Bring your Stories, Examples & Opinions to the Enterprise Agility Masterclass

I’ve been on a good number of agile training courses in the last year or so. I can honestly say The Enterprise Agility Masterclass (ICP-ENT) is quite unlike other courses I have attended. I know that’s a sweeping statement, and it’s something often said about training courses in our industry. That said, I truly believe this is true in this case. Anyone expecting a detailed run through of the various scaling frameworks should go on a different course. EAM covers a vast range of topics, it really nails the Masterclass concept.

During the three highly interactive days, participants are as much the trainer as the trainee. By bringing your stories, examples, and opinions you will work through many models to build a toolkit for enterprise agility. You will explore these models in small groups, pairs, and as a class, using your collective experiences to learn as a group.

I mentioned the word toolkit earlier and that’s certainly the most useful metaphor I can think of. Throughout the course, the trainers, Simon and Lisa, introduce models that help anyone working in agility in the enterprise. The journey joins together these models in interesting ways. My personal favourite is the extension of Larman’s 5th Law into Simon’s cultural change model for Enterprise agility. It’s a seemingly simple logical extension that brings in another dimension to the discussions around lasting organisation change.

Remember that model or theory you frequently quote, expect to see it in a whole new light. EAM joins threads through many models providing some useful tools for anyone in the enterprise agile space.

There are many other models shared throughout the course. For example, the models around systems and complexity theory. Unsurprisingly, when talking with other attendees, people found some models more useful than others. That’s part of the beauty of the toolkit, there’s something for everyone.

EAM is more than a series of models. You will explore professional coaching of executives and executive teams, gaining an understanding of neuroscience along the way. This is the most introspective area of the course, you will practice coaching on your cohorts and be the coachee for them too. For me personally, this was the most challenging aspect, an area of personal development – and look forward to exploring in depth on the “Coaching Enterprise Agility” course.

Bring your stories, examples and opinions. Be prepared to share in a safe environment but respect the airtime of others too.

More process focused areas are well placed throughout the course. Topics such as delegation, enterprise metrics, and lean thinking generated some of the most interesting conversations with the group. Simon and Lisa’s facilitation style came into its own, both were relaxed but confident in a range of subject matters to allow the group to explore topics at their own pace.

The culmination of the course ends with a workshop. Cohorts team up and put together a pitch for the first stages of an agile transformation. Without wanting to reveal too much, I will just say that this was my favourite part of the course. It was amazing seeing the various learnings from the 3 days come together. As I alluded to earlier, participants had different models they gravitated towards. Therefore, it was an interesting challenge to find a balance, deciding what to include and what problems to try and solve, because there was so much great content to choose from!

If you’re involved in agile transformation either as a leader, coach or manager and need to understand agility in the wider context of the organisation then I highly recommend attending this course. 

“Great 3 days with AWA, explaining the difficult topic of enterprise agility. This is a “must attend” for anyone thinking of starting this journey’” – Alan Ashe – Agile Coach