egos.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development was written by a group of people who came together to think together and record their thinking in a document to share with the world. There is no doubt that the Agile Manifesto has had a profound impact on the way many people think about work and life. It has shaped the world of work in countless ways. Easy, then, it would be for us to treat it as an immutable sacred text. Indeed, there are many examples of how fragile, cultish and highly-cohesive social groups vociferously defend the immutability of their founding ideas, manifestos and mission statements. The upholding of the transcendent status of their charismatic tribal leaders who provide rallying cries from the pulpit is vigorously pursued.

This is all understandable and in many ways predictable. Identity is such a powerful human need that people will go to any length to preserve it. So we need not regard such fragility as a failing of human character, something to mock or scorn. However, identity can be blind, and in most cases has its blind spots. In order for identity to maintain grounding in reality, the thinking behind identity needs to be explored and understood more deeply.

In this 90-minute session, participants will have the opportunity to think together--as the authors of the Manifesto did--in a safe and collaborative environment. Content gleaned from contributors to the discourse such as Senge, Schon, Bohm, Deming, Immelman and Taleb will help to guide and anchor the conversation.

The goal of the seminar is not to rewrite the Agile Manifesto. Rather, it is an opportunity to better understand, together, what it means to be "Agile", an "Agilist", to potentially discover some new thoughts and ways of thinking about agility and to offer a humble contribution to the broader discourse for the betterment of all and towards the greater resilience of the community as a whole.

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development was written by a group of people who came together to think together and record their thinking in a document to share with the world. There is no doubt that the Agile Manifesto has had a profound impact on the way many people think about work and life. It has shaped the world of work in countless ways.

As people come to identify themselves both individually and collectively by the doctrines of a manifesto, elevating it to the status of immutable sacred text is both tempting and comforting. Indeed, there are many examples of how highly-cohesive, cultish and fragile social groups vociferously defend the immutability of their founding ideas, manifestos and mission statements. The upholding of the transcendent status of their charismatic tribal leaders who provide rallying cries from the pulpit is vigorously pursued.

Unsustainable as a movement, within one to two generations disintegrative patterns begin to emerge. Out of a desire to protect its aims and interests, the community becomes inward looking and insular. Insularity creates unnatural stressors that degrade integrity. Jockeying, antipathy, animosity and infighting among tribal leaders (especially if the movement is closely tied to their individual material gain) gradually escalate to the point of schism, fragmentation and multiplication of competing variations of ideology. Estrangement and apathy retard progress and stagnate intellectual activity. Some of the most influential, wide-spread and world-shaping movements have succumbed to this kind of collapse.

We need not regard such susceptibility to inward collapse--such fragility--as an abomination, something to mock or scorn--something that only happens to other movements, other people with different beliefs and superstitions from our own. Identity is such a powerful human need that human beings will go to any length to preserve it, even to the point of self-ruin. It is social. It seeks belonging.

Social cohesion galvanizes the identity of the individual. Much of this occurs at the level of the sub-conscious. In its noblest forms of expression, it has lead to the highest achievements of humanity. However, identity can be blind, and in most cases has its blind spots. It can lead us down a dark and perilous path. For identity to remain grounded in reality and illumined by truth, the thinking behind identity needs to be explored and understood more deeply.

In this 90-minute session, participants will have the opportunity to think together--as the authors of the Manifesto did--in a safe and collaborative environment. Content gleaned from contributors to the discourse such as Senge, Schon, Kahneman, Bohm, Deming, Immelman and Taleb will help to guide and anchor the conversation.

The goal of the seminar is not to rewrite the Agile Manifesto. Rather, it is an opportunity to better understand, together, what it means to be "Agile", an "Agilist", to potentially discover some new thoughts and ways of thinking about agility and to offer a humble contribution to the broader discourse for the betterment of all and towards the greater resilience of the community as a whole.

An exploration of effective, evidence-based approaches to policy design and the need for leaders to evolve policy for sustained organizational learning and development. As policies evolve, they should more accurately reflect and harness the energy and talents of knowledge workers. The Evolutionary Policy Design Canvas provides pragmatic guidance for the design and evolution of effective policies.

Leadership involves the management of systems and enabling people to become protagonists of their own work.

Clarity

Latitude

Encouragement

Accompaniment

Resources

Deming helps set the stage:

“The most valuable ‘currency’ of any organization is the initiative and creativity of its members. Every leader has the solemn moral responsibility to develop these to the maximum in all his people. This is the leader's highest priority.”

"People are already doing their best; the problems are with the system. Only managers can change the system."

Servant leadership is a fad. It's a buzzword that leaders latch on to, for example, soon after Scrum is rolled out into an organization. The Scrum Guide declares that the Scrum Master is a servant-leader. Managers and HR often need to find a way to create objectives for such a role. It becomes a hot topic, especially when there are concerns that the Scrum teams aren't delivering on the promises of Agile. Soon, questions arise, such as "Do we have the right Scrum Masters?”.

There is a need to be more clear.

The Scrum Master competency red bead experiment (and similar ones for Product Owners, Developers and Coaches) continues until someone takes some kind of leadership responsibility and learns to adopt a systems thinking mindset. Until then, the whole conversation around servant leadership will be obscured by preconceived notions, wishful thinking, self promotion/preservation and blame.

Leaders serve well by managing systems and by ensuring that the people working in and with such systems are the well-served protagonists of their own work and whose lives are enriched thereby.

The CLEAR model helps traditional management thinkers connect with key concepts in a way that is non-threatening and easy to remember.

The Evolutionary Policy Design Canvas helps managers to design and improve acts of leadership that bridge the gap from people management focus to systems management.

https://www.slideshare.net/TravisBirch1/evolutionary-policy-design