Wholehearted
Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation
New ways to understand your organisation, and new ways to engage with its challenges. The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation is a fresh, ground-up reconstruction of the classic Viable System Model, approached humanely and with a 21st-century appreciation for complexity.
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About the Book
“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“At a time when many organisations are still wrestling with bureaucratic inertia and outdated processes, Wholehearted offers a pathway to more effective decision-making and leadership.”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.
Author
About the Author
Agendashift founder Mike Burrows is author of Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (2025)., Organizing Conversations (2024), Agendashift (2nd edition 2021), Right to Left (2019, audiobook 2020), and the Lean-Agile classic Kanban from the Inside (2014), He has been the interim delivery manager for two UK government digital "exemplar" projects and consultant to public and private sector organisations at home and abroad. Prior to his consulting career, he was global development manager and Executive Director at a top tier investment bank, and IT Director for an energy risk management startup. A speaker at conferences around the world, he now works as a consultant and trainer.
Contents
Table of Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
-
Introduction
- Wholehearted
- The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation
- Engaging with complexity
- Ingredients
- Why read this book
- Overview
- Part I: Business Agility at Every Scale
-
Chapter 1. Delivering-Discovering-Renewing
- What must be there? What constrains it?
- Delivery, discovery, and renewal
- We need to talk about dysfunction
- The Great Rebalancing
- Process improvement and the pursuit of excellence
- As below, so above
- Review
- Engage, Invite, Celebrate
-
Chapter 2. Adaptive Strategising
- Prologue: Right to Left
- Six constraints on strategising
- Pursuing viability: The startup
- Scaling the strategy process
- Outside-in and inside-out
- Review
- Engage, Invite, Celebrate
-
Chapter 3. Mutual Trust Building
- The costs of mistrust
- Models of trust-building leadership
- Requisite variety
- One hundred years of organising
- Trust building’s systemic role
- The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation’s third space
- Model, map, and method: How they compare
- Review
- Engage, Invite, Celebrate
- Part II: Between Spaces, Scopes, and Scales
-
Chapter 4. The Space Between
- Navigating the formal organisation
- Dimensions of strategy
- Between scales
- Strand 1. Structuring
- Strand 2. Translating
- Strand 3. Reconciling
- Strand 4. Connecting
- How product organisations scale
- Review
- Engage, Invite, Celebrate
-
Chapter 5. Organising without Reorganising
- Your organisation in five networks
- Adaptive Space
- Teaming
- Dynamic Reteaming
- Thinking in circles
- The Deliberately Developmental Organisation
- Review
- Engage, Invite, Celebrate
-
Chapter 6. What Lies Beneath
- Moving into action
- Engaging with the model, engaging with the organisation
- Welcome to Constraints Club
- Affordance Mapping
- Affordance, constraint, and inquiry
- Enabling change, increasing possibility
- Engage, Invite, Celebrate
- Appendix A. Initial study findings
- Resources
- About the Author
- Contents
- Foreword
- Author’s preface
- Acknowledgements
-
Introduction
- The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation
- Engaging with complexity
- Overview
- Glossary
- Part I: Business Agility at Every Scale
-
Chapter 1. Delivering-Discovering-Renewing
- What must be there? What constrains it?
- Must they be there?
- Does it check out?
- We need to talk about dysfunction
- Process improvement and the pursuit of excellence
- Adaptive potential, liberated
- Review
- Reflection: Engage, Invite, Celebrate
- Imagine… You’re celebrating! You’re celebrating your next big breakthrough, celebrating with everyone who helped make it happen, reminding each other how you were stretched and why it was all worth it.
-
Chapter 2. Adaptive Strategising.
- Prologue: Right to Left
- Aside: If at this point you’re worrying that these different ways to limit or otherwise constrain work in progress (WIP) might be at odds with the idea of increasing possibility, that’s a valid concern, but context and scale matter greatly. For example, a product designer might well want to keep a large number of design questions under active consideration both to fuel the creative process and so as not to close down options before some overall sense of coherence has been achieved. On the other hand (and this may be true for the designer too), a delivery team that is drowning in excess WIP makes only slow impact externally relative to its effort. If you zoom out to take in its customers, can it really be said to be increasing possibility? The notion that the overburdened team has more choice is illusory. Most of its options are bad; far from improving its situation and those of its customers, they worsen them. What you are seeing is not choice, but entropy (and whatever that word conjures up for you, hold that thought for the next chapter).
- Six constraints on strategising
- Technical aside: In the canonical construction of the Viable System Model, a relationship is drawn between System 4 and the scope’s external environment, indicating an intelligence-gathering, sense-making, and influencing capability independent of System 1, whose view is wide enough to take in adjacent threats, opportunities, and possibilities, and whose influence has a shaping effect on demand. As I will argue in the next chapter, our reconstruction makes this relationship redundant in a way that it wasn’t in classic VSM. But with it or without it, there is no getting away from this issue: how the organisation is deployed operationally affects how well-informed its strategising will be. And as per the OODA loop figure, if it is to minimise the gaps between perception, intention, and reality, it cannot rely solely on occasional snapshots or some generalised sense of what the environment needs–on market research or executive gut instinct, for example. It must make proper use of timely feedback on and insight into the unfolding of the actions it has set in train, both internally and externally. At the heart of that real-world action is System 1.
- Pursuing viability: The startup
- Scaling the strategy process
- Outside-in and inside-out
- Review
- Reflection: Engage, Invite, Celebrate
-
Chapter 3. Mutual Trust Building
- The costs of mistrust
- Five models of trust-building leadership
- Requisite variety
- One hundred years of organising
- Trust building’s systemic role
- The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation’s third space
- Model, map, and method: How they compare
- Review
- Reflection: Engage, Invite, Celebrate
- Part II: Between Spaces, Scopes, and Scales
-
Chapter 4. The Space Between
- Delivering-Discovering-Renewing
- Adaptive Strategising.
- Mutual Trust Building
- How product organisations scale
- Review
- Reflection: Engage, Invite, Celebrate
-
Chapter 5. Organising without Reorganising
- Your organisation in five networks
- Adaptive Space
- Teaming
- Dynamic Reteaming
- Thinking in circles
- The Deliberately Developmental Organisation
- Review
- Reflection: Engage, Invite, Celebrate
-
Chapter 6. What Lies Beneath
- Moving into action
- Engaging with the model, engaging with the organisation
- Group exercises
- Affordance, constraint, and inquiry
- Enabling change, increasing possibility
- Engage, Invite, Celebrate
- Appendix A. Initial Study Findings
- Appendix B. Agile’s Great Rebalancing
- Resources
- About the author
- Index
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