Coming soon:
30 April to 11 June, online, cohort-based – 7 weekly sessions, 2 hours each
Mike Burrows
27 May, 18:30 BST, 19:30 CEST, 1:30pm EDT | Blackmetric's BA Community Webinar Series
Mike Burrows
More: Events calendar | Self-paced training | Webinars | Keynotes
Books: Wholehearted (2025) | Organizing Conversations (2024) | Agendashift (2nd edition 2021) | Right to Left (2019) | Kanban from the Inside (2014)
Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

Wholehearted is due for full release in print and on Kindle on April 16th. The Kindle edition is available for preorder from the following Amazon stores:
- amazon.co.uk (UK)
- amazon.com (US)
- amazon.de (DE)
And on these other e-book platforms:
Praise for Wholehearted:
“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“At a time when many organisations are still wrestling with bureaucratic inertia and outdated processes, Wholehearted offers a pathway to more effective decision-making and leadership.”
“A refreshingly candid exploration of what it takes to lead effectively in an environment defined by constant change”
“I can’t recommend Mike’s books enough, and this one is truly quite special”
This book will change two things for you: how you think about organisations, and how you engage with their challenges. At its heart is the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a fresh, complexity-aware, and ground-up reconstruction of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model. The diagnostic power of this classic organisational model remains unrivalled, and to it we bring a truly 21st century approach. We work with rather than against the grain of two key realities: that everyone's experience of the organisation is different, and that they see different possibilities emerging for it.
Not only does that turn the traditional change management paradigm on its head, it helps leaders better understand what it means for them to be “creating the conditions” – creating the conditions for performance, emergence, innovation, self-organisation, adaptability, resilience, and so on – everything we look for in the pursuit of business agility.
With reference to a number of complementary frameworks, including the OODA loop, the Cynefin framework, Lean, Agile, and multiple models of trust-building leadership, this book’s main focus is the digital-age (though not necessarily technology-centric) organisation, in which product development, customer-focused service delivery, and organisational renewal are becoming increasingly integrated. With that come issues of context and scale, for which process-based approaches are ill-equipped to meet.
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.
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About us
Agendashift™ is brought to you by Agendashift Ltd (formerly Positive Incline Ltd), UK-based specialists in leadership, engagement, strategy, and change. Founder Mike Burrows came to prominence in the Lean-Agile community as the originator of Kanban’s values model, out of which came his first book, Kanban from the Inside (2014). His more recent books Agendashift (2nd edition 2021) and Right to Left (2019) bring a resolutely needs-based and outcome-oriented perspective to change, transformation, and the Lean-Agile landscape as a whole, contributing meanwhile a number of popular tools, games, and other resources. He works as a consultant, facilitator, and trainer, and as a keynote speaker at events public and private around the world.
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