Safari Day by Yenni Fang I blogged recently about the Revolutionary Six Strategy Deployment Steps for Effective Change. That post resulted from learning about “Why Change Programs Don’t Produce Change” by Russell Eisenstat, Bert Spector, and Michael Beer in the book Strategy Safari by Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel. Subsequently, after finishing that book, I want to reflect on how it relates to Strategy Deployment. Therefore, this is another post in the series on Strategy Deployment and other ideas. The Schools To quickly recap, the Strategi Safari describes the following 1 ..read more

The North Star by Wilson Lam In the early days of Agendashift, I started using the phrase “outcome-oriented, continuous transformation” to describe that approach to Agile transformation. I have recently expanded that to “outcome-oriented, continuous transformation, everywhere” and it seems like a good time to explain what I mean by the phrase. Outcome-oriented Firstly, what do we mean by outcomes? It is a word with a fairly broad definition (e.g. a final product or end result). One meaning could be that an outcome is the implementation of the final product or end result. This tends to be a res ..read more

This isn’t an announcement of a new certification or secret society! Rather, the Order of the X-Matrix is the way that I use it in practice. The order in which I introduce the X-Matrix is TASTE first, followed by the Correlations. However, when I work with a group to populate an X-Matrix, I work through it in a slightly different order. The Order of the X-Matrix This is the order I use in practice, as shown in the picture below. True North Aspirations Strategies Correlations of Strategies to Aspirations Evidence Correlations of Evidence to Aspirations Tactics Correlations of Tactics to Strat ..read more

Last week Jose Casal posted on LinkedIn about how Agile and Agility are not the same thing. In that post, he includes a photograph of an old slide of mine with the words “Agility is a Strategy. Agile is a Tactic”. It created a fair amount of reaction so I thought it would be worth expanding on that and describing what I mean by Strategic Agility. The slide was from a presentation “Turn Your Organisation Into A Laboratory with Strategy Deployment” from Lean Kanban Central Europe in 2015. I originally blogged about Agility is a Strategy, Agile is a Tactic the same year. Additionally, there is a ..read more

I’ve been working my way through Strategy Safari by Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel. My initial curiosity was around how they describe Emergent Strategy, as pictured to the right, as a way of characterising Strategy Deployment. In the end, my biggest takeaway was a set of six strategy deployment steps that I wasn’t previously aware of. Admittedly, they’ve been around since the 1990’s so arguably they’re not that revolutionary. However, they could have made a huge difference if they had been better known. Strategy Schools The book describes 10 “Schools” of strategy which I’l ..read more

Reading enlightens – Art seen at Guruke in Córdoba, Spain. One of the challenges of the X-Matrix is that it can be initially confusing for people. Their eyes can glaze over when it is presented on its own. I’ve seen various attempts to try and address this with different X-Matrix flavours. However, I don’t think the format is the problem. These three tips are how I now approach the challenge of X-Matrix communication. Use the X-Matrix for collaboration The X-Matrix’s core strength is as a collaboration framework. When I work through the format, step by step, people intuitively pick it up as th ..read more

Mike Burrows recently published a blog post From Flow to Business Agility where he introduced the idea of “increasing decision-making capacity“. This was in part a reaction to my earlier post on Strategy Deployment and Developer Experience which refers to cognitive load. I still support cognitive load as a useful concept, and I don’t think it’s the same as what Mike is proposing, although there is some relationship. Having said that, this post is not a rebuttal to his post, but one supporting it. I do consider decision-making capacity to be a valuable idea, and something relevant to Strategy ..read more

Photo by Robb Banks I’m not a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions. Mostly because they assume a degree of certainty and predictability about the future that rarely plays out. But also, it seems like an arbitrary and infrequent time to review and reflect! Having said that, at the start of 2023, I did decide to make an intentional effort to blog more. Reflections In a review of 2022, I realised that I had only published 5 posts, and that was part of a longer trend. I wanted to get back into the habit of writing more. Therefore, I decided to make sure I scheduled 1-2 hours every week for writing. T ..read more

In a 2021 paper, Michaela Greiler, Margaret-Anne Storey and Abi Noda defined Developer Experience as “how developers think about, feel about, and value their work“. Subsequently in 2023, along with Nicole Forsgren, they published a follow-up paper titled: “DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity“. In that paper, they describe three dimensions of DevEx; Feedback Loops and Cognitive Load and Flow State. This post, as part of the series that looks at Strategy Deployment and other approaches, explores how these DevEx dimensions can be applied. Developer Experience Strategies Essentially, the thr ..read more

I recently came across the idea of foxes and hedgehogs in a Cautionary Tales podcast episode. It has inspired this post in my occasional series on Strategy Deployment and other ideas. Isaiah Berlin popularised the metaphor in an essay and subsequent book, which is based on an excerpt from a classic poem from ancient Greece. “The fox knows many things, the hedgehog knows one big thing”. Archilochus Subsequently, numerous authors and academics have referenced it, including Philip Tetlock in his work on Superforecasting. What are foxes and hedgehogs? Telock argues that so-called experts can be ..read more