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)