Leading in the Knowledge Economy (LIKE) – Copenhagen/Malmö

The training of the book Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (April 2025). Participants receive a free copy! If you can't wait that long, search Amazon for "Wholehearted Mike Burrows".

What they said:

“Complex concepts presented with clarity and simplicity”

“A language for exploring and discussing organisational issues – issues that aren't only process-related”

“Found the ideas of context and awareness tied well into managing different relationships”

“This rounds out organisational change aspects any serious practitioner should know”

“I wish I'd had this training years ago!”

Overview

In this training, we'll be answering some important questions about leadership and organisation, questions that become increasingly critical as our organisations become more and more information-dependent. In a nutshell: How do you create the conditions for business agility when the critical resources are 1) communication capacity, 2) decision-making capacity, and 3) the context everyone needs to make good decisions?

Our main focus will be the digital-age though not necessarily technology-centric organisation, in which product development, customer-focused service delivery, and organisational improvement are becoming increasingly integrated. With that come challenges of context and scale, to which process-based approaches are ill-equipped to meet.

Your lens on the organisation will be the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation, a fresh, complexity-aware, and ground-up reconstruction of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model. The diagnostic power of this classic model remains unrivalled, and to it we bring a truly 21st-century approach. We will help you 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, possibilities they may already be motivated to help bring about.

In the process, we'll be turning the traditional change management paradigm on its head! In place of monolithic solutions to supposedly singular problems (the basis of the rollout-based paradigm that has failed us for so long), we look to meet complex challenges well, making progress coherently across a broad front.

Learning Objectives

• Understand how different vital aspects of your organisation relate to each other – at each scale of organisation (team, team-of-teams, and higher, up to the whole organisation) and between scales
• Understand what it means for those relationships to be healthy and productive, and conversely, how a wide range of organisational dysfunctions may be understood as relational imbalances
• Learn to recognise what diminishes your organisation’s capacity to adapt as its business environment changes – and what you might do about it
• Understand how the organisation is impacted by failures of context, and what leaders up and down the organisation can do about it
• Learn how to involve others in framing, prioritising, and engaging with the organisation’s challenges and opportunities
• Relevant to all but the smallest organisations (and of special importance if you are using or considering using a so-called scaling framework), learn new tools for understanding and dealing with issues of scale
• Learn how to organise your options in various ways, including visually and as OKRs
• Practise generating diverse solution ideas and framing them as hypotheses
• Understand the leadership takeaways from some classic exercises from the Agendashift / Leading with Outcomes stable, including Obstacles Fast and Slow and our Clean Language-inspired coaching game, 15-minute FOTO

Included

• The Adaptive Organisation Assessment
• Free one-year membership of the Leading with Outcomes Authorised Facilitator programme
• A certificate of completion at the end of the course
• A free digital copy of the accompanying book, Wholehearted: Engaging with Complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (2025), by your host, Agendashift founder Mike Burrows.

Corporate and public sectors

Ping us for a 30% discount on block bookings of three or more places. For government, public healthcare, and NGO employees, discounts are available from the first seat and increase to 50% for three or more.

Get in touch also if you might prefer to have this run privately. If you are considering adding LIKE or other Leading with Outcomes trainings to your internal leadership development curriculum, we provide a path to self-sufficiency via our Authorised Trainer and Facilitator programmes.

Agenda

1. Leading in a Wholehearted Organisation

1. Introducing two patterns: Engage, Invite Celebrate, and Ideal, Obstacles, Outcomes, aka the IdOO pattern
2. Introducing the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation
3. Stories of success and failure

2. Space 1. Delivering-Discovering-Renewing

1. The value-creating work and its immediate relationships
2. The organisation's capacities for communication and decision-making
3. Liberating the organisation's adaptive capacity

3. Space 2. Adaptive Strategising

1. The Right to Left pattern – working backwards from key moments of impact and learning
2. Six constraints on strategising
3. Identity, purpose, and self-governance – keeping operational and developmental activities in appropriate balance

4. Obstacles and Outcomes (time permitting)

1. Reviewing solution ideas
2. Obstacles Fast and Slow – identifying obstacles, reframing them in ways conducive to a productive conversation
3. 15-minute FOTO – our Clean Language-based coaching game

5. Space 3. Mutual Trust Building

1. 100 years of organising
2. Models of trust-building leadership
3. Addressing the context challenge

6. The Space Between

1. Dimensions of strategy – identifying concerns and accountabilities outside the formal structure
2. Navigating organisational structure with the customer/geography/technology/time model
3. Exploring the challenges of scale through the organisation's inter-scale relationships

7. Organising without Reorganising – aka Organising at Human Scale (time permitting)

1. Your organisation in 5 networks
2. Teaming, re-teaming, and thinking in circles
3. The Deliberately Developmental Organisation (DDO)

8. What Lies Beneath

1. Constraints Club – describing what's really happening
2. Affordance Mapping – organising our opportunities for change
3. Who's invited? Setting up those next moments of impact and learning

Your trainer

This training will be led by Agendashift founder Mike Burrows, creator of Leading with Outcomes, and five-time author:

• Wholehearted: Engaging with complexity in the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation (2025)
• Organizing Conversations: Preparing Groups to Take on Adaptive Challenges (BMI series in Dialogic Organisation Development, 2024)
• Agendashift: Outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation (2nd edition 2021)
• Right to Left: The digital leader's guide to Lean and Agile (2019, audiobook 2020)
• Kanban from the Inside (2014)

Mike is recognised for his pioneering work in Lean, Agile, and Kanban, his advocacy for participatory and outcome-oriented approaches to change, transformation, and strategy, and his relational approach to organisation. Prior to his consulting career, he was global development manager and Executive Director at a top tier investment bank, CTO for an energy risk management startup, and interim delivery manager for two of the UK government's digital ‘exemplar’ projects. Through Agendashift and the Agendashift Academy, his focus now is on wholehearted, deliberately adaptive organisations and the transformational leadership that enables them.