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In order to maximize the adaptive potential of the organization, create the infrastructure to support loosely coupled, tightly aligned teams.
FAST Agile!!!
see if your team is open to canceling all meetings for two weeks.
a complex adaptive system is a kind of hive mind, capable of solving problems the individual agents cannot.
FAST tribe/collective
in a complex system, the interactions matter more than the parts.
W. L. Gore founder Bill Gore coined the notion of a “lattice organization” in which “each person in the Lattice interacts directly with every other person with no intermediary.”
FAST creates a lattice structure
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.
FAST Agile!
Holding someone hostage does not create peak performance. It creates resentment and disengagement.
FAST Agile!
Management puts eight people in a room and calls one of them the leader, and we’re off to the races.
Don’t limit yourself to the structures and policies of the past. It’s unlikely that an adaptive and resilient system is going to look like a traditional employer filled with twenty-year veterans.
FAST Agile!
One of the consequences of weaponized Taylorism is that work has become a place to perform, not a place to learn.
Everything about the future of work calls us to connect with our deeper sense of self—our empathy, our vulnerability, our bravery, our humility, and our humanity.
Shifting to a “role mix” enables us to pick up and put down roles as we grow.
If you’re not clear on your own talents and purpose, self-direction can seem overwhelming.
developing personal and professional mastery is a basic human need.
competence is complex and contextual. Don’t try to reduce talents and skills to a matrix.
Management guru W. Edwards Deming had it right when he said, “Pay is not a motivator.”
“It’s not so much that money buys you happiness but that lack of money buys you misery.”
Whole Foods has shared salary data internally since 1986.
Incentive compensation is counterproductive. At best, it rewards behavior that was already happening and, in the process, strips that activity of its intrinsic value. At worst, it actually promotes negative behavior in the form of sandbagging, unhealthy competition, and manipulation.
individual performance is a myth. Not because there aren’t heroes among us capable of amazing feats—there probably are software developers that code ten times better than the mean. But being a great player is not the same as winning the championship.
If you really want to reward your team for business performance, do it in the form of profit sharing proportional to their percentage of the salary pool. That metric is harder to game, and it brings everyone together.
compensation is a hygiene factor that should be fair and generous enough to not matter.
Keep the focus on autonomy, mastery, and purpose—conditions that actually support motivation.
You’re trying to lead your organization to a place where you’re not the leader anymore, at least not in the way you are today.
Culture can’t be controlled or designed. It emerges. It isn’t happening to people; it’s happening among people.
“Culture is like a shadow: You cannot change it, but it changes all the time. Culture is read-only.”
Ben Franklin once said, “Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you’ll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others.”
So, if we can’t change culture and we can’t change people, what can we do? We can change the system. We’re headed into uncharted territory now. Here there be dragons.
We made the case that what Control Inc. needed was bigger than Agile and more nuanced than a reorg. It needed to evolve its operating system.
Agile is at best a local optimization
changing a complex system is not like changing a complicated one. There are no Gantt charts in OS transformation
“What would happen if you stopped playing the role of fixer?”
We need a new approach to organizational transformation. We can start by accepting that organizations are complex adaptive systems, not complicated mechanical ones. They are living systems, not machines. They are the sum total of the principles, practices, mindsets, assumptions, and behavior of hundreds or thousands of people.
The history of human innovation is a story of happy accidents.
changes that serve us can spread quickly.
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.
we should measure the results of our experiments, probes, nudges, and flips according to those ideals.
Will a change we make increase our ability to respond to changing circumstances? Improve our relationships or social density? Bring more meaning to the workplace? Or will it move us away from those things?
We can make small local changes routine and find that progress compounds.
If you’ve ever seen a murmuration—thousands of starlings engaged in aerial ballet—you know how incredible emergence can be.
recruiting people who are not just skilled but ready to reinvent how they work.
If you’re an established organization, that means finding the rebels in the system who are already hacking the bureaucracy.
“We’re looking for insurgents with influence,”
OS transformation needs liminal space to survive. We need a place in the organization where we can say: here we’re going to do things differently, here it is safe to try.
Same for FAST
Antibodies and muscle memory will emerge and try to maintain the status quo.
tension is always present in every living system. Without it we cannot grow. Without tension we are dead.
“What’s stopping the organization from achieving its purpose?”
Beneficial coherence can happen anywhere. When you see it, seize it.
At Buurtzorg, the roughly one thousand self-managed teams are supported by a network of eighteen coaches.
cultures that don’t value and nurture openness and connection become dysfunctional and eventually toxic.
