Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

Contents

Foreword

Author’s preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction
Wholehearted
The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation
Engaging with complexity
Ingredients
Why read this book
Overview

Part I: Business Agility at Every Scale

Chapter 1. Delivering-Discovering-Renewing
What must be there? What constrains it?
Delivery, discovery, and renewal
We need to talk about dysfunction
The Great Rebalancing
Process improvement and the pursuit of excellence
As below, so above
Review
Engage, Invite, Celebrate

Chapter 2. Adaptive Strategising
Prologue: Right to Left
Six constraints on strategising
Pursuing viability: The startup
Scaling the strategy process
Outside-in and inside-out
Review
Engage, Invite, Celebrate

Chapter 3. Mutual Trust Building
The costs of mistrust
Models of trust-building leadership
Requisite variety
One hundred years of organising
Trust building’s systemic role
The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation’s third space
Model, map, and method: How they compare
Review
Engage, Invite, Celebrate

Part II: Between Spaces, Scopes, and Scales

Chapter 4. The Space Between
Navigating the formal organisation
Dimensions of strategy
Between scales
Strand 1. Structuring
Strand 2. Translating
Strand 3. Reconciling
Strand 4. Connecting
How product organisations scale
Review
Engage, Invite, Celebrate

Chapter 5. Organising without Reorganising
Your organisation in five networks
Adaptive Space
Teaming
Dynamic Reteaming
Thinking in circles
The Deliberately Developmental Organisation
Review
Engage, Invite, Celebrate

Chapter 6. What Lies Beneath
Moving into action
Engaging with the model, engaging with the organisation
Welcome to Constraints Club
Affordance Mapping
Affordance, constraint, and inquiry
Enabling change, increasing possibility
Engage, Invite, Celebrate

Appendix A. Initial study findings

Resources

About the author

Index (print edition only)

Wholehearted is published by Agendashift Press, copyright © 2025 Mike Burrows.
Print edition ISBN 978-1-0684436-0-2.

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