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

by Aaron Dignan

Working in Public. When a culture is risk averse and teams lack the authority to make decisions about their work, a funny thing happens to work in progress. It goes underground. Why? Because teams know that if they share incomplete or imperfect work, leadership will likely poke holes in it and question their competence. So we end up with cultures where everything has to be perfect before it’s shared. This leads to information silos that hurt everyone. Two teams working on the same thing won’t know about it until it’s too late. Leaders who might have helped shape early work in progress can only approve or deny. Anyone wanting to know the status of a project has to hope they know the right people and catch them on a good day. And anything and everything that could be repurposed and reused is trapped in place. Or we can work in public, which is shorthand for developing our work in applications and environments that are visible to and searchable by everyone in the organization. On day one at my company, a new member can search, find, copy, and reuse the active and prior work of the entire organization. Does that mean nothing is ever under lock and key? No. If you’re legally obligated to keep certain information protected, you can adopt a policy of default to open. That means everyone starts with the assumption that all work should be open and searchable by default, unless there’s a good reason to secure it.