New Ways Of Working and Managing: Human Systems Agility

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The theme of this course is making work better: better lives, better society, better results. As everybody is surely aware by now, big things are afoot in how we think about work and management. Agile has spilled out of IT into the enterprise. Complex systems theory is finally shifting how we think. Safety culture is revealing the value in failure. Less widely known (so far), Open leadership is flipping the hierarchy. As well there's ideas like servant manager, transformational leader, open space, invitational leadership, promise theory, sustainability, and more... They all aim for "better value sooner, safer, happier". The world seems to still lump it all under the term "Agile Enterprise". We simply call them the New Ways of Working, or Human Systems Agility.

Human: people, humanity, wholeness, culture, sharing, empathy, diversity, inclusiveness, egality, trust, integrity, authenticity, open, transparency, curiosity, learning, mastery, pride, empowerment, freedom, authorisation, servant manager, safety, wellbeing, health. [states]
Systems: customer, value, flow, feedback, quality, lean, streams, iteration, networks, complexity, chaos, emergence, antifragile, shift left, teams, organisation, collaboration, ritual, sharing, resilience, human error, holistic, data, science. [artefacts]
Agility: ambiguous, uncertain, iterate, increment, experiment, explore, observe, adjust, fluid, organic, improve, curious, embrace failure, fail fast, small, granular, simplify, flexible, pragmatic. [actions/adjectives]

The new ways of work are iterative, incremental, experimenting, exploring complex systems. These ways are displacing the ideas of big-bang projects; zero risk; certainty and accuracy; plan once execute perfectly; failure is not an option. The goal is to meet the changing needs of our organisation faster.

At least as important though, is New Ways Of Managing. Too often, management views the advancement to New Ways as something done to improve the practitioner workforce, not to management. This can't be. For an organisation to change, the management must change. So we combine the two into the phrase New Ways Of Working And Managing. It is cumbersome but we leave it like that to make a point. This is one of the biggest issues facing organisations moving to agile ways of working. Managers must understand and focus on empowerment, collaboration, agility, and flow.

"We" are Teal Unicorn, a partnership of Dr Cherry Vu and Rob England providing consulting and training for enterprises in New Zealand and Vietnam. We have worked with executives in organisations from 40 to 12,000 people, in government and private enterprise, in IT and the whole organisation.

This course will look at:

  • The new world order driving us.
  • Some new ways of working we have to deal with the new order:
    • Complexity theory
    • Agile
    • Networks
    • Humanistics
    • The Open movement
  • How we advance (please, not "transform").
  • The new ways of managing we need to make this happen.
  • The underpinning new ideas of society and work (a summary - we will dig in as much as we have time, but these are rabbit-holes).
  • Practical advice on getting to new ways - patterns that work for us.
  • A personal action canvas to help think about your next steps.

The course will be lecture style with questions and discussion. This is a huge topic: there is only time for an overview of all aspects. We run simulation workshops, but there won't be time for practical games or exercises in this format unfortunately.

What you will learn:

At the end of this course attendees will:

  • learn some of the primary models for new ways of working.
  • see new ways of managing as the key to unlock the advance.
  • have methods for advancing the organisation towards the new ways of working and managing.
  • understand why work needs to change.
  • understand the philosophical underpinnings that drive this social change.
  • have a wide range of new areas to explore for personal and career development.

Target audience:

This course is intended for anyone exploring new ways of making work better:

  • executives
  • governors
  • managers
  • stakeholders: HR, finance, audit, PMO, etc
  • practitioners, workers
  • consultants

 

About The Presenter

Rob England is a self-employed IT commentator and consultant. He consults in New Zealand on business agility, and IT governance, management, and processes. Internationally, he is best known for his blog "The IT Skeptic" and half a dozen books on IT, including The agile Manager (small a), and he speaks widely at conferences and online.

Rob was the NZ IT Service Management Champion for 2010, and a life member of the itSMFnz. He is an acknowledged contributor to ITIL 2011, The DevOps Handbook, and The Phoenix Project. He attended almost all the DevOps Enterprise Management Summits in the USA and UK, and presented at several. Rob is New Zealand's only certified DevOps Institute instructor. He is an ICAgile Certified Professional - Business Agility Foundations, a Member of the Open Leadership Network, a DOI Certified Agile Service Manager, accredited for OpenSpace In Organisations, and of course a Chartered IT Professional (CITPNZ).

 

Registration Details:

You can register for this event via Credit Card online now by using the link below, or alternatively call 0800 252 255 with your Credit Card details.

ITP Corporate Partners and approved organisations can opt to pay by invoice by calling 0800 252 255 or emailing attendee and business details through to [email protected]. Credit criteria and other conditions apply.


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Simply register your interest and we'll look at whether we can bring to you when you want it. If you're interested in an in-house option, register your interest and we'll come back to you.


Indicative Cost

Indicative cost for public workshops. Please contact us for in-house pricing.

ITP Financial Members: FREE
Staff of Corporate Partners (20% Discount): $0.87 + GST / $1.00 incl GST
Non-Members: $17.39 + GST / $20.00 incl GST


This is an indicative cost only. Actual cost will be confirmed with you. Minimum numbers and other conditions apply.