Daniel Walsh
Principal Consultant and Coach, FiveWhyz & nuCognitive
Austin, Texas, United States
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Daniel Walsh is a Lean and Agile consultant, product development coach, international keynote speaker, professional facilitator, and systems engineer. He passionately advocates for Lean, Agile, and applied complexity methods and practices with 25+ years of engineering and product development experience. He was an engineering manager and a product manager at Intel Corp. for 18 years and has developed heuristics for successful, sustainable Lean & Agile transformations. Walsh led and coached diverse groups' transformation efforts, including digital transformation in the tech, energy, finance, and pharmaceutical sectors.
Walsh is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) graduate with an M.S. in Engineering Systems and an M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School of Business. He drives business results while cultivating work environments where people thrive and do their best work. He specializes in Lean, Agile, Product Management, OKRs, JTBD, Cynefin, strategy, culture change, Kanban, and other heuristics. These methodologies emphasize agility, autonomy, and capacity-building, empowering clients to become more effective, efficient, and resilient.
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OKR Blueprint Workshop: Design and operationalize a more effective and efficient OKR system
The OKR Blueprint Workshop is a facilitated session to equip leaders, managers, and change agents with insights and acumen to make informed design decisions to tailor their Objectives and Key Results (OKR) system. Participants will apply heuristics and explore a comprehensive collection of design constraints, questions, and trade-off considerations to develop an OKR implementation tailored to their unique ways of working and cultural context. Participants can use the resulting OKR blueprint to explain the current OKR system to stakeholders and avoid wastes and inefficiencies from muddling through or languishing in a suboptimal OKR configuration.
Participants will explore an end-to-end process and holistic set of questions to design and refine their OKR system from inception to continuous improvement.
The OKR Blueprint Workshop leverages 18 years of firsthand experience with OKRs from Intel Corporation and offers pragmatic strategies to align and focus organizational efforts. It stresses the significance of purposeful goal setting, cadence, grading, learning-by-doing, and the delicate balance in metrics to ensure holistic success. The approach is comprehensive, addressing the nuances of OKR adoption at various organizational levels and advocating for a mindful, disciplined execution of OKRs to optimize collective outcomes and drive meaningful progress.
Navigate the Narrative Landscape: Assess and Measure Culture Change with Stories
In a world where culture change and organizational transformation are ever-shifting landscapes, 'Sense-making' and participative narrative inquiry emerge as fit-for-purpose methods and beacons to guide leaders at every level through the fog. This session delves into the art of detecting weak signals and understanding the dynamics and patterns of organizations through the lived experiences shared by individuals.
Sense-making is a participatory form of ethnography. Individuals share personal experiences or observations and enrich these narratives by answering targeted questions, adding depth and layers of meaning. This method uniquely marries hard data with soft, qualitative insights. It inherently reduces bias, as participants, rather than external analysts, interpret and code their own stories. This approach not only lends authenticity to the data but also ensures that real-life stories, supported by data, are at the forefront of driving culture change and measuring progress.
The power of these narratives, especially when they reveal consistent patterns supported by quantitative evidence, is undeniable. They offer a detailed, multifaceted view, aiding leaders in spotting trends and behaviors within their organizations. By analyzing a broad collection of such narratives, organizations can detect subtle changes and inform targeted actions, making sense-making an invaluable tool for understanding complex systems and guiding interventions.
In this session, we'll explore practical insights from applying sense-making to identify barriers in Agile implementation and culture change, focusing on intrinsic motivation and team health. Additionally, we'll present several mini-case studies to help participants understand how to assess and measure culture change with narratives.
Enhance Team Autonomy and Performance: The Power of Behavioral Marker Systems
Augmenting team working agreements with behavioral marker systems can effectively enhance a team's autonomy and performance. These systems empower teams to introspect and proactively adjust their behavior and interactions to improve team interactions and outcomes.
Behavioral markers are observable behaviors contributing to superior or substandard performance within a work environment. Behavioral Marker Systems are based on Crew Resource Management research from aviation, surgical teams, and other high-stakes domains where a team's performance is a matter of life and death. Teams use them in a variety of ways, including:
- as a mirror to reflect on their interactions and behaviors that contribute to overall team performance
- as an objective measure of teamwork based on specific behaviors, interactions, and working agreements across individuals, time, and contexts (e.g. Daily stand-up, PI planning)
- as a tool to scale and accelerate the development of agile coaching skills across the organization (e.g. coaches, managers, RTEs, SMs)
The session will intertwine theoretical insights with a practical mini-case study, offering Scrum teams a comprehensive "how-to" guide. Participants will discover actionable strategies and tools to implement behavioral marker systems, enabling them to witness firsthand the transformation in team performance and collaboration. By embedding these systems, teams amplify their capacity to self-organize, fostering an environment that nurtures autonomy and self-correction, critical competencies for any high-performing Agile team.
Context is King: Tailor Your Agile Practices with Heuristics and the Cynefin Framework
Have you ever wondered why some approaches work well in one context and not so well in others? We make important decisions daily with imperfect data and limited situational awareness. To improve our chances for success, we need to understand the context we are working with to take appropriate action. Failing to recognize the nature of the situation results in misinformed decisions with potentially catastrophic consequences.
In this interactive session, participants will discover how to critically evaluate and adapt Agile methods to fit their unique organizational contexts. The session will make the case that Agile is a collection of pragmatic heuristics, not a one-size-fits-all recipe. Heuristics, or rules of thumb, are anything that provides a plausible aid or direction in the solution of a problem. All heuristics work by exploiting the structure of an environment, so heuristics work well in some settings and less well (or not at all) in others. We need to understand why and where methods and practices work - and where they don't - to adopt, tailor, use, and improve them.
The Cynefin Framework will be highlighted as a crucial sense-making framework to help participants comprehend various contexts and select appropriate Agile heuristics that fit. Cynefin is a sense-making framework that helps people understand their context and situation to take appropriate action. This session introduces the framework, which enables a better understanding of systems, how they differ, and how to take appropriate action depending on the context of the situation. As a sense-making framework, it focuses on how people perceive and make sense of situations to make decisions across various contexts.
Participants will apply the Cynefin framework to assess and select heuristics appropriate for the environment rather than defaulting to a single, one-size-fits-all approach. The goal is to foster an environment where Agile adoption is more successful and aligned with the unique demands of each situation, encouraging the development of tailored approaches that balance local needs with the need to standardize some things to scale.
Daniel Walsh
Principal Consultant and Coach, FiveWhyz & nuCognitive
Austin, Texas, United States
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