About: Outcome Oriented

Outcomes all the way down

Agendashift deals coherently, humanely, and strategically with outcomes – everything from the most aspirational of goals to the impact of the smallest experiment. These outcomes are agreed through participation, the right people in the room agreeing authentically on outcomes relevant and meaningful to them, articulating them in their own words, organising them into strategy.

Approached this way, outcomes give direction, they give people something to organise around, they provide measures of success, and they give focus to innovation. Putting them first creates the space for solutions to emerge from the people closest to the problem.

Because we enjoy their broad range, we prefer not to define the term outcome too tightly. Instead, some helpful starting points:

• Someone’s need met (see our definition of done)
• A story’s happy ending
• The way the world changed for someone

Shared stories – both real and imagined – help to connect everyday work to mission, purpose, and strategy. That’s what makes outcomes so powerful!

Developing and pursuing strategy, leading with outcomes

It's not enough just to agree on outcomes; for that agreement to make a lasting difference, it's important to keep outcomes in the foreground. Fail to do that, and it’s easy to be distracted by shiny solutions or mere activity. Moreover, leaders in transforming organisations and those that support them should be alert to the potential for these conversations and the resulting action to happen in new places, engaging with the organisation in all of its complexity.

Agendashift serves two closely-related purposes:

1. As an engagement model for change practitioners – coaches, facilitators, etc
2. As a model for ”leaders in transforming organisations”, strapline for the Agendashift™ Academy, home of the Leading with Outcomes leadership development curriculum

For both purposes, Agendashift can be summarised as a system of three strategies, two of which are explicitly about outcomes:

1. Keep putting agreement on outcomes before solutions
2. Keep bringing outcomes to the foreground
3. Keep finding new places to develop and pursue strategy

Supporting to the three strategies, three patterns:

1. Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes – the IdOO (“I do”) pattern
2. Meaning, Measure, Method
3. Right-to-Left Strategy Deployment (or just Right to Left)

These faciliate the integration of tools and practices drawn from a wide and growing range of sources.

Find out more:

• Leading with Outcomes (academy.agendashift.com) – self-paced training for “leaders in transforming organisations”, all who aspire to that role, and those that support them
• Upgrade your account – how to access to our assessment tools, workhop materials, and more
• Subscribe - join the Agendashift mailing list (1-3 updates per month)
• Slack – join our Slack community
• The books:
  • Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2nd edition 2021)
  • Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020)

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Related

• About Agendashift
  • Our mission: Wholehearted
  • Agendashift Assessments and Free 14-day trial
  • Events calendar – training and other events
  • Subscribe
• Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy:
  • Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
  • Inside-out Strategy: On the same page, with purpose
  • Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale
  • Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success
  • Leading with Outcomes: Authorised Facilitator and Trainer Programmes
• The books:
  • Organizing Conversations: Preparing Groups to Take on Adaptive Challenges (May 2024)
  • Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2nd edition 2021)
  • Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020)
• Agendashift as framework
  • Generative patterns
  • Core activities
  • Models, sources, and inspirations
• Resources
• The Agendashift blog (blog.agendashift.com)
  • Monthly roundups
  • Classic posts
• Agendashift communities on Slack and LinkedIn