The Agile Lean Leadership Foundation course shows ambitious leaders how Agile Lean Leadership (ALL) can transform an organization. It demonstrates how to scale Agile and Lean principles for a single Team, for a whole organization, for large projects, or single Teams handling multiple streams of work.

Read a PDF description of the course here…

Change in an organization is always hard. For decades the Neo-Taylorist, reductionist way of seeing an organization as a giant machine that can be programmed by the appropriate expert has dominated management thinking and been regarded by many as an undisputed fact. Alongside this idea, the imperial leader emerged, either of the bureaucratic or the heroic type. The worst consequence of this is the resulting separation of thinking and doing; people’s pride of workmanship is gone, as is their sense of autonomy and sometimes also their sense of purpose.

This approach may have worked well for mass production, or commodity-type businesses, but in today’s highly technical and rapidly innovating world, the challenges are much more complex and the average worker, more highly educated and skilled. So faced with novel and complex challenges, organizations must learn how to organize in ways that allow them to adapt and survive in uncharted territory, where knowledge may be fragmented or non-existent, requiring it to be acquired through experiment and analysis.

Luckily the solution requires more common sense than rocket science. In fact, as much as Agile-Lean Leadership is forward-looking and innovative, it also reflects on a time when craftsmen were respected for their skills and trusted with the responsibility of doing their jobs well. Today’s “craftsmen” include engineers, designers, technologists, and scientists, but the idea is the same, de-emphasize the top-down command and control approach and give responsibility to those doing the work. Make them accountable to their team, but allow them to solve their own issue with minimal external direction.

The Agile Lean Leadership Foundation course will teach the participants the foundation of building an organization that:

The following principles and models are used

• Cynefin for complexity and sense-making
• Systems Thinking
• Design Thinking
• Beyond Budgeting
• Dual Leadership
• Lean thinking, Scrum and Kanban
• The Learning organization