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

by Aaron Dignan

a system in trauma can’t transform.

We create space at the dawn of something new.

To make up for what is effectively a dysfunctional operating system, they’ve had to adopt an unsustainable pace of work.

Continuous improvement is not magic; it is a discipline. It is a thing we do.

we can’t learn if there’s no time to think.

Teams need time for retrospection. They need time for personal reflection. They need time for deep work. They need time to run experiments and find a better way.

People who have a vested interest in the status quo will try to preserve it.

People who don’t understand something new will try to resist it.

In complexity, rules can become constraints that limit our ability to adapt.

Mistaking a complex system for a complicated one, leaders try to control the change.

in a complex world, things can change rapidly and unexpectedly.

You’ll be surprised how easy it is to scale something that has been validated and improved by the people who have to use it every day.

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

The vast majority of rules and process are created because we don’t trust people to do the right thing.

People can and do change. They just do so when it makes sense to them.

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.

Refreshing large dysfunctional systems without total system failure is actually one of the great challenges of our time.

toppling bureaucracy and replacing it with something more adaptive, vital, and human is crucial,

Insurgence is messy. It’s going to butt up against the antibodies of the existing OS at every turn.

We can always start by starting.

A person can tip a team, a team can tip a division, and a division can tip a global corporation.

GDP growth can’t continue forever with finite resources.