The Art of System Observation

Does bringing change to your organization feel like throwing darts to the wall to see what sticks?

Or worse, it feels like pushing a huge boulder uphill?

Too often, we focus on the “obvious” aspects:

the engineers are missing <skill or trait> ;
the tool is limited;
the process is stupid
etc.

We add incentives, replace the engineer, the tool, or the process. And to our surprise - we are underwhelmed by the results.

It’s as if somehow nothing really changed.

What if there was a better way?

What if we were able to go under the surface and see what is holding the pattern in place?

What if we could design change experiments that targeted what is keeping the system in place?

That’s where the System X-Ray Vision superpower comes in.

Really, that’s only a catchy name for Observing the System.

And good news, it’s a learnable skill.

Join our 6 hours workshop (over two sessions) to learn the essentials about seeing how a social system works, and how to tweak it in the direction of positive change.

What You Will Learn

You’ll learn practical skills, that will enable you to:

comprehensively identify the factors that are holding the status quo
discover leverage points in the system
nudge iteratively toward the change you want to see
leave with experiments to try in YOUR system

Workshop Format

This is a live 2 sessions of 3 hours workshop delivered over Zoom. It contains a few short presentations of the models and tools, and a lot of hands-on work where you get to apply these to YOUR situation. To maximize interactions between instructors and participants, it is limited to 20 people.

Registration for the workshop is 495$.

The workshop is happening on November 19th and 20th at 9:00am Pacific (11:00am Central, 12:00pm Eastern).

Who Is This For?

Whether your role is tech lead, engineering manager, program manager, Scrum master, coach, if you are trying to change your team, department, or organization - you can benefit from learning the Art of System Observation.

What Others Said

"I really learned a lot during this workshop. Organisations are systems and having the tools to analyze situations or problem with this lens will be very useful to help address them in productive ways. I also enjoyed the format which allowed me to learn from my peers from all the over the world. Sharing experiences make a big difference."

- Joel Pomerleau
Director, Financial industry, Canada

"I've done some systems thinking workshop in the past. Being fascinated with the topic, I continue to look for more opportunities to learn more. I love how you took a complex topic and broke it down. This is an approach that I can take and easily share with the teams and leadership in my workplace."

- Craig Petska
Petska Coaching & Consulting - Agile Coach

"The workshop teaches participants practical methods for analyzing systems and how to affect change in a lightweight way through experiments. These are skills that anyone working with others will fine useful in the course of their job."

- Kyle Smith
Engineering Manager, Google

"I knew I was overwhelmed with the challenges of leading my team but I couldn't put my finger on anything that I could act on. The workshop showed me that I'm working within a system, and gave me a framework for understanding, managing, and improving the system."

- JJ
Data Architecture Leader

"This workshop gave me new insight into ways to address problems within our leadership team that we had been wrestling with for over a year."

- Anonymous

"For people who want to have some relatively easy-to-use tools to analyze or present systematic issues, this course is very helpful!"

- Irene Asay
Agile Coach

Meet the Facilitators

Esther Derby

Esther Derby draws on four decades of experience leading, observing, and living organizational change. She works with a broad array of organizations. Her clients include both startups and Fortune 500 companies. Based on experience and research, her approach blends attention to humans and deep knowledge of complex adaptive systems. Esther has been called one of the most influential voices within the agile communities when it comes to developing organizations, coaching teams, and transforming management. Her work over many years has influenced coaches and leaders across many companies.

Esther started her career as a programmer. However, over the years she’s worn many hats, including business owner, internal consultant, manager, and team leader. From all these perspectives, one thing was clear: individual, team, and even organizational success depends greatly on the work environment and organizational dynamics. As a result, she’s spent the last twenty-five years helping companies shape their environment for optimum success.

Francis Lacoste

Francis coaches engineering executives in becoming leaders who nurture amazing engineering cultures. Before coaching, he spent over twenty-five years in the open-source and cloud developer tools industry. First, as a software engineer, and then as an engineering manager and director at Canonical and Heroku where he built successful high-performance remote engineering teams.