The Purpose of the Workshop

Many Agile practitioners eventually reach a plateau.

They know Scrum, Kanban, or SAFe. They facilitate ceremonies, coach teams, and improve delivery. Yet as organizations grow, the challenges change. Cross-functional coordination, management alignment, organizational design, competing stakeholder needs, and stalled transformations require a different way of thinking.

This workshop is designed to help experienced Agile practitioners make that transition.

Its purpose is not to teach another framework or another collection of practices. Instead, it helps participants acquire the distinctions that enable them to see organizational challenges differently, diagnose them more effectively, and design better ways of working.

Throughout the workshop participants don’t simply learn new concepts—they use those concepts to examine their own work. Every major distinction is introduced through guided discovery, applied to real situations, and reflected upon before moving to the next. By the end of the day, participants have not only learned new ideas, they have practiced thinking in a different way.

The result is more than a deeper understanding of Agile. Participants begin developing the capability to think like organizational designers—people who can recognize governing dynamics, diagnose before prescribing, reason from objectives rather than implementation, and continually improve the systems in which they work.

Better practices naturally follow.

The capability to derive them is what this workshop develops.

You can participate in one of two ways:

1. Attend live and get access to all of the PowerPoints for your own use as well be in the full Sonesis Capability System for six months ($595)

2. Join the individual ACS journey for $49 / month, learn what you want (this and other material), but don’t get access to use the PowerPoints or Lucid Boards available to those in option 1.

Next workshop dates are August 4, 6, 11, 13th. 8-10am Pacific.

Part 1 – Learning to See the System

1. Introduction – Learning Together

Benefit

Participants begin by understanding that the workshop is a collaborative exploration rather than a traditional training class. The objective is to develop capability together by examining real organizational situations.

Concepts and Distinctions

• Learning through collaboration.
• Capability rather than information.
• Distinctions create possibilities.
• Why changing perception creates lasting improvement.

Learning pattern: Collaborative discovery.

2. The Inherent Challenge – Why Good Organizations Plateau

Benefit

Participants recognize why capable organizations frequently stagnate despite adopting Agile practices. They learn to identify how common improvement approaches unintentionally reinforce local optimization, organizational silos, and delayed feedback.

Concepts and Distinctions

• Local optimization versus system optimization.
• Improving activities versus improving operational models.
• Why organizations plateau.
• Feedback delays create waste.
• Better thinking precedes better practices.

Learning pattern:  Guided discovery.

3. Stakeholders

Benefit

Participants broaden their perspective beyond users to understand everyone who creates, receives, enables, funds, or constrains value.

Concepts and Distinctions

• Stakeholders rather than users.
• Value.
• Success criteria.
• Constraints.
• Stakeholders as governing forces.
• Practical stakeholder analysis exercise.

Learning pattern:  Exercise based on participants’ work. 

4. The Essence of Agile – Eliminating Waste

Benefit

Participants develop a deeper understanding of Agile that applies regardless of framework.

Concepts and Distinctions

• Discovering what matters at the right time.
• Managing Work in Process.
• Finishing creates feedback.
• Early versus late discovery.
• Rework versus stale knowledge.
• Feedback as the engine of improvement.

Learning pattern:  Exercise based on participants’ work.

Part 2 – Learning to Discover Value

5. From User Stories to Objectives Stories

Benefit

Participants learn to communicate work in ways that reduce misunderstandings and expose hidden assumptions before implementation begins.

Concepts and Distinctions

• Stakeholders.
• Objectives.
• Context.
• Means and ends.
• Downstream outcomes.
• Constraints.
• Objective Stories.

Learning pattern:  Guided discovery.

6. Objective Stories – exercise

Benefit

Participants will convert some of their user stories into objectives stories.

Concepts and Distinctions

• Context
• Objective
• Means
• Enables
• Constraints

Learning pattern:  Exercise based on participants’ work.

7. Choosing the Right Delivery Strategy 

Benefit

Participants learn how to choose the appropriate strategy for moving from understanding objectives to creating value. They discover when uncertainty requires experimentation through Minimum Viable Products and when the objective is sufficiently understood that a Quickest Valuable Release provides the fastest path to stakeholder value.

Concepts and Distinctions

• Discovery versus delivery.
• Matching the approach to the uncertainty.
• MVPs for validating assumptions.
• QVRs for rapidly delivering known value.
• Choosing the appropriate strategy rather than following a default practice.

Learning pattern:  Guided discovery

8. MVPs and QVRs – exercise

Benefit

Participants will learn how to take their epics to create MVPs or QVRs as appropriate.

Concepts and Distinctions – same as prior session.

Learning pattern: Exercise based on participants’ work.

Part 3 – Learning to Design Better Organizations

9. Value Creation Structures

Benefit

Participants apply the distinctions developed throughout the workshop to redesign how organizations create value, even when ideal team structures are unavailable.

Concepts and Distinctions

• Value Creation Structures.
• Cross-functional collaboration.
• Designing operational models.
• Organizing around value rather than organizational boundaries.

Learning pattern:  Guided discovery.

10 & 11. Diagnosing Before Prescribing

Benefit

Participants learn to diagnose organizational situations before proposing solutions, dramatically increasing the likelihood that improvements address underlying causes rather than symptoms.

Concepts and Distinctions

• Diagnosis before prescription.
• Current Operational Model.
• Missing distinctions.
• Adaptive Practices.
• Designing from objectives.

Learning pattern: Exercise based on participants’ work.

12. Coaching Corner

Benefit

Participants discover why they were able to think differently throughout the day. They will also discover why experts consistently perceive opportunities others miss, and how coaching can accelerate capability development by introducing new distinctions rather than simply transferring information.

Concepts and Distinctions

• Pickup Sticks.
• Automatic Interpretive Reframing.
• Perceptual Dynamics.
• Learning Dynamics.
• How expertise develops.

Learning pattern:  Guided discovery via an exercise.

Part 4 – Continuing the Journey

13. Premortem

Benefit

Participants apply their new distinctions to anticipate hidden risks before they become expensive failures.

Concepts and Distinctions

• Hidden assumptions.
• Anticipating failure.
• Better decision making.
• Applying distinctions under uncertainty.

Learning pattern:  Exercise based on participants’ work.

14. Sonesis/AI

Benefit

Participants learn how AI can become an ongoing capability partner that helps them diagnose situations, acquire new distinctions, and continue developing long after the workshop ends.

Concepts and Distinctions

• Capability Navigation.
• AI as a coaching partner.
• Diagnostics.
• Developing capability through guided inquiry.

Learning pattern:  Exercise where participants use Sonesis/AI to learn it.

15. Reflection

Benefit

Participants consolidate the distinctions they acquired throughout the workshop and identify how they will immediately begin improving their own organizations.

Concepts and Distinctions

• What became visible?
• What changed?
• What is now possible?
• Continuing capability development.

Learning pattern:  Exercise run using the Sonesis retrospection boards. 

16. Next steps

Benefit

Take these concepts into action.

Concepts and Distinctions

• What problems can you now solve?
• What stands in your way?
• Who can you enroll to help you?
• What are you going to do tomorrow?

Learning pattern:  Exercise to build an action plan.

Practices That Become Possible Once You See Differently

The workshop deliberately focuses live interaction on changing perception rather than teaching implementation techniques. Once participants understand the governing distinctions, many practical techniques become significantly more valuable.

Recorded modules and follow-on material include:

• Better Daily Scrums – Transform Daily Scrums from status meetings into collaborative planning sessions that improve flow and expose impediments early.
• Better Retrospectives – Move beyond discussing what happened toward diagnosing why it happened and identifying improvements to the operational model.
• Better Estimation – Learn practical estimation approaches that provide more useful information than traditional Planning Poker while encouraging better organizational conversations.

Additional implementation modules will continue to expand over time as participants apply their new distinctions to increasingly sophisticated organizational challenges.

Access to Sonesis/AI and hundreds of hours of recorded sessions, as well as 3 sessions a week for Q&A are also available.

The Outcome

The goal of this workshop is not simply to create better Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, or Product Managers.

It is to help experienced practitioners become capable of leading organizational improvement.

Throughout the workshop, participants acquire a sequence of distinctions that change how they perceive organizations. They learn to recognize governing dynamics, diagnose before prescribing, reason from objectives rather than implementation, and design operational models that better create stakeholder value.

The workshop also models the way these capabilities develop. Rather than presenting a collection of best practices, it introduces one distinction at a time, applies each to participants’ own work, and shows how those distinctions naturally lead to better decisions and better practices.

Participants leave with practical techniques they can apply immediately. More importantly, they leave with a richer way of thinking that enables them to continue improving long after the workshop has ended.

Better practices naturally follow.

The capability to derive those practices is what endures.

Lucid Collaboration Boards You Get To Keep

Several of the exercises are done on Lucid Sparks Collaboration boards. You get to keep these but you must own a license to use them on your own. No license is needed in the workshop. 

These are the boards used in the workshop:

• Generic Value Stream Diagnostic Board
• Sonesis Team Estimation Board
• After Action Review board (for retrospections)
• Doing a premortem

Other boards are also available and can be seen here.

Why the workshop is formatted this way.

Intense workshops are fun but they interfere with your work, you forget most of what you were exposed to and you don’t have time to try things out. 

Success Engineering’s training does this workshop over two weeks so you can try out what you’ve learned between the sessions.  You also have a 6 month subscription to the  Sonesis Capability System where you can learn even more.

We also avoid “death by PowerPoint” by having all of the sessions be highly interactive sessions.

The included 6 month subscription to the Sonesis Capability System is designed to enable you to continue growing and making a difference.

What You Can Do (or learn quickly in the program) After This Workshop

Your learning doesn’t end with this one-day. On the contrary, it’s just the beginning.

The Sonesis Capability System continues with 3 sessions a week.

This include the follwing:

1. How to use AI to increase your capability.
2. How to determine what the real problem
3. How to stop mechanical Scrum How to speak to management and feature factories.
4. How to get a stalled SAFe adoption going again.
5. How to create stakeholder alignment without endless meetings.
6. How to influence people when you don’t have authority.
7. How to make better decisions under uncertainty.
8. How to help people see what they are not seeing.
9. How to get requirements in a way that doesn’t cause rework as they emerge.
10. How to improve an organization without creating change fatigue.
11. How to know when a practice should be adapted instead of followed.
12. How to help people see what they are not seeing.
13. How to speak to management
14. How to create effective team structures (think Team Topologies, only more flexible).
15. How to avoid resistance in people when trying to guide improvement