Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale
Up and down the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation
Due Autumn 2022
What every leader needs to know about organising for adaptability at scale:
- Integrating strategy, delivery, and trust-building
- Between scales as well as across them
- Self-management, self-organisation, self-development
- Co-creation, sensemaking, and generativity
Module #4 of an integrated programme centred on leadership, strategy, and outcomes
With yearly and monthly Agendashift for Business and Agendashift for Individuals subscriptions, there's an affordable plan to suit you
Subscribe today“Very practical, highly participative – learning by doing. I can see so many opportunities to use the approach and tools in my work”
“You inspired people and got them talking – couldn’t have asked for more”
“Combines concepts I previously found challenging in a way that not only makes sense but is highly useful”
“I left motivated and confident enough to try these exercises the next day”
“Expertly and confidently helps you learn how to get from strategy to execution and back again”
“Intensely practical with solid theoretical foundations”
Overview (provisional)
Six chapters:
- Introduction: When three times three makes six
- Delivery, Discovery, and Renewal
- Adaptive Strategy
- Trust Building
- Between and across Scales: From Value Streams to Strategy Networks
- Self-Management, Self-Organisation, and Self-Development
Corresponding to chapters 2, 3, and 4, three commitments:
- Sensemaking: To make the best sense we can of every new challenge
- Co-creation: To keep finding better options, together
- Mutual trust-building: To build trust in every direction
And globally:
- Curiosity: To ask better questions
- Generativity: To create more ideas than we consume
- Consent: To celebrate the agency and ingenuity of others
The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation is powered by these great models:
- Viable System Model, Stafford Beer’s classic model for all organisations that have the drive to “meet the demands of surviving in the changing environment”; here it is the framework within which the other models and tools are integrated
- Agendashift, the wholehearted, outcome-oriented engagement model; Leading with Outcomes’ main source
- Sociocracy (aka Dynamic Governance, Circular Hierarchy) – purposeful collaboration and self-governance at every scale
- Lean-Agile (“Lean and Agile celebrated both separately and together”) and friends
- Objectives and Key Results (OKR) – the strategy deployment framework pioneered at Intel and employed at Google and elsewhere
- The Deliberately Developmental Organisation, Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey’s model for building organisations that align personal and organisational growth

Learning by doing:
- You'll be developing strategy yourself while learning how strategy works as a participatory process
- With each successive module you'll be gaining fluency in the language of outcomes, learning a range of tools you can use every day
- Along the way, plenty of opportunity to reflect on your organisation and your relationship with it
What sets us apart – the fundamentals

Three principles guide everything we do:
- Keep asking the agreement on outcomes question:
What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions? - Keep bringing outcomes to the foreground
- Keep finding new places for strategy to happen
For the big strategy occasions, for those everyday interactions, and for everything in between, we help leaders at all levels put those principles into practice:
- Having the kinds of conversations that too often get missed
- Working backwards from key moments of impact and learning
- Engaging with their organisations in all of their complexity
Is this for me?
If any of these apply:
- You're a leader in a transforming organisation
- You desire change and want it approached in the right way
- You aspire to leadership
- You have something to contribute to the strategy process
- You support others in that journey
Brought to you by Agendashift Academy co-founder and three-time author Mike Burrows
Mike's pioneering work in the pursuit of the wholehearted and deliberately adaptive organisation brings a needs-based and outcome-oriented perspective to leadership, strategy, and transformation.
Mike has real-world experience as a global leader in world-class organisations and clients in government, finance, industry, and the not-for-profit sectors.

Be part of something bigger
Included in your subscription: all four modules of Leading with Outcomes, the Agendashift Academy’s core curriculum. Take them at your own pace and join a growing community of leaders in transforming organisations who are learning to put outcomes before solutions.
The modules in recommended order:
- Leading with Outcomes: Foundation
- Inside-out Strategy: Fit for maximum impact
- Outside-in Strategy: Positioned for success
- Adaptive Organisation: Business agility at every scale (from autumn 2022)
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If you aren’t completely satisfied with Leading with Outcomes, just cancel your subscription before the end of your trial period.
Up and down your transforming organisation, people learning to lead with outcomes. Easy and cost-effective access for every leader and aspiring leader in your business, with benefits not available to individual subscribers.
Frequently asked Questions
How Leading with Outcomes works for you