[Apologies! This post went out on various channels in the run up to Christmas but not here. The offer still stands.]
For reasons regular readers will understand I’m sure, I’ve decided to break with tradition and dispense with the usual summary of activity for the past 12 months. Instead, let me round off 2025 with a special offer for this festive season and a brief look ahead to 2026.
The special offer: As of today, my fifth and most recent book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, is available on Amazon at the substantially reduced prices of £4.99 on Kindle and £9.99 in print. That’s the Amazon UK price of course, and updates are winging their way to other Amazons around the world as we speak. If you don’t see a roughly equivalent price where you are, just wait a bit! Search Amazon for “Wholehearted Mike Burrows”, and remember: reviews are incredibly valuable!
Looking forward: Compared to the quiet past few months (in public, at least), expect a small flurry of activity in the new year. In the pipeline are both updates to classic tools and some new stuff too. Roll on 2026!
That’s all for now, except to say that whatever you’re doing, I wish you the very best for Christmas and the New Year.
I’m sort of back to work now, mainly speaking engagements for the moment. We’ll be taking a holiday also – it will be the first time Sharon and I have been able to travel together since 2018. I’m not sure yet what 2026 will bring, but that’s ok, and I’m very open to ideas.
Just this month I have given my talk Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation four times now! It turns out to be very adaptable: twice this week (and next week at Øredev 2025) it took the form of a quick 30 or 40 minute talk. But earlier this week I had no trouble filling 90 minutes, and two weeks ago, nearly three hours! That last one was for a hybrid seminar at Hull University’s Centre for Systems Studies in association with the Operations Research Society, and it prompted plenty of thoughtful conversation.
Given my impending travels, I have already written my new keynote for Kanban India 2025, which takes place in early December. It’s called Thinking Organisationally about Process, and it puts the kanban of my first book, Kanban from the Inside, into the kind of organisational frame described by my fifth book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, with some of the glue provided by my middle book (and audiobook), Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile. If the clock starts with my best-known (not to mention career-changing) blog post, Introducing Kanban through its values, that’s a journey of nearly 13 years, but you can get the gist in some 45 minutes!
I mention these because if you run a meetup or conference, you might consider one or even both of these talks. For a fee, I do private events also, as I did only yesterday. Either way, I have availability from mid-December onwards.
Articles
I wrote two this month. Most recently, and prompted by that seminar in Hull and also by a panel session I did with Philippe Guenet and Jen Le Marinel for the International Coaching Federation (ICF):
With home life very much in transition, I’m honouring my remaining commitments for 2025 but deliberately keeping 2026 open. My public calendar now looks like this:
I wasn’t sure if I would produce a roundup this month, but given the overwhelming response to my personal update last week, I had to! I did not feel able last week to respond individually to each of the many messages received, but let me take the opportunity now to say that they were all very much appreciated.
Some have asked if they could make a donation in Florence’s memory. To the benefit of Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice, there is a page set up for that purpose:
They do great work and I can’t speak highly enough of them, but for something less local, you might also consider the Make-A-Wish Foundation (UK) or its equivalent in your country.
Work-wise, and in clarification to last week’s message, the online and Copenhagen-based trainings are off (leaving a couple of days free pre-Øredev in Copenhagen/Malmö if you have ideas about those), but the two India-based trainings remain very much on. This is what my events calendar looks like now:
I can’t honestly say when I’ll add further public trainings, so you may want to give serious consideration to joining me in Pune or Bengaluru for TTT/F or LIKE (respectively). Even with travel from outside of India, they look pretty cost-effective, and there’s the conference too. You wouldn’t be the first to make that choice!
Under the current circumstances, there are no new posts or videos; check out the media page and recent roundups for pointers to what’s out there. There is some interesting activity happening behind the scenes in relation to the recent book, and if that matures, I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, there is the book itself of course:
Following the travails reported in last month’s abbreviated roundup and my mid-month update with better news, I should say that things are stable enough at home now. Despite another step change in Florence’s care needs, I (with Sharon’s full support) remain fully committed to my published autumn schedule below, the first event of which takes place next week.
Speaking engagements aside, let me point out that the Autumn LIKE cohort begins September 30th – just four weeks on Tuesday! The in-person version in Copenhagen/Malmö takes place on November 3rd and 4th, and there are two different trainings planned for two different cities in India in December.
Real life introduces big time! My wife and I have spent most of the past couple of weeks with our daughter at Sheffield Children’s Hospital, and we have a few more days to go yet. Consequently, for reasons both of opportunity and headspace, my output has been minimal of late. I did however manage this LinkedIn post today, and our media page includes at least one new video that I haven’t mentioned previously here. Most of the recent ones are of course Wholehearted-related.
The events calendar hasn’t changed much, but the autumn cohort beginning at the end of September seems not so far away now, and I’m keen to learn who’s interested in attending in Copenhagen/Malmö in November also. Here it is with all kinds of events together, speaking engagements included:
For the online and Europe-based training, ping me if you need a discount code. All the usual reasons (gov, educational, non-profit, etc) apply, and the more the merrier.
A post-Wholehearted version of my white paper, Everywhere all at once
As previewed in last month’s roundup and announced this month, there is now a new version of the white paper, Everywhere all at once. Watch the short video and download your copy of the paper here:
As for the book, you can find Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (April 2025) in both print and Kindle editions on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de and other Amazon sites around the world. The e-book is also available on LeanPub, Kobo, Apple Books, and Google Play Books. Enjoy! Leave a review!
That’s all for now. Hoping that August will be considerably less fraught, but being the holidays for many, I expect that I’ll be keeping the next roundup light too. If you’ll be taking a break, enjoy!
In 2023, I published two versions of my white paper Everywhere all at once. That was well before Wholehearted (2025), so it’s high time it was revised! Not having dared to look at it for quite a while, I was relieved to find that the old version had stood up pretty well; nevertheless, I have enjoyed realigning it with the book.
Over the summer (if not longer) I will be producing frequent short videos, so here’s a quick overview:
Content-wise, the video follows the white paper pretty closely, though in less depth:
A relational approach
A model for every organisational scale
Between scales: the space between
Organising at human scale
What lies beneath: Constraints
Not your grandfather’s VSM / A model for the digital-age organisation
A post-Wholehearted version of my white paper, Everywhere all at once
1. Autumn Programme: conferences, LIKE, and TTT/F
In the form of my talk “Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation”, I will be taking my new book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation to three quite different conferences:
SysPrac25, the System Thinking Practitioners Conference, in Milton Keynes, UK
The big technology conference Øredev, in Malmö, Sweden
Kanban India 2025, in Bengaluru, India, to which I have been coming more years than I can remember!
My trips to Scandinavia and India create some training opportunities – two LIKEs and a TTT/F:
There are a couple of things to note about those. First, the Copenhagen one (which might join the conference on the Swedish side of the bridge in Malmö) needs a venue. Can you help? Would your organisation like to host it in return for free &/or discounted places or some other arrangement? It will be the first in-person training of its kind since the publication of Wholehearted, and it would be great to get at least a small quorum together sooner rather than later.
Second, the TTT/F in Pune (not in Bengaluru as in previous years) is the only public TTT/F planned for the remainder of the year. If you travel to India for this or for LIKE, you won’t be the first to have done so – it can be surprisingly cost-effective. And take in the conference while you’re there!
2. Concluding the “Leadership as…” series
Seven articles inspired by Chapter 4 – the scaling chapter – of Wholehearted:
Those last two posts (which you can take in either order) bring the preceding five together nicely, so you might like to start with one of those.
It’s hard to say whether my experimental policy of publishing to LinkedIn first has made a significant difference, but I will stick with it for a bit longer. LinkedIn being what it is, reactions (likes etc) are great, but it’s comments that really bring posts to others’ attention. Tell us what you think!
3. A post-Wholehearted version of my white paper, Everywhere all at once
Earlier versions of my white paper Everywhere all at once: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, an accessible, situational, and complexity-aware presentation of the Viable System Model were released in June and December 2023. Even that later version preceded the publication of Wholehearted by well over a year, and I have now reworked it. I’ll release this new version next month under an amended title, but if you’d like to review it meanwhile, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
As for the book, you can find Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (April 2025) in both print and Kindle editions on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de and other Amazon sites around the world. The e-book is also available on LeanPub, Kobo, Apple Books, and Google Play Books. Enjoy! Leave a review!
This week I was the guest at the Blackmetrics #BAcommunity webinar (thank you Adrian Reed for the invitation), and the recording, slides, references, and other links are already available here:
I overran a bit, so there was less time than usual for Q&A. I’ll be more careful with the level of detail in future versions! I’m giving it again next week, but in person:
Not yet in the calendar, I will do a 2-day in-person one of these in Bangalore in December, and possibly one in Sweden or Denmark in November if I’m accepted to speak at Øredev. I’m also very open to doing one again in Manchester – I have both university and NHS interest there, and it might be very cool to do one for both groups together.
Last but not least, and as previously announced, on the Media page you’ll find an interview released earlier this month with Rohit Gautam for his Curiosulus Chronicles podcast, and below that one, interviews released in April with Mike Jones and Laksh Raghavan for their Strategy Meets Reality and Cyb3rSyn Labs podcasts respectively.
Leading with Outcomes
All of the above comes very much under the Leading with Outcomes umbrella. Other news there:
This month saw the print and Kindle releases of my new book Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. In relation to that, I’ve been blogging more than usual, experimenting with a LinkedIn-first approach. The first two of those posts were perhaps a little dry (I had some things to get off my chest perhaps):
Thank you Mike Jones and Laksh Raghavan. Another is recorded and awaiting release, I’ll be recording another on Friday, and two more in the pipeline also!
Upcoming in May, two different formats – meetup and webinar – but essentially the same talk:
Both of those are online (don’t be put off by the “Berlin”), and I know at least one person who plans to attend both. There for the Q&A I guess! To be fair, that can be the most fun part – certainly the most unpredictable, perhaps because I ask for the hard questions!
Finally, a reminder that “Office hours” / Ask Mike Anything (AMA) sessions take place on Thursdays at 2pm UK time – 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.
Further ahead
The next TTT/F will be in June, and if the spring cohort of LIKE comes too early for you, there’ll be another in the autumn:
*LIKE begins 2pm UK time – 14:00 BST, 15:00 CEST, 9am EDT today. If you’d like to join, best get in touch with me directly, and quickly! All the usual discounts available.
Agendashift 