Beyond Structures: Building Deliberately Adaptive Organisations with Mike Burrows

Most organisations focus on structure when they talk about change—but structure isn’t what makes an organisation adaptive.

In this opening episode, Mike Burrows joins host Mike Jones to explore what it really means to build deliberately adaptive organisations. Drawing on his work with Agendashift, Mike challenges the assumption that hierarchy or agile-by-the-book can handle complexity—and offers a practical, purpose-driven alternative.

We explore:

• Why designing for participation matters more than structure
• The trap of importing organisational models out of context
• Why clarity of purpose is key in uncertain environments
• What leaders need to unlearn to support real adaptability

If you’re wrestling with how to make your organisation more responsive, this conversation will help you rethink the basics.

Guest Bio:
Mike Burrows is the founder of Agendashift and author of Right to Left and Agendashift. He works globally with organisations building outcome-oriented, participatory approaches to change.

📘 Pre-order his new book Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation → https://amzn.eu/d/5ezZG1t

🎧 Keywords: strategy, organisational design, adaptability, Mike Burrows, deliberately adaptive organisations, Agendashift, leadership, systems thinking, complexity, participation, organisational change

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💬 Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:52 Mike Burrows: Background and Journey
• 2:29 Understanding Deliberately Adaptive Organisations
• 4:43 Viable Systems Model: A New Perspective
• 7:33 The Importance of Relationships in Organisations
• 11:06 Balancing Freedom and Constraints
• 14:29 Adaptive Strategising and Mutual Trust
• 19:10 Inside-Out vs. Outside-In
• 24:01 Organisational Silos and Disconnects
• 26:25 Policies and Lifecycle Thinking
• 28:10 Learning from the Past
• 32:45 The Role of Social Capital
• 34:55 Change Fatigue and System Capacity
• 41:18 Elevating Conversations
• 47:15 Experiential Learning and Leadership
• 49:47 Outro

Transcript

Mike Burrows (00:00)
If the organization is committed to more than it's capable of delivering, that is a problem. you need to start having decision makers who can unmake some of those commitments

we end up with these conflicting ideas of what progress looks like.

and our plans of one view, our tracking systems of another view, the people doing the work of another view, the customer has their own view.

And what might they do with the liberated

decision making and communication capacity

Mike Jones (00:51)
Welcome Mike. if you give me bit of background, a bit of context where you come from and what you've been up to

Mike Burrows (00:52)
Thank you, thank you.

I have a background in technology. I'm in most of my career in technology in various places in investment banking for 10 years. I was an executive director at a leading investment bank, CTO of a risk management startup in the energy space, delivery manager on a couple of the...

UK government digital services at the time they were doing their exemplar projects And consultant, trainer, author, all those kind of things. And I've kind of been a bit of a journey, I suppose, starting with things that perhaps a bit more emphasis on process. My first book, Kanban From the Inside, it's not all about process, starting in that of quite lean flavoured approach to process.

When I was teaching Kanban years ago, I was always encouraging people to think more organisationally, but didn't quite have the words to explain what I meant by that. It's been a 10, 15 year journey to actually put the flesh on the bones of that. The latest put really is the fruit of that.

Mike Jones (02:01)
I thoroughly enjoy reading it and I really want to dive into it because I can see so many synergies with system thinking, especially with viable systems model that you referenced in there. And it really pulls at the tension that we find or the challenges we find with organization that they're too static and they believe in predictability not set themselves to be adaptable. first of I'd love to...

Mike Burrows (02:11)
Yes, yes.

Mike Jones (02:29)
at this idea of deliberately adaptive organisation. So what does that mean and how can you apply it?

Mike Burrows (02:33)
Yes.

Organisations are full of, you know, are communication happening, networks of communication, reporting structures, decisions being made with operational decisions, strategic decisions and so on. And I just wish we used more of those signals as signs that perhaps we're not quite structured quite right. Perhaps some of the relationships that we have, when I say relationships, I mean that very, very broadly, not just between people, not just between teams.

but between things like different levels of scale in the organisation between teams and teams of teams, for example, even between different aspects of the organisation, like how it does its work, how it coordinates, how it organises, how it strategises, all the rest of it. And this is where the viable system model comes in. Those might seem like abstract things, but it's actually very easy to identify them really at any scale of organisation. And if those aren't healthy and productive, you're going to be...

leaving a lot on the table, you're going to be wasting a lot of your communication capacity and decision making capacity, dealing with the consequences of things being not set up as really you would like. So that is an important aspect of being deliberately adaptive. It's using those signs, using all those signals to help actually encourage the organisation to stimulate the organisation into adapting and not seeing the organisation design.

in terms of design with a capital D, where someone works out on paper what it should look like and then that's the implementation plan. And I guess the second aspect, and I think that's perhaps what's unique about this book in terms of how I treat VSM, viable system model, not as something that you design, that you draw out on paper, but something that starts with the experience of every participant in the organisation, or at least every participant that you can get in the room.

And it's those different experiences that are the source of the organization's adaptive capacity. You know, it's by them communicating, by them having ideas, by them working with each other, making decisions and so on. That's actually how the organization ultimately achieves anything, how it adapts to anything novel in the environment or opportunities that it might see and so on.

Mike Jones (04:44)
Okay, yeah, that's really interesting. know, viable systems model works on different systems. And I've seen you, you play that in your book and you actually, you call it delivering, discovering and renewing. And, know, what do you mean by that? And how do those interplay?

Mike Burrows (04:55)
Yes.

Yeah.

Well, that's the title of chapter one, delivering, discovering, renewing. And it's very subtly. signpost. don't. I explain that I'm approaching it differently, but I wait till chapter three before I make the real comparison between classic VSM and what I call a deliberately adaptive organization. I'm really, you know, respectful, faithful even to Stafford Beer all the way through. He was the creator of VSM. But I start from a slightly different place.

Mike Jones (05:21)
Yeah.

Mike Burrows (05:25)
And the place I start with is not that we're in a factory where we're looking at producing widgets or whatever it might be. And we identify what are the productive activities of the organization and start with them. And that scopes the exercise. Instead, something that's much more suited to a 21st century organization, a digital organization, a digitally enabled organization.

product-centric organisation, a customer-centric organisation where delivery, discovery and renewal go hand in hand. If you've worked in digital, you're doing those together all the time. You're not just delivering, you're using that delivery to help you better understand what you should be delivering. And at the same time, you are improving things, you're improving your capabilities, how you do things, your platform, whether that's in terms of process or in terms of technology.

So basically, if it makes an impact, makes a material impact on the environment or on the organisation itself, to me that is still work. And accounting makes a material impact on the outside world. HR makes a material impact on the outside world. So I don't start with what are the productive activities of the organisation? And by not starting there, you actually widen the conversation.

Mike Jones (06:23)
Yes.

Mike Burrows (06:40)
And these different groups can still talk in terms of delivery, they can talk in terms of coordination, they can talk in terms of organising, and you make the whole thing much more generative

I take you through a process that anyone can understand. It's actually not that difficult to do. To people who aren't practitioners, what I do seems easiest and obvious and natural. I get people to talk to each other and to agree.

agree certain things, but not to nail things down, but to agree where the challenges and the opportunities are. And so I'm sidestepping certain things that many practitioners would spend a lot of time on. And in the right circumstances, it's good that they do, but that's just not how I do it. And if you do want to get to that adaptive thing, the adaptive capacity, if you do want to explore complexity,

explore multiple perspectives, all those kind of things. You need a different set of tools for doing it. And that's what Whole Heartly does.

Mike Jones (07:33)
Okay. That's

good. And you brought some really interesting things there around actually the relationships between things. And I think that's when in organizations and you picked up earlier around design, people draw it and it really comes down to people draw boxes and it's like, this person reports to this. What they're not really getting at is the relationship between the different elements that really matter. How do you encourage leaders to start thinking about

Mike Burrows (07:41)
Yes.

Yes.

No. No. No.

Mike Jones (07:59)
the relationships rather than our sort of traditional view of boxes and sense silos.

Mike Burrows (08:04)
Yeah,

partly it's by a change of language. I'm asking the question, is this relationship healthy and productive? And if you take just two things, the work and its business environment, is that a healthy and productive environment? Are customers benefiting in the way that we want to? Are we understanding customer needs in the way that we want to? And are we delivering in...

batches appropriate and so on. It's kind of a lean way of looking at it. But know, all these different models can prompt you to ask different questions about the relationships between things. When you make it a four way relationship between the work, the customer, or the environment, how you coordinate, how you organize, then that's still only like half of the model or a third of the model. But it starts to get really interesting because the way you

frame your commitments, your plans and so on, the way you coordinate your work, the way you actually do your work, and the way the customer thinks about the work may actually not really work well together. it's one, one reason for customer focus isn't only that's because it's the right thing to do and get happy customers and all the rest of it. It's also because we end up with these conflicting ideas of what progress looks like.

and our plans of one view, our tracking systems of another view, the people doing the work of another view, the customer has their own view.

And by aligning on a more custom-oriented view of what progress looks like, you start to eliminate a whole set of problems. And you start to have those different aspects actually working more productively together, bringing more balance with each other. And so that's an example on just one part of the model.

And there are different ways, generically, of understanding how things can get out of balance and what you might do with them. And there are some specific examples. There are things that different bodies of knowledge bring to play as well.

Mike Jones (09:55)
You brought up a really good point there around, we call it divergence of thought. We want divergence of thought, not divergence of action, but you've got to that shared understanding of what we're looking at.

Mike Burrows (10:00)
Yes.

Yes.

Yes, well, you kind of want what you want the right amount of agreements, you know, and another imbalance, for example, is where the plans might be overly prescriptive and you're actually denying the opportunity for the people doing the work to bring their expertise to bear, at the very least, and potentially denying opportunities for real innovation. So that's a problem. On the other hand.

Mike Jones (10:12)
Yes.

Mmm.

Mike Burrows (10:30)
make it too ambiguous, then no one knows what they're going to get. So that becomes a problem. So this is why we need to collaborate, we need to cooperate, we need to sense make all these different things. So without necessarily specifying things, nailing them down, we can come to an accommodation that works, that's flexible.

Mike Jones (10:33)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Burrows (10:48)
where the customer feels part of that conversation and so on.

Mike Jones (10:51)
touching on an interesting point around, you know, I call it freedom of action. So leaders that, you know, when they're trying to execute strategy, they obsess over, you know, perfection, perfect Gantt chart.

or anything like that, then they remove all freedom. But then, like you said, you go the other way where actually there is no constraints and it can start fracturing the organisation because there's too much autonomy in that sense. how do you, know, advise leaders to balance that

Mike Burrows (11:06)
Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Yeah, mean, that is respecting the different expertises that your workforce has. And there are to be areas, many areas, where there are people that know more than you do about certain things. And how do you enable that to be brought to bear on the challenge? You hire smart people. You want them to think for themselves. But at the same time, there are certain results that you want to achieve.

The challenge, and it's one of the ultimate challenges of organisation, is for the strategy part of the organisation and the delivery part of the organisation. And I'm not saying there should even be different people, but there's certain conversations that happen around delivery, there are conversations that happen around strategy. And if they don't not just inform each other, but deeply understand each other, then people can make bad decisions. know, you have strategy decisions based that are too separate from...

things like capacity, capability, and so on, you're going to have operational decisions that are made ignorant of what the organization is really trying to do and where it hopes to get to and so on. So some of the organization's capacity has to be devoted into those two aspects of organization, understanding each other, appreciating each other. And partly that's a state of mind, partly that is actually making sure the right conversations happen.

So for example, at the beginning of a piece of work, there's a great technique taught to me by a friend of mine, Philippe Gouiné. For this piece of work, do we need to coordinate over it, collaborate over it, cooperate over it? Easy question. But to answer that question, you've actually got to come to some level of understanding about what's actually involved.

Mike Jones (12:57)
Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Burrows (13:05)
Only sufficient understanding to answer that question and then if there is more understanding that needs to be had that will be obvious from the conclusion that you come to. If the conclusion is well, you know, our coordination systems are enough. If we do the obvious things, it will come together at the right time. Everything is good. If it's a cooperate answer, well, we'll need to break this down a bit, decide who's responsible for what, decide how things are going to come together, how we're going to track those pieces before they come together, that kind of thing.

Or does it need to be a deeply collaborative process where something we don't yet understand is going to come out of our creative conversations, out of us working together and so on and so on. That's a sense-making conversation. And we need to make sure that the right people are in the room

Mike Jones (13:49)
Yeah, I really like that. You know, the simplicity of the questions, but actually it helps you sense-make and, you I suppose get that alignment in what you're trying to actually do. Because often we're in conversations where we think we're doing the same thing or, you know, are aligned, but we're massively misaligned and that creates friction.

Mike Burrows (13:59)
Yes, yes.

Yeah, yes, yeah, yes. It's

a really clever question because we need to have just enough shared understanding. But at beginning of the conversation, we don't know what even just enough means, you know, by approaching it laterally with the, you know, coordinate, cooperate, collaborate idea, you know, you're actually calibrating it as well.

Mike Jones (14:18)
Yeah, yeah,

Yeah,

I really like it. In any book you also talk about adaptive strategizing and mutual trust building. And I think that's that tension between the two, the bit about looking outside in the future, understanding about the strategy, but then the ability to not only communicate that, but balance that tension with operations and the primary activities of the organization.

Mike Burrows (14:37)
Yes.

Yes.

Yeah, yes, yes.

I mean, the mutual trust building contextualizing as well as the, you one of the activities inside that it's, it really is making sure that those two aspects really do understand each other and, and, you know, at every level of organization as well, you know, you know, these things sort of become big, more you think about them. But it's, there's some basic leadership practice there, you know, things like managing by walking around, for example, you know, actually noticing what's different.

Mike Jones (15:20)
Hmm.

Mike Burrows (15:23)
noticing, or less a conversation I haven't had for a while, noticing there's a stone I haven't turned over for a while, you know, and that's kind of, you know, quite sort of top-down way of looking at it, but it's also about how open am I to having things being brought to me as well? Do we have systems that alert me when things aren't right and so on? And not just making it all about the leader, you know, when something's not right, do people naturally, first of all, know about it, and second,

come together to do something about it. We need people to have the capacity to act and to bring other people in to act with them as appropriate. And as people start to act together...

Possibly you're even creating a new social structure as you do it. And this is why it's so important to bring things down to the level of the individual. that is where that... an individual and relationships between individuals, because that's where that adaptive capacity lies as much as it does in those big meetings on strategy.

Mike Jones (16:09)
Yes.

Yeah,

I really like that idea. And you often see it in organizations where the leader or the leadership starts to become all, you know, not even such a leadership, but the people that are doing strategy-ish and the organization become disconnected because they're not enabling that feedback loop we often see it, it's red, all the signals are red, but

Mike Burrows (16:37)
Yes.

Yes. Yes.

Mike Jones (16:45)
madly by the time it reaches the top it's green.

Mike Burrows (16:48)
Yeah, what

projects are called? It's not my idea that term, but I love that one. Watermelon projects, know, red on the inside, green on the outside.

Mike Jones (16:56)
Yeah, let's say it's

so true and I all the time. then also that you've got a question last time that leaders really actually went down several layers of the organisation to understand what's going on, the difference between what they believe to be true and what's actually happening in reality. Because that can only help them when they go back to think about strategy. What inputs have I got? What's like you said earlier about the resources capabilities to enable strategy?

Mike Burrows (17:09)
if

Yes.

Yes,

yes. If there is a magic cure for these things, often it is participation. There are no silver bullets, obviously. But the more that you can get people in the room that understand where we want to get to, understand what's possible, understand what we're currently committed to, the easier you make this.

And when organizations are really stuck, you need people who can actually do something about each of those aspects, you know, perhaps and make some commitments that we actually get in the way of what we really want to really want to achieve, for example. And yeah, you know, in how you know, opening a whole new can of worms as well, you know, as soon as you get people in the room to have these conversations, you are bringing different

outside intelligence into the conversation as well. And you get to the whole thing about how you're organized actually has a massive impact on how you actually understand the outside world. So the question that you started with about are we setting up a mismatch between what we're planning and what we're actually capable of? Well, also we may be setting up a mismatch with what we're trying to do and what the world actually wants.

and how the will respond and so on and so on. So these things we need to bring much more closely and we need to have much tighter feedback loops on these things, much more participation if we're going to avoid those kind of problems.

Mike Jones (18:33)
Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, I agree. when I look at strategy approaches, especially in the last you know, 40 years, I would argue a lot of them are only inside focused. they, and they often start with the aspiration first. Yeah. Which comes to your point about, you know, are we doing the right things? What's, you know, what's happening? What's the current situation in external environment? And

Mike Burrows (19:01)
Yes. Yes.

Mike Jones (19:10)
where do we then get value or do you get fit for the customers? How do you suggest that leaders actually turn that out so they get in a bit of an outside in perspective?

Mike Burrows (19:13)
Yes, yes.

Yeah, yeah, well,

I talk explicitly about inside out and outside in and it's not that one is better than the other. It's that, you know, they actually need to work together. There's a, it's perhaps too glib to call it a virtuous circle because if it was a virtuous circle, every organization would be a runaway success if they cracked it. And perhaps they're the ones that have cracked it. But we need to make sure that...

Mike Jones (19:26)
Mm.

Yeah, yeah.

Mike Burrows (19:41)
we bring them together properly. So inside out strategy, starting with the experience and capability of the organization. And as we improve those, we create opportunities that might be leveraged externally, exploited externally. And there's outside in strategy where we start outside the organization with our customers, our suppliers, our competitors and everything else, come into a view on how we want ourselves to be seen externally, how we want to be positioned.

with what products and services we're going to do that. And then working the implications inside. What does that mean for our products? What does that mean for the platforms from which we deliver those products? so actually joining the dots there is where the real power is, I think.

Mike Jones (20:23)
Yeah. I think again, it's creating that balance between the two. And you see, you can quite clearly see strategies that have been heavily weighted between one and the other. I would argue mainly from sort of just the inside perspective, because I've yet to see.

Mike Burrows (20:35)
Yes.

Yes, I just thought

a really funny example where they did both, but they weren't connected. So it was by one lens, it was a very marketing driven organisation, and the engineering would be terrified about what the marketing director had just sold. On the other hand, from a technology point of view, the technologies were forever perfect in the platform.

Mike Jones (20:45)
Alright, wow.

Yeah

Mm-hmm.

Mike Burrows (21:01)
only rarely

did they generate something that would get the outside world excited. it's that disconnect was really fascinating.

Mike Jones (21:11)
You said you worked a lot with in IT and I know your background with agile. You know, from my perspective, I could see that as an easy trap for technology companies to fall in because they've got engineers that are so focused on delivering the perfect platform. And then you've got people looking at what does the actual client want? And I could see that could be a real friction between the two.

Mike Burrows (21:27)
Yes.

Yes, yes, and you get it internally as well. In enterprise IT as well. You get people that see technology as their fiefdom. And it's not enough about helping the business serve their customers, serving the business who are then serving their customers and so on. I remember I actually left one, I did an internal move shortly after a new manager joined.

Mike Jones (21:45)
Mm.

Mike Burrows (21:59)
who told us how great it was that we're going to be doing Java and the internet. I'm showing how old I am now. you know, there was just, he gave a motivational speech where the business wasn't mentioned, you know, the customer wasn't mentioned. I just thought, and I am, I was then still a pretty hardcore techie, but even so, I could see that that was a problem. And, you know,

Mike Jones (22:05)
Hahaha.

alright, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mike Burrows (22:25)
If you want to give career advice to a technologist, to get as close to the business as you possibly can. That would have been my advice 10 years ago. think even now it might be even understand your customers, understand their needs, understand their struggles, understand what progress looks like for them. I've been very influenced by job stories and so on in the last few years. You start to understand the world in needs and struggles, then...

Mike Jones (22:32)
Yes.

Yeah.

Mike Burrows (22:53)
and progress, I'll get back to what I said before about progress. If we're progress in those kinds of terms, it changes how we think about the work, and it changes how we think about learning and all these other things.

Mike Jones (23:01)
Yeah.

But I know you just triggered something in me about, know, it's not just, tech guys or girls that are working on the program. It's other parts of the organization. Like you're thinking about, because we almost fracture ourselves and we've got HR, we've got, you know, our sustainability colleagues. We've got all these elements of the organization that are talking about their strategy.

Mike Burrows (23:24)
Yeah.

Yes.

Yes.

Mike Jones (23:30)
And I do question actually, are they close to the business or are they looking at from their worldview that is disconnected from the business?

Mike Burrows (23:38)
Yes, yes. I touch on that. I mean, that's a dysfunction, isn't it? You know, when any part of the organisation, you know, sees its strategy as more important than anything else, that is dysfunctional. I mean, I call it the tail wagging the dog, you where, you know, you see it where, for example, and this is not to diss accountants, but where accounting policies drive strategy, for example.

Mike Jones (23:42)
Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Mm.

Yes.

Mike Burrows (24:01)
and or HR of a particular view on the kind of people we should be recruiting, you know, and so on. In a way, is somewhat inevitable. Much as we would love to be for everything to be truly cross-functional. Not every team is going to have an HR specialist. It's not going to happen.

Mike Jones (24:19)
No, no, no.

Mike Burrows (24:20)
And, you know, we can't expect delivery teams to become experts on all the legal implications of the HR related decisions that they might take. know, there is actually a reason. There is some real complexity in the real world, which is what that drives why we actually do have HR departments and accounting departments. It's not wrong that they exist.

Mike Jones (24:31)
Yes.

Mm.

Mike Burrows (24:45)
it becomes a problem when their power detracts from whatever the mission of the organisation might be or that there is an unresolved tension between policies of different parts of the organisation.

Mike Jones (24:52)
Yeah.

Yeah. And you see this where decisions, and probably rightly so, you know, while they've taken them, but they're starting to impact the ability of people or changes the focus of people. So for example, I've seen where finance have come in and said, you know, you've got a reduced budget. So straight away, people aren't looking at it and going, well, what do I need to achieve? And then what choices do I need to make with this new constraint?

Mike Burrows (25:24)
Yes.

Mike Jones (25:24)
They're now

looking at it as, I've got this budget and that becomes their aim and that's not their aim. That's a constraint, but it's not communicated in that way.

Mike Burrows (25:28)
Yeah, yes, No,

and the trouble with those one size fits all policies as well is that they at best, they fit only one stage in the product life cycle. Investing in a new idea is a very different thing to running a going concern and making sure that it is adequately resourced to meet the demands that the marketplace is going to.

impinge on it in the coming few months? Do we have the right provision of IT infrastructure to support the load, for example? I had some real responsibility there in my UBS days on that question. Or a product that's just, we're keeping this on bare bones maintenance while the next generation comes through. Again, you're going to make some very different decisions about investment and spending.

Mike Jones (25:58)
Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Mike Burrows (26:25)
in those situations. So it's making sure that the policies actually fit the, you know, where you are in the life cycle. It's one of a few examples in the book where I think we neglect the time dimension to our cost at times. And understanding things like customer life cycles and product life cycles actually gives us some more nuance and appropriate

Mike Jones (26:40)
Yes.

Mike Burrows (26:48)
set of policies, whether it's about how we staff up our teams, how we do budgets or whatever.

Mike Jones (26:55)
Yeah, You see it as almost an act of trying to simplify things by setting standard policies, but actually you make it more complex. Yeah.

Mike Burrows (27:00)
Yes, Yeah, yes, yes, exactly,

exactly. And that's a general problem. We all do it. When I'm at the stage of inviting solution ideas, I always ask for diverse solution ideas. And one way to get make them more diverse, if you have an idea that involves everybody else conforming to your policy, jumping through your hoops,

Mike Jones (27:09)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Burrows (27:26)
come up with one where it's you making the first move, where it's you trying to understand what everybody else needs and so on. And that's really important. mean, teams given in the lack of better things to optimise for, teams, departments, HR departments, accounting departments, but I'm including those with technology teams.

other teams in the business, they will optimize for their own convenience and you can't blame them for doing it. It's the lack of an overriding goal, an overarching goal is perhaps the problem there. And if we can all point to some overriding goal that we are trying to get to together, then we will get to some more sensible policies probably.

Mike Jones (27:53)
Yes.

That's that idea of sort of coherence. And I think that's lost in time because I can look back to Clausewitz know, 200, almost 300 years ago, and he talks about this and about how successful armies are the ones that have a coherence in what they're trying to do and minimize divergence of action against the common aim. But I do wonder how a lot of the

Mike Burrows (28:10)
Yes.

Yes, yes.

Yes.

Mike Jones (28:35)
the wisdom from the past is sorely forgotten now.

Mike Burrows (28:39)
Yes, yes. It's funny, I've had this conversation with a few people. seems like I've had a lot of joy in the last few years, sort of mining the 1970s. Stafford Beer is one example. But it seems like it was like it seems from the 2020s, like it was like the heyday of systems and organisational development, organisational psychology.

Mike Jones (28:49)
Yes, yeah.

Mike Burrows (29:02)
you know, a whole set of thing. Complexity was just maybe a twinkle in people's eye, you know. And there were some interesting things going on.

Mike Jones (29:06)
Mm.

Mike Burrows (29:10)
And I wish more people took it more seriously. One problem that Agile has had is that it has grown like toxic in the absence of theory. I think Agile was a great thing. I think it still has something to offer. I'm not going to go into all of Agile's woes here. Most of which are self-inflicted, I have to say.

Mike Jones (29:29)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Burrows (29:32)
But the idea that you scale agile by making the process bigger and more complicated flies in the face of the kind of theory that we're talking about today. And when you understand that things happen at different scales and things happen naturally at each scale, but also you need to have healthy and productive relationships between levels of scale, you start to worry less about the

Mike Jones (29:41)
Yes.

you

Mike Burrows (29:58)
you know, the detail of the process, the number of boxes on the poster, know, the of everything. And you're changing that conversation. I think some actual theory of organisation would be helpful. And some of the organisational psychology stuff is really helpful as well. Some of the stuff I talked about, about how things cohere socially even, actually is very relevant when you're talking about adaptability, you're talking about business agility and so on.

Mike Jones (30:03)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes.

Mike Burrows (30:22)
Creating those... developing social capital in that way can be really important as well. And I give an example or two in the book.

Mike Jones (30:30)
Yeah,

I like your idea. We talk about social capital. think that's really, really good concept to think about.

Mike Burrows (30:37)
there are real examples where, you know, we did a, you know, we solved, using people from different teams. And to start with, we were rubbish at it, you know, I didn't know what this teaming thing was. But we cracked it and we solved that problem. And then months later, we solved a completely different problem, one that I hadn't sponsored. You know, it just happened, you know, and that's wonderful.

Mike Jones (30:44)
Mmm.

Yeah, yeah.

Mike Burrows (30:59)
And that wasn't designed on paper. Situations like that don't get designed on paper. They happen because we make them possible. And that's really what this is about. And what makes them possible is removing the things that make them impossible to a large extent.

Mike Jones (31:07)
Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

Well, what do you think those things are that, know, an organization put in place that make it impossible?

Mike Burrows (31:23)
Yeah, classically, it's if you start from a lean perspective, you know, it's it's overburdened, it's over commitment, all those kinds of things. You know, if you and with this cut times back also to the theory of, you know, back to the 1970s or even earlier, you know, the what's it called? The potential redundant potential of redundant command or redundant potential McCulloch. Yeah, need enough. I I put it in, you know, more.

Mike Jones (31:31)
Hmm.

yeah, yeah, Yes.

Mike Burrows (31:49)
more modern terms, you know, without enough, as I said before, without enough decision making capacity and communication capacity in the organisation, those emergent things, those self-organised things just aren't going to happen. People aren't going to notice that it's even necessary. And if they do notice, they're not going to bring in the other people that they need to get the thing to happen. all those lean things, I think, you know,

Arrogant of me, but in reframing lean, even in terms not of eliminating waste, but into liberating those capacities. And then you can start thinking about what's the second order effects of liberating those capacities. If my team actually has the capacity to manage itself properly and the capacity to innovate and to adapt, that's reducing the burden on the surrounding organisation as well. And what might they do with the liberated

Mike Jones (32:42)
Yes.

Mike Burrows (32:46)
decision making and communication capacity

Mike Jones (32:48)
Yeah, you know, that's really good. see this with, you know, at an individual level, humans only have so much cognitive capacity. It's only so much they can do. Organisational level, you know, the same is only so much capacity. And often when, when you look at what, what are the outputs that you're expecting from this team and then what the resources that you've given them to produce those outputs, there's, often a huge mismatch there.

Mike Burrows (32:56)
Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah, yes,

absolutely. mean, that's one of those between levels of scale things. And there's a whole lot of related dysfunctions around that. what you described, the Cybernetic's people call the resource bargain, not being struck appropriately.

Mike Jones (33:29)
Yes, yeah, yeah.

Mike Burrows (33:31)
But people give different names to that. But there's a whole load of similar things about means and ends, micromanaging, tampering, there's a whole load of dysfunctions, setting people up for failure by making them responsible for things at the next level of organization up, which they don't have the appropriate influence. Those are all very, very familiar examples.

Mike Jones (33:46)
Yes, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Burrows (33:51)
Often you realise that the problem doesn't lie where the pain is felt. That's important because you're going to fix it. It's no good blaming the system that's suffering for the suffering if the suffering is inflicted from somewhere else.

Mike Jones (34:06)
Yeah, looking at adaptive organizations, you talk about that burden, that load. And for an organization to be adapted, they need to be able to deliver what they need to deliver now, but also understand what they need to change and have the capacity to change. But we often overburden them. that means they're going to deliver what they need to do today, because that's what we incentivize them to do.

Mike Burrows (34:19)
Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

Yes,

yes, yes. Well, I think that's why organisations sometimes they either grind themselves into the ground or they end up in some kind of crisis because as things get worse, they actually take away their capacity to think about how they're getting out of their problems and they get into a vicious cycle in that case. Overburdening is a problem.

Mike Jones (34:30)
and they don't leave any capacity for the adaption.

Yeah

Mike Burrows (34:55)
pretty easy to deal with, just decide not to work on two things at once. I'm simplifying, obviously. Overcommitment's a bit harder, and especially when that comes from the top. If the top is telling you you need to work on three things at once, that's a problem. If the organization is committed to more than it's capable of delivering, that is a problem. And that's where you need to start having decision makers who can unmake some of those commitments if we're going to do it.

Mike Jones (34:59)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes.

Mike Burrows (35:21)
something I have seen happen, I have to say.

I'm not just talking hypothetically.

Mike Jones (35:25)
Yeah,

I totally agree. another issue or thing we keep hearing at the moment around flat organizations, because you talk about different levels of scale, and then you keep hearing about this bossless organization, flat organizations. What's your view on that?

Mike Burrows (35:33)
Yeah. Yes.

Yes.

I think as it was all of these things, it's a simplification. And as I describe, you know, the flatter the organization is, there's a sort of, it creates an opportunity for self-organization because self-organization is creating organizations. So that sounds like it's going away from the flat organization thing. And I think,

You know, I don't want to split hairs here. think the more important thing is actually to get good at it. And I described where, you know, the situation where I actually, I wasn't good at it, but we fixed it and we got a great result. You know, we didn't just get the great result we wanted. We got a second order of great result as well. you know, I think we can all think of examples where cross-functional, call them teams, you know, the process of bringing people together from across the organization doesn't work as well as we need them to do.

Mike Jones (36:14)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Burrows (36:29)
I tell some personal stories in the book, some of my experiences of the healthcare system, where you need different parts of the healthcare system working together on a family member's behalf. It wasn't about me, but a family member. And in the early days it failed too often. I don't think it's an accident that Amy Edmondson has done a lot of her work in the healthcare sector.

Mike Jones (36:52)
Yes.

Mike Burrows (36:53)
It's where we need it to work. People's lives depend on it working. I've seen it break down too often, but I've also seen it get much better over the years, which is very encouraging. back to the question, flat organisations create opportunities for teaming, but you've got to learn how to get good at it.

Mike Jones (36:57)
Yes.

Yes.

Mike Burrows (37:13)
And

when teams don't just form but disband, you've to make sure that you haven't lost all that they created in the disbanding, that the learning is still going somewhere and so on. So there's still some fundamentals that need, know, buzzwords are great, flat organisations are great buzzwords, but there are some fundamentals that still need to be attended to if you're going to be successful in the longer run.

Mike Jones (37:28)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you brought this out. It's all great having nice words that sound great, but I think it really needs to think about the, as you put it, the second and third order effects of a lot of things.

Mike Burrows (37:44)
Yes,

yeah, yeah, yeah. trying to describe things in as plain language as I can for the book's intended organization. I'm not speaking down to anybody at all. As Benjamin kindly said in his foreword, I respect the reader's intelligence, but I try not to use buzzwords. I try not to make unreasonable assumptions either.

Mike Jones (37:56)
No.

Mike Burrows (38:10)
take people through step by step. Hopefully none of the leaps are so big that people don't follow. There's a theoretical model behind it all, which is quite abstract and that's its power. But there's enough concrete example, I hope, for people to find it really practical as well. And practical advice not only on how organisations work, but on how actually to have the conversations about the organisations, which is how we actually move them on.

Mike Jones (38:33)
Yeah,

yeah. it's like the, saying, your ability to regulate the system is only good as the model you're using to regulate the system. And I think your book gives a good model in which to have these conversations about that are abstract enough to have these conversations, but not too abstract that it doesn't make sense. can't be tangibly put to a context.

Mike Burrows (38:40)
Yes.

Yes.

No,

Yes, yes. And we need leaders engaging on the right challenges. But that then begs the question, how do they identify what those challenges are? And by having a model that's not so complicated that you can't get your head around it, but is rich enough that you can apply it at every scale and between scales and has enough relationships in it to be interesting,

I think something that VSM has highlighted for 50 years now is that organizations need to be good models of their environments or at least reflect some understanding of their environment. Organizations do reflect some understanding of the environment. The question is whether that's a good one or not.

Mike Jones (39:24)
Mm.

Yeah,

Yeah, it's a point. I think we can't understate the importance of understanding the external environment, you know, how much that shapes us and, you know, we shape that. And your point around leaders, using it to identify the real challenges Often we hear reductive or easy to point at problems.

Mike Burrows (39:37)
Yeah.

Yes.

Mike Jones (39:54)
So if an organization got a problem, I roll my eyes because they go, we've got a culture problem, or we've got this problem.

Mike Burrows (39:58)
I actually point at

one specifically, that makes my eyes roll as well. I it's a great way of sounding clever, but actually not identifying the issue. It's a political answer. You hear it in politics, don't you? I mean, it is literally a political answer. It's a great way of actually not, in a way, not actually taking any responsibility for anything in a way. So you've got to get to issues that are concrete enough that

Mike Jones (40:03)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And they do it all the time. They just like, yeah, they throw it out there. Yeah.

Mike Burrows (40:26)
people can engage with them, not so concrete that you're denying the generative opportunity, the creative opportunity in exploring them as well.

Mike Jones (40:38)
Yeah. And it comes back to another point we mentioned around the relationship between the parts and the relationship with the external environment, relationship between different entities of the organization, the relationship between different scales, the organization, even to the point where we're looking at misattribution of performance measures and all those things. Now, there's stuff that we can tangibly get hands around.

Mike Burrows (40:56)
Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Mike Jones (41:01)
And it's good that we have these models, you what you presented in Wholehearted so that we can get leaders to move away from these tropes and actually get to serious conversations and identify real challenges that they could do, effectively do something about,

Mike Burrows (41:10)
Yes.

Yes.

it really elevates the conversation. mean, think it's very easy to, if you look at the systems, it's very easy to say, yeah, we could make an improvement to how we do the work. We could make an improvement to how we coordinate. We could make an improvement to how we organise, to how we strategise, to how we self-govern, how we contextualise, all the rest of it. But when you start to ask the question, are these things working well enough together? Is every relationship there healthy and productive?

I think that's a different level of conversation there, a different level of engagement. And you might be surprised at some of the answers that you get, because as I said, the pain may not be the source of the problem. And there's enough relationships there. I think you could pick on any one relationship and find something to improve. But the beauty of getting people together is that they will talk about what is most important. After exploring this for not for very long,

Mike Jones (41:46)
Mmm.

Mike Burrows (42:11)
they'll start to home in on to what are the issues that are most important and then you've got something to work with then. That could take just literally minutes. Now we're talking halfway through the first morning, we are already identifying some real issues about the organisation and the things that we want to do something about.

Mike Jones (42:20)
Mmm.

Mike Burrows (42:30)
many practitioners would find helpful and many leaders certainly would find helpful. think actually leaders will find this easier to absorb than practitioners because they're used to having conversations in their organisations and this is just helping to elevate those conversations. To practitioners I'm presenting a quite different kind of approach. It's a dialogic approach, a generative approach and one that's putting off what they want to start with and there's a tension there.

Mike Jones (42:37)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Mike Burrows (42:59)
But

from those kind of tensions, perhaps someone else will come up with something that for a particular set of circumstances works better than either approach does on their own. I think there's opportunity for innovation here. I don't think I've bottomed this out. I think between the systems world, the complexity world, and the organisation development world, there's something interesting here that I'm

Mike Jones (43:15)
No, it-

Mike Burrows (43:28)
digging into. And I think too often those different communities have mistrusted each other.

Mike Jones (43:32)
Yeah, I think, as a system thinker and also organisation psychologist, I see the mistrust between a lot of the groups and you see it now with the rise of complexity science and it becomes almost the driving of the part of the two, but we're more closely aligned than I think people will like to admit. And actually we benefit from coming together rather than trying to be isolationist.

Mike Burrows (43:51)
Yes, yes.

Yes, yes. I think my book's real demonstration of the possibility there. I'm not saying I've solved it all, but I think by putting these three things together something interesting has come out of it. It's a fresh perspective on something that many people treasure, I treasure. But when you get a fresh perspective on something that's exciting. if something new can come out of that beyond what I've done, then that's fantastic.

Mike Jones (44:00)
Mmm. Yeah.

Yes.

I don't think we're ever going to solve the problems. think, you know, as we start to bring these things together, there's always going to be something else. And that's the same with organizations. what I like around the terms, delivering, discovering, renewing, is the fact that it sees the organization as a living system. And, you know, as the external environment

Mike Burrows (44:28)
Yes. Yeah.

Yes.

Mike Jones (44:42)
evolves, we're still going to renew. So there's going to be things that are. Yeah.

Mike Burrows (44:42)
Yes. I call it verbing

the nouns of business agility. When we call it delivery, when we call it strategy, these things sound fixed. When we're talking about delivering, discovering renewal, doing the value creating work, when we're coordinating, when we're organizing, when we're strategizing, contextualizing, self-governing, it's already more active, more dynamic.

Mike Jones (44:49)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes.

Mike Burrows (45:08)
If you bring the multiple scales thing, which VSM has always had, that makes it more interesting. It's more interesting still when you realise there's like this... Just a silly analogy, but know in quantum theory, how things come in and out of existence. But when we're talking about relationships, those come in and out of existence as well. Some relationships are quite...

Mike Jones (45:28)
Yes.

Mike Burrows (45:35)
They don't last more than a few hours, but that doesn't mean they were meaningless or useless. And you never know when an informal gathering of people might result in something that gets a life of its own, actually becomes a viable system in its own right. And just that potential has to be interesting. That potential is what I want us to be tapping into.

Mike Jones (45:38)
Mmm.

Yes.

And I think that's great. But again, that gets enabled by the capacity of the team. if we're over burdening our teams, then we're removing all that, that spontaneous interaction that can, can start to self-organize something that can help the organization.

Mike Burrows (46:04)
Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

But let's not kid ourselves that we'll only fix that by implementing Lean or Agile. That's getting to the relationship between delivery and coordinating most of all. I it does affect some of the other systems as well, but that's where most of that action is. And if we're not getting those other relationships right as well, that's going to be costing us too.

Mike Jones (46:20)
No, yeah.

Yes.

that's really important that, leaders start to look at the relationship between those things rather than those things in isolation, even a broad subjects like culture, people look at culture and, strategy and the organisation, in isolation to the detriment of everything else

Mike Burrows (46:40)
Yes.

Mike Jones (46:48)
how do we step back and look at it as a whole.

Mike Burrows (46:50)
Yes, I think my hesitation there is, we look at these things separately. We also can work too much at the level of generalisation. You know, our culture is this, our culture is that, we'd it to be more of that. And I think you remove some of that danger if we start with the experience and the consequences of that experience, how we'd like things to be different and what some of the consequences of that would be

Mike Jones (46:59)
Mmm. Yes. Yes.

I think that's really key and a great point to sort of leave with. And we could carry this on. I knew this would be the problem. There's so much stuff I want to go into. So no doubt, I think we're going to have to have a part two probably later on down the line. just tell us about when your book's going to come out.

Mike Burrows (47:22)
you

Cool. I'll be up for that.

I pre-released it

on LeanPub in March. So it's available in EPUB and PDF formats on LeanPub. More convenient formats, April the 16th is the date we're going for. So it's already available for pre-order on Kindle and Kobo. It should be available for pre-order soon on Apple and Google.

Mike Jones (47:55)
Awesome, and final question to ask, if you could leave leaders with one key insight from Wholehearted, what would that be?

Mike Burrows (48:04)
I'm torn between thinking relationally and thinking in terms of experience. It's got to be between one or those, those are the two. Those are the two things that I think are different about the book. Perhaps the experiential thing is the more important of the two. think, know, VSM people naturally think in terms of relationships, or least good VSM people do. You know, the way not to think about VSM is thinking of it as a data flow diagram. You know, it's not, that's not what it is. Well, it kind of, it kind of is, but that's, that's, that's like, like, about 1%, % of its power.

Mike Jones (48:28)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike Burrows (48:34)
I think the experiential thing is the thing we've got to focus in on and it's to remember and I'm boring as some other people but it's everyone's experience is different. It was a shock to me when I recognised that as a manager. When I became senior enough that I intimidated people. I thought I one of the nice guys but I was senior enough that people were just intimidated by the title.

Mike Jones (48:44)
Yes.

Mike Burrows (48:57)
and it's very easy for two people to have very different impressions of a conversation, for example, when there's that kind of dynamic there.

Mike Jones (49:04)
I think that's fantastic. what I really like about that is that, we make assumptions, we don't really ask those questions to understand, what's implicitly held. And once we can make it explicit, we can see the difference between what I believe to be true and what they believe to be true. And we can see how we can close those gaps.

Mike Burrows (49:12)
Yes.

Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Mike Jones (49:24)
Mike, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on Strategy Meets Reality. For those that want to dive deeper, you can find Mike's work on Agenda Shift. I'll put the links in. You could check out his book Wholehearted when it gets released 16th of April. I'll put the links in there. And thank you for listening. I hope you found this episode valuable.

I look forward to

speaking to you again soon.

Mike Burrows (49:45)
It's been my pleasure too, thank you.