Constructive AgilityⓇ for Leaders

A Curriculum for Creating Better Leaders at All Levels

A course that composed of bite-sized pieces, is interactive, is based on respected research, and is focused on today’s issues.

Discussions with leaders have told us that today’s leaders must:

Create trust, transparency, and psychological safety.

• Generate effective communication.

• Have empathy and a high EQ.

• Provide direction and provide the right amount of sense of urgency (“heat”).

• Create an esprit d'corps.

• Treat all outcomes as learning opportunities have a growth mindset.

• Build trust.

• Have a willingness to try new things.

• Ask challenging questions.

• Be humane.

• Ask others what is possible.

• Listen to those who will be affected before implementing a decision.

• Recognize risks.

• Apply strategic thinking.

• Have patience.

• Be willing to adapt and iterate on strategy.

• Have good listening skills.

• Have an ability to sell a strategy.

• Know how to create a roadmap.

• Be genuine.

This course provides you with the preparation that today’s leaders need — leaders at all levels, because merely sending executives to a Harvard seminar will not be enough. All leaders in your organization need to be effective.

Most leadership training focuses only on soft skills:

• Inspiration

• Listening

• Empowerment

• Growth

• The People side of things

That’s great stuff, but it is not enough! Much more is needed:

• Excellent insight about the market.

• Learning mindset.

• Identify issues, as soon as they arise.

• Generate effective discussions.

• Know who to pull into a discussion.

• Decisiveness, but with a mind toward experimenting.

• Outcome-focused, and ready to pivot.

• Set high expectations, so that people will behave in these ways.

• Advocate, evangelize, intervene.

This course is designed to provide the full range of what is needed for effective and agile leadership in today’s goal-oriented and fast-changing organization.

The course has a Core Curriculum and an Advanced Curriculum. The Core Curriculum includes models of leadership theory, and what leadership behaviors are effective in different situations and what behaviors generate agility. It also includes elements of behavioral psychology and cognitive science because these are important for understanding how people collaborate, think, create, and communicate. Lastly, important models from operations research are included and linked to Lean, Theory of Constraints, and DevOps, because these models and patterns are important areas of knowledge that leaders today must have. Crucially, participants are shown how to use critical thinking to select from and use these ideas intelligently.

Textbooks

Some people learn better by reading than by listening. And for many people, a combination is best. That is why in addition to the pre-recorded lectures, we created a textbook that covers each Topic. The textbooks can be obtained from Amazon.

And this is not just about you: this is about all of the leaders across your organization, at all levels.

So what can you do to make sure that your leaders are up to the task?

Overview video here.

Get a “taste”:

We run a free one-day “Intro” class for the for organization’s that would like to get a “taste”of the course. That way you can sample the content for real. You can request it here.

The major Topics include:

Core Curriculum:

1. Agility creates a baseline understanding of what real agility is.

2-4. Leadership is foundational provides an understanding of how effective leaders behave in a range of situations relevant to technology, including effective decision-making processes.

5. Collaboration and Communication is a core component of effective collaboration and execution.

6. Developing and Supporting People is about how leaders can support and develop their people, so that people have the capabilities and motivations that we need.

7. Culture, Complexity, and Systems Thinking is about how behaviors and “how we do things” become embedded in an organization, driven by leaders’ expectations and behavior.

8. Cultural Transformation is how to change behavior, and change culture.

9. Flow is how to make things go fast, but also manage risk in “real time”. Flow enables agility, by positioning you for flexibility and speed.

Advanced Curriculum:

14. Business Value provides a way of viewing every decision from a value-based perspective.

15. Goals, Strategies, and Measurement is about how to define goals and strategies, identify what indicators matter, and how to make those visible and make them people’s focus.

16. Planning and Execution tie everything together, enabling people to create flexible forward plans and manage dependencies.

Each Topic consists of 2-6 short (5-15 minute) pre-recorded lectures, written reflective questions, and multiple live workshops in which people examine their own behavior, share experiences, and apply what they have learned.

Training Your Teams

This course is designed to be especially effective for organization teams. Please contact us and we will discuss specifics and choose the days and times. The structure is as follows for the Core Curriculum. Each yellow of the five tracks can be done at a different time.

Pricing

We don’t publish our prices online. Please contact us below for a price sheet.

Upcoming Public Classes

We will be launching this new course for the public (individuals) in the spring of 2025. If interested, please click “I have a a question” below and check “Constructive AgilityⓇ for Leaders course”.

Questions?

Want to enroll a group? Or want to arrange for something customized? Or just have a question? Contact us!