Videos, notes, and links for keynote presentations

• Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation
• How organisations scale: What the scaling frameworks don’t tell you (this page)
• How to “create the conditions”: Engage, Invite, Celebrate
• In times of change, what scales better than process?
• To ‘Done’ and Beyond: Coordinating, Organising, Strategising, and Trust Building with Kanban
• Right to Left: Implementing Agile Strategies That Deliver Real Business Outcomes
• Agile Strategy Meetup: Meet Mike Burrows on Strategy
• Thinking organisationally about process

More: Keynotes home

How organisations scale: What the scaling frameworks don’t tell you

This talk was previously known as Between spaces, scopes, and scales. It is based on Chapter 4 of Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (2025).

Instead of scaling process – making it bigger and more complicated – what alternatives are there? Only by understanding the relationships between different scales of organisation can that question be answered properly. In other words, before trying to scale, it pays to have a credible theory of organisation.

Drawn from Chapter 4 of Wholehearted and the Agendashift Academy’s two-part module Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale, this talk integrates systems, complexity, and flow thinking (models such as the Viable System Model, the Cynefin framework, and Flight Levels) and shows how that with or without branded frameworks, many scale-related challenges reflect deep organisational imbalances that we can learn to recognise and address.

Video recorded at the Kanban New Zealand online meetup under its original title:

Download a PDF of the slides:

• November 2025 version, as given at Øredev 2025 (dropbox.com)
• April 2024 version, as shown in the video (dropbox.com)

Read the book

Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation was published in April 2025. “The Space Between” is the title of Chapter 4.

Related podcast interviews

• Wholehearted Leadership in a Complex World (youtube.com, Curiosulus Chronicles podcast)
• Beyond Structures: Building Deliberately Adaptive Organisations with Mike Burrows (lbiconsulting.com, Strategy Meets Reality Podcast)

Wholehearted-related training

Save 15% with coupon code KEYNOTE15! Applies to all the trainings described above - cohort-based and self-paced.

White paper:

• Everywhere all at once: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

Related articles

• Wholehearted, backwards (linkedin.com)
• Engage with the organisation *as it actually is* (linkedin.com)
• Verbing the nouns of business agility (blog.agendashift.com)
• OODA loop takeaways (blog.agendashift.com)
• Leaders as keepers of context (blog.agendashift.com)
• What Lies Beneath (blog.agendashift.com)
• Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation (blog.agendashift.com)
• Agile’s Great Rebalancing: My next book’s take on the Agile manifesto (blog.agendashift.com)
• Your organisation in 5 networks (blog.agendashift.com)

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• Subscribe - for news on Wholehearted, Agendashift, and Leading with Outcomes

References:

• Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (Agendashift Press, 2025)
• Brain of the Firm,
  Stafford Beer (John Wiley & Sons, 1972)
• The Heart of Enterprise,
  Stafford Beer (John Wiley & Sons, 1979)
• The Fractal Organization: Creating Sustainable Organizations with the Viable System Model,
  Patrick Hoverstadt (John Wiley & Sons, 2008)
• Rethinking Agile: Why Agile Teams Have Nothing To Do With Business Agility,
  Klaus Leopold (LEANability PRESS, 2018)
• Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow,
  Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais (IT Revolution Press, 2019)
• Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress,
  Bob Moesa & Greg Engle (Lioncrest Publishing, 2020)
• Cynefin - Weaving Sense-Making into the Fabric of Our World,
  Dave Snowden et al (Cognitive Edge Pte Ltd, 2020)