Creating Generative Conversations by Leading with Outcomes

What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions? That generative question underpins Leading with Outcomes, a participatory and pattern-based approach to change that integrates strategy and leadership through participation.

Leading with Outcomes works at two levels. First, it can be seen as an engagement model for practitioners of generative change, a collection of well-tested tools and higher-level patterns that assemble to span the Generative Change Model [Bushe] in its entirety, albeit with a deliberately outcome-oriented flavour.

Second, we pay attention not only to the content of conversations and their outputs, but also to their underlying patterns. Making these explicit and understanding them as patterns of strategy-related conversation, we raise each participant’s awareness of them in their experience and make them transferrable into their everyday practice.

Leading with Outcomes is based on Agendashift, which in turn integrates a diverse range of tools models sourced from inside and outside the dialogic organisation development community. Key inspirations include Clean Language, Solutions Focus, Lean and Lean Startup, Kanban, and Management Cybernetics.

More important than the tools however are its commitments to participation and to outcomes. Not using outcomes to sell solutions (that approach belongs with the diagnostic paradigm), but outcomes agreed authentically, articulated in the participants’ own words, and organised to focus and fuel the innovation process. Furthermore, Leading with Outcomes takes these commitments and relates them to the role and practices of leadership.

On completion of Leading with Outcomes you will be familiar with its patterns and able to apply them both with and without their accompanying tools. You will have ample opportunity to see them in their proper context, to practice them, and to reflect on their application and their underlying meaning.