Inviting Agility

Inviting Agility helps any kind of enterprise – corporate or community, startup or silo’d, from team room to C-suite – grow more, better and easier results:

• create more satisfied customers and engaged employees,
• invite faster and smarter innovation and adaptation,
• produce more value for owners and stakeholders, and
• make a bigger social and environmental impact.   

There is more in you – your team, organization and community – than you think.  Inviting Agility calls it out, makes it visible, and aligns everyone around accomplishing the things that matter most.  Notice what’s working. Let’s make more of that.

Start with the people and resources you already have, and these two lists: All the outcomes you need to achieve (i.e. what’s your high performance?) AND… All the reasons you can’t (i.e. what’s your permanent whitewater?).

Together, we can create fully-engaged all hands meetings, translate the results into roadmaps your teams can rally around, and cultivate the enterprise-wide cadences and practices you need to hit your marks – faster and easier than you’d expect.

Inviting Agility can help you respond quickly and effectively to any kind of change or disruption – in spite of everything.  It’s a framework for resilience: engagement, learning, transformation, adaptation, scaling and growth.

• Mobilize Everyone to Respond Together (open some space)
• Visualize Everything to Plan and Manage Effectively (create a canvas or marketplace)
• Work Incrementally to Deliver Dependably (synchronize cadences)
• Learn Together to Improve, Replicate, Scale and Evolve (review, refine, repeat)

This simple, powerful framework is immediately practical. Start with one or a few teams. Link product and marketing, sales and finance, in reinforcing cycles. Connect supporting functions. For best results, leaders go first.

Finally, we meet. I’m Michael Herman. Thank you for visiting and scrolling this far. I hope you’re finding something useful here.

I’ve been inviting agility and high performance, with clients and colleagues on six continents, for more than 30 years.  In 1990, I was the rare Outward Bound instructor with an MBA in Finance from a big name b-school. Since then, I’ve become a recognized teacher and facilitator of emergent self-organization, team learning, and enterprise agility.

My passion has always been discovering, understanding, and sharing better ways of organizing ourselves for work. The “Inviting Organization” I described in this website, in 1998, is still a useful guide to what is emerging today as “business agility.”

What I now call Inviting Agility weaves together the important principles and powerful practices that are transforming organizations and informing startups everywhere. Why Invite Agility?

I support fellow leaders and champions, innovators and learners, disrupters and transformers. Please have a look around – and contact me if I can help with whatever you’re working on.

More Biography | Publications | What People Say

The Resources Library offers original guides, papers, checklists and practice tools. There’s a small heap of other important foundational materials for those who want to go deeper.