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

by Aaron Dignan

Mistaking a complex system for a complicated one, leaders try to control the change. They decide who will be in the know. They review and approve everything as if they were building a custom home. They review survey results and filter which parts managers get to see (some) and which parts everyone else gets to see (far less than that). They envision the future and then demand that the system conform to that vision. Which is too bad, because all the information about how the system needs to change in order to achieve their goals is out there, in the system. Change, for most people in most organizations, is effectively an announcement: effective today, things are different. But they know better. Instead we encourage participation and ownership from the earliest days of any transformation effort. Long before anything is decided, we invite everyone who will be affected to join in. This entails some risk. Every member within the boundary we select has a seat at the table and the ability to know what is going on from day one. They are “looping without supervision.” This is an intensely uncomfortable proposition to leaders. They immediately fear a variety of negative outcomes: that teams will unleash chaos, that candor and transparency will create panic or negativity, that they won’t be able to control what unfolds, and of course the shadow fear—that they aren’t really needed at all. They have to let these fears go. The more they trust, the faster the right change can occur.

Trust is greater than control