About: Our mission: Wholehearted

As text:

Our mission: To help organisations grow in wholeheartedness

Continously renewing themselves from the inside:

• Engaging openly on all that would make them unwhole – their challenges, imbalances, and contradictions
• Inviting participation in every dimension of the strategy process – developing it, pursuing it, finding new opportunities for it
• Celebrating the initiative of those closest to the need and the opportunity

Where we’re coming from: Agendashift’s founders, partners, collaborators, supporters, and champions work at the exciting intersection of (Lean-Agile) Delivery, Strategy, and Organisation Development, are growing into that space, or see its potential for their organisations.

What sets us apart: a fundamentally outcome-oriented approach. Outcomes identified, articulated, and organised strategically through participation. Outcomes kept in the foreground, solutions following, emerging at the right time and the right scale from the people closest to the problem. Not for us the solution-driven rollout, a source of failure and dysfunction when applied in the context of cultural and other adaptive challenges.

The challenge that motivates us: We see too many organisations expose themselves to the familiar risks of the conventional approaches to change: mediocrity, disappointment, and (most damaging of all) disengagement. Ironically, they often exacerbate the very problems that they are called upon to solve; no wonder then that so many change initiatives fail. Isn’t it time we left those tired old ways behind?

Actionable at every level of organisation: Wholehearted is not just a dream. Whatever the level of organisation you operate at, there's plenty you can do to make it a reality. In yourself and in others you can develop the skills of the outcome-oriented strategy conversation. You can practice keeping outcomes in the foreground, creating both the space for impactful innovation and the sense of meaningful progress. You can learn to recognise the richness of opportunity that your organisation represents.

Find out more:

• Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy – self-paced training for “leaders in transforming organisations”, all who aspire to that role, and all those that support them
• Subscribe - join the Agendashift mailing list (1-3 updates per month)
• Slack – join our Slack community
• The books:
  • Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020) – see the section below for Wholehearted's origins and inspiration
  • Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2nd edition 2021) – the practitioner's guide

Inspiration

The original inspiration for our characteristically needs-based and outcome-oriented use of the word wholehearted is this short paragraph from a classic book, The Timeless Way of Building, by the renowned architect Christopher Alexander:

A thing is whole according to how free it is of inner contradictions. When it is at war with itself, and gives rise to forces which act to tear it down, it is unwhole. The more free it is of its own inner contradictions, the more whole and healthy and wholehearted it becomes.

The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander (1980, OUP USA)

On the surface at least, Alexander is writing about the design of buildings and the built environment. However, deeply struck by the metaphor and its application to organisation design, in my 2019 book Right to Left I wrote this:

I love the idea that as leaders and trusted advisers we can choose to be in the business of helping organisations to be more wholehearted ... (If) we improve our delivery processes by removing impediments to flow, then we improve our organisations by removing impediments to alignment.

I choose this! Do you?

Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile
Mike Burrows (2019, New Generation Publishing; audiobook 2020)

Mike Burrows, with Steven Mackenzie, Dragan Jojic, Karl Scotland, Teddy Zetterlund, Kjell Tore Guttormsen, and Andrea Chiou

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Copyright © 2015-2023 Agendashift Ltd (formerly Positive Incline Ltd). All rights reserved. The page Our mission: Wholehearted by Mike Burrows of Agendashift Ltd is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

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Related

• About Agendashift
  • Our mission: Wholehearted
  • Agendashift Assessments and Free 14-day trial
  • Events calendar – training and other events
  • Subscribe
• Leading with Outcomes from the Agendashift Academy (academy.agendashift.com):
  • Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
  • Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale
  • Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact
  • Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success
  • Leading with Outcomes: Authorised Facilitator and Trainer Programmes
• The books:
  • Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2nd edition 2021)
  • Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020)
• Agendashift as framework
  • Generative patterns
  • Core activities
  • Models, sources, and inspirations
• Resources
• The Agendashift blog (blog.agendashift.com)
  • Monthly roundups
  • Classic posts
• Agendashift communities on Slack and LinkedIn