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

by Aaron Dignan

Push vs. Pull. One reason we hesitate to adopt a more transparent approach to information is that we fear being overwhelmed. We’re already swimming in a sea of messages and news feeds. Researchers at UC San Diego found that the average person is confronted with thirty-four gigabytes of information every day. The idea that we should all share everything all the time seems crazy. But that’s only because we misunderstand how to share information—the difference between push and pull. Legacy information sharing is “push,” meaning that the information is delivered to us without our consent. When information is pushed, we have to wade through it and separate the signal (what we need) from the noise (what we don’t). But when information is abundant, a “pull”-based system where information is tagged, stored, and ready to search is far superior. Email is push. The internet is pull. A single-track conference is push. A multitrack conference is pull. In the early days of Percolate, a content-marketing platform used by some of the biggest brands in the world, it built a tool called Barista that allowed anyone in the company to ask a question and route it to people who might know the answer. Completed questions were tagged, saved, and searchable by everyone else. Instead of trying to drown a new employee in pushed information, Percolate let them find what they needed when they needed it. When information is optional, accessible, and searchable, everyone wins. Less push, more pull.

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.

What information is shared freely? What information is contained or controlled? How do we decide what is safe to share? How is information stored and shared? What tools, systems, or forums support storing and sharing? How do we find the information we seek? How do we update our information when things change? What communication style(s) do we encourage?

How am I sharing my work? Not very openly and consistently

Boundaries can be clearly defined or purposefully blurry. Agreements within teams can be explicit or informal. Enforcement can be lenient or strict. What matters is that we are intentional. Evolutionary Organizations play with these continuums in an increasingly nonbinary way. Burning Man blurs the lines between attendee and host, customer and volunteer, and in so doing creates a richer and more participatory experience. Airbnb does the same. A host in one city is often a guest in another. Wikipedia does the same, as do countless open-source projects and peer-to-peer platforms. The future of membership may end up looking like many ways to play, clearly defined and held simultaneously.

This sounds a lot like emergence. Birds in flight shifting roles of leader and followers within their group of 7, within a larger group

A member who is brought on board properly feels a sense of belonging and has a keen sense of how to move in and out of different membership spaces within the organization. A member who is thrust into a team or a role without that context may feel unwelcome and unclear. Do they belong? Are they safe? How should they navigate this system? Until resolved, a portion of their attention will always be dedicated to these questions.

An invitation, an opening, a gathering

Honoring and supporting these thresholds is our collective responsibility.

If you accept that each individual in your organization should choose their projects and their colleagues, something interesting happens. Teams become sovereign spaces and microenterprises. They have to generate their own resources, either through a budgeting process or through “charging” for their services. They have to cultivate their own membership, recruiting and removing members as needed. They have to develop their own norms and patterns of behavior. They have to create feedback loops, individually and collectively. They have to perform and add value to the broader ecosystem. This is the inherent tension between freedom and responsibility. Individuals and teams are free from hierarchical command but not free from constraints and accountability. They are in the roundabout, and everyone is counting on them.

We want our organizations to get more interesting over time. That’s the kind of cultural complexity that helps us see around corners.

Dave Snowden, the director of the Centre for Applied Complexity at Bangor University, has spent decades thinking about knowledge management and ten years ago shared seven principles that challenge everything about our current approach: Knowledge can only be volunteered; it cannot be conscripted. We only know what we know when we need to know it. In the context of real need, few people will withhold their knowledge. Everything is fragmented. Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success. The way we know things is not the way we report we know things. We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down.

Consider the case of Etsy, the online marketplace that hosts an internal Etsy School where the curriculum is taught by and attended by employees. Classes range from silk-screening to Python programming and help team members connect across disciplines in ways that help them grow in- and outside of work.

Multilingual group? As well as other classes

It means that increasing salaries that are too low can reduce job dissatisfaction, but increasing salaries that are already generous won’t increase job satisfaction in any meaningful or lasting way.

Once the museum field “reduces dissatisfaction” in jobs by equitable and transparency around pay, the next step would be to look at how the field could offer moving between roles as a motivators for job satisfaction. How amazing would it be to evaluate museum jobs based on what you will learn from other members and/or as your role evolves within the organization?

It won’t make us any happier either. According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, household income above $75,000 a year doesn’t make us measurably happier.

What would happen if every employee at a museum made the same salary?

The truth is that in an increasingly complex world, plans are lies committed to paper. They’re mere horoscopes drafted by the people furthest from the action that diverge from reality the moment they’re published. Change plans are no exception. In fact, they’re worse. Getting everyone to execute in service of a strategic plan using their existing habits and practices is one thing. Getting them to change those habits and practices (and the mindsets that support them) is something else entirely.

I wonder what would happen if the working groups, or guilds or communities of practice created small scale changes, while opening their process to the staff fro longer term ideas or direction.

Perhaps this is why so few transformations succeed at all. A recent McKinsey study showed that only 26 percent of transformation efforts succeed in the eyes of the people involved. If you ask frontline employees only, that drops to just 6 percent. Based on those statistics, you’re almost as likely to hit blackjack on your first hand at a card table as you are to complete a transformation that is felt and recognized by the front line. Clearly, something has to give.

This is why I am concerned about change management efforts

Complexity expert Dave Snowden offers enigmatic but essential advice on the matter. “Managing the present to actually create a new direction of travel is more important than creating false expectations about how things could be in the future.” What he’s getting at is the difference between closing the gap—trying to achieve a predetermined future state—and discovering what author Steven Johnson calls the adjacent possible. In his words, “The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.”

A contrary idea to an emphasis on the future

In a system that’s not overly constrained, changes that serve us can spread quickly. Niels Pflaeging holds a similar view. He contends that “milk in coffee is a more helpful metaphor than the widespread notion of seeing change as a journey from here to there.” Like milk in coffee, the right kind of change can unfold throughout a system quickly and continuously.

Milk in coffee! Brilliant, how do we get to there?

At this point you might be realizing, Oh shit, we’re not just changing the organization; we’re changing how we change the organization. You’re right. And it’s every bit as meta as you’re imagining. By accepting that your organization is complex, you are compelled to change both the OS and the manner in which you change it. You can’t blow up bureaucracy with a bureaucratic change process. You can’t build a culture of trust with a program full of oversight and verification. Start the way you mean to finish.

Meta Cognition! Phenomenological!

If someone got upset because they thought their colleague was overpaid, would that mean the experiment was a failure? Not at all. Our goal isn’t harmony. Our goal is an ever better organization. By revealing a disparity between expectation and pay, we created a learning opportunity. Either the system is right, and the individual can learn more about how and why we value certain skills, or the individual is right and the system can be adjusted. Either path increases knowledge, trust, and fairness. In the short run, it’s easier keeping everyone in the dark. In the long run, a little light goes a long way.

Discomfort is part of progress, frictionless means no change at all

But why wait? Why unleash that level of participation, candor, catharsis, and innovation only once every 365 days? If participatory change is so powerful, why not make it continuous? The knee-jerk response is “We don’t have time.” But I think the more honest answer is “We don’t know how to execute and learn at the same time.” Getting an organization to the point of Pixar, where they’re ready for notes, is hard enough. Keeping it going is something else entirely. That’s one of the reasons continuous participatory change is so rare in mainstream organizations—a lack of willingness to figure it out. But if we stop looking for a proven process and start looking for patterns, we can find ways to make change an everyday occurrence.

Continuous participatory change

Starting with system-wide diagnosis also perpetuates the belief that the organization is a complicated and autocratic system—something that can be analyzed and then fixed from above. It puts the power of interpretation into the hands of the few. “We will design the survey, we will interpret the data, and we will decide what to do.” This is the command-and-control theater of change that we want to avoid.

Who has agency? Who is a decision maker? Why not share authority? Because it undermines the hierarchy at its core and leaders thrive on power

Worst of all, discovery and diagnosis in a large bureaucratic system are painfully slow. In the time it takes to design a survey, get it approved, send it out to your employees, nag them to fill it out, get the results back, average them out, and decide on your top three objectives . . . we can help dozens and dozens of teams explore and experience their own adjacent possibilities.

This is why the IDEA survey will not deliver the best results, I already personally felt that the questions aren’t open enough and lean towards top down, “leadership” based solutions

Instead of diagnosis, we typically proceed with a process of experiential learning and dialogue we call priming. For catalysts, leaders, and teams who are willing, we want to challenge the basic assumptions we all hold about organizations and how we work in them. Most of us have not had the time to think about how we work, and why we work that way, in a long time (maybe ever). We’re on autopilot. And while we might be frustrated by the systems we serve, we rarely stop to think about how we would change them if we could. Even executives with enormous power end up moving boxes and lines around rather than attempting real OS change. The idea behind priming is to pull people out of their patterns and back onto a learning edge through play, reflection, and debate. To realize what it means to be People Positive and Complexity Conscious, we have to experience them.

Priming = experiential learning

Typical topics we like to prime include complexity, emergence, self-organization, organizational debt, agility, leanness, motivation, self-awareness, mastery, trust, generative difference, psychological safety, and more. It’s the twenty-first-century curriculum that’s never taught in business school. The more time we have, the more breadth and depth we can cover.

Experiential learning examples, way beyond workshop activities. Can some of these go into the multilingual workshop?

In it he briefly introduced a concept called creative tension. “Imagine a rubber band, stretched between your vision and current reality. When stretched, the rubber band creates tension. . . . What does tension seek? Resolution or release.” In Senge’s view, creative tension must be resolved by either pulling reality toward the vision (change) or pulling your vision toward reality (compromise). If you feel, for example, that your organization has an insufficient parental leave policy, that’s a tension. You can try to change it, or you can accept it. Simply living with tension is unproductive. While we don’t want to get too hung up on our visions for the future (remember, we are operating in complexity), there is something deeply resonant about the idea that we can sense potential in our own systems and that we need to tune into that ability and put it to use.

This is me. I cannot live with the tension being unacknowledged. What I could work on is acknowledgement followed by acceptance.

Which are you willing to try? ☐ Craft a clear and compelling purpose for the organization. ☐ Craft a clear and compelling purpose for every team and every role. ☐ Ask teams to share their essential intent for the next six to twenty-four months. ☐ Clarify the metrics that matter and use them to steer. ☐ Recognize and celebrate noble failure. ☐ Replace “Is it perfect?” with “Is it safe to try?” ☐ Give everyone the freedom to choose when, where, and how they work. ☐ Clarify the decision rights held by teams and roles. ☐ Use the concept of a waterline to create guardrails around team and individual autonomy. ☐ Start distributing authority to the edge of the organization. ☐ Crowdsource and eliminate policies and processes that no longer make sense. ☐ Start by stopping a meeting, process, or habit that is holding us back. ☐ Leverage decision science to reduce bias and make objectively better choices. ☐ Use Integrative Decision Making for important collective decisions. ☐ Distinguish between reversible and irreversible decisions and treat them differently. ☐ Define spending thresholds below which no approval or advice is necessary. ☐ Replace the permission process with a robust advice process. ☐ Trade autocracy and consensus for governance by consent. ☐ Form SLAM teams—self-managing, lean, audacious, multidisciplinary—around critical initiatives. ☐ Decentralize some of the work of central functions to teams at the edge for greater context and speed. ☐ Abandon singular job titles ...

Amazing list of transformative changes

And finally, sometimes the best practice is no practice. In heavily bureaucratic systems, often the smartest thing you can do is remove obstacles. That might mean eliminating a policy, a layer, a meeting, a budget, or a project to see how the culture responds. So while everyone is giddy with the excitement of what we should do, add, and try, take the opportunity to ask them what we should stop doing. Strip the system down to a few simple rules with a healthy boundary, and you’ll be amazed at what emerges (often exactly what is needed).

Sometimes best practice is no practice. Edit, strip down, get rid of what’s unecc’y

There is one very real challenge around looping that I want to make you aware of. Operating systems are interdependent and self-reinforcing. That means that an isolated experiment might not work. Not because the change was ill conceived but because it relies on a broader context to be successful. The classic example is a culture that suddenly empowers everyone to make decisions without considering the rest of the OS. What happens then? Lacking the information, tools, and sense of security required to take action, people hold back. “Nobody is stepping up and making decisions. They must not be natural leaders,” management observes. But what actually happened was that they skipped ahead of the adjacent possible.

This is definitely us

This reaction is extremely common. Many leaders have been trained to believe that making time for emotional and relational development is optional or even counterproductive. This is reinforced by a cultural narrative that says we should keep our personal and professional lives separate. Even the statement “be professional” is laden with expectations about putting on the corporate mask. Just do your job. Keep your feelings to yourself and your head down. As if we were still on a factory floor at the turn of the last century. One of the reasons we don’t like to get into the “soft stuff” is that it makes us feel vulnerable. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned climbing the corporate ladder, it’s this: don’t appear weak. If you’re exposed, someone else might take advantage of you. Or you’ll be shamed. Or worst of all, you’ll be fired. And so we’ve actually built up antibodies to honest human conversation at work. Sure, we might let the truth fly over drinks after hours, but in a meeting, in front of everyone else? Not a chance. This translates into an aversion to risk of any kind. If we can’t even be real for fear of the consequences, what are the chances we’re going to swing for the fences with our next disruptive idea?

On the soft stuff of vulnerability and emotions

At Emergent Inc. we decided to build some psychological safety right out of the gate, using a technique called ICBD. ICBD stands for Intentions, Concerns, Borders, and Dreams. It’s a conversational exercise created by Alex Jamieson and Bob Gower that boosts trust within a team by asking members to confide in one another. We asked the group to sit in a circle and presented them with a question from each of the four areas. The question for Intentions was “Why do you personally want to participate in this change?” Then we heard an answer from each participant while the rest of the group listened. Over the years, I’ve seen this process elicit reactions ranging from solemn silence to full-on tears. It can be deeply emotional. Teams report feeling more connected and eager to continue having honest conversations. Of course, some people also choose to play it safe. That’s to be expected. So I kept reminding this team, “You get what you give here, folks.” But I couldn’t do the work for them. What I could do was model the vulnerability we’re looking for. So I consciously chose to say the things coaches and consultants don’t say out loud. “My intention is to create a case study here that I can use in my book. My concern is that I won’t be successful in getting this group to open up. My border is that I leave work at 5:00 P.M. every day to spend time with my family. No late-night emails or calls with you just because we’re under contract. My dream is that this will spread to other par...

For multilingual workshop. Really great opening conversation, also invite Heidi to join the workshop as co-facilitator and note drawer?

Creating space means ensuring that everyone on the team is committed to taking risks together and supporting one another. As wonderful as your culture may be, it’s best to assume that some people in your organization don’t feel safe. They don’t feel safe to be themselves. They don’t feel safe to tell the truth. They don’t feel safe to fail. Even if you think they’ve got it wrong—you and your team have work to do to make it right. Ask people in the organization about the consequences of taking risks. Listen not just to what they say but to how they say it. And then begin to change the dynamic. Let people see risk taking and failure recognized and rewarded. Let them see empathy. Let them see inclusion. Creating space also means making time for change. Because most teams simply don’t have it. They are constantly being asked to one-up themselves, delivering more and more performance in the never-ending quest for growth. But they’re juggling too many balls. To make up for what is effectively a dysfunctional operating system, they’ve had to adopt an unsustainable pace of work. Long days. Few breaks. And so most teams are one emergency away from total exhaustion.

Take time. Reflect. Make better decisions by questioning what works, how things feel, how you all feel.

Holding space means making room for teams to figure things out for themselves—for failure, learning, and growth. You’re asking teams to take responsibility for their own way of working. They have to find their own way in order to grow. Every time you give an order or an answer, you’re either wrong and preventing them from discovering something better, or you’re right and preventing them from learning. Holding space means being committed to building the muscle, scar tissue, and resilience that can come only from walking the path.

What it means to prioritize resilience above answers

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

Instead encourage teams to experience and experiment with new ways of working rather than discussing and debating them. If the time frame for the experiment is reasonable, we’ll just try it without any fanfare and then reflect on how it helped (or didn’t). We do this for two reasons. First, the amount of data you have after you try something is infinitely more than the amount you have beforehand. And second, most changes to a way of working are, in fact, safe to try. The worst-case scenario is we all look at one another and agree: let’s not do that again. Even that lesson has value.

The amount of data you have after experimenting is vastly more than you have while predicting.

Instead we can choose to practice sensing. Sensing means noticing—with our heads and our hearts—what’s really going on. We can sense what’s happening in the room, what’s happening in a relationship, even what’s happening in our own bodies. Avoiding a colleague because you subconsciously feel judged by them is not progress. Noticing that you feel that way, naming it, and working on it (ideally with them) is sensing and responding.

How can I incorporate sense-making more into my practice?

“What can we remove, take away, or stop doing?”

Great question for the process group!

field that blunts our empathy and our humility. People can and do change. They just do so when it makes sense to them. People don’t resist all change; they resist incoherent change poorly managed. Perhaps we’re asking people to take risks while their incentives push them to avoid failure at all costs. Or we’re asking them to trade mastery in one process or tool for confusion in a new one. These kinds of scenarios cause very real, often very rational human reactions. In response, we’re dismissive. So they dig in further and shut down. And then we’re stuck. Instead of perpetuating this pattern, look at resistance as information. People are telling you something when they resist change. Your job is to find out what. Resistance is an invitation to talk, listen, and learn. That doesn’t mean convincing or cajoling skeptics. Let them come to the work if and when they’re ready. But while you wait and hold space for them, use their insights to ensure that the change you’re driving is ever more coherent and inclusive.

Resistance is a good barometer