The 2017 Agile Maine Day event is in the books. Great event organization. Great energizing crowd. Amazing presenters and speakers.
Below are the summaries of two selected presentations, whose themes were mostly relevant to System Thinking and System Design:
Don Macintyre’s topic “Agile Leadership” was about Radical Management (Steve Denning’s teaching) and covered:
- Shifting focus from making money for shareholders to focus on delighting customers through continuous innovation
- Managers focusing on controlling individuals to Managers empowering and supporting self-organizing teams
- Shifting from controlling work with bureaucracy to guiding innovation with priorities
- Shifting from predominantly valuing efficiency to valuing Continuous Innovation
- Shifting from top-down command structures to horizontal communication and collaboration
Don also talked about Agile Leadership Mindset and stressed the importance of the following behavioral transitions:
- From Directing to Coaching
- From Hiding Failure to Learning from Failure
- From Telling to Collaborating
- From Avoiding Blame to Seeing Feedback
Bob Sarni’s – “Radical Collaboration” delivered the following main message: “Organizations cannot compete externally until they can collaborate internally“
Bob referenced the book “Corporate Culture and Performance” by John Kotter and James Heskett: Non-enhancing Cultures vs. Enhancing Cultures, alluding to the fact that sometimes the best way to overcome resistance, is to remove resistors.
The following four quadrants of self-discovery were covered:
- Who we are (Self-mastery):
- Self-Awareness
- Self-Esteem
- Emotional Intelligence
- Values
- Interpersonal (Social Intelligence):
- Communication
- Trustworthiness
- Cooperation
- Rules of Engagement
- What we Do:
- Project
- Product
- Task
- Service
- How We Do it:
- Systems/Processes
- Decision Making
- Structure
- Policies
Bob also stressed the point that when it comes to going through organizational changes, companies tend to focus on Practices, instead of focusing on underlining Principles and Values. This results in unsustainable, short-term successes only.
Another great quote from Bob’s session: “Business Analysis have their focus on the outer side of business”, mainly focusing on questions of ‘what should we be doing?‘ and ‘how can we do it better, faster and more efficiently’. It turns out that the inner side of the business is where the greatest opportunity for radical improvement resides”. The inner side of the business contains the heart and soul of the business.
Finally, Bob talked about Red Zone vs. Green Zone Behaviors (refernicing work of James Tamm)
Bob also described Pink Zone behavior that usually manifests itself by the following actions: Leave, Quit, Hide, Passively Resist, Appease, Give in
(At closing, a kodak moment with Dan Mezick and Bob Sarni)