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)

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

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Copyright © 2015-2024 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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