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

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How do leaders up and down the 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 (2024), Agendashift (2nd edition 2021), Right to Left (2019, audiobook 2020), and the Lean-Agile classic, Kanban from the Inside (2014).

Wholehearted is published by Agendashift Press, copyright © 2025 Mike Burrows. Print edition ISBN 978-1-0684436-0-2.

Who it's for

(This section adapted from the Agendashift blog, blog.agendashift.com)

Wholehearted is for anyone who wishes that their organisation worked better – not only in process terms, but in terms of how different aspects of the organisation relate to each other. That includes how your part of the organisation relates to others, how it relates to its business environment, how aspects such as delivery and strategy relate to each other, how different scales of organisation relate to each other, and how leadership relates not only all of that but to many other aspects too. Role-wise, and especially in organisations large enough to have at least a few teams, those issues should concern leaders of many kinds and the practitioners – consultants, coaches, etc – who support them.

Behind it all, there is some very well-regarded and well-tested theory, most notably the Viable System Model (VSM). To managers and others who have worked inside organisations for long enough to participate meaningfully in their conversations, the way I approach this model will seem easy, obvious, and natural, because in its own way, it is! However, to practitioners and researchers already familiar with the model, I make clear that this is not your grandfather’s VSM. First, it starts from a very different place, one that much better suits the modern (e.g. digital, digitally-enabled, or customer-focussed) organisation. Second, and no less importantly, it takes care to embrace rather than gloss over the way different people’s experiences of the organisation differ, taking an approach by which you can much better tap into the organisation’s adaptive capacity. The book’s subtitle, Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, speaks to that and more.

As for the book’s main title, Wholehearted, that’s squarely on leaders, leadership, and the organisation’s expectations on both. Are they engaging with the right challenges? Are they inviting people into the process? Are they celebrating their successes? Those questions raise further questions, but be in no doubt that there is much at stake here. Ultimately, your organisation’s continued wholeness may depend on its answers.

Wholehearted-related training