Mike Burrows's Blog, page 3

Wholehearted Leadership in a Complex World

[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:

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!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.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.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.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

Previously: OODA loop takeaways

[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

Agendashift roundup, April 2025

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):

Where is the complexity in ‘Wholehearted’? Systems, purpose, and perspective: Pointers to Wholehearted’s philosophical influences

Then I found my stride:

Wholehearted, backwards Engage with the organisation *as it actually is* OODA loop takeaways

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:

Beyond Structures: Building Deliberately Adaptive Organisations with Mike Burrows (Strategy Meets Reality Podcast, lbiconsulting.com) Viable Systems Model: Deliberately Adaptive Organizations (Cyb3rSyn Labs Podcast, cyb3rsyn.com)

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:

08 May, Online, Business Agility Meetup, Berlin, 18:00 BST, 19:00 CEST, 1pm EDT:
Meetup: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation 27 May, 18:30 BST, 19:30 CEST, 1:30pm EDT | Blackmetric’s BA Community Webinar Series:
Webinar: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

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:

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

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

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*

It gets complicated…

Think about which part of your organisation you identify with most strongly. Then the parts it relates to – peer units, subunits formal and informal, higher-level units, and so on – and the nature of those relationships – relationships of flow, service, accountability, belonging, strategic interest, and so on.

It gets complicated pretty quickly, doesn’t it! Now think about how you experience those relationships, and how that experience changes with each new priority, each new challenge, and with the passing of time and the deepening of your understanding. So not just complicated, but ever-changing.

Now begin to imagine how different colleagues new and old would answer those same questions. Especially as organisations get larger, no single person’s perspective can hope to describe it adequately. However you try to represent it, it’s at best a compromise, and a static one at that. Your organisation is not just complicated, it is by any useful definition of the word, complex, and we’ve hardly begun to identify all the relationships involved.

Beginning Wednesday 30th – just a week away now – the spring cohort of Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) will help you, with others, to make new sense of your organisation, and better understand its challenges and how to engage with them. At its heart is the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a descriptive, relational, and complexity-friendly model, a lens on your organisation and framework for organisational inquiry and generative change. It’s the same model that’s explored in my new book Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation and you’ll get a free copy of the e-book edition of that too. Join us!

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

Today and further ahead

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

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

Further ahead:

08 May, Online, Business Agility Meetup, Berlin, 18:00 BST, 19:00 CEST, 1pm EDT:
Meetup: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation 27 May, 18:30 BST, 19:30 CEST, 1:30pm EDT | Blackmetric’s BA Community Webinar Series:
Webinar: 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

The BLOG15 coupon code (etc) applies to TTT/F and the Autumn cohort also.

Engage with the organisation *as it actually is*

Previously: Wholehearted, backwards Next: OODA loop takeaways

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation hit Amazon earlier this month. You can find both print and Kindle editions on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de and other Amazon sites around the world. The e-book is also available on LeanPub, Kobo, Apple Books, and Google Play Books.

Previously: Wholehearted, backwards Next: OODA loop takeaways

Wholehearted, backwards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation hit Amazon last week. You can find both print and Kindle editions on amazon.co.uk, amazon.com, amazon.de and other Amazon sites around the world. The e-book is also available on LeanPub, Kobo, Apple Books, and Google Play Books.

___

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One week on, two weeks to go

One week on

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

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

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

A favour to ask

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

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

Two weeks to go

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

Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Spring 2025 cohort

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

Further ahead:

08 May, Online, Business Agility Meetup, Berlin, 18:00 BST, 19:00 CEST, 1pm EDT:
Meetup: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation 27 May, 18:30 BST, 19:30 CEST, 1:30pm EDT | Blackmetric’s BA Community Webinar Series:
Webinar: 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

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

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

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

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

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

Previously: Where is the complexity in ‘Wholehearted’? Next: OODA loop takeaways

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

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

In Chapter 1, I wrote this about them:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next: OODA loop takeaways

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where’s the complexity in ‘Wholehearted’?

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

Where is the complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, the VSM-inspired¹ model that’s central to my new book, Wholehearted? That might seem a strange question to ask, but complexity is an issue for all organisations, and if the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation is to be an effective lens on yours, the issue must be engaged with.

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

The value-creating work – the “doing” part, if you likeCoordinating – coordinating between participants (people or teams, depending on the level of scale you’re thinking about) and over shared resourcesOrganising – organising around shared commitments and in some desired directionThe business environment – users, customers, suppliers, competitors, and so on

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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