About: Our mission: Wholehearted

As text:

Our mission: To help organisations grow in wholeheartedness

Continously renewing themselves from the inside:

• Engaging openly on all that would make them unwhole – their challenges, imbalances, and contradictions
• Inviting participation in every dimension of the strategy process – developing it, pursuing it, finding new opportunities for it
• Celebrating the initiative of those closest to the need and the opportunity

More succinctly: Engage, invite, celebrate! Learn more about this call to action for leaders:

• Engage, Invite, Celebrate: Leading “wholeheartedly” for innovation (blog.agendashift.com)
• Leading with Outcomes: Foundation (academy.agendashift.com)
• Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale (academy.agendashift.com)

And now the fifth book by Agendashift founder Mike Burrows:

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

Inspiration

The original inspiration for our use of the word wholehearted is this short paragraph from a classic book, The Timeless Way of Building, by the renowned architect Christopher Alexander:

A thing is whole according to how free it is of inner contradictions. When it is at war with itself, and gives rise to forces which act to tear it down, it is unwhole. The more free it is of its own inner contradictions, the more whole and healthy and wholehearted it becomes.

The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander (1980, OUP USA)

On the surface at least, Alexander is writing about the design of buildings and the built environment. However, deeply struck by the metaphor and its application to organisation design, in my 2019 book Right to Left I wrote this:

I love the idea that as leaders and trusted advisers we can choose to be in the business of helping organisations to be more wholehearted ... (If) we improve our delivery processes by removing impediments to flow, then we improve our organisations by removing impediments to alignment.

I choose this! Do you?

Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile
Mike Burrows (2019, New Generation Publishing; audiobook 2020)

This page last updated 2024-07-20. Mike Burrows, with Steven Mackenzie, Dragan Jojic, Karl Scotland, Teddy Zetterlund, Kjell Tore Guttormsen, and Andrea Chiou

About Agendashift™, the wholehearted, outcome-oriented engagement model

In the vanguard of a new category, the engagement model

You can’t upgrade your organisation like you’re upgrading your email server! Traditional change management’s track record on cultural and other adaptive challenges is so disastrous that it’s time to carve out a new category, the engagement model.

Engagement models have just three jobs to do:

1. To structure and support the work of those who would encourage innovation, change, and transformation
2. To help the organisation engage its staff meaningfully in change-related work
3. To keep the organisation’s parts engaged with each other as they change

If any of those jobs are yours too, you’d want an approach that encourages engagement, not destroys it!

Outcomes all the way down, outcome-oriented

Agendashift deals coherently, humanely, and strategically with outcomes ranging from the most aspirational of goals to the impact of the smallest experiment, and everything in between. With outcomes generated, organised, and developed through participation, agreement on outcomes is a natural part of the process; solutions follow as they should on a just-in-time basis.

Because we enjoy its broad range, we prefer not to define outcome too tightly. Here though are some helpful starting points:

• Someone’s need met (see also our definition of done and the first of our principles)
• A story’s happy ending
• The way the world changed for someone

Shared examples of outcomes such as these – both real and imagined – help to connect everyday work to mission, purpose, and strategy. That’s what makes outcomes so powerful!

We’re in the business of building wholehearted organisations

Our mission: Helping organisations grow in wholeheartedness – to become less at war with themselves, their obstacles, imbalances, and contradictions identified and owned, value and meaning created through authentic engagement.

More: About Agendashift™

Copyright © 2015-2025 Agendashift Ltd (formerly Positive Incline Ltd). All rights reserved. The page Our mission: Wholehearted by Mike Burrows of Agendashift Ltd is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

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