Tag: headlines

Engage with the organisation *as it actually is*

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Previously: Wholehearted, backwards Next: OODA loop takeaways

[This post was first published on LinkedIn here – comments there welcome!]

I keep promising that my next post will be called “OODA loop takeaways”, but it will wait. Meanwhile, something else I keep finding myself saying:

If you fail to engage with how the organisation is actually experienced by people, you aren’t really engaging with the organisation at all.

Managers and practitioners alike can easily fall into the trap with engaging not with the organisation but with some abstraction thereof – one person’s view (perhaps the official view) of its structure or process, or something even further removed from reality, some idealised, future-state design.

This is not engaging with the organisation as it actually is. I think we can all accept that this is true for the process diagram; there will always be nuances that it won’t take into account. So let’s look instead at structure. Even allowing that no one expects an org chart to describe the organisation’s process (that’s not its job), I’ve never seen one that adequately captures all of the relationships of accountability, belonging, and identity that different people experience. That’s not to say that the org chart isn’t useful, but let’s not pretend that people aren’t dealing with competing loyalties, with having to make difficult decisions about how to prioritise their investment in each relationship, even with reconciling the different understandings of the organisation and its business environment that each group or stakeholder represents.

So when I say to engage with how the organisation is actually experienced by people, I don’t just mean listening to complaints. I mean helping people make sense of it all – what’s working, what’s not working, what’s possible, and what could be made possible. That’s a big task, so let’s look at it from a range of different angles. As a followup to and in the manner of my previous post, Wholehearted, backwards, let’s go backwards through Wholehearted, a chapter at a time:

Chapter 6. What Lies Beneath: Whether on their own or banding together, given the opportunity, what constraints on the organisation would people choose to work on? For they themselves and for those who benefit from their work, what would that be like? What new possibilities might it enable? Whose needs would the organisation be meeting? What new stories would they then be able to tell? If the organisation is to engage with some overall challenge and meet it well, on how broad a front do we need this to be happening? So, who’s invited, and what range of experiences does that bring to the conversation?

Chapter 5. Organising without Reorganising: How do people experience change in this organisation? What is it like to leave a team? What is it like to join one? As teams form or change significantly in their constitution, how quickly and how automatically do the basics of coordination, organising, and learning establish themselves? And addressing an understandable source of deep frustration, for teams of limited lifespan, how do we ensure that their learning doesn’t go to waste?

Chapter 4. The Space Between: To the above-mentioned relationships of accountability, belonging, and identity, how are they experienced? And how do they actually function? How do they maintain the coherence between levels of organisation without limiting each other’s options unduly, or setting up expectations that can’t be met?

Chapter 3. Mutual Trust Building: In a similar vein, how do people experience the relationship between delivery and strategy? How does each aspect open itself up to the other so that decisions on either side are made with adequate context? How does that manifest itself in terms of presence, availability, and so on? How are each of those experienced? Likewise trust and trustworthiness: are people and groups generally trusted to meet their commitments and to retain responsibility for their respective domains, and when things aren’t going well or the unexpected happens, do the right people get to know about it quickly enough? And when it all goes wrong?

Chapter 2. Adaptive Strategising: What opportunities do people and the groups they identify with have to shape their respective futures? What opportunity is there to explore the way individual or group identity constrains those conversations? What, rightly or wrongly, is out of bounds? And how do people experience any imbalance between work that is delivery-related versus work that is more developmental?

Chapter 1. Delivering-Discovering-Renewing: Last but not least (remember we’re going backwards here), how is the work experienced day to day? What’s it like? What could it be like? Referring back to some of the basics – the work itself, how it is coordinated, and how it is organised – how are each of those experienced, and how much of those experiences are explained by the relationships between them?

The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, the VSM-inspired model at the heart of Wholehearted is rich source of such questions, an aid to participatory enquiry, and an aid thereby to generative change. It is not a prescription that you roll out; it is a descriptive model, a framework, a way of making new sense of one’s and one’s colleagues’ experiences of the organisation. From there to the coherent action on a broad front alluded to above is not a big step, and if your organisation wants to meet its challenges well, that’s what it needs.

Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation hit Amazon earlier this month. You can find 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.

Previously: Wholehearted, backwards Next: OODA loop takeaways

Wholehearted, backwards

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Previously: Systems, purpose, and perspective: Pointers to Wholehearted’s philosophical influences Next: OODA loop takeaways

[This post was first published on LinkedIn here – comments there welcome!]

If I had to tell Wholehearted backwards [1], would my story make sense? Let’s try! Working backwards through some of the key conclusions of the book’s six chapters:

Chapter 6. What Lies Beneath: Keeping your organisation healthy and productive requires work at every scale of the organisation and across a broad front. To keep that work coherent, what people need is not a detailed masterplan (these rarely survive contact with reality for long) but some shared and suitably engaging sense of the organisation’s challenges, opportunities, and of particular interest in this chapter, constraints. Constraints are what give shape to the organisation and its activity, and if things are not as we would wish, some of them will need attention.

Chapter 5. Organising without Reorganising: Whether for change-related reasons or to meet some short-term challenge, effective mobilisation depends on the abundance and distribution of certain key organisational skills. If they’re framed in the right way, those skills are relevant not only to ad-hoc work, they benefit regular teamworking, they improve everyone’s experience of change, they make team structures easier to evolve, and perhaps most crucially, they ensure that the learning hasn’t already been wasted when initiatives come to an end.

Chapter 4. The Space Between: It’s great to improve organisational flexibility, but let’s not pretend that structure does not matter. What does yours say about how it understands its business environment? How open is it to signals that might suggest that this understanding – and therefore its structure – is in need of some work? Then there’s what happens in the relationship between teams and their respective teams-of-teams and in similar relationships of belonging, accountability, and identity. Given that these scale-related relationships are so often confused with the relationship between delivery and strategy, it’s small wonder that they are important sources of organisational dysfunction.

Chapter 3. Mutual Trust Building: But what about that relationship between delivery and strategy? Get that wrong, and mistakes will be made on both sides. If people don’t have the context they need to make good decisions, sooner or later they’ll make bad decisions that may be costly to unwind. It turns out that this issue is so fundamental that no given organisation design is sufficient to eliminate it. That makes this “context challenge” [2] a key issue for leaders up and down the organisation, who must make the most of their limited capacities for availability, presence, and attention outside the established routine. It also means not wasting those capacities, which in turn means building a more trusting and trustworthy organisation.

Chapter 2. Adaptive Strategising: I’ve mentioned ‘strategy’ a couple of times now, but a better word might be ‘strategising’ [3]. Yes, as already suggested, it’s important to have some shared framework for coherent action, but a strategy is no use once it loses its connection with reality, a connection that might have been weak in the first place – weak for reasons that may be relational (see above) or structural (see further above). Strategies last longer if they avoid unnecessary prescription – creating important space thereby for expertise and innovation – but ultimately, they need to be seen as the focus of a learning process. And in relation to another word that I have used previously, namely identity, it could be said that “the team that strategises together stays together”, a cute way of saying that some of that learning activity serves to maintain and where necessary develop a self-governing group’s ethos, purpose, boundaries, and so on.

Chapter 1. Delivering-Discovering-Renewing: In the digital-age organisation, much of the work of renewing the organisation is integrated with two other kinds of work: delivery and discovery, the purpose of the latter being to identify opportunities for the other two kinds. Balancing the three, both with each other and with strategising, ranks with the aforementioned context challenge in difficulty and importance. That key aspect of self-governance belongs in the Adaptive Strategising space. However, the Delivering-Discovering-Renewing space is often where the organisation’s adaptive capacity is first liberated. Much of the drain on the organisation’s decision-making and communication capacity comes from dysfunctional relationships. These include relationships already mentioned above, but the three-way set of mutual relationships between the value-creating work, the way the work is organised, and the way it is coordinated is often a prime candidate for improvement, together with the relationship between the work and its corresponding business environment. Free that adaptive capacity, and the organisation’s ability not only to notice threats and opportunities but to act on them is greatly increased. And if the work is self-managed more effectively, what further capacity does that liberate in those other spaces? What would your organisation do with it if it had it? Those second-order effects are what makes such improvements “unreasonably effective” [4].

So how did I do? Did I manage to keep my story straight?

Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation hit Amazon last week. You can find 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.

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[1] Matt Lloyd, Speed so Fast it Felt Like I Was Drunk, System Soundbites blog (systemsoundbites.com, 2024)

[2] Alicia Juarerro, Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence (2023) and Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (2002)

[3] Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (2016) and A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2019)

[4]  Ian Buchanan, Assemblage Theory and Method: An Introduction and Guide (2020). This one isn’t referenced in Wholehearted – it’s the next book for our reading circle, and I haven’t finished it yet!

[5] “Things physical or psychological that by their proximity, availability, or their narrative or explanatory power affect each other” – Juarerro and DeLanda emphasising things whose existence we can make certain of, Buchanan placing more emphasis on how we experience them.

[6] Karl E. Weick, The Social Psychology of Organizing (1979)

[7] Where is the complexity in ‘Wholehearted’? Not wanting to go there (so to speak), for what are here called ‘systems’, I used the more neutral term of ‘aspects’.

[8] Verbing the nouns of business agility (blog.agendashift.com 2025)

[9] Stafford Beer, Brain of the Firm (1972) and The Heart of Enterprise (1979)

One week on, two weeks to go

Posted on by Mike Burrows

One week on

It’s a week since the print edition of Wholehearted was released, and I’m finding time to blog again! I’m experimenting with releasing them first as LinkedIn articles, and here are the first two of several planned:

  1. Where is the complexity in ‘Wholehearted’? (Thursday)
  2. Systems, purpose, and perspective: Pointers to Wholehearted’s philosophical influences (today)

In both cases, and before anyone gets the wrong impression, they expand on things alluded to mainly in the footnotes. Wholehearted is not a philosophy book and neither is it demanding in that way. But writing it, I found it helpful to be forced to think about things more carefully – not to add a ton more detail, but to make sure I wasn’t making any unwarranted assumptions. If that means fewer “huh?” moments for the reader, that’s all to the good!

A favour to ask

If you’re reading Wholehearted or have already finished it, can I ask that you rate it on Amazon (five stars would be lovely!) and perhaps leave a comment? Social proof is everything in this game! And it would make my day 🙂

The issue of ratings aside, few surprises. The print edition is outselling Kindle – quite comfortably in fact, explained perhaps by the e-book’s head start on LeanPub. The UK, US, and Germany are its biggest markets, in that order, the same order I had them on Wholehearted‘s landing page.

Two weeks to go

Wednesday 30th sees the beginning of the spring cohort for LIKE – Leading in the Knowledge Economy – Wholehearted as participatory training. Book here:

Save 15% with coupon code BLOG15, and contact me for other codes (government, healthcare, education, non-profits, NGOs – that kind of thing, also bulk discounts). Don’t stress over your ability to make all 7 sessions – that affects one participant already, and there are ways to catch up.

Further ahead:

The ACADEMY20 coupon code (etc) applies to TTT/F and the Autumn cohort also.

And every Thursday, at 14:00 BST, 15:00 CEST, 9am EDT it’s Office Hours, aka Ask Mike Anything (AMA), all welcome. Zoom details:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85069940421?pwd=7KSsYrub7wUx9EXe1JpGbeo6qyXDsY.1
Meeting ID: 850 6994 0421
Passcode: 864206

Watch LinkedIn for those next blog posts and also a couple more podcasts, but that’s it for now.

Systems, purpose, and perspective: Pointers to Wholehearted’s philosophical influences

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Previously: Where is the complexity in ‘Wholehearted’? Next: Wholehearted, backwards

[This post was first published on LinkedIn here – comments there welcome!]

A week ago today, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation was released in print, and I thought it might be interesting to expand on some of its philosophical influences. Given that I describe the book as exploring the fascinating (and dare I say somewhat politicised) intersection between systems, complexity, and dialogic/generative organisation development, why not start with the concept of ‘system’?

In Chapter 1, I wrote this about them:

Calling [something] a ‘system’ indicates nothing more than that its function is fulfilled through multiple interacting parts … . The word should not be taken to imply the design of some outside authority; as we will see, these things can come together and change of their own accord. In our multiple-perspective approach, it is not even essential that participants agree on their composition or their boundaries.

Out of context, some might take issue with that word ‘function’. By it, I meant something like “what it does”, alluding to Stafford Beer’s famous dictum, “the purpose of a system is what it does”. But if that’s our starting point for an appreciation of systems, it introduces problems of its own.

Addressing one possible objection, my friend Matt Lloyd improves significantly on POSIWID with “the purpose of a system is what it does based on the perspective of the observer” [1]. That’s an important change that aligns with Wholehearted’s multi-perspective approach. However, we remain in problematic territory if Beer’s ‘purpose’ carries the implication of intent, something that my quoted paragraph is at pains to avoid. I’m inclined to treat his use of that word as a rhetorical flourish and a playful tease (I’ve been guilty of that myself), but it’s important to keep in mind that while some systems are designed and implemented with deliberate intent, most aren’t.

To help avoid that unsafe assumption, sharp-eyed readers of Wholehearted may notice the influence of philosopher Alicia Juarerro [2], and from a more continental tradition, of assemblage theory and other concepts from New Materialist philosophy [3]. (And let me pause here for a moment to express my gratitude to the friends I’ve made while studying them together!) For a little taste, see Ian Buchanan’s Assemblage Theory and Method [4]:

Concepts should bring about a new way of seeing something and not simply fix a label to something we think we already know about. For Deleuze and Guattari, the critical analytic question is always: Given a specific situation, what kind of assemblage would be required to produce it?

Taking those various sources together, let’s expand that question into an approach that begins with something other than purpose and the process by which it is fulfilled:

  1. We begin with some specific situation, the effects it produces, and how they are experienced
  2. We then look to the assemblages of things physical or psychological that by their proximity, availability, or by their narrative or explanatory power affect each other [5] – contributing to the situation and our experience of it by constraining each other, activating or suppressing certain tendencies
  3. For anything that might fall into the category of “a label [for] something we think we already know about”, we increase our confidence in their reality by accounting for their emergence

One interesting and widely observed example of a situational and emergence-producing tendency goes like this: rewarding interactions tend to get repeated [6]. What constitutes ‘rewarding’ may vary widely between individuals, but still this tendency contributes to the formation and maintenance of social relationships and larger social structures. Inside an organisation, those informal networks and the organisation’s formally recognised structures and processes interact with each other. Together, they affect how each person experiences the organisation and the possibilities that they imagine for it. That in turn affects their preferences and choices, and thereby what interactions get repeated!

Within this complex dynamic, organisational forms and the flows of material and information can be understood both as products of that process and also as participants in it, the point being that they are not the only possible starting point for inquiry. One has to start somewhere, and it’s understandable that these are common choices, but let’s face it: confronted with that complexity, it can’t hurt to try some alternatives. Indeed, I argue in Wholehearted that if your goal is to tap into what the book calls the organisation’s ‘adaptive capacity’, you might want to start elsewhere.

Back now to Chapter 1, and to one of several ways to arrive at three key systems highlighted in my previous post [7]. The situation we begin with comprises the following: the organisational scopes with which participants each identify, the value-creating work of those scopes, and the fact that this work is not in such complete chaos that any sense of identity is lost. What then constrains that value-creating work to the extent that it has some coherence? There are very many answers to that question, many of which we can divide into two groups:

  1. Those that have some coordinating effect, helping in a general sense to keep the work within safe and effective limits of operation (and perhaps helping also to make certain interpersonal interactions easier and more rewarding)
  2. Those that have an organising effect, in terms of what the work is currently organised around and guided towards (and also perhaps to motivate new social structures)

That division may seem arbitrary, but it works, it receives support from multiple and diverse sources, and there’s no denying the reality of the detail involved. From that initial system, the value-creating work, we have identified two further systems, coordinating and organising. These are the names [8] I give to what Stafford Beer called Systems 1, 2, and 3 in his Viable System Model [9], the first three of six. This is the model reconstructed bottom-up in Wholehearted as the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a descriptive model of the digital-age organisation and scopes therein. Then, and situationally: How do we experience each of the mutual relationships between those systems? Can we imagine them being healthier and more productive? Taking that further, how might we and other stakeholders experience them in the ideal? What stops that?

That’s quite a turn! What looked like analysis has become something generative, a different way for groups to explore this rich and complex space, to see and articulate new possibilities for it, and to identify focuses for change. It’s using the model as a framework for inquiry, much more open than “What’s your process?”, “Explain the design of your system of work”, or “By what principles and with what intent was your system of work designed?”. If you 1) allow that different people experience those relationships differently, and 2) give them the opportunity to make new sense of them together, you might be surprised at how much can be achieved without the formal aspects of organisation and process being documented. Those aspects can (and do) look after themselves until some specific topic of conversation brings them to the foreground. What’s important meanwhile is that participants will be identifying some real challenges and/or exciting opportunities that they are motivated to engage with. Surely that’s worth something?

Acknowledgements: Many thanks to Matt Lloyd PLY, William Bartlett, Colin Freeth, John Cumming, Christian Fredriksson , and Johan Ivari for their input and feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Previously: Where is the complexity in ‘Wholehearted’? Next: Wholehearted, backwards

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[1] Matt Lloyd, Speed so Fast it Felt Like I Was Drunk, System Soundbites blog (systemsoundbites.com, 2024)

[2] Alicia Juarerro, Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence (2023) and Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System (2002)

[3] Manuel DeLanda, Assemblage Theory (2016) and A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (2019)

[4]  Ian Buchanan, Assemblage Theory and Method: An Introduction and Guide (2020). This one isn’t referenced in Wholehearted – it’s the next book for our reading circle, and I haven’t finished it yet!

[5] “Things physical or psychological that by their proximity, availability, or their narrative or explanatory power affect each other” – Juarerro and DeLanda emphasising things whose existence we can make certain of, Buchanan placing more emphasis on how we experience them.

[6] Karl E. Weick, The Social Psychology of Organizing (1979)

[7] Where is the complexity in ‘Wholehearted’? Not wanting to go there (so to speak), for what are here called ‘systems’, I used the more neutral term of ‘aspects’.

[8] Verbing the nouns of business agility (blog.agendashift.com 2025)

[9] Stafford Beer, Brain of the Firm (1972) and The Heart of Enterprise (1979)

Where’s the complexity in ‘Wholehearted’?

Posted on by Mike Burrows

[This post was first published on LinkedIn here – comments there welcome!]

Where is the complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, the VSM-inspired [1] model that’s central to my new book, Wholehearted? That might seem a strange question to ask, but complexity is an issue for all organisations, and if the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation is to be an effective lens on yours, the issue must be engaged with.

Take, for example, Chapter 1, Delivering-Discovering-Renewing (or session 2 of LIKE). How can its slice of the model say anything interesting when it has only the following four elements?

  1. The value-creating work – the “doing” part, if you like
  2. Coordinating – coordinating between participants (people or teams, depending on the level of scale you’re thinking about) and over shared resources
  3. Organising – organising around shared commitments and in some desired direction
  4. The business environment – users, customers, suppliers, competitors, and so on

First of all, there is complexity in the relationship between the work and the business environment. Analysis takes you only so far; probe the environment (by delivering something new, for example), and you can never be certain what you’ll get back, which is why delivering and discovering go together. Likewise when it probes you!

Next, there’s the sense that “virtual” deliberately adaptive organisations (or, if you prefer, “potentially viable” systems) can pop in and out of existence at any time, the product of a process that is emergent and self-organised. If you see some new challenge to the organisation or some new opportunity that’s bigger than you can deal with on your own, you will need to coordinate and organise with others in ways that do not necessarily coincide with pre-existing structures. What you’re experiencing there is a social aspect of organisation aligning with the model (and to that extent, validating it), and it’s an important way in which complexity gets contained to the benefit of the wider organisation.

Then add the effects of scale. As I have hinted at already, the model works for any level of scale – subteam up to team, teams-of-teams and bigger up to the whole organisation, and other ad-hoc or cross-cutting structures. Skimming over the details here, this implies that there must be some interesting structure internal to the four elements above, different strands in the relationships (not necessarily hierarchical) between different levels of scale. That might sound merely complicated, but when you allow for that virtual activity and its potential for knock-on effects higher up the organisation, things get truly complex again. An adaptive organisation both encourages and learns from this activity, some of which may be a signal that the organisation’s more stable structures aren’t a good fit for its challenges, i.e. that it is set up to meet its challenges less well than it could be.

And back to those participants (people, teams, or larger structures) that need to coordinate and organise together. Are their respective commitments coherent? Likewise their respective senses of progress? Whether it’s through many bilateral conversations up, down, and across the organisation, fewer conversations with wider participation, or some combination, that process of reconciliation takes time, and the world moves on meanwhile. And who can be certain of where those conversations will lead?

Finally, and in some ways most importantly, there’s the simple truth that every participant experiences all of this differently. There is no unifying picture that can hope to describe it all. Let’s embrace that! Let’s give it voice! In Wholehearted, we use the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation not as an encouragement to draw concrete representations of the organisation’s formal structures but as a framework for generative conversations and other forms of productive dialogue [2]. Different colleagues – perhaps from different parts of the organisation – can understand things differently, but shared concerns will quickly reveal themselves, and with those, perhaps some underlying organisational constraint. Already we have motivation for change, and likely ideas for making it happen too. Ultimately, that’s what Wholehearted is all about!

That’s just one chapter’s worth of model, covering roughly half of its main elements. Add in Adaptive Strategising and Mutual Trust Building (the overlapping “spaces” described in Chapters 2 and 3), the “space between” described in Chapter 4 (exploring those inter-scale relationships and their strands), the “organising without reorganising” of Chapter 5, and the constraint-based perspective offered by Chapter 6, What Lies Beneath, then, yes, there is plenty of scope for complexity. That is a good thing. Your organisation has it, and you need to engage with it. You’ll need also to invite others into that process, and a shared framework for those conversations will make that very much easier.

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[1] VSM here referring to Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model, and the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation being a ground-up, complexity-friendly reconstruction of it, scoped to the digital-age organisation.

[2] See also Organizing Conversations (2024) and Agendashift (2ⁿᵈ edition 2021)

‘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!

Agendashift roundup, March 2025

Posted on by Mike Burrows

So that was March – Wholehearted pre-released on LeanPub, spring and autumn cohorts announced, and the release of a new version of Leading with Outcomes: Foundation. Intense! Normal blogging service will be resumed shortly, but expect more activity around the first two shortly.

Wholehearted is due out in print and on other platforms on April 16th, a date which I may bring forward. You can find the relevant links to Amazon, Kobo, Apple, Google, and LeanPub here, and the e-book formats are available for preorder. For the print edition, Amazon is making it unnecessarily difficult to preorder, but I’ll save any write-up on the publishing process until later.

So far the reception has been super encouraging; I’ve shared some of it here, including a video interview by LeanPub founder Len Epp. Mike Jones interviewed me last week for what I believe will become multiple podcast episodes, and Laksh Raghaven will have me on his podcast soon too. Per the calendar below, Adrian Reed has invited me back to Blackmetric’s BA community webinar series also. Similar invitations welcome!

To experience Wholehearted in a very different way, Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) begins April 30th, which is four weeks on Wednesday. At the time of writing, there are still a couple of early bird tickets available, and there are public sector / non-profit / NGO discounts available also (ping me for coupon codes if that’s you). Details in the blog posts and calendar below.

Finally, a reminder that “Office hours” / Ask Mike Anything (AMA) sessions take place on Thursdays at 2pm UK time. Our clocks changed yesterday, so that’s 14:00 BST, 15:00 CEST, 9am EDT. Invitations are published weekly to Academy and Slack subscribers. You can also book a 30-minute Zoom via my Calendly.

March’s top posts

  1. (Pre)released today – Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (March)
  2. Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE): 7-week cohort-based training (March)
  3. Wholehearted: How it’s going and who it’s for (March)
  4. Leading with Outcomes: Foundation v3.1.2 (March)
  5. Meeting the context challenge (February)

Upcoming

Wholehearted: How it’s going and who it’s for

Posted on by Mike Burrows

It’s time for an update, and let me begin with another video! Here I’m interviewed by Len Epp, co-founder of LeanPub, the platform on which Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation has been pre-released:

(Wondering why there’s a cut halfway through? In my enthusiasm, I knocked over my microphone)

In case you missed them, here is the trio of March announcements, covering the LeanPub pre-release, the related cohort-based training, and supporting the latter, the latest version of Leading with Outcomes: Foundation:

And to the LeanPub edition, three highly encouraging responses on LinkedIn, all unsolicited:

If you have engaged with any of those posts or are about to, thank you! I’m also getting invites for podcast interviews, meetups, webinars etc, and if you’d like to invite me to yours, don’t hesitate to ask. I’ll likely be appearing at least a couple of international conferences this year also.

Full release April 16th

The print and Kindle editions will be released on Amazon on April 16th, with the e-book available from that date on Kobo, Apple Books, and Google Play Books also. Google aside (which seems to be the slowest at completing its checks), the e-books are already available for pre-order, and the print edition will be too as soon as the cover is ready. You can track availability at agendashift.com/books/wholehearted.

Who it’s for

Really it’s for anyone who wishes that their organisation worked better – not only in process terms, but in terms of how different aspects of the organisation relate to each other. That includes how your part of the organisation relates to others, how it relates to its business environment, how aspects such as delivery and strategy relate to each other, how different scales of organisation relate to each other, and how leadership relates not only all of that but to many other aspects too. Role-wise, and especially in organisations large enough to have at least a few teams, those issues should concern leaders of many kinds and the practitioners (consultants, coaches, etc) who support them.

Behind it all, there is some very well-regarded theory, most notably the Viable System Model (VSM). To managers and others who have worked inside organisations for long enough to participate meaningfully in their conversations, the way I approach it will seem easy, obvious, and natural, because in its own way, it is! However, to practitioners and researchers already familiar with the model, I make clear that this is not your grandfather’s VSM. First, it starts from a very different place, one that much better suits the modern (e.g. digital, digitally-enabled, or customer-focussed) organisation. Second, and no less importantly, it takes care to embrace rather than gloss over the way different people’s experiences of the organisation differ, taking an approach by which you can much better tap into the organisation’s adaptive capacity. The book’s subtitle, Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, speaks to that and more.

As for the book’s main title, Wholehearted, that’s squarely on leaders, leadership, and the organisation’s expectations on both. Are they engaging with the right challenges? Are they inviting people into the process? Are they celebrating their successes? Those questions raise further questions, but be in no doubt that there is much at stake here. Ultimately, your organisation’s continued wholeness may depend on its answers.

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation v3.1.2

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Yes, it’s the third of the three announcements I promised for this month.

The first was this:

The summer cohort begins on April 30th and we have Easter before that, so check it out now.

And the second:

That was last Thursday, and today it sits at #3 on LeanPub. Can we get it to #1 before tomorrow?

Before the third announcement, a reminder: “Office hours” / AMA (Ask Mike Anything) restarts tomorrow after a two-week break. Join me on Zoom most Thursdays at 2pm UK time, i.e. 14:00 GMT, 15:00 CST. If you’re based outside of Europe, check times carefully; here, daylight savings time hasn’t kicked in yet. Call details will be published tomorrow morning on Slack and (for subscribers) at the Agendashift Academy.

Leading with Outcomes: Foundation 3.1.2

So to that third announcement, the release at the Agendashift Academy of the latest version of our Foundation module. Already well-tested in the classroom, it runs more smoothly than its predecessors, and now it’s available in self-paced video-based form.

Pattern-based rather than prescriptive, Leading with Outcomes: Foundation covers four key patterns:

  1. Engage, Invite, Celebrate, a leadership model that features prominently in Wholehearted
  2. Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes, aka the IdOO (“I do”) pattern, the strategy-related conversation pattern that’s at the heart of Organising Conversations (2024) and Agendashift (2nd edition 2021)
  3. Meaning, Measure, Method, our outcome-oriented ideation pattern
  4. Right to Left, all about impact and learning, it’s the pattern that gave its name to my 2019 book and 2020 audiobook

This third announcement also relates to the first one. How do we squeeze 3 days of Leading in a Transforming Organisation into 14 hours of cohort-based training? We cheat, that’s how! Join Leading in the Knowledge Economy and get free access to the video-based material, Foundation included.

As you can imagine, it has been an intense few weeks. Not that it stops! Next week I have a private Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (yes that’s a thing; the next public one is in June). And I need to get Wholehearted onto Amazon. I can’t wait to have a print copy in my hands!

Related

(Pre)released today – Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Today, to coincide with the Kanban Edge conference in which I am participating as speaker and workshop host, I am thrilled to announce a prerelease of Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. If it shows as embargoed, ignore that!

I say “prerelease” – so far it’s only available digitally on LeanPub – but it’s done, including an awesome foreword by Benjamin Taylor which landed only this morning! For LeanPub fans, it will stay there indefinitely, and its publication in the coming weeks in print and Kindle formats won’t change that.

The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation made its first appearance in the final chapter of the Agendashift 2nd edition (2021). Although it drew some favourable comments at the time, I have to say that in Wholehearted, it has changed almost beyond recognition. You get to understand not only how organisations work (important if you want to understand their dysfunctions), you get to understand how they come to be what they are. There’s an idea there that can be taken further: how do organisations become what they are to each of their participants individually? If every experience of the organisation is different, how can we use that? Instead of glossing over those differences as the traditional modelling process must do, let’s recognise the vast untapped reserve of adaptive capability that they represent.

That has implications for leadership. What does it mean for leaders to “create the conditions”, in particular to create the conditions for everything we might associate with business agility? Too often, that question is answered either with platitudes or with the assumption that all that is needed is a better-designed process. The former is of little help of course; try to scale up that latter kind of thinking and what do you get? Bigger and more complicated processes. Ouch. With a better appreciation of 1) how organisations work at different scales, 2) the dynamics that operate between scales, and 3) ways to change the organisation at what I call “human scale”, leaders can do very much better than that, and that’s good news for everyone.

And so, despite the book being anchored in a classic model from the 70s and early 80s – Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model – its sensibilities are very much of this age. Not only the digital age (significant enough in itself, as readers will discover), but an age that appreciates complexity, conversation, and change very differently. This is not your grandfather’s VSM! To make it work, both how the model is presented and how it is applied must change. A natural enough process (with a ring of familiarity even, if you know Agendashift or Leading with Outcomes), but – and despite my deep respect for the model – radically different.

I believe I have demonstrated that between the systems and complexity worlds lies a fertile land, not the minefield it sometimes appears to be. Receive the book in that spirit! Here it is again: Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation.

Mike
March 6th, 2025

PS

Hopefully, it won’t have escaped your notice that this is the second of three announcements planned for this month. Tuesday’s announcement anticipated this one; the booking pages for the new cohort-based trainings actually contained spoilers in the shape of links to the book! And here they are again, together with the June TTT/F:

There are some early bird tickets available, so grab those while you can. For a 30% discount on block bookings of three or more places, ping me. For government, public health (eg NHS), and NGO employees, discounts are available from the first seat and increase to 50% for three or more.