Mike Burrows's Blog, page 2

Some quick mid-month updates

Some quick updates, all Wholehearted-related:

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

Leadership as inviting 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”):

30 September to 18 November, online, cohort-based – 8 weekly sessions, 2 hours each:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Autumn 2025 cohort

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

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:

Leadership as structuring Leadership as translating Leadership as reconciling Leadership as connecting Leadership as inviting Leadership as representing (this post)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…” 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:

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.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.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.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:

Leadership as structuring Leadership as translating Leadership as reconciling Leadership as connecting Leadership as inviting Leadership as representing Untangling the strands

Leadership as inviting

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:

Leadership as structuring Leadership as translating Leadership as reconciling Leadership as connecting Leadership as inviting (this post)Leadership and identityUntangling 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:

Leadership as structuring Leadership as translating Leadership as reconciling Leadership as connecting Leadership as inviting (this post)Leadership and identity

But while we’re here, some upcoming events:

16-19 June, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) 30 September to 11 November, online, cohort-based – 7 weekly sessions, 2 hours each:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Autumn 2025 cohort

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

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):

16-19 June, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) *

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:

30 September to 18 November, online, cohort-based – 8 weekly sessions, 2 hours each:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Autumn 2025 cohort *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:

Leadership as structuring Leadership as translating Leadership as reconciling Leadership as connecting

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

Leadership and participationLeadership and identity

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

Leadership as connecting

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:

Leadership as structuring Leadership as translating Leadership as reconciling Leadership as connecting (this post)

And to come:

Leadership and participationLeadership and identityLeadership 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:

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.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.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:

Thinking More Organisationally About Process (kanbanzone.com)

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

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

Leadership as structuring Leadership as translating Leadership as reconciling Leadership as connecting (this post)

To come:

Leadership and participationLeadership and identity

But while we’re here, some upcoming events:

16-19 June, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) 30 September to 11 November, online, cohort-based – 7 weekly sessions, 2 hours each:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Autumn 2025 cohort

Agendashift roundup, May 2025

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:

Keynote: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (agendashift.com)

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:

05 June, Nottingham, England:
Mike Burrows: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

Thank you Sergio Seelochan and Agile Nottingham for that one.

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

Leadership as structuring Leadership as translating Leadership as reconciling

To come:

Leadership as connectingLeadership and participationLeadership and identity

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

30 September to 11 November, online, cohort-based – 7 weekly sessions, 2 hours each:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Autumn 2025 cohort

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:

A new Leading with Outcomes Cheat Sheet And check out Leading with Outcomes: Foundation for a new and cheaper Foundation-only subscription

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

16-19 June, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) Top posts

Blog:

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

LinkedIn articles:

Leadership as structuring Mid-month update: Wholehearted Leadership in a Complex World and more Prescriptive vs descriptive Leadership as translating Leadership as reconciling

Leadership as reconciling

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:

Leadership as structuring Leadership as translating Leadership as reconciling (this post)

And to come:

Leadership as connectingLeadership and participationLeadership and identityLeadership 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:

Filter (or Ignore) – decide whether this information demands any kind of consideration or responseAdjust – make any immediate changes to plans or designs that may be warrantedShare – share with other team members as appropriateStrategise – develop options for a more considered response, if one is neededReconcile – compare notes with the team as a whole so that effort won’t be duplicated and any overall response will be coherentStructure – clarify expectations at some appropriate level of detailOrganise – 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:

Leadership as structuring Leadership as translating Leadership as reconciling (this post)

To come:

Leadership as connectingLeadership and participationLeadership and identity

But while we’re here, some upcoming events:

05 June, Nottingham, England:
Mike Burrows: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation 16-19 June, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) 30 September to 11 November, online, cohort-based – 7 weekly sessions, 2 hours each:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Autumn 2025 cohort

Leadership as translating

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:

27 May, 18:30 BST, 19:30 CEST, 1:30pm EDT | Blackmetric’s BA Community Webinar Series:
Webinar: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation 05 June, Nottingham, England:
Mike Burrows: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation 16-19 June, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) 30 September to 11 November, online, cohort-based – 7 weekly sessions, 2 hours each:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Autumn 2025 cohort

[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

Previously: Wholehearted Leadership in a Complex World

[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:

The organisation’s formal structure – i.e. how it is generally understood, which lines of accountability are most important, and so onHow 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:

The organisation’s commitments and their structure – plans, strategies, objectives, and so onThe 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!

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] 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

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

Leading with Outcomes Cheat Sheet v2.1

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve done a couple of iterations on the Leading with Outcomes cheat sheet. In addition to several cosmetic improvements, the latest includes a version of the graphic we use in our training for the IdOO (“I do”) pattern: Ideal, Obstacles Outcomes:

Grab yours here (it’s free!):

Leading with Outcomes Cheat Sheet

This resource concentrates on what OD folks might describe as the inquiry aspect [1] of Leading with Outcomes. I hope in due course to produce similar cheat sheets for its context-capturing aspects and its generative/ideation conversations, but for now, let’s see how this existing cheat sheet relates to the Leading with Outcomes curriculum.

Starting (as one should) with Leading with Outcomes: Foundation, the IdOO pattern shown in the cheat sheet’s centre is this module’s most important topic, dominating three out of four sessions and making its presence felt in the last one too. In exercise form, the pattern is most often used with the setup questions shown middle left; as a leadership routine, it allows plenty of room for personalisation. Foundation uses a somewhat simplified version of Obstacles Fast and Slow (bottom middle, formerly Good Obstacle, Bad Obstacle) and a much-simplified version of 15-minute FOTO (bottom right).

As workshop activities and coaching patterns, and with leadership takeaways, those simplified exercises are covered in more depth in the Inside-out Strategy module, whose structure is given by the now-familiar IdOO pattern. This module also covers the Challenge Mapping questions (bottom left), of which “Why is that important?” appears on its own in Foundation. We like to sneak it into the otherwise Clean Language-based coaching game 15-minute FOTO also – see [2] for a writeup.

Combined with the IdOO pattern, the Outside-in Strategy Review questions (top right) feature heavily in the Outside-in Strategy module. There is plenty in them to unpack!

Notice the section top centre of the cheat sheet, Starting points: generative images and challenge questions. That’s starting points plural, so where do you start? Now we are in workshop/intervention design territory, and that is covered in the fourth and final session of Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F). The next one takes place in a month’s time:

16-19 June, four 4-hour sessions online, afternoons UK time:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F)

Still unaccounted for module-wise is the Adaptive Organisation. Rather than focusing on the abovementioned patterns, routines, and exercises, this more advanced module assumes at least some passing exposure to them. Accordingly, in various packages of public and private training held both in person and online, the Adaptive Organisation and Foundation modules are often combined. With the spring cohort of LIKE already underway, your next scheduled opportunity comes in the autumn:

30 September to 11 November, online, cohort-based – 7 weekly sessions, 2 hours each:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Autumn 2025 cohort

If that seems too far away, there is the recent book Wholehearted for you to read and further whet your appetite, and also the self-paced training option, which you could begin today! For the latter, Foundation is the place to start, and a cheaper Foundation-only subscription is now available. You can upgrade this to cover the whole Leading with Outcomes in your own time. So what’s stopping you?

Further reading

[1] See my 2024 book Organizing Conversations for a distinction between inquiry and generative conversations that I didn’t make in the 2021 Agendashift 2nd edition. Both come under the umbrella of dialogic organisation development (dialogic OD).

[2] 15-minute FOTO’s cheat mode (October 2023)