In two senses, a wholehearted organisation is a high-intelligence organisation

[This post first published on LinkedIn here]

It’s about 6 months since Wholehearted [1] was published, and more than a year since the blog post Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation [2]. As I begin my return from my enforced break, I’d like briefly to explain why a wholehearted organisation is in two ways a high-intelligence organisation.

First, and to recap: engage, invite, celebrate. Up and down a wholehearted organisation – at every scale of organisation and covering its key business domains (a moving target) – there are people who are:

Engaging on the right challengesInviting people into that process, andCelebrating their accomplishments

Through its development of the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (a thoroughly modern take on the classic Viable System Model), the book expands on what those challenges might be and – more importantly – how they might be recognised, but here we are focusing not on that model but on those essential leadership behaviours.

Intelligence has multiple meanings, but two have particular relevance in an organisational context. There’s the organisation’s ability to capture information about itself and its business environment and get it to the right places. Then there’s the organisation’s ability to apply its knowledge and capabilities in the right ways and at the right times.

One person alone does not a wholehearted organisation make. One person – even the CEO – engaging, inviting, and celebrating creates neither the informational network nor the distributed capacity for decision making, innovation, and resilience that the organisation needs if it is to respond to challenges and opportunities on multiple and emerging fronts. The gamechanger is an organisational and appropriately complex response to that complexity – specifically to invite others to engage, invite, celebrate too, and with a density sufficient for the resulting scopes of activity to maintain relationships with its neighbours both at equivalent levels of scale and between scales. Through these relationships, information is diffused, strategies (plural) align, and actions (plentiful) coordinate.

To be clear, this is as much a lens on the organisation as it is an operating model, in fact more so. I’m not asking you to throw out what you have and roll out some pre-packaged Agile or Sociocratic framework, rather to see (and more powerfully, to help you to help others to see) where and how the organisation is failing to meet its challenges well, whether that’s indicative of some deep and longstanding organisational issue or simply a change of circumstances that needs some timely response. Either way, you probably won’t fix it on your own and indeed there may be no singular solution. But have enough people on a broad enough front 1) engaging with each challenge for the response to be rich enough and 2) engaging with each other sufficiently for that response to be coherent enough, then you maximise your chances to make meaningful progress.

How much is enough? How much is sufficient? It’s in the nature of complex (or if you prefer, adaptive) challenges that you won’t know until people engage actively with them. Responses will scope themselves soon enough!

[1] Mike Burrows, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (2025)

[2] Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation (July 2024)