Tag: wholehearted

Agendashift roundup, June 2025

Posted on by Mike Burrows

In this edition:

  1. Autumn programme: conferences, LIKE, and TTT/F
  2. Concluding the “Leadership as…” series
  3. 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:

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

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!

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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!

Agendashift roundup, May 2025

Posted on by Mike Burrows

In this edition: The wholehearted, deliberately adaptive organisation; Leading with Outcomes; Top posts

The wholehearted, deliberately adaptive organisation

Given that it’s the month after the full release of Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, it’s hardly surprising that I’ve been busy promoting the new book!

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:

Thank you Sergio Seelochan and Agile Nottingham for that one.

I have also been blogging on LinkedIn, and it’s turning into a series:

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

To come:

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

Further ahead, there’s the Autumn LIKE (the Spring one is past its halfway point now):

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:

And the next TTT/F begins on the 16th:

Top posts

Blog:

  1. (Pre)released today – Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (March)
  2. Agendashift roundup of the year 2024 (December)
  3. What Lies Beneath (Spoiler: Constraints) (October 2023)
  4. Leading with Outcomes Cheat Sheet v2.1 (May)
  5. My favourite Clean Language question (January 2019)

LinkedIn articles:

  1. Leadership as structuring
  2. Mid-month update: Wholehearted Leadership in a Complex World and more
  3. Prescriptive vs descriptive
  4. Leadership as translating
  5. Leadership as reconciling

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

Prescriptive vs descriptive

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Previously: OODA loop takeaways | Next: Wholehearted Leadership in a Complex World

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

What is the Toyota Production System (TPS)? Is it a long list of tools, many with Japanese names – kanban cards, heijunka, andon cords, hoshin kanri, and so on? Or is it an expression of Toyota’s epic, multi-generational pursuit of customer-focused flow, whose practices change as the world changes and as the organisation learns? It’s an important question: the early years of Lean were so entranced by TPS’s surface detail that it failed to grasp not only what produced and sustained it but what would drive its continued evolution.

We can ask a similar question about Scrum. Is it going through the motions of backlogs, planning meetings, daily meetings, reviews, retrospectives, and so on? Or does it seek to paint a picture of a high-performing team iterating its way to product success, goal by goal? [1]

Describe Scrum “left to right”, backlog first, and an Agile fairy dies. Sorry about that! And Scrum is to a significant degree prescriptive. Without the artefacts, events, and roles laid out in the Scrum Guide you’re not doing Scrum. But if, as I have, you have enjoyed the privilege of working on that kind of high-performing, customer-focused team, whether or not you are doing things by the book matters little. And to put Scrum into historical context, for the teams that first inspired the model, there was no book!

Why put yourself through all that pain when you could address scale-related dysfunctions so very much more directly?

Prescriptive models have their place; the better ones capture (without too much distortion, one hopes) what has worked for someone, somewhere. The problem of course is that they tell you to do certain things regardless of whether they actually address whatever problems are most pressing in your context. The larger the model and the more expensive, time-consuming, disrupting, and (above all) distracting it is to implement, the bigger this problem becomes. I’m not against the models so much as their rollout; in the case of the scaled Agile process frameworks, for example, why put yourself through all that pain when you could address scale-related dysfunctions so very much more directly?

That’s an issue for Chapters 4 and 5 of Wholehearted; here I want to say some more about descriptive models – models that describe what’s there, useful not for what they prescribe but for the insights they bring and those they trigger. One such model is the OODA loop, the subject of my previous article and referenced in Chapter 2, but the book’s main model is the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a reconstruction of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM), scoped to the digital-age organisation.

It really isn’t something you roll out. It has no prescribed process, organisation structure, roles, or practices. It is descriptive of organisations because it identifies aspects that every organisation must inevitably have to at least some degree, likewise pretty much any organisational scope at any organisational scale that you might identify with. To say that it is useful is an understatement; its undoubted power lies in the relationships between aspects, relationships at and between every scale of organisation that lead to dysfunction if they are out of balance. Working in the other direction, many if not most of the dysfunctions that your organisation currently manifests can be understood relationally.

It might sound abstract to understand a dysfunction in terms of relationships between aspects, but it really helps. You are much less likely to point the finger at some person or group if you can point to a relationship between things you can easily depersonalise. Working at the problem from both ends and from the middle, your solution options are doubled and tripled.

For example, you might follow best practices in the conduct of your delivery-related work and have what you believe to be a world-class system for coordinating that work. But best-practice and world-class or otherwise, if their relationship is not healthy and productive, that’s a real problem. What is the nature of that conflict? That is worth digging into. More than that, it’s worth getting multiple perspectives on it – from those who do the work, those who administer and/or champion the coordination system, and others impacted by the problem. If they can articulate a shared understanding what “good” feels like for that relationship and identify what seems to be getting in the way of that, testable solution ideas can’t be far behind.

The model has enough aspects to be interesting – six “systems” organised into three overlapping “spaces” – and not so many that the model overwhelms, especially if it is taken one space and three systems at a time. Its richness is in its relationships: each system or space has at least two, and that’s considering only one level of organisation. Relationships between scales of organisation (and in practice there are typically many more of those than the org chart shows) are multi-stranded, and untangling those is key to understanding scale-related dysfunction. Understand the problem and you’re already making real progress. Can the same truly be said about the rollout alternative?

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] ‘Right to Left’ works for Scrum too (July 2018)

Previously: OODA loop takeaways | Next: Wholehearted Leadership in a Complex World

Agendashift roundup, April 2025

Posted on by Mike Burrows
Mike's new book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation


Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Spring 2025 cohort begins today*, so I’m getting this out early. In this edition: Wholehearted is released in print and on Kindle; Podcasts, meetups, webinars, and Office hours / AMA; Further ahead

Wholehearted is released in print and on Kindle

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):

Then I found my stride:

Beginning with “Trust-building leadership” (chapter 3) I have a series on leadership planned; expect the first of those early May.

To the book itself, 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.

Podcasts, meetups, webinars, and Office hours / AMA

Two podcast interviews were released this month:

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:

That’s it for April – bring on May!

*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.

OODA loop takeaways

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Previously: Engage with the organisation *as it actually is*

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

I’m old enough to have grown up with the original BBC Radio version of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, and this was one of my favourite scenes (one of the several that as teenagers we would recite at school):

MARVIN: I’ve just worked out an answer to the square root of minus one.

FORD: Go and get Zaphod.

MARVIN: It’s never been worked out before. It’s always been thought impossible.

FORD: Go and get –

MARVIN: I’m going. Pausing only to reconstruct the whole infrastructure of integral mathematics in his head, he went about his humble task. Never thinking to ask for reward, recognition, or even a moment’s ease from the terrible pain in all the diodes down his left side. “Fetch Beeblebrox,” they say, and forth he goes.

“Pausing only to reconstruct the whole infrastructure of integral mathematics in his head, he went about his humble task”. That line comes to me when I think about how I first responded to John Boyd’s OODA loop, which I introduce in Chapter 2 of Wholehearted, the chapter titled “Adaptive Strategising”:

OODA loop image by Patrick Edwin Moran, after John Boyd. CC-BY 3.0. Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

To understand my initial reaction, you need to know that before John Boyd became known as a military strategist, he was a fighter pilot. Looking at the Orient part of that picture, did he – mid combat, and before executing his next move – pause only to reconstruct the entire infrastructure of cultural traditions, genetic heritage, etc on which his performance was founded? Doing that faster than his adversary – “getting inside their OODA loop”, as the popular takeaway goes – is that what was key to his survival?

To some extent perhaps, but that is, I think, to miss the point. Acting in the moment, a highly trained pilot draws on what they know. Flashes of insight may occur, but most of the learning comes afterwards, reflecting on what happened, integrating the experience and the new information that it generated. That’s a much longer loop than the moment-to-moment decision-making of combat.

There is no adversary whose OODA loop you need to get inside!

Mercifully (and I don’t say this lightly), most of us will never experience combat. Our situations are not even best understood as adversarial. There is no adversary whose OODA loop you need to get inside! But, and paraphrasing if not directly quoting Boyd himself, we do need to “develop our capacity for independent action”. We need somehow to stay in the game when the game itself may be changing, and that Orient box – the only one that connects to all the others – is crucial.

Boyd was right: it is important to bear in mind that the understanding and the intelligence on which our strategies depend are very much products of the past – of our “tradition” and “heritage”, if you like. For your organisation, how it thinks depends very much on the path it has travelled. Moreover, its current structure and its priorities speak to how it now understands the world and its challenges. And therein lies another challenge: let it not be forgotten that they are significant constraints on what new intelligence and insights it will be capable of gathering and generating.

Effective strategising must therefore be conscious of the fact that everything that it thinks it knows is not only very incomplete, it has passed through perceptual filters that are both narrow and path-dependent. You can’t escape that, but you can act accordingly. Not as catchy as the popular takeaway, but that, for me, is the one to remember.

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: Engage with the organisation *as it actually is*