Tag: leadership

Untangling the strands (Or: How not to scale, and a remedy)

Posted on by Mike Burrows

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):

  1. Leadership as structuring
  2. Leadership as translating
  3. Leadership as reconciling
  4. Leadership as connecting
  5. Leadership as inviting
  6. Leadership as representing
  7. Untangling the strands (this post)

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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!

Some quick mid-month updates

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Some quick updates, all Wholehearted-related:

Articles five and six in the “Leadership as…” series are now out, published first on LinkedIn:

  1. Leadership as inviting
  2. Leadership as representing

You might like to start with that sixth one – indirectly, it gives an overview of what’s in the preceding articles. Still to come is just one concluding post, “Untangling the strands”, for which an alternative title might be “How not to scale”, so watch out for that!

The autumn LIKE training has moved to evenings, UK time, and expanded to eight online sessions to include one on “Organising without Organising” (aka “Organising at Human Scale”):

As always, shout if you think you might in any way qualify for a discount. The more the merrier!

November 5th-7th in Malmö, I’ll be speaking on Wholehearted-related matters not once but twice at the Øredev conference. To make the most of the trip, I’m looking into the possibility of doing an in-person LIKE there or across the bridge in Copenhagen on the 3rd and 4th. If your organisation might be interested in hosting it, do please let me know urgently – I have been asked to book my travel soon.

And then my near-annual visit to India for Kanban India 2025 in early December, and not for the first time, a two-city trip. Beginning this time with a Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) in Pune, I’ll also be doing LIKE in person in Bengaluru, where the conference is. Fingers crossed, the event page for that second training will be up in time for the end-of-month roundup. These events (training and conference) attract people from outside as well as inside India, and I’d love to see you there.

Finally, to Wholehearted itself. I hope you don’t mind me mentioning again just how crucial your Amazon ratings and especially reviews are to its success – and hugely appreciated! Candidly, it could do with a few more. You can find both print and Kindle editions of the book on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de, and other Amazon sites around the world. Outside of Amazon, the e-book is also available on LeanPub, Kobo, Apple Books, and Google Play Books.

Leadership as representing

Posted on by Mike Burrows

This post is the sixth in a series inspired by the fourth chapter of my new book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (April 2025). 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.

Building on the organisational model developed in the first three chapters, Chapter 4, The Space Between, deals with scale-related challenges, and it is those that are addressed in this series:

  1. Leadership as structuring
  2. Leadership as translating
  3. Leadership as reconciling
  4. Leadership as connecting
  5. Leadership as inviting
  6. Leadership as representing (this post)
  7. Untangling the strands

If you were expecting “Leadership and identity” at this point, don’t worry. As I did with the previous instalment, I decided to rename it rather than break from the “Leadership as…<verb>” theme. As it happens, I find the new title more interesting! As for the concluding post, “Untangling the strands”, an alternative title might be “How not to scale”, so watch out for that!

Leadership as representing

The topics of the preceding five posts can easily be viewed from the perspective of representation. Starting with the first four, and whether you regard the responsibilities below as conferred on leaders by the organisation or taken on by those who choose to act as leaders, I hope that you find it helpful to consider and perhaps reflect on this list:

  1. With leadership as structuring, leaders represent their respective organisational scope’s place in the wider organisation, its particular responsibilities with respect to which part of the outside business environment, and its objectives within the context of the organisation’s broader goals. That much is straightforward enough, but those three structures – organisation, environment, and strategy – are rarely in perfect alignment. That creates the challenge of at least acknowledging the inherent challenges, conflicts, and contradictions therein. When they are up for discussion, the leader represents their scope to the wider organisation and vice versa.
  2. With leadership as translating, leaders represent their scopes in terms of progress, issues, and performance, doing that in the language of their audience (most often that of those they report to, those that report to them, or that of peer scopes), or explaining how it translates. Again, in support of the reverse flow of information, they must also do this internally on behalf of other scopes, i.e. representing them.
  3. With leadership as reconciling, to that translation challenge is added a significant complication: the strategies of any or all of the scopes involved may need adjustment in the light of new information or new goals, perhaps to the extent that existing structures come under challenge. After all, an organisation that isn’t open to that can hardly be said to be adaptive! In these conversations, leaders must at a minimum be able to express their scope’s strategies adequately to others, and when representing internally the strategies of related scopes, to do that justice too.
  4. With leadership as connecting, leaders represent the availability (or lack thereof) of context. That means two things: First, their presence at opportune times both to offer and to acquire the business context on which good decision-making depends, and second, representing the systemic challenge of minimising the likelihood and impact of bad decisions. To do that without at the same time stifling initiative is a difficult task indeed.

Notice that none of the above requires leaders to have all the answers. Quite the contrary! The need to structure and connect arises in part because no leader can hope to be all-knowing. When translating and reconciling, no reasonable person expects leaders to understand the progress and plans of related scopes to the extent that they understand their own. And so to leadership as inviting, the fifth of the preceding topics in this series. In any kind of consequential conversation, who better to represent any scope of activity – whether formally recognised as an organisational structure or otherwise – than actual, first-hand representatives of that scope? That works both ways, of course; it is in the intersection of interests that the need for effective and appropriately diverse representation is most acute.

That is not the full extent of leadership as representing. The clue is in this article’s previously advertised working title, “Leadership and identity”. That would have been about how in various different aspects, different organisational scopes see themselves and are seen by others. Among these aspects are how the scope’s members conduct their work, how they coordinate internally and with other scopes, how they organise around each new challenge and steer the resulting work, and how they strategise, internally or with others. In all of those, there are boundaries of acceptability, a function not only of the prevailing senses of safety, trust, and trustworthiness, but also of what the scope and its surrounding organisation really stand for.

The hardest part here isn’t that of maintaining appropriate boundaries, it’s knowing when to acknowledge that old identities or values may be holding us back. Most of the time, those true, group-held boundaries are essential; they minimise noise and they cost little mental or conversational effort. Sometimes though, it must be acknowledged that how we present ourselves in our different relationships may not be in our or others’ best interests. If such issues are to be dealt with authentically, they become issues of identity.

Hold the line, or allow lines to be tested? Stay the course, or pivot? Stick or twist? Let me answer those questions with a book recommendation. It is Edwin H. Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (10th anniversary edition 2017). The clues are there in the title. Don’t lose your nerve! Accept no unsustainable quick fixes. Lead!

Postscript

That book recommendation reminds me of another book! I haven’t finished it yet, but my wife Sharon and I are enjoying Rutger Bregman’s Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference (2025). Bregman’s moral ambition and Friedman’s non-anxious presence aren’t the same thing, but they do have something in common. For a taste, see this recent CNN article (cnn.com).

Posts in this series appear first as LinkedIn articles. You can read and comment there:

  1. Leadership as structuring
  2. Leadership as translating
  3. Leadership as reconciling
  4. Leadership as connecting
  5. Leadership as inviting
  6. Leadership as representing
  7. Untangling the strands

Leadership as inviting

Posted on by Mike Burrows

This post is the fifth in a series inspired by the fourth chapter of my new book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (April 2025). 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. Building on the organisational model developed in the first three chapters, Chapter 4, The Space Between, deals with scale-related challenges.

In this series:

  1. Leadership as structuring
  2. Leadership as translating
  3. Leadership as reconciling
  4. Leadership as connecting
  5. Leadership as inviting (this post)
  6. Leadership and identity
  7. Untangling the strands

This instalment was previously advertised under the working title of “Leadership and participation”, a title that would have broken away from the “Leadership as…” theme. It remains to be seen whether I find a new title for the next one, “Leadership and identity”!

Leadership as inviting

One way or another, articles in this series have been concerned with issues of scale, and I will bring them all together with a concluding post, “Untangling the strands”. In this one, the issue is that of participation in the strategy process, which begs three questions: Who’s invited? How? Why?

I’ll leave the How to Daniel Mezick and Mark Sheffield’s book Inviting Leadership [1]. That leaves the Who and the Why.

Why invite people into the strategy process?

I have two answers to this one. The first is about the role of leadership and how that relates to others around you. As I wrote in the introduction to Wholehearted (2025) and before that, in the 2024 blog post [2] that introduced the Engage, Invite, Celebrate model, if you are not engaging with the right challenges, inviting people into the process, and celebrating their successes, are you actually leading? And how do you scale and sustain that? By inviting others to do the same of course! And to turn it around, wouldn’t you want to be invited? Wouldn’t you want to participate? When they have something to contribute, wouldn’t most people?

My second answer relates to organisational scale, and it builds on previous articles in this series. We organise in part to moderate the impact of complexity. Not every detail of what happens at one level of scale or one organisational scope needs to be or indeed can be visible outside, and to think otherwise is to be either unaware of one’s blind spots or at risk of being overwhelmed. It would be delusional therefore to think that leaders are all-knowing, and it follows that strategies dependent on good operational or customer intelligence and insight need those concerns to be represented adequately. Show me a strategy that needs neither of those, and I’ll show you one that doesn’t matter.

When you combine those people-related and systemic aspects, you get a sense of participation in the process, the right people in the room, shared ownership of what the process produces, and not just a plan on paper but actual, celebration-worthy results!

Who’s invited?

The term strategy deployment isn’t meant to imply “rollout,” but it feels like it to me, and I’m not its greatest fan therefore. Nevertheless, the mechanisms by which the organisation ensures some appropriate level of alignment or coherence are important, they affect who gets invited, and they can vary widely between organisations. For example, those mainly Japanese firms that practice hoshin kanri achieve it mainly through rounds of one-to-one conversations up and down the organisation. Not a top-down cascade, but a painstaking process of briefing and back-briefing – painstaking because it can take some considerable time for the organisation as a whole to converge on something coherent. At the other extreme in terms of both participation and speed is Open Space (or more properly, Open Space Technology, OST) [3], to which many people may be invited – perhaps everyone. These have a self-organised agenda and typically a dedicated host/facilitator. I would note that it is rare to see a productive Open Space event that doesn’t begin with an invitingly worded challenge that was either pre-prepared or the product of preliminary conversations; events that lack one can be desultory affairs indeed! Further to the topic of the motivating challenge, see also generative change [4]; much of my work of the past ten years comes under that banner.

In several of my books and in Leading with Outcomes [5], I recommend something between those one-to-one and all-hands extremes. For an impactful strategy conversation, try to get representation from least three levels of organisation, such that you get real-world intelligence, business context, and between those, those people whose job is to hold it all together. For example, if you’re starting with a leadership team (typically two levels of organisation – a senior manager and their direct reports), add some team representation, some customer representation, and/or what we used to call sponsorship. Try it! I’ve had senior managers sit next to new joiners and customers in the room also, and it worked really well.

Not every conversation needs everyone, and not every conversation needs to be had in one go, but an effective strategy process does depend on adequate representation. With my “three levels” suggestion in mind, try working backwards, right to left [6]: Whose needs will we be meeting? When they are making meaningful progress in their “struggling moments” [7], from whom will the best solution ideas have come from? Who has a sufficiently close and empathetic relationship with them to understand their needs in their proper context? Who will have been asked to work differently or to different objectives? And whose expertise will have been needed? Whose support? Whose sponsorship? Resisting the urge to decide or design things on your own, thinking instead about the possibilities you can enable, Who’s invited?

[1] Daniel Mezick and Mark Sheffield, Inviting Leadership: Invitation-Based Change™ in the New World of Work (Freestanding Press, 2018)

[2] Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation (July 2024)

[3] Harrison Owen, Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008)

[4] Gervase R. Bushe, The Dynamics of Generative Change (BMI Series in Dialogic Organization Development, 2020)

[5] Leading with Outcomes (academy.agendashift.com)

[6] The Right to Left principle/pattern – working backwards from key moments of impact and learning – is described in several of my books, Wholehearted included, but the definitive one is Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020)

[7] A book I recommend at every opportunity: Bob Moesta with Greg Engle, Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress (Lioncrest Publishing, 2020)

Posts in this series appear first as LinkedIn articles. You can read and comment there:

  1. Leadership as structuring
  2. Leadership as translating
  3. Leadership as reconciling
  4. Leadership as connecting
  5. Leadership as inviting (this post)
  6. Leadership and identity

But while we’re here, some upcoming events:

TTT/F, LIKE, and the next instalment in the “Leadership as…” series

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Three things:

1 .Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

The next online Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) begins on Monday 16th (ten days away):

And in case you think that its title implies that it’s not for you, a reminder:

Not everyone joins TTT/F with the aim of becoming a Facilitator or Trainer. Some join for the challenge to existing ways of doing things that Leading with Outcomes brings. Some join for the conversation. Some join to hone their coaching skills, to add a strategy dimension to those, or, conversely perhaps, to bring a coaching dimension to their work as manager or consultant. Whatever your role, if you’re looking for participatory, outcome-oriented, and generative alternatives to managed change and the solution-driven rollout, you’ll be in the right place.

*Coupon code BLOG15 will get you 15% off this training and also LIKE below. For the latter, that’s further to any early bird discounts that remain available.

2. Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE)

Meanwhile, the Spring cohort of Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) is nearly finished – only one session remaining! Following a class discussion this week, the Autumn one will gain an additional session. This is to allow “Organising without Organising, aka “Organising at Human Scale” to get its own session, not (as now) relegated to homework. Book your place here:

3. The next instalment in the “Leadership as…” series

The fourth article in the “Leadership as…” series came out on LinkedIn earlier this week. Including that one, the series so far:

  1. Leadership as structuring
  2. Leadership as translating
  3. Leadership as reconciling
  4. Leadership as connecting

Breaking slightly from the naming convention, the next two will be as follows:

  1. Leadership and participation
  2. Leadership and identity

That’s all for now! Have a great weekend!

Leadership as connecting

Posted on by Mike Burrows

This post is the fourth in a series inspired by the fourth chapter of my new book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (April 2025). 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. Building on the organisational model developed in the first three chapters, Chapter 4, The Space Between, deals with scale-related challenges.

In this series:

  1. Leadership as structuring
  2. Leadership as translating
  3. Leadership as reconciling
  4. Leadership as connecting (this post)

And to come:

  1. Leadership and participation
  2. Leadership and identity

Leadership as connecting

Few issues are as fundamental to organisations as this one; it’s right up there with the need for sufficient reserves of decision-making and communication capacity being available at every level of organisation for it to notice and respond to new challenges. And like that one, it goes under-recognised. It’s that bad decisions – both operational and strategic – will inevitably be made for lack of context. The left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Operational decisions lagging changes to policy or to its underlying strategic intent. Strategy decisions made in ignorance of current operational or customer realities.

Why is this inevitable? It’s because if organisations can be said to be optimised, it’s for what they know, not what they don’t. Not that I am complaining: as per the first article in this series, Leadership as structuring, structure does matter. Actually it’s structures plural, but you get the point: there’s no organisation structure in the world that guarantees that information always and without fail gets to where it’s needed quickly enough.

Those bad decisions can be very costly. So what does a leader do to preempt them? Broadly under the heading of “make the organisation both more trusting and more trustworthy”, there’s a clue in the opening paragraph. Use your limited personal reserves – i.e. what’s left when all the routine things have taken their share – in the following three ways:

  1. Develop the knack of being available and present at the right times and in the right places. Follow your intuitions about what you should be curious about, whether that’s a potential source of risk, a more positive kind of possibility, or simply something that you’ve neglected for too long. For each of these, remember that they bring opportunities for a trust-building kind of transparency also; the need for context works in both directions.
  2. Not to supplant the first but to help it, develop the mechanisms by which exceptional conditions bring the right people together quickly. “Routines for the non-routine”, you might say, of which Lean’s andon cord, aka stop the line [1] is a great example.
  3. Develop these behaviours in others.

A more trusting and trustworthy organisation wastes less of its precious reserves. It increases its capacity to have the right people coming together at the right time, with all the potential for adaptation, innovation, and resilience that may follow. On its own, it causes people to connect, but that process could often use a little help. It’s a beautiful thing to connect people that would otherwise not be connected, and leaders are uniquely well placed to do it, regardless of whether they see themselves as connectors. Do it once, and your future self may come to thank you. Keep doing it, and you’re changing the organisation. Have others do it, and you take it to a whole new level, developing a new kind of organisation.

It begs a question though: individually and collectively, how do you develop the necessary intuition, the knack of being in the right place at the right time? No magic involved, it’s a learning process like any other. Every time you retrospect and reflect, who struggled for lack of what context? What conversations should we have had? Who had the context we needed? Inside or outside the organisation, what relationships need developing? Action at least one of those insights, rinse, and repeat.

It’s possible to take that idea to another level too. What if you could do that not only retrospectively, but proactively? Rather than expand on that thought here, let me finish by sharing a post I had the opportunity to share recently on the Kanban Zone blog:

[1] Andon (manufacturing) (en.wikipedia.org)

Posts in this series appear first as LinkedIn articles. You can read and comment there:

  1. Leadership as structuring
  2. Leadership as translating
  3. Leadership as reconciling
  4. Leadership as connecting (this post)

To come:

  1. Leadership and participation
  2. Leadership and identity

But while we’re here, some upcoming events:

Leadership as reconciling

Posted on by Mike Burrows

This post is the third in a series inspired by the fourth chapter of my new book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (April 2025). 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. Building on the organisational model developed in the first three chapters, Chapter 4, The Space Between, deals with scale-related challenges.

In this series:

  1. Leadership as structuring
  2. Leadership as translating
  3. Leadership as reconciling (this post)

And to come:

  1. Leadership as connecting
  2. Leadership and participation
  3. Leadership and identity

Leadership as reconciling

How do teams respond to surprises – to new information, to novelty? To the members of the best teams, it seems to come so naturally:

  1. Filter (or Ignore) – decide whether this information demands any kind of consideration or response
  2. Adjust – make any immediate changes to plans or designs that may be warranted
  3. Share – share with other team members as appropriate
  4. Strategise – develop options for a more considered response, if one is needed
  5. Reconcile – compare notes with the team as a whole so that effort won’t be duplicated and any overall response will be coherent
  6. Structure – clarify expectations at some appropriate level of detail
  7. Organise – the team organises around its modified commitments

There are a couple of interesting things about this process. The first is that each step represents an opportunity to contain or expand the response, each decision an exercise of discretion. Share freely, add to the noise, and risk overwhelm, or withhold what may turn out to be something vital? Given that we’re dealing with novelty, that question won’t always be easy to answer, and given the possible consequences, it seems fair to recognise that in even the most self-organising of teams, it may represent a leadership challenge.

The second is that if you start this process with step 4 (Strategise), and squint a bit, it kinda describes the team’s delivery process! Small wonder then that the self-organising team handles surprises so naturally. There are limits to that of course, but larger surprises need not break the model. Rather, it needs to work at different levels of scale. From the perspective of (for example) a team of teams, each team encounters novelty every day, some of which will be relevant to others, and so on up the organisation.

That’s easy to say of course, but the higher the level of organisation things get escalated to, the harder it gets, particularly that final step, organising around its modified commitments. To change commitments is hard enough; to reorganise is more difficult still, to put it mildly. Or do we have that the wrong way round? What if leaders could relax or unmake commitments sufficiently for responses to be self-organised? Whether the response is organised or self-organised may seem only a matter of perspective, but if organisations are going to respond well to change, it’s an important shift to make.

And don’t underestimate the importance of that reconciliation step. There are many ways to achieve it, ranging from lots of one-to-one conversations that iterate until a suitable level of coherence is achieved, to getting everyone together in one room and hashing it out. Different mechanisms will suit different situations, different corporate cultures, and perhaps even different national cultures (I have heard it said that the one-to-ones of hoshin kanri work rather better in Japan than they do elsewhere), but to focus solely on practice would be to miss the point. Organisations can live with incoherence for only so long.

Postscript

In the original draft of this article, I was reluctant to suggest that one can rely on established processes of reflection and inquiry to deal with the issues raised. This is not to say that they aren’t important (they really are), but because it’s too easy to make unsafe assumptions about their effectiveness. To recognise that they aren’t effective enough, deep enough, or frequent enough is the beginning of leadership! More shockingly perhaps, no formal process can ever suffice. We’ll explore that issue next.

Posts in this series appear first as LinkedIn articles. You can read and comment there:

  1. Leadership as structuring
  2. Leadership as translating
  3. Leadership as reconciling (this post)

To come:

  1. Leadership as connecting
  2. Leadership and participation
  3. Leadership and identity

But while we’re here, some upcoming events:

Leadership as translating

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Previously: Leadership as structuring

[This post first appeared on LinkedIn. You can comment on it here]

You don’t have to be in management for long to learn that half the job involves representing the scope for which you are responsible to those to whom you are accountable, and vice versa. Those who are successful at it are those who can speak the language of both. If you work in IT, for example, it can be good for your career to be seen as “the acceptable face of technology”, as I was once described.

It is not difficult to understand why this should be so. The boardroom and the frontline team each discuss progress, issues, and performance very differently, but somehow they are related, and thus they need to be translated through the organisation’s different levels of scale, and in both directions.

Despite the allure of the hierarchical work breakdown structure (WBS) and the all-knowing management information system (MIS), it would be a serious mistake to think that translation is equivalent to aggregation. For one thing, there is such a thing as overcommunication! The team may care little that a team member discovered and dealt with a minor issue in the course of their work. Likewise, a team-of-teams need not be informed of issues its member teams should reasonably be expected to contain, so long as its wider goals are not impacted. Does the board need visibility of every small increment of progress, every minor issue? Quite the opposite: the organisation’s capacities for communication and decision making are finite. We organise to contain what can be contained, in a sense to manage complexity so that we are not overwhelmed by it.

There is therefore a relationship between this “leadership as translating” and the topic of my previous post, Leadership as structuring. (See also [1] to explain my fondness for those ‘-ing’ words.) Structures of various kinds need to be optimised to contain that complexity – neither so flat that the centre cannot hold, nor so deep that too much gets lost in translation. At the same time, every organisational scope must learn to share appropriately. That’s another optimisation problem, and one that requires those who do the sharing to empathise with their audiences, to speak their language, even to share their goals. You leave that to your reporting system at your peril, so work on those skills!

This post was inspired by my new book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. 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. Building on the organisational model developed in the first three chapters, Chapter 4, The Space Between, deals with scale-related challenges.

While we’re here, some upcoming events:

[1] Verbing the nouns of business agility (January 2025)

Previously: Wholehearted Leadership in a Complex World

[This post first appeared on LinkedIn. You can comment on it here]

Leadership as structuring

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Previously: Wholehearted Leadership in a Complex World | Next: Leadership as translating

[This post first appeared on LinkedIn. You can comment on it here]

A core idea of my new book, Wholehearted, is that we – leaders, practitioners, anyone who would engage in any serious way with the organisation or would help others to do so – must pay attention to the mutual relationships that exist between different aspects of the organisation. Are those relationships healthy and productive? Where they aren’t, what stops that? What gets in the way?

That general approach begs an obvious question: which relationships, and which aspects in particular? That question may be open-ended and contextual, but the model at the book’s core, namely the VSM-inspired Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, helpfully identifies some that necessarily exist in every organisation and at every scale thereof. Rather than listing them here (see [1] for some clues), for this post I’d like to focus on four aspects that are of particular interest when considering issues of scale.

The first two:

  1. The organisation’s formal structure – i.e. how it is generally understood, which lines of accountability are most important, and so on
  2. How the organisation understands its business environment – in terms of who and where its users, customers, suppliers, and competitors are, their needs, how they change over time, and so on

The relationship between those structures is very interesting! Not only can we ask if it is healthy and productive overall, we can ask it for every substructure. For every organisational scope, formal or otherwise (in the book, we place far more emphasis on what different participants actually experience than we do on what is formally settled upon), is its respective environmental relationship healthy and productive? Whose needs does it serve? What needs? How well? How do we know? What intelligence and insights is it uniquely well-placed to gather? And looking at it from the opposite direction, are there aspects of the environment that are not well served, or as the book has it, are there “holes in the whole product”?

Both of those first two aspects can and do change over time, but they are relatively stable compared to the last two:

  1. The organisation’s commitments and their structure – plans, strategies, objectives, and so on
  2. The organisation’s challenges, most interestingly (but not limited to) those that emerge from the environment

These new aspects introduce some tension. Is the organisation structured to fit its environment or to execute its plans? Do we understand the environment in terms of what persists or what’s new?

Except perhaps the most benign of conditions, those tensions never go away. At the extreme, the issues are existential. If, in the name of responsiveness, we blow in the winds of challenge, what do we actually stand for? Why then do we exist? Conversely, what if what we stand for risks becoming irrelevant?

To lead is both to represent those structures in spite of those tensions and to engage with the paradoxes therein, knowing that there is no quick fix – no supposedly objective formula, no algorithm, no methodology – that can resolve them for you. To fail to do those things when it matters most would represent a failure of nerve [2] and therefore of leadership. But both to depersonalise the issue and to create opportunities for leadership, a deliberately adaptive organisation frequently challenges its structures, its understanding, and its commitments, and does that at every level of organisation. Embedding that discourse, learning, and meaning-making in the face of structural change is as much an act of organisation design as the structural changes themselves, more so as the latter are experienced not as imposed but as self-organised. Formal structures may remain, but do we let them get in the way of doing the right thing? Only if we let them!

This post was inspired by my new book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. 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. Building on the organisational model developed in the first three chapters, Chapter 4, The Space Between, deals with scale-related challenges.

[1] Verbing the nouns of business agility (January 2025)

[2] Edwin H. Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (1999, 2007, 2017)

Previously: Wholehearted Leadership in a Complex World | Next: Leadership as translating

[This post first appeared on LinkedIn. You can comment on it here]

Wholehearted Leadership in a Complex World

Posted on by Mike Burrows

[This post first appeared on LinkedIn. You can comment on it here]

It was a great pleasure last week to join Rohit Gautam on his Curiosulus Chronicles podcast, and the episode is now available on YouTube:

We were of course focused on the recent publication of Wholehearted, and Rohit was not the first to be intrigued by Chapter 3, Mutual Trust Building, and in particular, a section titled “Models of trust-building leadership”. This section covers:

  1. The inverted pyramid, aka reverse hierachy, in which the CEO is still at the “pointy end” of the organisation, but that sits at the bottom. In this model, the job of the organisation and its leadership is to support those who serve the customer. More easily said than done!
  2. Servant Leadership, the title of Robert Greenleaf’s classic book. The metaphor doesn’t work for everyone, but I can’t fault Greenleaf’s starting point: leaders that fail to meet the needs and expectations of their staff will lose their legitimacy in that role. Seems kinda obvious now, but in the 1970s, still the era of the “job for life”, ahead of its time.
  3. Host Leadership, which I wish was the title of Mark McKergow and Helen Bailey’s Host: Six new roles of engagement for teams, organisations, communities, movements. This and the next one illustrate very well something I learned for myself as a senior manager: sometimes it’s not so much about your different competencies or the different stances you are capable of adopting, what matters is your ability to move quickly and fluently between them, even in the course of a single conversation.
  4. Clear Leadership, after Gervase Bushe‘s book of the same name, speaks to a core theme of Wholehearted, your organisation’s capacity for communication and decision making, on which are founded your organisation’s adaptive capacity and thereby its resilience and its ability to innovate. On the topic of trust, how can you expect to be trusted if you can’t even trust yourself? That requires you to be in command of yourself. That doesn’t mean emotionlessness, it means listening to and acknowledging your feelings, and as appropriate, being transparent about them and about where you’re coming from. If several of my books emphasise curiosity, it may be skilful transparency (or “descriptiveness”) that earns you that right.
  5. Intent-based models, via Stephen Bungay, L. David Marquet, and Stan McChrystal, mission command (aka commander’s intent) and some fascinating developments thereof. It manifests itself as efficient communication with just the right balance between prescription and ambiguity that leaves room for others’ expertise, autonomy, and innovation, but that’s just the beginning.

I feel the need sometimes to reiterate my belief in leadership. Self-organisation doesn’t preclude it! Wholehearted could well be described as a leadership book! Organisations need people who are engaging on the right challenges, inviting others to participate, and celebrating their successes [1]. And at any given level of organisation, absent presence, availability, a good nose for what needs attending to next, and the drive to build a more trusting and trustworthy organisation, it becomes increasingly difficult for the operational and strategic aspects of the organisation to understand each other. Sooner or later, and for lack of context, bad decisions will be made. Alongside the issues of communication and decision-making capacity, that so-called “context challenge” is a fundamental organisational constraint and one to which leaders must allocate significant personal effort. Those models aren’t the whole story – it would be foolish to think that in something as complex as an organisation that there is ever only one story – but in what is a difficult task, they do help.

Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation hit Amazon last 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.

[1] Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation (July 2024)

Previously: Prescriptive vs descriptive