Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

by Aaron Dignan

Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.

Verycuripuss to hear what is bad about personal stories and Anecdotes

When it comes to how they build teams, manage projects, make decisions, share information, set targets, review performance, and set compensation, their approach is not a signal-controlled intersection but a roundabout. They use purpose, transparency, and reputation to create cultures of freedom and responsibility. They are intentional but full of serendipity. They are decentralized but coherent. Above all, these firms are People Positive and Complexity Conscious—two foundational mindsets that we’ll explore in detail. I refer to these iconoclasts as Evolutionary Organizations because they use these mindsets to collectively and continuously improve their shared OS. This isn’t just a way of being; it’s a way of doing. It is a practice.

Fourth. There is an almost equal division of the work and the responsibility between the management and the workmen. The management take over all work for which they are better fitted than the workmen, while in the past almost all of the work and the greater part of the responsibility were thrown upon the men. Implicit in these principles was the idea that the thinking (the work for which management was “better fitted”) and the doing (the hard labor) were to be separated once and for all. This is perhaps the most pronounced aspect of Taylor’s legacy.

If Taylor worked at a multinational company today, he’d be flummoxed to find his principles metastasized into something truly inefficient. According to an employee at one federally owned corporation, toiletries have a six-month lead time. To get them, you must make a service request and get a Problem Evaluation Report. Then you need to get a work order, and a purchase order must be processed by the Procurement Engineering Group, who will then contact the vendor to ensure no changes have been made and the products meet regulatory requirements. And 180 days later, if you’re lucky, you’ll get your toilet paper.

London Business School professor Gary Hamel has taken up a crusade against bureaucracy by trying to put a value on our lost time and energy. After a broad workforce analysis, Hamel and his coauthor, Michele Zanini, claim that roughly half of the 23.8 million management roles in the United States are unnecessary.

I define organizational debt as any structure or policy that no longer serves an organization.

Under the guise of creating order, we drift toward the disorder of a thousand stupid rules, leaving no ability to respond to the world as it unfolds.

The point is this: to avoid the pitfalls of organizational debt, we need constant and vigilant simplification. We need to create roles, rules, and processes that are inherently agile—built to learn and change. Unfortunately, the very bureaucracy that created our org debt also stands in the way of addressing it. Org debt creates bureaucracy, and bureaucracy protects org debt. It’s a tragic love affair.

Among them are Richard Foster and Innosight, who have been studying corporate longevity within the S&P 500—a curated list of publicly traded companies that represents the U.S. stock market. Their research shows that in 1958, the average tenure of a company on that list was sixty-one years. But by 2016 that number had been reduced to twenty-four years. The data suggests this pattern will continue. At the current rate of churn, about half the list will be replaced in the next decade. And by 2027 the average tenure will shrink to just twelve years. This fits with broader research recently completed by the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. In its analysis of more than 25,000 companies, it found that the half-life of all firms was roughly 10.5 years. Big business, small business, it doesn’t matter. Our days are numbered. Organizations are under siege. If we can’t learn to adapt, we may never see another century-old company.

The minority view, the one held by FAVI, Buurtzorg, and Evolutionary Organizations everywhere, contends that we have an innate desire to fulfill our potential and self-actualize. Rooted in the work of psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, this view maintains that people are naturally motivated and capable of self-direction. That we are worthy of trust and respect. And importantly, that we are all chameleons, capable of suppressing or distorting our true nature depending on our environment and social context.

Unlike complicated problems, complex problems cannot be solved, only managed. They cannot be controlled, only nudged.

Here expertise can be a disadvantage if it becomes dogma or blinds us to the inherent uncertainty present in our situation.

Complex systems are typically made up of a large number of interacting components—people, ants, brain cells, startups—that together exhibit adaptive or emergent behavior without requiring a leader or central control. As a result, complex systems are more about the relationships and interactions among their components than about the components themselves. And these interactions give rise to unpredictable behavior. If a system surprises you, or has the potential to surprise you, it is likely complex. Software is complicated. Creating a software startup is complex. An airplane is complicated. What happens between the people on board is complex. An assault rifle is complicated. Gun control is complex. Building a skyscraper is complicated. Cities are complex.

Conserving an object is complicated. The role of museums in society is complex.

While many of the activities and outputs of organizations are indeed complicated, the organization itself is complex. Accordingly, organizational culture isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s an emergent phenomenon that we have to cultivate.

If we can just create the right conditions, everyone will continually find ways to achieve our goals. This translates into a culture that is made coherent and free by enabling constraints—agreements that create freedom to use judgment and interaction in the vast majority of situations.

But our bureaucracies are no match for complexity. They can’t handle the surprises that we face every day, and worse, they’ll never surprise us with an unexpected breakthrough. If we continue to treat the complex like it’s complicated, we’ll spend our careers frustrated that control is always just beyond our grasp. Gripping so tightly, we’ll forget about the magic that can happen when we let go.

Why do we reject innovative approaches when they are clearly better? Behavioral economists have a name for this: the status quo bias. Think of this as our tendency to like things to stay the way they are.

We strive for improvements—better bosses! simpler budgets! fewer layers!—but they’re inherently incremental. We tweak the recipe without ever questioning whether we should make an entirely different dish.

This is like the difference between in house and consultant. If soomeene in house says maybe we can do better nd it means scrapping the existing, its much harder to reject nd it can lso feel like betrayal. If n outsider says it its not only has value empericlly but the injsiders know that they can just say no.

Scientific Management reveals only the best way to do what we’re already doing. True innovation often requires a departure from the safety of the status quo.

Astro Teller, captain of moonshots at Alphabet’s X (formerly Google X), puts it this way: “It’s often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better. . . . Because when you’re working to make things 10 percent better, you inevitably focus on the existing tools and assumptions, and on building on top of an existing solution that many people have already spent a lot of time thinking about . . . But when you aim for a 10x gain, you lean instead on bravery and creativity—the kind that, literally and metaphorically, can put a man on the moon.”

Its interesting that dignan uses this quote to intoduce the story to introduce strategy not just new ideas

The canvas forces us to confront the deltas between our assumptions, our beliefs, and our reality. If we say we want to hear every voice but spend most of the day talking over others, that tells us something. If we say we value agility, but every decision requires a dozen approvals, the opportunity is clear.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. —F. Scott Fitzgerald

From a complexity perspective, reducing an organization to its independent parts is folly. The canvas simply highlights the areas that our research tells us are most in flux. Better to start in these dynamic spaces than to remain immobilized by the sheer intractable nature of it all.

A great purpose is aspirational, but it’s also a constraint. It focuses our energy and attention. It places a boundary around our efforts by saying, Here is where we will build our dream. Too mundane (e.g., shareholder value) and we lack meaning. Too vague (e.g., change the world) and we lack focus. Too concrete (e.g., a computer on every desk) and we can find ourselves rudderless after the moment of victory. Done well, purpose unites us, orients us, and helps us make decisions as we go.

How many people in how many roles lack the authority they need to do their jobs well? In a dynamic and fast-changing world, preventing people from using judgment and making decisions is just too slow. A client recently told me the story of an initiative that required sixteen individual sign-offs before proceeding. This is our addiction to control masquerading as “risk management.” What firms like this fail to recognize is that the true risk they face is that bureaucratic immobilization will make them irrelevant.

Decision Discipline. There is a surprising inconsistency in Legacy Organizations: while they are extremely restrictive about who can make decisions, they are positively lackadaisical about how those decisions are made. Behavioral economists, psychologists, game theorists, and others have learned a lot about how to make better decisions. We have the opportunity to internalize a more disciplined approach to decision making based on all this insight. This applies to how we define decision spaces, how we size decisions, whom we involve, how we decide, and how we evaluate the choices we’ve made. Take the time to find out more about decision science, so that when faced with a big decision you have a whole tool kit at your disposal.

What about decisions that are clearly below your waterline? The ones that are really risky? One approach is to grant those decision rights to specific people or roles. But it’s often more powerful to leverage the advice process. In many Evolutionary Organizations, anyone can make a big decision, but first they must seek advice from colleagues who have experience with or will be affected by their choice. That means they seek them out, sit down with them, and talk through all the implications of the decision. This takes time and discipline. For an advice process to work, the person making the decision must be humble enough to seek advice and really listen. And advisers must be comfortable with the idea that their counsel may or may not be heeded. This is not stakeholder management where dozens of leaders get to tweak the proposal until it’s truly average. This is advice, plain and simple. Once a decision has been made, it should be shared transparently along with the rationale and perspectives that shaped it, so that others can learn too. When it works, this process creates a sense of ownership and responsibility that is hard to replicate.

How is authority distributed? Who can tell others what to do? What kinds of decisions do we make? How do we make important decisions? How do we approach risk? What is safe to try? What is not? What decision rights do all members have? What decision rights are reserved for specific roles or teams?

Connect this to the concept of experimentation, google’s 20% of “free time” and you have a recipe for a new organization

SLAM Teams.

Dynamic Teaming.

This would be so so useful for exhibition team formation and what a great way to foster agency within the organization

Budgeting is broken. But few organizations find the courage to bring true dynamism and collective intelligence to resource allocation. Fortunately, it can be done, if we’re willing to give up the illusion of control that modern budgeting provides.

Without the fixed assumptions of budgets, maybe when circumstances change (which they will) we wouldn’t be so upset.

When teams have the right (and the inclination) to experiment with their own rules and norms, they can find ways to collaboratively leverage and preserve resources. If “our money” really were our money, who knows how well we could deploy it in service of our collective purpose? The tragedy of the commons is that we think we can’t share.

Amen. The misnomers that lower level employees wouldn’t know how to run the dept is just because they would actually make changes that they needed, not what managers think and have been told must happen.

Zero-Based Zephyr.

How do we allocate funds, effort, space, and other assets? Are resources deployed annually, quarterly, or dynamically? Do we use targets, forecasts, trends, and/or tolerances? If so, how? How do strategy and planning influence resource allocation? How do we balance resources across the short term and long term? How do we balance resources across our core business and innovation? How do we define and measure the performance of our resources? How does our approach enable us to respond to emergent events?

This is like what we did with spark. I think a brown bag that helps NMAH employees create data visualizations would be “offering it up”

Defaults vs. Standards. It’s easy to get in the habit of cementing practices, methods, tools, and products as standards. Standards tend to be enforced. We use this tool and only this tool. We evaluate leads using this process and only this process. And so on. The great thing about standards is that they show us a proven way to do something and they are reliable (for the most part). The problem with standards is that they undermine our ability to use judgment, innovate, and learn. Instead of enforcing standards, think about proven practices as defaults. Defaults are exactly like standards with one exception: you don’t have to use them. A default says: If you don’t know what you’re doing, do this. If you don’t have time to think, try it our way. But if you’ve achieved some level of mastery in an area and you think you see a better way, feel free. Let us all know how it goes, because either you’ll generate further proof that our default is sound or you’ll sow the seeds for a new default that we can all benefit from. In the case of my firm, we maintain a default fee structure for our services. If an experienced member wants to try something different—a price premium, a discount, an equity swap—there are no rules against that, but we want to learn from it. Our members know they can take a risk and go their own way, but only when they think that we all stand to benefit.

I fucking hate the term best practices. This explains why.

OS transformation rarely starts with a focus on the practice of innovation, because other domains are typically what hold our creative energy back. But in the end, finding our way to an Evolutionary OS is all about change. We want our organizations to be more agile and adaptive. What that means in practice is that we want to get better at learning, better at finding and trying new things. This applies at the product level, of course, where we meet the market, but it’s equally important in our way of working. The act of working on any dimension of your OS is an act of disruption and invention. So while you might not get around to talking about the system-wide approach to novelty right away, rest easy knowing that you’re working on it.

When you nurture large functions—engineering, marketing, human resources—you create an environment where important projects have to cut across the matrix and necessitate the participation of a wide variety of disconnected people. In terms of workflow, that’s like salmon swimming upstream. So how do we make sure these people do what they’re supposed to do? Enter project management. Since the team working on the project isn’t really a team, we appoint a project manager to shepherd the herd. Of course, they lack the authority to really lead the effort, because all the participants’ allegiances lie with their functions. Still, it gives us someone to hold accountable. And while we’re at it, wouldn’t it be nice if all these projects used the same “efficient” process? All hail the project management office (PMO), yet another group that will define and maintain the standards that our project managers enforce. This is what passes for workflow innovation in corporate America today—an additional layer of bureaucracy.

Since the team working on the project isn’t really a team.... so so so true.

Salesforce executive Vala Afshar masterfully highlighted the irony of our meeting culture when he tweeted, “You likely have to get management approval for a $500 expense . . . but you can call a 1 hour meeting with 20 people and no one notices.”

What follows is a two-hour free-form discussion, a feedback session known for what author Kim Scott calls radical candor. That’s what happens when we challenge one another directly but make it clear that we care personally. The Braintrust leaves egos at the door, pulls no punches, and puts all their energy into making the movie better. As Ed Catmull, the cofounder and president of Pixar, says, “The film—not the filmmaker—is under the microscope.”

There’s one more thing that makes a Braintrust meeting different from a traditional feedback session. The Braintrust has no authority. The goal of the meeting isn’t necessarily to solve problems but to shine a light on them, to trace them to their source, and give the creative team the perspective they need to start fixing them. Ultimately it’s up to the director to decide how to proceed. “We don’t want the Braintrust to solve a director’s problem because we believe that, in all likelihood, our solution won’t be as good as the one the director and his or her creative team comes up with.” Teams leave the Braintrust with a renewed clarity about their film, one way or another, determined to unearth the greatness within.

Ahhh, this is just like the compelling questions group! We offer advice, assume the best of intentions

Death to Status Updates. One of the most popular and dysfunctional meetings I encounter in my work involves a team presenting work in progress to their boss for their feedback and/or blessing. Many leaders believe that these status updates are the best way to scale themselves across multiple projects. But holding court and dropping “pearls of wisdom” on teams actually causes more trouble than it’s worth. For starters, leaders often lack the context to understand complex initiatives and the situation at the edge. This can lead to naive questions at best and irresponsible recommendations at worst. Updates are also disruptive, and not in a good way. Last-minute changes undermine teams and waste much of the time that was invested prior to the review. And, as you might imagine, these meetings become theatrical productions. Teams see updates as their chance to shine, so they overprepare, spending an average of four hours per week preparing for these moments. The alternative is far simpler. Leaders can either join a team and become part of the workflow, or they can be part of an advice process at the outset of the project or upon request. As one of my colleagues likes to say, “status should live in software.” Words to live by.

Ok, so what’s the alternate for design studio updates? I guess my desire to know what’s going on could be an email chain? Or a quick post up of current work? Maybe it’s about hearing my coworkers answer to the question “so what do you intend to do?”

One-on-ones are often used as a salve for hidden dysfunction. When members lack the authority to make decisions, these meetings become the only mechanism for moving things forward. When members lack the ability to resolve conflict, these private audiences with the leader become a forum for politicking. Great one-on-ones can provide feedback and mentorship, deepen relationships, or give us a chance to collaborate on the work. But if you notice they’re becoming a venue for other unmet needs, pull the rip cord and bring those conversations into the light.

Yes.

Governance. Over the years, corporate governance has become a circus of compliance and risk avoidance. In the meantime we have forgotten that true stewardship comes from participation and ownership, not fear. Put simply, if we want organizations to learn and adapt—if we want them to be good citizens—then we need a distributed mechanism for steering and changing the organization. One way to do this is to encourage every team to hold a monthly governance meeting. The goal of this meeting is for everyone to have the chance to voice their concerns and propose local changes to structure, strategy, resources . . . anything that will help the organization pursue its purpose. Thousands of organizations around the world that practice Sociocracy, Holacracy, or other forms of participatory governance are doing this today. Imagine every team in your organization continuously and deliberately tweaking, not just your products and services but the organization itself.

Holy shit, this is a transformational idea.

Facilitators and Scribes. One of the best ways to increase meeting effectiveness is to ensure that someone is responsible for the structure, flow, and output of every meeting. Two roles that we have found to be particularly effective are facilitator and scribe. The facilitator role keeps the meeting on track, enforcing whatever format and ground rules the team has agreed upon. That could include cutting off conversational tangents, noticing when some people need to step up or step back, and even pointing out when the leader isn’t playing by the rules. The scribe role captures any actions or outputs created throughout the meeting and leverages any tools or interfaces required by the work. This could include anything from a digital Kanban board to a live document to a task manager. To get started, try electing a facilitator and scribe in each of your recurring meetings. Give them the authority to design and hold the space for meaningful interactions. After ninety days or so, elect new players to fill those roles, until everyone has held that responsibility.

Project doula!

Retrospectives. If you were to chart the most valuable but least practiced meetings, the hands-down winner would be something called a retrospective. A retro is simply a chance for any team to stop, notice, and learn. After a big push of work, or ideally on a regular interval, the team will gather for an hour or two and share their perspectives on what happened, what stood out to them, and what they ultimately learned. The goal is simple: to do better next time. Many forms of retrospective exist, ranging from the simple (mapping highs and lows over the time line of the project) to the more complex (four Ls: liked, learned, lacked, longed for). The best kind of retrospective? The one that happens. Most teams have an abysmal track record of protecting the time for these sessions. Moving on to the next thing is too tempting. It’s up to you to make sure that your team looks back and takes the time to learn regularly. It’s also important to make sure that retros are a place where participants can say what needs to be said. If everyone holds back, the value of the meeting drops enormously.

If you’re hungry for more, liberatingstructures.com is a fantastic resource for anyone ready to move beyond conventional meetings to something more inclusive and generative. The website, app, and the book that inspired them provide a menu of thirty-three methods for activities such as brainstorming, problem solving, and sensemaking, complete with instructions for how to facilitate them.

Within most Legacy Organizations, information is power. We hoard it to elevate our status, create job security, and protect ourselves from its misuse. Information is guarded and shared on a case-by-case basis. This perpetuates the power structure and creates opacity that allows bias and misinformation to thrive. Unchecked, this almost always leads to scandal and missed opportunities.

All living systems, at some level, are information processors. Starve any living thing of information and it will quickly perish. Professor Melanie Mitchell defines a complex adaptive system as “a system in which large networks of components with no central control and simple rules of operation give rise to complex collective behavior, sophisticated information processing, and adaptation via learning or evolution.” In this way, a complex adaptive system is a kind of hive mind, capable of solving problems the individual agents cannot. Organizations are no different. Every single activity we conduct at work—recruiting, sales, accounting—is dependent on information processing and knowledge transfer. If we can tap into our collective intelligence, we can accomplish amazing things. And so it’s somewhat surprising how little time we spend on our information architecture—our approach to discovering, storing, and sharing what we know.

Transparency. It’s difficult to overstate the degree to which Evolutionary Organizations value and practice transparency. In complexity, as McChrystal and the teams inside JSOC discovered, insight can come from anywhere, but only if information reaches the right person at the right time. Because we can’t predict when that will be, we have to aspire to what economists refer to as information symmetry—a condition in which all relevant information is known to all participants. This is a continuation and expansion of earlier concepts such as open-book management, in which employees have access to financial information such as revenue, profit, cost, cash flow, and expenses. The primary resistance to transparency stems from two beliefs: the Theory X notion that people can’t be trusted and the scarcity-driven assumption that information is power.