Day Two, May 15:

The Leadership Symposium Workshops

May 15 is the second day of the Symposium and is the day when the Workshops listed below are presented. Some of these Workshops are offering a Level 0 certificate of completion from the Open Leadership Network.

Quick Links to the May 15 Workshops:

 

 

The Open Leadership Network Certifications

The Open Leadership Symposium is produced by the Open Leadership Network or OLN. The OLN is the certification body dedicated to spreading the Open patterns and practices that enable genuine business agility. Your ticket to the Symposium includes Membership in the Open Leadership Network. Your membership in the OLN includes valuable discounts on certified Courses that are delivered in classrooms and online.

In addition to your Membership discounts, participation in a specific Workshop earns you a deeper discount on the next-level certification training in that subject, from that instructor. If for example you participate in the No Limits Self Management Workshop from Doug Kirkpatrick, you will earn a Level 0 certificate of completion in that subject, and also receive a very substantial thirty percent discount on the Level 1 certification class scheduled for delivery online, by Doug, after the event in June or July.

You can learn more about the certification programs of Open Leadership Network here.


The detailed descriptions of each of the May 15 Workshops on Open Leadership are listed below:

 

 

ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE WITH OPENSPACE AGILITY, from DIANA WILLIAMS

NOTE: This Workshop includes a Membership-level certification in OSA from the Open Leadership Network, and a 30% off discount on the Level 1 (Associate Level) certification course, which you can attend online after the Symposium. Learn more here.

OpenSpace Agility (OSA) is a safe, pragmatic and repeatable  technique for getting a rapid and lasting business agility transformation. It works with the framework you are currently using, and OSA can be added at any time. OSA is used to actively engage as many employees as possible in your org-level change program.

For executive leaders, OSA is an Employee Engagement Model and A-B-C template that operationalizes the core values of Lean, namely: respect for people, and continuous improvement.

For executives who are truly committed to these values, OSA represents a simple, effective and very efficient way forward.

With OpenSpace Agility, you can expect:

  • A dramatic reduction in the coaching & training costs of implementing your Agile program
  • A genuine, rapid and lasting Agile transformation
  • A dramatic increase in employee engagement scores
  • A dramatic increase in stakeholder satisfaction and potentially, genuine stakeholder delight
  • Predictable, reliable, repeatable, EVIDENCE-BASED improvement in overall results

Each OpenSpace Agility cycle has just 5 basic and repeatable steps. These steps are:

  • Step 1: Leadership and Enterprise Preparation
  • Step 2: Initiate the process using an all-hands “Open Space” meeting
  • Step 3: Initiate Agile practices across the enterprise
  • Step 4: Complete the process in Open Space
  • Step 5: Inspect Results and Adapt

At first glance, OSA seems like a simple enough process. However, like most things, there is nuance in the actual implementation. I have been primarily using OpenSpace Agility when doing work with my clients. There have been great successes, and more importantly, many insightful learnings. I have found that there are many ‘small’ details that help make the OSA experience more enriching. Join me in this interactive session as I share my experiences and learnings with you.  

Click here for Diana Williams’ bio.

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION TO CLEAN LANGUAGE AND CLEAN QUESTIONS, from Caitlin Walker and Marian Way


Clean Language is a communication protocol based on Open principles. The basic concept is to reflect back the language of the sender, to help determine exactly what it is that the sender means to communicate. Clean Language in a highly efficient, non-intrusive, opt-in communication protocol that is designed to encourage higher functioning in individuals, groups and organizations. Clean Language is gaining influence throughout the world as an effective tool for realizing enterprise-level improvement. The Agendashift engagement model, for example, is based in part of the Clean Language and Clean Questions protocols.

We’ll start with: ‘What would you like to know before we begin?’ A simple Clean way to start any group interaction. We’ll go on to explore personal experience of ‘drama’ times when you’re in contempt of yourself or others, and it limits your commitment and your creativity. From a felt sense of being in drama, vs being open and curious and in a position to learn, we’ll explore when it’s advantageous to be in each position. From here we will play with some Clean tools for moving into cooperation and collaboration. As a result of this Workshop, participants exit this learning event with new tools for clarity in communication.

What You Will Learn:

  • What is Clean Language? What is a Clean Question?
  • How can I immediately put Clean Language to work, in pursuit of higher performance?
  • How can I leverage Clean Language and Clean Questions to accelerate immediate improvement in my organization?
  • What are the key outcomes from the use of Clean?
  • What is the best way to socialize Clean Language across my organization?

Click here for Caitlin Walker’s bio and here for Marian Way’s bio

 

 

THRIVING WITH BUSINESS AGILITY from MICHELLE HOLLIDAY

Here is my definition of Business Agility: the capacity of a business organization to respond to change, in service to positive outcomes, for the business and for the living community it touches.

Business metaphors often describe the organization as a machine. But machines are not alive. Organizations are populated with people. And people are alive. Organizations are living systems too, and recognizing this brings us closer to the reality of how real business and real business agility works. 


At the root of every major problem we face – individually and collectively – is the need for a new way of understanding ourselves, our work and the purpose and patterns of our lives. In contrast to the still-dominant mechanistic paradigm of the Industrial Era, an expanded story is emerging, this time with life solidly at the center of its plot. This new narrative invites us to see our organizations, communities — and even all of humanity — as dynamic, self-organizing, living systems.


To embrace this view and to operate effectively within it, you need to understand how to support a living system’s ability to thrive — its thrivability. In this session, you are introduced to the Thrivability framework from Michelle Holliday and her book.

You’ll learn how to:

  • View your organization as a living system
  • Apply the living systems model to your leadership work
  • Build a set of leadership competencies that leverage the living energy of your organization

Click here for Michelle Holliday’s bio

 

 

FULL-ON BUSINESS AGILITY USING SCRUM@SCALE, from Daniel Mezick

Scrum At Scale is not simply the most likely future of Agile, it is the most likely the very future of work itself. Created by Jeff Sutherland, Scrum@Scale is an Open framework that can infinitely scale agile and digital transformation across enormous global enterprises. It can scale to organize an enterprise of any size and any scope. Ironically, that is because Scrum@Scale implements a “scale free” organizational architecture. And this is one of the reasons why Scrum@Scale is the most likely future of work.

If you are looking to create and scale great business agility across your organization, this is your Workshop. 


What you will learn: 

  • What is a “scale free” scaling framework?
  • The 5 KEY differentiating features of Scrum@Scale, which make it unlike every other scaling framework in existence today- including yours
  • The 7 absolutely core things you need to know before you implement Scrum@Scale
  • What you must do as your VERY FIRST step when you implement Scrum@Scale
  • How to handle your context: those remote teams, executives always traveling, 15,000 employees in 7 offices, spread across 3 countries, etc.
  • How to engage all of your employees in the change
  • Resources you can use tomorrow: The Ready for Scrum@Scale Checklist and more

Click here for Daniel Mezick’s bio

 

 

NO LIMITS: ORGANIZATIONAL SELF MANAGEMENT AT SCALE, from Doug Kirkpatrick

NOTE: This Workshop includes a Membership-level certification in No Limits Self-Management from the Open Leadership Network, and a 30% off discount on the Level 1 (Associate Level) certification course, which you can attend online after the Symposium. Learn more here.

This workshop explores the lessons learned from vanguard companies as they unleash the power of organizational self-management. New organizational models link mission-critical processes to individual stewardship without the need for burdensome traditional management and hierarchy. Interest in organizational self-management is bubbling up throughout the world as more leaders recognize the strategic opportunities available when organizations can focus on execution rather than bureaucracy.

What You Will Learn:

  • Learn How to Create a Highly Scalable Enterprise Without Human Bosses, Titles and Position Power
  • Learn How to Drive Organizational Agility, Innovation and Leadership through Organizational Self-Management
  • Learn How Organizational Self-Management Can Create Strategic Business Advantage
  • Learn How to Slash the Costs of Management, the Least Efficient Activity of Any Enterprise

What you’ll remember:

After engaging in this workshop, you will be able to see the costs and pitfalls of traditional hierarchical bureaucracy more clearly than ever before, and appreciate the often unnecessary burden that it places on all of us in our daily lives.

Click here for Doug Kirkpatrick’s bio

 

 

LEARNING THE LANGUAGE OF OUTCOMES, from Mike Burrows

Agendashift is an Engagement Model based on Open principles and focused on outcomes and desired results. Agendashift is used to engage top executives and is used before you select yoru framework or approach. Agendashift focuses first on what you want– on your desired outcomes. 

This is a 90-minute workshop taken from the Discovery chapter of the Agendashift book, Every exercise is published as freely available open source, so you can take it with you. Agendashift and these exercises are designed to help you learn the language of outcomes, a vital ingredient in effective self-organization.

The Workshop Agenda:

  • Celebration-5W: A great workshop opener, a way to some create some business context for your workshop or team event
  • True North: A way for diverse groups to prioritise high level obstacles to effective collaboration “across the organization and beyond”, inspired by Lean and Agile, expressed in plain language
  • 15-minute FOTO: Turn those obstacles into outcomes, in your own words (and an introduction to Clean Language)
  • Plan on a page: Organize those fragmentary outcomes into something coherent and compelling

Click here for Mike Burrows’ bio

 

 

THOUGHT CLINIC: MAKING THE SELF-ORGANIZED “BETA” ORGANIZATION REAL, Through “Full Fledged” Very Fast Organizational Transformation, from NIELS PFLAGING

In this highly interactive session, Niels will discuss with us how to combine Open and open source social technologies such as Beta (formerly known as the Beyond Budgeting model,)  Agile, Lean, OpenSpace, and OpenSpace Beta into a fast & complexity-robust approach to transformation that works. Anywhere. There will be no lecturing, nor use of power point in this session. But lots of space for discourse and dialog. Be prepared to be surprised!

What You Will Learn:

  • Self-organization: How to organize for complexity, not against it – for human nature, not against it
  •  Decentralization & Leaderships: How to think about work & organizations more effectively, and appropriate a stern approach to organizational design
  •  Invite, do not impose: How to distinguish the good, the bad, and the evil approaches to organizational development, learning & change
  • Further secrets of Very Fast Organizational Transformation: How to make it happen in your organization, or with your clients

Click here for Niels Pflaeging’s bio

 

 

APPLYING PROMISE THEORY TO ORGANIZATIONS from MARK BURGESS

This 90-minute session on the principles and practices surrounding Promise Theory, a core foundational aspect of Open principles. This Worksho is facilitated by Mark Burgess, the formulator of Promise Theory. This Workshop includes everything you need to begin safely and pragmatically applying Open principles to enterprise-level digital and agile transformation at massive scale.

What You Will Learn:

  • Promise Theory concepts and facilities
  • What it actually means to “Think in Promises”
  • Why a promise is NOT a guarantee
  • Voluntary cooperation: a power source of energy and commitment
  • Applying Promise Theory to Machines…and Human Social Systems
  • Applying Promise Theory to large-scale agile and digital transformation

Click here for Mark Burgess’ bio

 

 

OPEN PATTERNS AND PRACTICES AT COX AUTOMOTIVE, from DAN SLOAN

Dan Sloan is an Enterprise Coach and ‘ways of working’ advocate at Cox Automotive, a global automotive services and software company focused on transforming the way the world buys, sells, owns and uses cars. This organization uses Open patterns and practices such as Open Space to foster employee engagement and high performing outcomes. In his role as Enterprise Coach, Dan helps orchestrate the ongoing application of Open principles while strengthening the capabilities senior leaders, teams and the entire organization.

In this session Dan tells his story of the trials and trade-offs he encountered as he helped move the organization in this direction. Dan shares the progress and challenges along the way, and offers clear guidance on what to do- and what NOT to do.

What You Will Experience and Learn:

  • How Open patterns and practices are working at Cox Automotive
  • What worked, and what did not
  • How to incrementally introduce Open patterns and practices
  • How to work with executive leaders
  • How to keep it going
  • What to avoid and what to favor in terms of approach with senior leaders
  • Coaching from Dan: How to achieve an Open leadership approach in your organization by using some of the learning found here

 

 

SCALING HIGH-PERFORMANCE with FAST, from RON QUARTEL

One day in 2014, at an Open Space session at a large Agile conference event in New Orleans… Ron Quartel had the flash of an interesting idea. Why don’t we use Open Space as a way of scaling agile and digital transformation? I mean, we just managed to self-organize 800 people, to create a one-day conference event, in 20 minutes, using a process called Open Space that is totally in alignment with Agile principles!

Agile at Scale was the hot topic of the day. And the idea of using Open Space felt more “agile” than what a lot of other people were proposing for solving this problem. It felt like they were using command-and-control thinking to solve the challenge of agile at scale, instead of Open approaches.

Ron built FAST upon this initial seed of this idea. He created just enough structure for a easy and effective framework, built on Open Space Technology, to self-organize people around teams and teamwork. Ron will share how this self-managed teamwork-at-scale framework evolved through trial and error, when he applied it inside a major health insurance company in the Pacific Northwest. He’ll also share how FAST has since spread all over the world as a way to scale team and teamwork inside digital and agile transformations.

By attending this 90-minute session, you will:

  • Learn the basics of FAST and the benefits and advantages of using it to dynamically compose your teams
  • Learn about a specific case study and experience report of a FAST implemention in the Healthcare industry
  • Learn now to use FAST to attract top talent and improve employee retention, employee engagement, company culture, and business outcomes
  • Learn now to immediately implement FAST in your own organization
  • Connect with the community of innovators who are using FAST today

You can learn more about the FAST method, and Ron Quartel, via this link:
www.fast-agile.com

 

 

FAILAGILITY: THE BUSINESS OF IMPERFECTION with Stacia Viscardi Heimgartner

Author Stacia Heimgartner Viscardi introduces you to the modern essential competitive differentiator for individuals, teams, and organizations: Failagility. Success merely reflects a judgment at a particular point in time; today’s success may very well be tomorrow’s failure, and the same actions that led us to success yesterday may not be sufficient for success today or tomorrow. Organizations are imperfect because the people employed within are imperfect, and organizations can only be as agile as their imperfect people and teams. It is thus essential that all employees understand the Failagility Framework as a way to work within an imperfect world, improving resilience to shorten the distance between disappointment (failure) and desired outcome. Leaders must create the space to wholly embrace imperfection, try, listen and adapt, else the organization will stagnate in the status quo and eventually become irrelevant in the market.  

Whether you’re a team member or a leader, this workshop will introduce you to the exciting new Failagility Framework so that you may learn how to quickly move from one failure to another to eventually realize success, whether it’s in your personal or business lives. Our discussion and hands-on exercises will take us through the following topics:

  • Reconcieving failure to define Failagility
  • Exercise 1: Couldn’t or Wouldn’t
  • Understanding the Success Trap
  • Exercise 2: Success as a continuum
  • Exploring the Failagility Factor in Organizations
  • Exercise 3: Failing towards Success
  • Final: Leadership’s Role in Cultivating Failagility

Click here for Stacia’s bio

INVITING VISION, from DARREN TERRELL

With ever increasing demands for being innovative and nimble, organizations need to be able to work on the right things… and do it quickly.  Otherwise, they risk being disrupted.  Organizations need vision!  Just as importantly, we need employees that can engage on achieving the vision.  

Born from the Open Movement, INVITING VISION is a framework designed to empower people to align around and move the organization forward.  It’s as stepwise procedure for leaders to engage the whole organization in creating and advancing a clear answer to the question: “Why?”

Here are some questions that the INVITING VISION approach can help with:

  • Are we working on the right stuff to “move the needle?”
  • Can we empower our employees to drive our vision?
  • Is the organization making progress towards the goals?
  • How can we be more responsive to change?
  • What ways can we communicate boundaries, values, and principles?

Everyone exits this Workshop with tool and resources including the following:

  • A set of checklists for leaders and coaches
  • A digital copy of Darren’s new book by the same name: INVITING VISION

Click here for DARREN TERRELL’s Bio

COACHING WITH CONSENT from Heidi Araya

NOTE: This Workshop includes a Membership-level certification in Coaching With Consent from the Open Leadership Network, and a 30% off discount on the Level 1 (Associate Level) certification course, which you can attend online after the Symposium. Learn more here.

As Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters, we often find ourselves in environments where “Agile transformations” have been imposed on people. Such “transformations” fail to deliver promised results, and they often create disengagement and a sense of apathy in the teams we are tasked with helping. Through the use of Open Methods, we have a unique opportunity to stop playing “process police” and instead enable empowered teams through invitation. In this session Heidi will share specific methods and offer clear guidance on how to gain alignment, engagement and real improvement at the team level using Open techniques. 

Everyone who attends the workshop will receive a toolkit of techniques to improve team cohesion and teamwork, including:

  • Team Foundation: A list of suggested agreements, activities and discussions to set teams up for success and improve team bonding and teamwork  
  • Outside the Box: Inventive ideas to test in your team or company, to improve culture and engagement
  • Exceptional Meetings: Innovative meeting formats that will improve team psychological safety, participation and engagement
  • Guiding questions: A list of questions to use in specific meetings to improve alignment and outcomes

Click here for Heidi Araya’s bio

 

 

Intro to INVITING LEADERSHIP with Daniel Mezick

NOTE: This Workshop includes a Membership-level certification in Inviting Leadership from the Open Leadership Network, and a 30% off discount on the Level 1 (Associate Level) certification course, which you can attend online after the Symposium. Learn more here.

Engaging employees is essential to achieving rapid and lasting change, and invitations from leaders are a primary way to engage the workforce. The challenge is in how to safely and pragmatically balance the use of delegation and invitation to achieve the desired outcomes. Exactly how to do that is the focus of this introductory Workshop. If you are responsible for delivering on business agility through an agile or digital transformation, or if you provide consulting to those who do, this is your class. 

Click here to learn more about the Inviting Leadership book.



The successful leaders of today are finding ways to engage the entire workforce and focus the attention of the whole enterprise on higher performance. These leaders are pivoting their style from delegation to invitation. 

INVITING LEADERSHIP is your roadmap for implementing Invitation-Based Change™ in the new world of work. This Workshop introduces you to how to leverage genuine invitation to engage the workforce, and generate the positive business outcomes that come from self-managed teams. INVITING LEADERSHIP shows you how to do more with less. 

You will learn how to achieve the following goals:

  • Greatly increase employee engagement
  • Attract and retain top talent
  • Help your entire organization become more competitive and adaptive
  • Scale these business outcomes across the entire enterprise

INVITING LEADERSHIP is your leadership road map for achieving genuine and lasting business agility by applying Open methods to engage, motivate and inspire your people. 

What You Will Learn:

  • Learn the fundamental concepts and facilities of leadership invitation
  • Understand the link between delegation, invitation, employee decision-making, and genuine business agility.
  • Learn when to use delegation, invitation or a mix of the two approaches
  • How to use leadership invitation to get exponential growth in employee engagement and results

Click here for Daniel Mezick’s Bio