Videos, notes, and links for keynote presentations

• Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (this page)
• Between spaces, scopes, and scales: What the scaling frameworks don't tell you
• 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

More: Keynotes home

Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation is the model at the heart of Mike’s new book Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a fresh, complexity-aware, and ground-up reconstruction of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM). The diagnostic power of this classic organisational model remains unrivalled, and to it we bring a truly 21st century approach, making it a lens suitable for the digital-age organisation. 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. What’s at stake: how you think about organisations, and how you engage with their challenges.

As presented at the following events:

• 05 June, 18:30 BST, Nottingham
  Meetup: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (meetup.com)
• 03-04 September:
  SysPrac25 Conference (systemspractice.org)

Download a PDF of the slides:

• Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation 2025-04-10.pdf (dropbox.com)

An older version of this talk was recorded at the Blackmetrics #BAcommunity webinar:

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.

Links

• Wholehearted, backwards (linkedin.com)
• Engage with the organisation *as it actually is* (linkedin.com)
• Prescriptive vs descriptive (linkedin.com)
• OODA loop takeaways (blog.agendashift.com)
• Verbing the nouns of business agility (blog.agendashift.com)
• Agile’s Great Rebalancing: My next book’s take on the Agile manifesto (blog.agendashift.com)
• Where's the complexity in 'Wholehearted'? (linkedin.com)
• Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation (blog.agendashift.com)
• Your organisation in 5 networks (blog.agendashift.com)
• Leaders as keepers of context (blog.agendashift.com)
• What Lies Beneath (blog.agendashift.com)
• Everywhere all at once: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (white paper)

Contact

• Contact Mike Burrows, book a meeting
• Subscribe - for news on Wholehearted, Agendashift, and Leading with Outcomes
• Agendashift on Slack
• Agendashift on LinkedIn

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)