Draghi Diagnosed Europe. Ten Practitioners Diagnose the Company.

Editor’s note (6 October 2026): This press release uses the terms of the book. The Society’s reference model is the definition of an adaptive organisation and its three pillars on the home page: Product Orientation, Fast Improvement Cycles and Organisational Ambidexterity. Solution Orientation and Organisational Multidexterity are broader terms for the first and third pillar; Adaptive Leadership and Healthy Relationships describe the conditions the pillars depend on.

MUNICH, September 2026 – The Society for Adaptive Organisations (SfAO) today published its first book. Adaptive Organisations: Thriving in Complexity applies the diagnosis of the 2024 Draghi report on European competitiveness to the individual company. Ten members of the Society wrote it collectively.

In September 2024, Mario Draghi handed the European Commission a 400-page report with a blunt conclusion: Europe faces an existential challenge. The gap in gross domestic product with the United States had widened from 17% to 30% in twenty years. The diagnosis pointed at structures too slow and too fragmented to turn talent, capital and ambition into results.

The book’s starting point is that the same diagnosis applies one level down. 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 passes through a chain of committees. Same mechanism, different scale.

One Definition and Twelve Principles

Conversations about organisational agility stall when everyone means something different by it. The book supplies one precise definition, built on a century of accumulated evidence and refined against engagements across industries, company sizes and countries, together with twelve principles that make the definition operational.

One idea shapes the argument: adaptivity is an emergent property. It arises from the interplay of structures, practices, relationships and leadership behaviours, and fades when those conditions erode. The book develops the Society’s four core dimensions, solution orientation, fast improvement cycles, organisational multidexterity and adaptive leadership, and adds a chapter on the healthy relationships that hold them together.

The second half is practical. It describes nine sabotaging patterns by which adaptivity is quietly undermined, from passive non-participation to compliance theatre, an assessment for locating where an organisation currently stands, first steps chosen because they generate learning, and visual working methods that make the structure behind the work discussable.

“Adaptivity lies beyond the reach of any single framework or methodology. It asks for a body of knowledge that holds structure, strategy, leadership and relationships together, and this is the first time ours sits in one volume, written by practitioners who have tested it in real organisations.”

— Roza Silva, Managing Director, Society for Adaptive Organisations

“Every leadership team we work with already knows its organisation decides too slowly. What they lack is language precise enough to say why, and a place to start on Monday morning. That is what the twelve principles and the nine sabotaging patterns give them: you stop arguing about whether to be more agile and start examining the structures through which you actually decide.”

— Pierluigi Pugliese, Qualified Educator and co-author, Society for Adaptive Organisations

Contents and Availability

Adaptive Organisations: Thriving in Complexity runs to twelve chapters in four parts, with forty-one diagrams, a glossary, a bibliography, further reading and an index. The authors are Peter Beck, Ilker Demirel, Mario Gadet, Jürgen Hoffmann, Roman Mueller, Pierluigi Pugliese, Stefan Roock, Andreas Schliep, Roza Silva and Dario Zanotto.

The book is available now in English, in PDF and EPUB format, through Leanpub at https://leanpub.com/adaptiveorganisations. Leanpub lets readers choose what they pay: the minimum price is $20 and the suggested price is $25. Further details are at https://adaptive-organisations.org/en/books/.

About the Society for Adaptive Organisations

The Society for Adaptive Organisations is dedicated to helping organisations develop the capabilities needed to thrive in complex, rapidly changing environments. Through professional certifications, research, and community building, the Society supports leaders and practitioners in creating more responsive, innovative, and human-centred organisations.

Press contact: Society for Adaptive Organisations e.V. Roza Silva, Managing Director presse@adaptive-organisations.org https://adaptive-organisations.org