Mike Burrows's Blog

In this edition: A personal note; Two keynote talks; Articles; Upcoming

To begin on a personal note, Sharon and I are immensely grateful for your kind donations in Florence’s memory. More than £1,500 has been raised for Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice, and the Lean Agile Brighton conference also raised a four-figure sum this month (exact amount to be announced) for the Make-A-Wish Foundation. On both counts, amazing! Thank you!

Two keynote talks

I’m sort of back to work now, mainly speaking engagements for the moment. We’ll be taking a holiday also – it will be the first time Sharon and I have been able to travel together since 2018. I’m not sure yet what 2026 will bring, but that’s ok, and I’m very open to ideas.

Just this month I have given my talk Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation four times now! It turns out to be very adaptable: twice this week (and next week at Øredev 2025) it took the form of a quick 30 or 40 minute talk. But earlier this week I had no trouble filling 90 minutes, and two weeks ago, nearly three hours! That last one was for a hybrid seminar at Hull University’s Centre for Systems Studies in association with the Operations Research Society, and it prompted plenty of thoughtful conversation.

Given my impending travels, I have already written my new keynote for Kanban India 2025, which takes place in early December. It’s called Thinking Organisationally about Process, and it puts the kanban of my first book, Kanban from the Inside, into the kind of organisational frame described by my fifth book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, with some of the glue provided by my middle book (and audiobook), Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile. If the clock starts with my best-known (not to mention career-changing) blog post, Introducing Kanban through its values, that’s a journey of nearly 13 years, but you can get the gist in some 45 minutes!

I mention these because if you run a meetup or conference, you might consider one or even both of these talks. For a fee, I do private events also, as I did only yesterday. Either way, I have availability from mid-December onwards.

Articles

I wrote two this month. Most recently, and prompted by that seminar in Hull and also by a panel session I did with Philippe Guenet and Jen Le Marinel for the International Coaching Federation (ICF):

Polarities, asymmetries, and why we do what we do

Before that:

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

With home life very much in transition, I’m honouring my remaining commitments for 2025 but deliberately keeping 2026 open. My public calendar now looks like this:

5-7 November, Malmö, Sweden:
Øredev 2025 30 November to 01 December, Pune, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) – Pune 5-6 December, Bengaluru, India:
Kanban India 2025

Blog-wise, that’s it for October, and with my travels, quite possibly November also. See you in December if not before!

[Published first on LinkedIn here]

On Friday last week, I led a nearly three-hour seminar (a recording will follow I’m told) by invitation of the Operations Research (OR) Society and Hull University’s Centre for System Studies. I based it on my keynote, Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation [1], which is in turn based on my fifth and most recent book, Wholehearted [2]. This time though, I added a preamble and an open discussion that owed more to my fourth book, Organizing Conversations [3], and just as I hoped, it had a profound effect on the seminar as a whole.

Some rough polarities…

Here is that preamble’s key slide:

Introducing those polarities (extremes, perhaps on a spectrum, perhaps interdependent, perhaps paradoxically so) in the form of rhetorical questions, it may seem that I’m trading in platitudes or false dichotomies, but there is a much more serious and practical point to be made. But first that more shallow treatment, where the “we” in question refers to practitioners of things systems-related:

Do we see it as our job to design better systems, or instead to engage with organisations as they are, and to help others do the same?Do we see ourselves as conducting research, analysis, or diagnosis, or instead as stimulating dialogue, inquiry, and generative conversations – solutions emerging from those?Are we trying to document a single, authoritative perspective, or instead to give voice to multiple, diverse, and perhaps conflicting perspectives?And following on from that last one, are we drawn to what can easily be formalised and perhaps visualised, or instead to actual experiences and their differences and ambiguities?Are we documenting the organisation as though frozen in time, or engaging with the experience of change – relationships and structures of various kinds continuously and emergently forming, dissolving, and re-forming out of what I referred to tongue-in-cheek as the “quantum foam of organisation”?Are we looking for problems to solve, or helping the organisation to meet its challenges well [4]?Are we designing solutions, or helping people and/or organisations to make meaningful progress?Clarifying that previous one, is our motivation instrumental (e.g. to achieve some efficiency or performance improvement) or to emancipatory, referring to human conditions, freedoms, etcAre we imposing perspectives and/or solutions (predetermined or otherwise) on people, or is the process not only invitational and participatory, but authentically so?Even after allowing a time of divergence, do we feel driven to converge on a limited number of key concepts, problems, and interventions, or are we about enabling progress on a broad front?

To that last point in particular, I had a couple of different things in mind. First and most obviously, there is, after Kaner [5], the classic diverge-converge pattern of facilitated decision making, with its central “groan zone” of maximum divergence. One of the reasons that Organizing Conversations took me two and half years to write – much to not only its own betterment but Wholehearted‘s too – is that editor Gervase Bushe took me to task whenever he thought I was promoting convergence unnecessarily. I ended up adding a whole chapter on calibration, making explicit the range of choices between convergence and divergence the host or facilitator has in the design and conduct of participatory experiences. That line of thinking carries over into Wholehearted, making its treatment of the Viable System Model decidely non-traditional both philosophically and practically.

Talking of philosophy, the second issue I had fresh in mind was prompted by my recent reading of John Mingers, Systems Thinking, Critical Realism and Philosophy [6]. The critical realism aspect of this book was fascinating, but I wish that in its treatment of systems thinking, it had been more critical! I did a double take when he went straight from the existence, study, and hypothesising of the (real) causal mechanisms that shape the (actual) events and non-events that we are able to observe, to the apparent necessity of systems thinkers to draw boundaries around things at the earliest possible opportunity. In such a book, and especially given the book’s own discussions about the significant difficulties of boundary identification, this illogical and unquestioned non-sequitur was surprising, to put it mildly.

And their asymmetries (or one asymmetry in particular)

One way I could weasel out of false dichotomy mode would be to steal a trick from the Agile manifesto: While we value the things on the left, we value the things on the right more. Not to comment on the Agile Manifesto but its derivatives, its “this over that” style has been done to death already, and it’s too easy to fall not only into cliché but platitude that way.

The issue and the asymmetry goes as follows. On the one hand, doing the things on the right gives the things on the left (assuming you need to do them at all) more material to work with. That may seem like harder work, but it increases your chances of hitting on something important, and if you really must converge on a smaller set of things to focus on, that’s easily done. On the other hand, doing the things on the left may exclude important possibilities in ways that aren’t nearly so easily fixed later in the process. When the damage is done, it’s done.

For example:

A “design better systems” framing may – even if unintentionally – seem to exclude more evolutionary approaches from the outsetResearch, analysis, and diagnosis often serve to delay conversations that could easily happen very much closer to the start of the process, and when they do happen, they’re now about what that work has produced. The reverse is not true; dialogue does not have to time-consuming.A single, authoritative, and easily formalised perspective (a process diagram, for example) glosses over difference, and once again, it shifts the focus from actual experience to model, from territory to map.A frozen-in-time model of the organisation fails to capture what is gained and lost in the process of change (self-organised or otherwise), a key consideration if the organisation in question aspires to adaptability. There is also a real issue of scalability; in his writings on the Viable System Model, for example, Stafford Beer himself warns that there may be (and this is not his word but his emphasis too) thousands of things to analyse, and is it then even remotely possible to keep up in the presence of even modest amounts of flux?Framings of problem solving and solution implementation are by definition unhelpful if the challenge is in any sense adaptive – i.e. one with a propensity to change itself and/or us in the process of our engaging with it, which covers many if not most challenges not only in the social sphere but in product development also. Conversely, “meeting our challenges well” has a generative quality, and may help to inspire even where technical solutions are available. And what is our job if it is not to help people “make meaningful progress”? (To be fair that’s a whole topic in itself, but have a play with that framing, one long known to work well in the product sphere [7])With regard to instrumental vs emancipatory (if I can put it like that), history shows that the two can often go hand in hand. But let’s not leave the human dimension looking like an afterthought – once the damage is done, it’s hard to recoverOn the imposed vs invitational / participatory axis, are we using well-intentioned ends to justify inappropriate or inauthentic means? How long until so-called participants see through the contradiction?Coherent by construction

If by this point you’re feeling uncomfortable, perhaps you’re thinking that a push to the things on the right just turns everything into an undifferentiated mess. Not so! With the generative patterns (see figure below) of Organizing Conversations (and before that, Agendashift [8] and the Agendashift Academy’s Leading with Outcomes leadership development programme [9]), the process is best understood as one of exploring a multi-dimensional space of possibility. With step representing a change of direction/dimension, the conversational threads that describe experiences, concepts, and new ideas get carried over, dropped, or picked up again naturally without the need for any forced convergence. At the end of the process, everything that has been produced is easily traceable back to its origins. Not random ideas then, but an organisational strategy that is coherent by construction, anchored in reality (I’ll say in passing that this happens to be the most rigorous part of the process), and yet full of possibility.

What it means to be a practitioner (or to choose one)

If your discomfort remains, I hear you. Returning to that first slide, my aim here was not to condemn the things on the left and their respective practices; in their rightful places, they’re all useful – essential even. But if you consider yourself a practitioner, do yourself a favour: see how long you can postpone them, and push yourself to keep working on that.

And yes, you’re constrained by the expectations of your engagement, so let’s address that elephant too. To those on the buy side looking to engage a practitioner of some kind, think seriously about your organisation “meeting its challenges well” and “making meaningful progress”. Then reflect on what it would feel like for both of those to be sustained over time and into the future – a future not only of uncertainty and challenge but of possibility too. What kind of help and what kind of engagement do you then need? This may be your opportunity to turn a tactical choice into a more strategic one.

Acknowledgements and references

Thank you to Matt Lloyd PLY, Gemma Smith, Roberto Palacios-Rodriguez, and Mandy Stirling of The OR Society for Friday’s seminar invitation, and to Kert D. Peterson, CST, AKT for comments on earlier drafts of this article. Some of this ground was also covered in a panel session earlier last week with Philippe Guenet and Jen Le Marinel at the invitation of Kirsty Knowles, PCC, Senior Prac. and Jessi Dent of the International Coaching Federation (UK ICF). Recordings of both events are due to be published, and I’ll add them to the our media page once they’re available.

[1] Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (agendashift.com/keynotes)

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

[3] Mike Burrows, Organizing Conversations: Preparing groups to take on adaptive challenges (2024, BMI Series in Dialogic Organization Development)

[4] Nora Bateson, Combining (2023, Triarchy Press)

[5] Kaner, Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making (3rd edition, 2014, Jossey-Bass Business & Management). The 1st edition was published in 1996.

[6] John Mingers, Systems Thinking, Critical Realism and Philosophy: A Confluence of Ideas (2014, Routledge Critical Realism)

[7] Bob Moesta & Greg Engle, Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress (2020)

[8] Mike Burrows, Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2019)

[9] Leading with Outcomes (academy.agendashift.com)

[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)

I wasn’t sure if I would produce a roundup this month, but given the overwhelming response to my personal update last week, I had to! I did not feel able last week to respond individually to each of the many messages received, but let me take the opportunity now to say that they were all very much appreciated.

Some have asked if they could make a donation in Florence’s memory. To the benefit of Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice, there is a page set up for that purpose:

Florence Ann Burrows

They do great work and I can’t speak highly enough of them, but for something less local, you might also consider the Make-A-Wish Foundation (UK) or its equivalent in your country.

Work-wise, and in clarification to last week’s message, the online and Copenhagen-based trainings are off (leaving a couple of days free pre-Øredev in Copenhagen/Malmö if you have ideas about those), but the two India-based trainings remain very much on. This is what my events calendar looks like now:

5-7 November, Malmö, Sweden:
Øredev 2025 30 November to 01 December, Pune, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) – Pune 3-4 December, Bengaluru, India:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Bengaluru 5-6 December, Bengaluru, India:
Kanban India 2025

I can’t honestly say when I’ll add further public trainings, so you may want to give serious consideration to joining me in Pune or Bengaluru for TTT/F or LIKE (respectively). Even with travel from outside of India, they look pretty cost-effective, and there’s the conference too. You wouldn’t be the first to make that choice!

Under the current circumstances, there are no new posts or videos; check out the media page and recent roundups for pointers to what’s out there. There is some interesting activity happening behind the scenes in relation to the recent book, and if that matures, I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, there is the book itself of course:

Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (2025)

Best regards,
Mike
agendashift.com/mike

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The time has come for me to share the sad but not entirely unexpected news that our daughter Florence passed away at Bluebell Wood Children’s Hospice a week ago today. Although it was indeed a very difficult summer, the combined efforts of Sheffield Children’s Hospital and the Make-A-Wish Foundation enabled us to enjoy a very special family weekend away together last month, and the two-week period we spent at the hospice was a peaceful and precious time for which we will always be grateful.

Work will take a back seat for the next few weeks, and we will be travelling in November. Accordingly, I am cancelling the online and Copenhagen LIKE trainings (though still attending Øredev), and the extent of my December trip to India is under review. Please accept my sincere apologies for any inconvenience; refunds for the two LIKE trainings will be issued this week.

Mike

Following the travails reported in last month’s abbreviated roundup and my mid-month update with better news, I should say that things are stable enough at home now. Despite another step change in Florence’s care needs, I (with Sharon’s full support) remain fully committed to my published autumn schedule below, the first event of which takes place next week.

Speaking engagements aside, let me point out that the Autumn LIKE cohort begins September 30th – just four weeks on Tuesday! The in-person version in Copenhagen/Malmö takes place on November 3rd and 4th, and there are two different trainings planned for two different cities in India in December.

3-4 September, Milton Keynes, UK:
SysPrac25 11 September, online, 18:15 BST, 19:15 CEST, 1.15pm EDT:
Agile Northants: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation with Mike Burrows 30 September to 18 November, online, cohort-based – 8 weekly sessions, 2 hours each:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Autumn 2025 cohort 3-4 November, Copenhagen, Denmark:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Copenhagen 5-7 November, Malmö, Sweden:
Øredev 2025 30 November to 01 December, Pune, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) – Pune 3-4 December, Bengaluru, India:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Bengaluru 5-6 December, Bengaluru, India:
Kanban India 2025

In lieu of new content, I leave you with a selection of recent videos:

16 July 2025, video:
Short (09:52): Verbing the nouns of business agility
linkedin.com09 July 2025, video:
Short (07:28): White paper: Everywhere all at once
linkedin.com05 July 2025, video:
Short (06:18): Engage with the organisation *as it actually is*
linkedin.com03 July 2025, video:
Short (05:52): Wholehearted, backwards
linkedin.com27 May 2025, video, webinar:
Webinar: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation
Blackmetric #BAcommunity webinars05 May 2025, video, podcast:
Wholehearted Leadership in a Complex World
Rohit Gautam interviews Mike Burrows for the Curiosulus Chronicles podcast20 April 2025, video, podcast:
Viable Systems Model: Deliberately Adaptive Organizations
Laksh Raghavan interviews Mike Burrows for the Cyb3rSyn Labs Podcast08 April 2025, podcast (video, audio):
Beyond Structures: Building Deliberately Adaptive Organisations with Mike Burrows
Mike Jones interviews Mike Burrows for the Strategy Meets Reality Podcast

See the media page for more.

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I mentioned in an abbreviated July roundup that Sharon and I had already spend a couple of weeks with our daughter at Sheffield Children’s Hospital, with few more days still to go. Thank you to all who reached out! I’m pleased to report that Florence came home on Friday, three weeks to the day after admission. Now, and with the hospital’s full support, we have a previously-planned long weekend away coming up, facilitated by the wonderful Make-A-Wish Foundation who are kindly providing ambulance transport and some equipment. Things feel a lot less fraught than they did, but I don’t expect to make much progress on anything work-related before mid next week at the earliest. And that’s ok!

Meanwhile:

Another 5-star review for WholeheartedTraining starts up again at the end of SeptemberAlso a busy conference seasonAnother 5-star review for Wholehearted

This from Jasenka Rapajic:

Finally, a book that brings the experiential reality of tech and business to the forefront of leadership thinking. Wholehearted highlights the critical role of interdependencies between people, processes, and technology – key drivers of organisational outcomes often overlooked by mainstream leadership when faced with complexity.

What sets this book apart is Mike’s ability to expose the limitations of generic organisational models – and the technologies that support them – which fail to reflect the real-life complexity of specific organisations. It shows how such models often compress rich, lived experiences into narrow frameworks, stripping away their relevance and effectiveness.

This is a rare and valuable insight into the heart of business – one that supports the creation of adaptive organisations and leadership practices. It provides a practical foundation for fostering innovation that is aligned with the actual needs of the organisation.

The book doesn’t just address surface-level symptoms of dysfunction; it guides the reader toward understanding and resolving deeper, systemic issues. In doing so, it calls for a more sustainable and humane approach to business – especially relevant in the digital age, where adaptation to real-world complexity, service delivery, and tech support are becoming inseparably linked.

You’ll find Jasenka’s review on Amazon here. You can find Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (April 2025) in 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. Enjoy! Be like Jasenka! Leave a review!

Training starts up again at the end of September

Online, Copenhagen, Pune, and Bengaluru:

30 September to 18 November, online, cohort-based – 8 weekly sessions, 2 hours each:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Autumn 2025 cohort 3-4 November, Copenhagen, Denmark:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Copenhagen 30 November to 01 December, Pune, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) – Pune 3-4 December, Bengaluru, India:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Bengaluru

Book-wise, LIKE (online, Copenhagen, and Bengaluru) corresponds to Wholehearted – i.e. it is a deep dive into the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation. TTT/F (Pune) corresponds to Agendashift and Organizing Conversations, focusing on participatory, generative, and outcome-oriented change.

For the online and Copenhagen training, ping me if you need a discount code. All the usual reasons (gov, educational, non-profit, etc) apply, and the more the merrier.

Also a busy conference season

Beginning in just three weeks:

3-4 September, Milton Keynes, UK:
SysPrac25 11 September, online, 18:15 BST, 19:15 CEST, 1.15pm EDT:
Agile Northants: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation with Mike Burrows 5-7 November, Malmö, Sweden:
Øredev 2025 5-6 December, Bengaluru, India:
Kanban India 2025

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Real life introduces big time! My wife and I have spent most of the past couple of weeks with our daughter at Sheffield Children’s Hospital, and we have a few more days to go yet. Consequently, for reasons both of opportunity and headspace, my output has been minimal of late. I did however manage this LinkedIn post today, and our media page includes at least one new video that I haven’t mentioned previously here. Most of the recent ones are of course Wholehearted-related.

The events calendar hasn’t changed much, but the autumn cohort beginning at the end of September seems not so far away now, and I’m keen to learn who’s interested in attending in Copenhagen/Malmö in November also. Here it is with all kinds of events together, speaking engagements included:

3-4 September, Milton Keynes, UK:
SysPrac25 11 September, online, 18:15 BST, 19:15 CEST, 1.15pm EDT:
Agile Northants: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation with Mike Burrows 30 September to 18 November, online, cohort-based – 8 weekly sessions, 2 hours each:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Autumn 2025 cohort 3-4 November, Copenhagen, Denmark:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Copenhagen 5-7 November, Malmö, Sweden:
Øredev 2025 30 November to 01 December, Pune, India:
Leading with Outcomes: Train-the-Trainer / Facilitator (TTT/F) – Pune 3-4 December, Bengaluru, India:
Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Bengaluru 5-6 December, Bengaluru, India:
Kanban India 2025

For the online and Europe-based training, ping me if you need a discount code. All the usual reasons (gov, educational, non-profit, etc) apply, and the more the merrier.

A post-Wholehearted version of my white paper, Everywhere all at once

As previewed in last month’s roundup and announced this month, there is now a new version of the white paper, Everywhere all at once. Watch the short video and download your copy of the paper here:

Everywhere all at once: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

As for the book, you can find Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (April 2025) in 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. Enjoy! Leave a review!

That’s all for now. Hoping that August will be considerably less fraught, but being the holidays for many, I expect that I’ll be keeping the next roundup light too. If you’ll be taking a break, enjoy!

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In 2023, I published two versions of my white paper Everywhere all at once. That was well before Wholehearted (2025), so it’s high time it was revised! Not having dared to look at it for quite a while, I was relieved to find that the old version had stood up pretty well; nevertheless, I have enjoyed realigning it with the book.

Over the summer (if not longer) I will be producing frequent short videos, so here’s a quick overview:

Content-wise, the video follows the white paper pretty closely, though in less depth:

A relational approachA model for every organisational scaleBetween scales: the space betweenOrganising at human scaleWhat lies beneath: ConstraintsNot your grandfather’s VSM / A model for the digital-age organisation

Grab the white paper itself at agendashift.com/everywhere. 

Whether you watch or read first, enjoy!

Cheers,
Mike

Three videos, 5 or 6 minutes each:

Agendashift roundup, June 2025 Wholehearted, backwards Engage with the organisation *as it actually is*

Enjoy! All published to LinkedIn, also on my YouTube channel. “Like and subscribe”, as they say!