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.
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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)
