“A refreshingly candid exploration of what it takes to lead effectively in an environment defined by constant change”

“A must-read for anyone interested in transforming organisational design and strategy. It doesn’t just inform; it inspires and equips you to make a tangible difference in your organisational landscape.”

“At a time when many organisations are still wrestling with bureaucratic inertia and outdated processes, Wholehearted offers a pathway to more effective decision-making and leadership.”

How do leaders at all scales of organisation create the conditions for innovation, excellence, and performance? Initial clues are to be found in the Wholehearted organisation – one that recognises the leadership of those who find the right challenges to engage with, invite others into that process, and celebrate their successes.

Deeper answers come via the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a ground-up and complexity-aware reconstruction of Stafford Beer’s classic Viable System Model. Through its lens, and with reference to a number of complementary models, frameworks, and patterns, you will make new sense of your organisation’s myriad relationships – relationships not only between people, but between different organisational scopes, their different aspects, and different levels of scale. Where these relationships are insufficiently healthy and productive, they are drains on your organisation’s adaptive capacity – capacity you will want to liberate!

The need for organisations to be adaptive has never been greater. But because they ignore too many other dimensions, the process-centric approaches of the past couple of decades are proving themselves insufficient to the task. For the digital-age organisation in which product development, customer-focused service delivery, and participatory organisational renewal must become increasingly integrated, challenges of context and scale are never far away. Wholehearted tackles these head-on.

Former Executive Director and CTO Mike Burrows is the author of Organizing Conversations, Right to Left, Agendashift, and the Lean-Agile classic, Kanban from the Inside.