Resources: Everywhere all at once: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, an accessible, situational, and complexity-aware presentation of the Viable System Model

This white paper describes the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, the organisational model at the heart of the Leading with Outcomes module Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale and its related assessment tool. Motivated initially by a desire to bring some deeper thinking on organisation to the Lean-Agile community but already showing the promise of wider application, it builds on a classic model from the systems community, Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model (VSM), which we introduce and use in a novel way.

In contrast to the more traditional diagnostic and rollout-driven approaches to organisation development (still paradoxically popular despite their poor track record), this elegant and accessible model is highly suited for use in the participatory, outcome-oriented, and complexity-aware way already associated with Agendashift and Leading with Outcomes.

We introduce the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation in stages. First, it is introduced as a simple model of three mutually-related spaces applicable at every organisational scale. Next, we engage with each space’s internal structure. Finally, we identify four key strands in the relationships between organisational scales. At each stage, imbalances in the relationships between model elements makes organisational dysfunctions easy to identify. Envisioning those relationships working at their healthy and productive best for everyone leads us (via obstacles and outcomes) to a testable organisational strategy, participants already motivated to find fitting solutions.

White paper contents

1. Introduction
2. At every scale
3. Between scales
4. Organising at human scale
5. Discussion
6. Related offerings
7. References
8. Acknowledgements

Request your 9-page white paper (PDF):

See also:

• Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale – the Leading with Outcomes module
• Global survey: Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, mini edition – try the 12-prompt mini assessment distilled from the full 35-prompt edition, available to authorised facilitators or via the above training

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