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.

To be presented at the following events:

• 08 May, Online, Business Agility Meetup, Berlin, 18:00 BST, 19:00 CEST, 1pm EDT:
  Meetup: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (meetup.com)
• 27 May, 18:30 BST, 19:30 CEST, 1:30pm EDT | Blackmetric's BA Community Webinar Series:
  Webinar: Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (blackmetric.com)

A video is expected to follow that second event. Related media meanwhile:

• Beyond Structures: Building Deliberately Adaptive Organisations with Mike Burrows (Strategy Meets Reality Podcast)

Download a PDF of the slides:

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

Wholehearted-related training

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

Links

• Where's the complexity in 'Wholehearted'? (linkedin.com)
• Verbing the nouns of business agility (blog.agendashift.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)
• Subscribe - for news 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)