'Growing Agile Leaders - The Inconvenient Truth'

1. Growing Agile Leaders:
The Inconvenient Truths
David Chilcott
Founder/ President, Outformations, Inc.

2. Opening Exercise – Part 1
Solo Work: Think of a tense or edgy situation you
were in recently
• Maybe a meeting or a 1:1 conversation
• Be specific – jot some notes down… key points
• Who was at their edge to begin with?
• What happened next? What did you do (or not do)?
• How effective was the result? How well did were people’s needs
met? (make a guess and apply a % estimate to it?)

3. Purpose:
To introduce a powerful perspective
and tools to support your growth as
an Agile Leader.

4. Desired Outcomes:
By the end of this session you will:
• have an overview of the Leadership 360 model
• have identified some specific strategies for working with
reactive tendencies
• know what to do to deepen your own and others’ learning
• understand of some of the Inconvenient Truths about
Agile Leadership

5. Who am I?
David Chilcott

6. Introducing the Reactive Personas
3 Leadership Pitfalls
ProtectingComplying Controlling

7. Complying Chase

8. Protecting Paula

9. Controlling Chris

10. Opening Exercise Part 2 – Pairs/Triads
Discuss what happened in your tense or edgy
situations:
• Which reactive behaviors did you notice in
others in your scenarios?
• Which reactive behaviors did you notice in
yourself in your scenarios?
• Label your index cards accordingly

11. Opening Exercise
Which of these three areas best fits your scenario?

12. Opening Exercise – Debrief
Straw poll: How many…
• Complying behaviors in others?
• Protecting behaviors in others?
• Controlling behaviors in others?
What do you make of the distribution in the room?
Self?
Self?
Self?

13. Inconvenient Truth #1
Leadership starts with US.
We must EACH enter into our own
personal transformation into
Leadership.

14. Agile Leadership for Adaptive Work

15. Leadership in Complex Adaptive Systems
Leadership in
Complicated Systems
Role defining
Decision making
Tight structuring
Knowing
Staying the course
Leadership in
Adaptive Systems
Relationship building
Sense making
Loose coupling
Learning
Notice emergent directions

16. Adaptive Work
1. Requires NEW Approaches
2. Demands Learning
3. Distributes Responsibility
4. Generates Resistance/Fear/Loss
5. Demands Experimentation
6. Has Unknown Timelines
7. Develops NEW Cultural Norms

17. Agile Leadership Tensions
Command & Control Agile Leadership
Efficiency Creativity
Certainty Ambiguity
Planning Emergence
Autocratic Shared decision making
Controlling Empowering

18. Inconvenient Truth #2
These tensions
CANNOT
be resolved. They must be held
and balanced and managed.

20. Creative
Competencies
Reactive
Styles

21. People Tasks

22. What difference does
this make in business?

23. Leadership Effectiveness:
correlation with Creative and Reactive
Total Reactive Score
R = -0.66
Rsq = 0.44
Total Creative Score
R = 0.93
Rsq = 0.86

24. Exercise: Invoking the Wheel

27. Which is YOUR dominant Reactive Style?
Write it down!
Straw Poll: Based on what you’ve learned so far
• Who is Complying?
• Who is Protecting?
• Who is Controlling?
What do you make of the distribution in the room?
Exercise: Invoking the Wheel DEBRIEF

28. Inconvenient Truth #3
We all need to manage our
reactive tendencies
in order to powerfully influence
that good work happens.

29. Working with Reactive Personas
ProtectingComplying Controlling

30. Exercise: Working with Reactive Personas
• Get back into your pair/triad
• 8 min to talk about new strategies
• Capture what you discover on your worksheets

32. Inconvenient Truth #4
We are responsible for our own
experience and self-management
whether we are the boss, a
subordinate or a peer...

33. Or Opportunity…
When we are responsible for our
own experience we can be
leaderful whether we are the boss,
a subordinate or a peer...

34. Highlights & Learning & Questions

35. Now what?
• Email me to get a more detailed description of the
reactive dimensions and strategies
• Invite us for a brown bag lunch for your organization
• Evaluate the leadership culture in your organization
and across teams

36. Follow-Up:
David Chilcott
drc@outformations.com

37. Stick a fork in us….
We’re DONE!

38. Thanks for listening…
David Chilcott
Outformations, Inc.