‘Wholehearted’ launches a week early

Posted on by Mike Burrows

That time has come! Book 5, or to use its proper title, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation is here. “Here” meaning Amazon (print and Kindle):

And “here” meaning these other e-book platforms:

The sticking point was the print edition (Amazon-only, currently), whose release date I could not adequately control (Amazon playing games there I think, but that conversation is for another day). But not only is it now purchasable, I have already received the copies I ordered. The e-book releases were scheduled for the 16th; I brought them forward a week to the 9th, i.e. tomorrow. It prelaunched on LeanPub where it remains as the slightly more expensive DRM-free option, and the e-book is preorderable everywhere else in the meantime.

A double launch

Today is also launch day for Mike Jones’ Strategy Meets Reality podcast, and I’m his first guest!

I’m really pleased with how that came out! I’m doing another podcast interview tomorrow, and I’ll share that one too when it’s ready.

Next month, I’m scheduled to do a meetup and a webinar (slightly different formats but similar material):

Before either those, you can experience the book in participatory form:

The spring cohort has a small quorum already, which is to say both that it’s definitely going ahead and that there’s room for more! Ping me for coupon codes – there’s bound to be one that applies.

Back to Wholehearted

This launch feels different! For me personally, it feels like the culmination of a decade or more of work. And when I share even just a little of what it’s about, people respond! There’s a real hunger for models that help people make sense of their organisational challenges. At the same time, they’re smart enough to recognise that traditional methods don’t scale well, that they tend to gloss over different people’s diverse experiences of the organisation, and that they don’t do enough to enable participants to follow through on their own ideas. Wholehearted offers something different, a fascinating bringing together of old and new – tried and tested frameworks (frameworks in the “lens” sense, not on the “something to roll out” sense), presented in a more engaging way, and coupled with modern, generative practices that play well with complexity. Given the tensions between the various “schools” involved, if all that Wholehearted achieves is to demonstrate that such a synthesis is possible, it will have made a contribution, and I believe that it achieves more than that.

Wholehearted will help you understand your organisation differently. It will also help you engage differently with its challenges and your organisation to meet them better. And the result? The liberation of its decision-making and communication capacity. On its own, that is no small thing, but consider the second-order effects. What new possibilities might be enabled?

A long list of thank you’s

First, I must thank Patrick Hoverstadt (UK), Dave Snowden (UK), and Gervase Bushe (Canada), who for the purposes of the book represent the systems, complexity, and dialogic/generative organisation development communities, whose work I am brave (or perhaps foolhardy) enough to bring together here. Patrick’s help was invaluable when I first created what would become the springboard for this book, a sketchy and now superseded version of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation that I included the final chapter of the 2021 second edition of Agendashift. Dave meanwhile, well known for the Cynefin framework, was developing his Estuarine Mapping approach, one element of which appears in the final chapter. Also as a result of the Agendashift second edition, Gervase commissioned and edited my fourth book, Organizing Conversations, which was published only last year in the BMI Series in Dialogic Organisation Development. It is fair to say that the development of that book and this one overlapped, and while I have no regrets about the delay to this one (it benefited, no doubt), I’m grateful to Gervase for his patience.

Next, I must thank those who gave this work an early platform or who supported it (and me) in other ways: Prachi Arora (India), Ryan Behrman (UK), Jens Benke (Germany), Chris Combe (Australia), Dan Davies (UK), Morten Elvang (Denmark), Ann Gambles (UK), Markus Hippeli (Germany), Peter Coesmans (Netherlands), Heidi Helfand (US), Klaus Leopold (Austria), Steve Morlidge (UK), Annette Nolan (Sweden), Noopur Pathak India), Priyank Pathak (India), Andrea Place (UK), Daniel Ploeg (Australia), Adrian Reed (UK), Martin Rosén-Lidholm (Denmark), David Spinks (UK), Katie Taylor (UK), Ian Vellosa (Switzerland), Stan Wade (UK), and Andreas Wittler (Germany).

Specifically to the book’s content, I am hugely grateful for input, feedback and encouragement from Ricardo Alvarez (Switzerland), Dickson Alves de Souza (Brazil), Karen Beck (UK), Olivier Bertrand (Canada), Kyle Byrd (US), Greg Brougham (UK), Michael Ciccotti (US), John Coleman (UK), Nariman Dorafshan (Iran), Marika Gartelius (Sweden), Philippe Geuenet (UK), Ivaylo Gueorguiev (Bulgaria), Leif Hanack (US), Cat Hicks (US), Johan Ivari (Sweden), Simon Jaillais (France), Elizabeth Jones (US), Russ Lewis (UK), Craig Lucia (UK), Thomas Lissajoux (France), David Michel (UK), Matt Mitchell (Australia), Zak Moore (UK), Silke Noll (New Zealand), John Obelenus (US), Anna Panagiotou (Switzerland), Dustin Parham (US), Kert Peterson (Canada), Alex Pukinskis (Germany), Karl Scotland (UK), Badre Srinivasan (India), Nader Talai (UK), Daniel Shern Tee Walters (Australia), Matthew White (UK), Sarah Whitely (UK), Mushon Zer-Aviv (Israel), Mushon Zer-Aviv (Israel), and Teddy Zetterlund (Sweden). Many of you have read multiple drafts, the early ones rough and incomplete. It can’t have been easy, and I admire your perseverance! From that long and truly international list, a special mention to Mushon, who helped inspire the Constraints Club exercise (Chapter 6).

Finally, and for the fifth time now, I must thank my amazing wife Sharon. “Without whom” doesn’t begin to cover it!