Adaptive Organisations: Thriving in Complexity
Adaptive Organisations: Thriving in Complexity, written collectively by ten members of the Society for Adaptive Organisations, among them Pierluigi Pugliese and Dario Zanotto of Connexxo.
The organisations that win are not the biggest or the fastest. They are the ones that learn faster than their environment changes. Organisations fail the same way at every size, when the structures through which they decide are slower than the world they are deciding about. A continent takes nineteen months to move a regulation from proposal to adoption; a manufacturer takes months to approve a product change as it crawls through a chain of committees. Same mechanism, different scale.
This book is about what to build instead. It offers one precise definition of adaptivity, drawn from a century of accumulated evidence and refined against engagements across industries, sizes and geographies, together with twelve principles that make that definition operational. One idea shapes everything that follows: adaptivity is an emergent property. It arises from the interplay of structures, practices, relationships and leadership behaviours, and fades when those conditions erode.
It is a practical book. An assessment holds up a mirror to where your organisation actually stands, treating truthful answers as more useful than right ones. Nine adaptivity-sabotaging patterns are described so that you recognise them in the room, because you will meet them: passive non-participation, death by prioritisation, compliance theatre and the rest. And a closing part deals with Monday morning, with the shifts leaders have to make, first steps chosen because they generate learning, and visual working methods that make what a team believes about its own system discussable.
Twelve chapters in four parts, with forty-one diagrams, a glossary, a bibliography, further reading and an index. It is written for leaders who can see their organisation deciding too slowly and want something more precise than “be more agile”, and for the coaches and consultants who need a defensible definition and a shared vocabulary.
Published in English, in PDF and EPUB. Leanpub lets you choose what you pay: the minimum price is $18 and the suggested price is $25.
The book was written collectively by ten members of the Society, most of them educators who teach and coach adaptivity in practice: Peter Beck · Ilker Demirel · Mario Gadet · Jürgen Hoffmann · Roman Mueller · Pierluigi Pugliese · Stefan Roock · Andreas Schliep · Roza Silva · Dario Zanotto.
The full table of contents and further detail are on the Society’s books page. You can also read our short introduction to what an adaptive organisation is.