I’m sort of back to work now, mainly speaking engagements for the moment. We’ll be taking a holiday also – it will be the first time Sharon and I have been able to travel together since 2018. I’m not sure yet what 2026 will bring, but that’s ok, and I’m very open to ideas.
Just this month I have given my talk Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation four times now! It turns out to be very adaptable: twice this week (and next week at Øredev 2025) it took the form of a quick 30 or 40 minute talk. But earlier this week I had no trouble filling 90 minutes, and two weeks ago, nearly three hours! That last one was for a hybrid seminar at Hull University’s Centre for Systems Studies in association with the Operations Research Society, and it prompted plenty of thoughtful conversation.
Given my impending travels, I have already written my new keynote for Kanban India 2025, which takes place in early December. It’s called Thinking Organisationally about Process, and it puts the kanban of my first book, Kanban from the Inside, into the kind of organisational frame described by my fifth book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, with some of the glue provided by my middle book (and audiobook), Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile. If the clock starts with my best-known (not to mention career-changing) blog post, Introducing Kanban through its values, that’s a journey of nearly 13 years, but you can get the gist in some 45 minutes!
I mention these because if you run a meetup or conference, you might consider one or even both of these talks. For a fee, I do private events also, as I did only yesterday. Either way, I have availability from mid-December onwards.
Articles
I wrote two this month. Most recently, and prompted by that seminar in Hull and also by a panel session I did with Philippe Guenet and Jen Le Marinel for the International Coaching Federation (ICF):
With home life very much in transition, I’m honouring my remaining commitments for 2025 but deliberately keeping 2026 open. My public calendar now looks like this:
On Friday last week, I led a nearly three-hour seminar (a recording will follow I’m told) by invitation of the Operations Research (OR) Society and Hull University’s Centre for System Studies. I based it on my keynote, Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation [1], which is in turn based on my fifth and most recent book, Wholehearted [2]. This time though, I added a preamble and an open discussion that owed more to my fourth book, Organizing Conversations [3], and just as I hoped, it had a profound effect on the seminar as a whole.
Some rough polarities…
Here is that preamble’s key slide:
Introducing those polarities (extremes, perhaps on a spectrum, perhaps interdependent, perhaps paradoxically so) in the form of rhetorical questions, it may seem that I’m trading in platitudes or false dichotomies, but there is a much more serious and practical point to be made. But first that more shallow treatment, where the “we” in question refers to practitioners of things systems-related:
Do we see it as our job to design better systems, or instead to engage with organisations as they are, and to help others do the same?
Do we see ourselves as conducting research, analysis, or diagnosis, or instead as stimulating dialogue, inquiry, and generative conversations – solutions emerging from those?
Are we trying to document a single, authoritative perspective, or instead to give voice to multiple, diverse, and perhaps conflicting perspectives?
And following on from that last one, are we drawn to what can easily be formalised and perhaps visualised, or instead to actual experiences and their differences and ambiguities?
Are we documenting the organisation as though frozen in time, or engaging with the experience of change – relationships and structures of various kinds continuously and emergently forming, dissolving, and re-forming out of what I referred to tongue-in-cheek as the “quantum foam of organisation”?
Are we looking for problems to solve, or helping the organisation to meet its challenges well [4]?
Are we designing solutions, or helping people and/or organisations to make meaningful progress?
Clarifying that previous one, is our motivation instrumental (e.g. to achieve some efficiency or performance improvement) or to emancipatory, referring to human conditions, freedoms, etc
Are we imposing perspectives and/or solutions (predetermined or otherwise) on people, or is the process not only invitational and participatory, but authentically so?
Even after allowing a time of divergence, do we feel driven to converge on a limited number of key concepts, problems, and interventions, or are we about enabling progress on a broad front?
To that last point in particular, I had a couple of different things in mind. First and most obviously, there is, after Kaner [5], the classic diverge-converge pattern of facilitated decision making, with its central “groan zone” of maximum divergence. One of the reasons that Organizing Conversations took me two and half years to write – much to not only its own betterment but Wholehearted‘s too – is that editor Gervase Bushe took me to task whenever he thought I was promoting convergence unnecessarily. I ended up adding a whole chapter on calibration, making explicit the range of choices between convergence and divergence the host or facilitator has in the design and conduct of participatory experiences. That line of thinking carries over into Wholehearted, making its treatment of the Viable System Model decidely non-traditional both philosophically and practically.
Talking of philosophy, the second issue I had fresh in mind was prompted by my recent reading of John Mingers, Systems Thinking, Critical Realism and Philosophy [6]. The critical realism aspect of this book was fascinating, but I wish that in its treatment of systems thinking, it had been more critical! I did a double take when he went straight from the existence, study, and hypothesising of the (real) causal mechanisms that shape the (actual) events and non-events that we are able to observe, to the apparent necessity of systems thinkers to draw boundaries around things at the earliest possible opportunity. In such a book, and especially given the book’s own discussions about the significant difficulties of boundary identification, this illogical and unquestioned non-sequitur was surprising, to put it mildly.
And their asymmetries (or one asymmetry in particular)
One way I could weasel out of false dichotomy mode would be to steal a trick from the Agile manifesto: While we value the things on the left, we value the things on the right more. Not to comment on the Agile Manifesto but its derivatives, its “this over that” style has been done to death already, and it’s too easy to fall not only into cliché but platitude that way.
The issue and the asymmetry goes as follows. On the one hand, doing the things on the right gives the things on the left (assuming you need to do them at all) more material to work with. That may seem like harder work, but it increases your chances of hitting on something important, and if you really must converge on a smaller set of things to focus on, that’s easily done. On the other hand, doing the things on the left may exclude important possibilities in ways that aren’t nearly so easily fixed later in the process. When the damage is done, it’s done.
For example:
A “design better systems” framing may – even if unintentionally – seem to exclude more evolutionary approaches from the outset
Research, analysis, and diagnosis often serve to delay conversations that could easily happen very much closer to the start of the process, and when they do happen, they’re now about what that work has produced. The reverse is not true; dialogue does not have to time-consuming.
A single, authoritative, and easily formalised perspective (a process diagram, for example) glosses over difference, and once again, it shifts the focus from actual experience to model, from territory to map.
A frozen-in-time model of the organisation fails to capture what is gained and lost in the process of change (self-organised or otherwise), a key consideration if the organisation in question aspires to adaptability. There is also a real issue of scalability; in his writings on the Viable System Model, for example, Stafford Beer himself warns that there may be (and this is not his word but his emphasis too) thousands of things to analyse, and is it then even remotely possible to keep up in the presence of even modest amounts of flux?
Framings of problem solving and solution implementation are by definition unhelpful if the challenge is in any sense adaptive – i.e. one with a propensity to change itself and/or us in the process of our engaging with it, which covers many if not most challenges not only in the social sphere but in product development also. Conversely, “meeting our challenges well” has a generative quality, and may help to inspire even where technical solutions are available. And what is our job if it is not to help people “make meaningful progress”? (To be fair that’s a whole topic in itself, but have a play with that framing, one long known to work well in the product sphere [7])
With regard to instrumental vs emancipatory (if I can put it like that), history shows that the two can often go hand in hand. But let’s not leave the human dimension looking like an afterthought – once the damage is done, it’s hard to recover
On the imposed vs invitational / participatory axis, are we using well-intentioned ends to justify inappropriate or inauthentic means? How long until so-called participants see through the contradiction?
Coherent by construction
If by this point you’re feeling uncomfortable, perhaps you’re thinking that a push to the things on the right just turns everything into an undifferentiated mess. Not so! With the generative patterns (see figure below) of Organizing Conversations (and before that, Agendashift [8] and the Agendashift Academy’s Leading with Outcomes leadership development programme [9]), the process is best understood as one of exploring a multi-dimensional space of possibility. With step representing a change of direction/dimension, the conversational threads that describe experiences, concepts, and new ideas get carried over, dropped, or picked up again naturally without the need for any forced convergence. At the end of the process, everything that has been produced is easily traceable back to its origins. Not random ideas then, but an organisational strategy that is coherent by construction, anchored in reality (I’ll say in passing that this happens to be the most rigorous part of the process), and yet full of possibility.
What it means to be a practitioner (or to choose one)
If your discomfort remains, I hear you. Returning to that first slide, my aim here was not to condemn the things on the left and their respective practices; in their rightful places, they’re all useful – essential even. But if you consider yourself a practitioner, do yourself a favour: see how long you can postpone them, and push yourself to keep working on that.
And yes, you’re constrained by the expectations of your engagement, so let’s address that elephant too. To those on the buy side looking to engage a practitioner of some kind, think seriously about your organisation “meeting its challenges well” and “making meaningful progress”. Then reflect on what it would feel like for both of those to be sustained over time and into the future – a future not only of uncertainty and challenge but of possibility too. What kind of help and what kind of engagement do you then need? This may be your opportunity to turn a tactical choice into a more strategic one.
[5] Kaner, Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (3rd edition, 2014, Jossey-Bass Business & Management). The 1st edition was published in 1996.
[6] John Mingers, Systems Thinking, Critical Realism and Philosophy: A Confluence of Ideas (2014, Routledge Critical Realism)
[7] Bob Moesta & Greg Engle, Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress (2020)
[8] Mike Burrows, Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2019)
It’s about 6 months since Wholehearted [1] was published, and more than a year since the blog post Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation [2]. As I begin my return from my enforced break, I’d like briefly to explain why a wholehearted organisation is in two ways a high-intelligence organisation.
First, and to recap: engage, invite, celebrate. Up and down a wholehearted organisation – at every scale of organisation and covering its key business domains (a moving target) – there are people who are:
Engaging on the right challenges
Inviting people into that process, and
Celebrating their accomplishments
Through its development of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (a thoroughly modern take on the classic Viable System Model), the book expands on what those challenges might be and – more importantly – how they might be recognised, but here we are focusing not on that model but on those essential leadership behaviours.
Intelligence has multiple meanings, but two have particular relevance in an organisational context. There’s the organisation’s ability to capture information about itself and its business environment and get it to the right places. Then there’s the organisation’s ability to apply its knowledge and capabilities in the right ways and at the right times.
One person alone does not a wholehearted organisation make. One person – even the CEO – engaging, inviting, and celebrating creates neither the informational network nor the distributed capacity for decision making, innovation, and resilience that the organisation needs if it is to respond to challenges and opportunities on multiple and emerging fronts. The gamechanger is an organisational and appropriately complex response to that complexity – specifically to invite others to engage, invite, celebrate too, and with a density sufficient for the resulting scopes of activity to maintain relationships with its neighbours both at equivalent levels of scale and between scales. Through these relationships, information is diffused, strategies (plural) align, and actions (plentiful) coordinate.
To be clear, this is as much a lens on the organisation as it is an operating model, in fact more so. I’m not asking you to throw out what you have and roll out some pre-packaged Agile or Sociocratic framework, rather to see (and more powerfully, to help you to help others to see) where and how the organisation is failing to meet its challenges well, whether that’s indicative of some deep and longstanding organisational issue or simply a change of circumstances that needs some timely response. Either way, you probably won’t fix it on your own and indeed there may be no singular solution. But have enough people on a broad enough front 1) engaging with each challenge for the response to be rich enough and 2) engaging with each other sufficiently for that response to be coherent enough, then you maximise your chances to make meaningful progress.
How much is enough? How much is sufficient? It’s in the nature of complex (or if you prefer, adaptive) challenges that you won’t know until people engage actively with them. Responses will scope themselves soon enough!
[1] Mike Burrows, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (2025)
The time has come for me to share the sad but not entirely unexpected news that our daughter Florence passed away at Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice a week ago today. Although it was indeed a very difficult summer, the combined efforts of Sheffield Children’s Hospital and the Make-A-Wish Foundation enabled us to enjoy a very special family weekend away together last month, and the two-week period we spent at the hospice was a peaceful and precious time for which we will always be grateful.
Work will take a back seat for the next few weeks, and we will be travelling in November. Accordingly, I am cancelling the online and Copenhagen LIKE trainings (though still attending Øredev), and the extent of my December trip to India is under review. Please accept my sincere apologies for any inconvenience; refunds for the two LIKE trainings will be issued this week.
I mentioned in an abbreviated July roundup that Sharon and I had already spend a couple of weeks with our daughter at Sheffield Children’s Hospital, with few more days still to go. Thank you to all who reached out! I’m pleased to report that Florence came home on Friday, three weeks to the day after admission. Now, and with the hospital’s full support, we have a previously-planned long weekend away coming up, facilitated by the wonderful Make-A-Wish Foundation who are kindly providing ambulance transport and some equipment. Things feel a lot less fraught than they did, but I don’t expect to make much progress on anything work-related before mid next week at the earliest. And that’s ok!
Finally, a book that brings the experiential reality of tech and business to the forefront of leadership thinking. Wholehearted highlights the critical role of interdependencies between people, processes, and technology – key drivers of organisational outcomes often overlooked by mainstream leadership when faced with complexity.
What sets this book apart is Mike’s ability to expose the limitations of generic organisational models – and the technologies that support them – which fail to reflect the real-life complexity of specific organisations. It shows how such models often compress rich, lived experiences into narrow frameworks, stripping away their relevance and effectiveness.
This is a rare and valuable insight into the heart of business – one that supports the creation of adaptive organisations and leadership practices. It provides a practical foundation for fostering innovation that is aligned with the actual needs of the organisation.
The book doesn’t just address surface-level symptoms of dysfunction; it guides the reader toward understanding and resolving deeper, systemic issues. In doing so, it calls for a more sustainable and humane approach to business – especially relevant in the digital age, where adaptation to real-world complexity, service delivery, and tech support are becoming inseparably linked.
You’ll find Jasenka’s review on Amazon here. You can find Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (April 2025) in both print and Kindle editions on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de and other Amazon sites around the world. The e-book is also available on LeanPub, Kobo, Apple Books, and Google Play Books. Enjoy! Be like Jasenka! Leave a review!
Book-wise, LIKE (online, Copenhagen, and Bengaluru) corresponds to Wholehearted – i.e. it is a deep dive into the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. TTT/F (Pune) corresponds to Agendashift and Organizing Conversations, focusing on participatory, generative, and outcome-oriented change.
For the online and Copenhagen training, ping me if you need a discount code. All the usual reasons (gov, educational, non-profit, etc) apply, and the more the merrier.
Real life introduces big time! My wife and I have spent most of the past couple of weeks with our daughter at Sheffield Children’s Hospital, and we have a few more days to go yet. Consequently, for reasons both of opportunity and headspace, my output has been minimal of late. I did however manage this LinkedIn post today, and our media page includes at least one new video that I haven’t mentioned previously here. Most of the recent ones are of course Wholehearted-related.
The events calendar hasn’t changed much, but the autumn cohort beginning at the end of September seems not so far away now, and I’m keen to learn who’s interested in attending in Copenhagen/Malmö in November also. Here it is with all kinds of events together, speaking engagements included:
For the online and Europe-based training, ping me if you need a discount code. All the usual reasons (gov, educational, non-profit, etc) apply, and the more the merrier.
A post-Wholehearted version of my white paper, Everywhere all at once
As previewed in last month’s roundup and announced this month, there is now a new version of the white paper, Everywhere all at once. Watch the short video and download your copy of the paper here:
As for the book, you can find Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (April 2025) in both print and Kindle editions on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de and other Amazon sites around the world. The e-book is also available on LeanPub, Kobo, Apple Books, and Google Play Books. Enjoy! Leave a review!
That’s all for now. Hoping that August will be considerably less fraught, but being the holidays for many, I expect that I’ll be keeping the next roundup light too. If you’ll be taking a break, enjoy!
In 2023, I published two versions of my white paper Everywhere all at once. That was well before Wholehearted (2025), so it’s high time it was revised! Not having dared to look at it for quite a while, I was relieved to find that the old version had stood up pretty well; nevertheless, I have enjoyed realigning it with the book.
Over the summer (if not longer) I will be producing frequent short videos, so here’s a quick overview:
Content-wise, the video follows the white paper pretty closely, though in less depth:
A relational approach
A model for every organisational scale
Between scales: the space between
Organising at human scale
What lies beneath: Constraints
Not your grandfather’s VSM / A model for the digital-age organisation
A post-Wholehearted version of my white paper, Everywhere all at once
1. Autumn Programme: conferences, LIKE, and TTT/F
In the form of my talk “Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation”, I will be taking my new book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation to three quite different conferences:
SysPrac25, the System Thinking Practitioners Conference, in Milton Keynes, UK
The big technology conference Øredev, in Malmö, Sweden
Kanban India 2025, in Bengaluru, India, to which I have been coming more years than I can remember!
My trips to Scandinavia and India create some training opportunities – two LIKEs and a TTT/F:
There are a couple of things to note about those. First, the Copenhagen one (which might join the conference on the Swedish side of the bridge in Malmö) needs a venue. Can you help? Would your organisation like to host it in return for free &/or discounted places or some other arrangement? It will be the first in-person training of its kind since the publication of Wholehearted, and it would be great to get at least a small quorum together sooner rather than later.
Second, the TTT/F in Pune (not in Bengaluru as in previous years) is the only public TTT/F planned for the remainder of the year. If you travel to India for this or for LIKE, you won’t be the first to have done so – it can be surprisingly cost-effective. And take in the conference while you’re there!
2. Concluding the “Leadership as…” series
Seven articles inspired by Chapter 4 – the scaling chapter – of Wholehearted:
Those last two posts (which you can take in either order) bring the preceding five together nicely, so you might like to start with one of those.
It’s hard to say whether my experimental policy of publishing to LinkedIn first has made a significant difference, but I will stick with it for a bit longer. LinkedIn being what it is, reactions (likes etc) are great, but it’s comments that really bring posts to others’ attention. Tell us what you think!
3. A post-Wholehearted version of my white paper, Everywhere all at once
Earlier versions of my white paper Everywhere all at once: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, an accessible, situational, and complexity-aware presentation of the Viable System Model were released in June and December 2023. Even that later version preceded the publication of Wholehearted by well over a year, and I have now reworked it. I’ll release this new version next month under an amended title, but if you’d like to review it meanwhile, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
As for the book, you can find Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (April 2025) in both print and Kindle editions on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de and other Amazon sites around the world. The e-book is also available on LeanPub, Kobo, Apple Books, and Google Play Books. Enjoy! Leave a review!
This post concludes a series inspired by the fourth chapter of my new book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (April 2025). Building on the organisational model developed in the first three chapters, that fourth chapter, The Space Between, deals with scale-related challenges. The series so far (published first on LinkedIn):
Don’t worry if you haven’t read those preceding articles yet, you can save them for later.
Untangling the strands
If I say that (for example) teams and teams-of-teams exist at different levels of scale, each of those preceding articles identifies 1) some aspect of the relationships that exist between levels of scale, 2) some corresponding leadership responsibility, and 3) some of the dysfunctions that may arise when that relationship isn’t working as it should. I call those relational aspects strands; although they can to some extent compensate for each other, any weaknesses will affect the strength of the relationship as a whole, and with organisational consequences.
It should be plain from this series that I believe in leadership. Also, it may be apparent that behind these articles is a model. I should mention however that in that model, the presence of a manager (or indeed any formal role) isn’t a requirement; what matters is what happens. For it to be maximally applicable – i.e. for this non-prescriptive model to describe as many styles of organisation as possible – it must be capable of accommodating (for example) the self-organising team. It’s a very good thing that it does, and for that and a host of other complexity-related reasons, it would be helpful if it could have something useful to say about organisations that are yet to establish themselves or that exist mostly in the realms of possibility, and regardless of whether the process of formation is directed top-down or emerges bottom-up.
In this model, the strands connect different aspects (traditionally called systems) that you can expect to find present in almost every organisational scope at any level of scale. I say “almost” because scope boundaries may need to be adjusted so that two conditions apply: 1) included in it must be people who identify with it, and 2) beyond planning or managing, it does materially impactful work. The first condition suggests that some of its energy is devoted to maintaining its identity, and the second is a reminder that a functioning organisational scope is more than its manager or leadership team. Ultimately, scopes in this model are defined by their work, not by who is in charge.
Presented in a slightly different order to that used previously, the numbered points below loosely describe for an organisational context the systems numbered 1-5 and 3* in Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM) [1]. The names in bold for the systems and their corresponding strands are mine, taken from Wholehearted and its core model, the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. This is my complexity-friendly reconstruction of VSM as it applies to digital-age organisations – not necessarily technology-centric organisations but organisations in which the work of delivery, discovery, and renewal are deeply integrated in ways not envisaged when VSM was created.
The value-creating work, which as I have said, the presence and range of which helps to define an organisational scope. In a scale relationship, the work of the higher level scope is made up of the work of its lower-scopes (or slices thereof; we can’t afford to assume that scopes are nested in a strict hierarchy). As explored in the structuring article, not only does that imply some organisational structure, it’s important that this structure plays well with other structures, most notably that of the scope’s business environment (market segments, suppliers, competitors, etc), and of the wider organisation’s strategic commitments, both of which change.
Coordinating between people or groups thereof and over the scope’s work and its shared resources, etc, lest chaos ensue. For scopes at each level of scale to be able to do that in their own language, some translating of progress, issues, performance, etc between levels of scale will be necessary. You can’t impose the language of the boardroom onto the team, or vice versa – certainly not in the general case, and rarely in practice either.
Organising around current commitments and steering in the direction of goals. Here, the reconciling strand ensures that between and across scales, the commitments of related scopes remain coherent in the light of new information or changes to higher-level plans.
Strategising, whereby the scope makes sure that it always has options, staying ahead of the game when the game may be changing. Run out of options, and it’s game over! Its corresponding strand, inviting/participating, ensures that the right people are in the room for these conversations.
Self-governing, keeping operational and strategic activities in appropriate balance and acting as a filter on options that “just aren’t us” – at least until such time as self-identity is rightfully up for challenge, a pivot being in order, for example. The corresponding strand here is identifying/representing, which attends to wider coherence on identity-related matters such as purpose, values, and ethos. If a scope does value-creating work and you identify with it, it almost certainly has this system, the first one, and all the others in between, hence my two preconditions on scope boundaries.
Finally, contextualising, making sure that operational and strategic decisions alike have the context they need – and the timely connecting of people between and across scales necessary for that to happen beyond the established routine. The issue here isn’t only the obvious one of what happens when context is lacking and bad decisions are made as a result, it’s that no formal structure or processes can eliminate the problem, making this an ongoing challenge.
Why does any of that matter? Straightforwardly, if at some level of scale any of those systems aren’t working well, that’s a problem. More powerfully, if the relationships between systems aren’t working well, that’s a problem too, even if on their own terms, the systems involved seem well-designed. Relationships within a level of scale are beyond the scope of this article (see Part I of the book for that), but it’s true between scales too. How then do you understand the intricacies of those inter-scale relationships and any dysfunctions that may arise therein? One practical way is to approach them a strand at a time, which is what the abovementioned Chapter 4, The Space Between does.
How not to scale, and a remedy
Scaling an organisation is one of those problems for which the common and seemingly obvious answer (at least the one that is easiest to formalise, package up, and sell as an off-the-shelf solution) is the wrong one. You don’t just start with the organisation’s top-level strategy, turn it into a work breakdown structure (WBS) and a parallel hierarchy of objectives, allocate out the work (mapping those structures to the organisation structure), monitor the work, and adjust plans top-down as problems are encountered. Elegant as that may sound (and perhaps attractive to the control-hungry or those with centralising tendencies), the result will be that too many of the problems it will encounter will be dealt with by the wrong people at the at wrong level of organisation and at the wrong level of abstraction. It risks the combination of bad decision making and overwhelm – horrible enough, and with the potential for it to spiral into something worse.
Let me go further. The idea that an organisation’s response to scale-related challenges should be to roll out a process framework is absurd – a sledgehammer not to crack a nut but to make an omelette! Your approach should be not process-based but organisational. And participatory too (or more technically, dialogic and generative [2]):
Together, make sense of your issues (the model is your lens on the organisation here), and prioritise them
For the most important of those, and without limiting your solution options, articulate richly what “better” would be like – what stories you could tell “in the Ideal”, of relationships in “healthy and productive balance”, for example
Identify what stops those stories and what outcomes those obstacles impede
Invite solution ideas for the stories, obstacles, or outcomes that participants are most drawn to
Test the best of those ideas
Monitor progress, again in terms of outcomes – not only those that prompted solutions, but outcomes that indicate meaningful progress, outcomes that tell you when you’re winning, and outcomes that organise all the others – all of which may prompt more solution ideas as needed
Work toward each affected (and self-governing) scope at every affected scale doing their own monitoring, steering, and strategising in their own language, the right people in the room
What more could you want of an organisational strategy? It’s engaging, highly testable, and doesn’t risk too much on monolithic solutions. It’s based on well-tested and complexity-aware theory, and on 21st-century practice. It puts governance and decision-making in all the right places. It helps you make progress on a broad front, so that you can meet your challenges well. Not a sledgehammer to make an omelette, but an organisational approach to organisational challenges.
The book
You can find Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (April 2025) in both print and Kindle editions on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de and other Amazon sites around the world. The e-book is also available on LeanPub, Kobo, Apple Books, and Google Play Books. Enjoy!
Notes
[1] The identification of system 3* (“three star”) in Stafford Beer’s The Heart of Enterprise (1979) broke the numbering system established in his earlier book, Brain of the Firm (1972). Or at least it seems to; it can instead be interpreted as system 3 trying to do the impossible, to be in two places at once. No wonder then that the context challenge never goes away! See Chapter 3 of Wholehearted, which for those most interested in the theory is also the chapter in which VSM and the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation are reconciled.
[2] See my 2024 book (a commission for the BMI series in Dialogic Organisation Development), Organizing Conversations: Preparing Groups to Take on Adaptive Challenges.
While we’re here
There will be two (and possibly three) opportunities later in the year to explore these important issues with others. Already scheduled, one online and one in person in Bengaluru, India:
I’m also looking into the possibility of running another in-person training in Copenhagen or Malmö on November 3rd & 4th, ahead of the Øredev conference. If you might be interested in hosting that, please let me know. My flights are already booked – the only question is what I do those two days!
Agendashift 