(Pre)released today – Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

Today, to coincide with the Kanban Edge conference in which I am participating as speaker and workshop host, I am thrilled to announce a prerelease of Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. If it shows as embargoed, ignore that!

I say “prerelease” – so far it’s only available digitally on LeanPub – but it’s done, including an awesome foreword by Benjamin Taylor which landed only this morning! For LeanPub fans, it will stay there indefinitely, and its publication in the coming weeks in print and Kindle formats won’t change that.

The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation made its first appearance in the final chapter of the Agendashift 2nd edition (2021). Although it drew some favourable comments at the time, I have to say that in Wholehearted, it has changed almost beyond recognition. You get to understand not only how organisations work (important if you want to understand their dysfunctions), you get to understand how they come to be what they are. There’s an idea there that can be taken further: how do organisations become what they are to each of their participants individually? If every experience of the organisation is different, how can we use that? Instead of glossing over those differences as the traditional modelling process must do, let’s recognise the vast untapped reserve of adaptive capability that they represent.

That has implications for leadership. What does it mean for leaders to “create the conditions”, in particular to create the conditions for everything we might associate with business agility? Too often, that question is answered either with platitudes or with the assumption that all that is needed is a better-designed process. The former is of little help of course; try to scale up that latter kind of thinking and what do you get? Bigger and more complicated processes. Ouch. With a better appreciation of 1) how organisations work at different scales, 2) the dynamics that operate between scales, and 3) ways to change the organisation at what I call “human scale”, leaders can do very much better than that, and that’s good news for everyone.

And so, despite the book being anchored in a classic model from the 70s and early 80s – Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model – its sensibilities are very much of this age. Not only the digital age (significant enough in itself, as readers will discover), but an age that appreciates complexity, conversation, and change very differently. This is not your grandfather’s VSM! To make it work, both how the model is presented and how it is applied must change. A natural enough process (with a ring of familiarity even, if you know Agendashift or Leading with Outcomes), but – and despite my deep respect for the model – radically different.

I believe I have demonstrated that between the systems and complexity worlds lies a fertile land, not the minefield it sometimes appears to be. Receive the book in that spirit! Here it is again: Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation.

Mike
March 6th, 2025

PS

Hopefully, it won’t have escaped your notice that this is the second of three announcements planned for this month. Tuesday’s announcement anticipated this one; the booking pages for the new cohort-based trainings actually contained spoilers in the shape of links to the book! And here they are again, together with the June TTT/F:

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

There are some early bird tickets available, so grab those while you can. For a 30% discount on block bookings of three or more places, ping me. For government, public health (eg NHS), and NGO employees, discounts are available from the first seat and increase to 50% for three or more.