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

by Aaron Dignan

We are all confronted with the fact that the scale and bureaucracy that once made our organizations strong are liabilities in this era of constant change.

Think back on your career, whether that’s a few years or a few decades. Think about the things that have frustrated you. What has held you back. What do you wish you could change. Now read the following instructions and see if you recognize them. Have you ever seen a colleague behave this way?

Excelklent list follows

In 1944, at the height of World War II, William J. Donovan was the director of the United States Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA). He was looking for ways to undermine and destabilize enemy states, particularly those that figured prominently in the war. To that end, he commissioned a new field manual to be developed by the agency. The manual would be provided to ordinary citizens inside enemy territory who were sympathetic to the Allies. It would have a singular focus: helping these citizens carry out acts of “simple sabotage” that would destabilize their own communities and businesses. When completed, the so-called Simple Sabotage Field Manual was wide-ranging. It covered everything from damaging buildings and infrastructure to interrupting supply lines. But there at the end was a little section focused on disrupting day-to-day business operations. As you may have deduced by now, the instructions in the list on the previous page—the ones that sound so eerily familiar—were copied verbatim from that manual, written in 1944. And yet here we are. We see our organizations in those instructions. We see our colleagues. We see ourselves. Somehow, in less than a lifetime, modern work has become indistinguishable from sabotage.

EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED, EXCEPT MANAGEMENT

Operating systems are all around us. Take intersections. Two roads crossing present a deceptively simple challenge: how do we prevent cars from hitting one another, while maintaining the maximum flow of traffic?

Excellent example follows

We are addicted to the idea that the world can be predicted and controlled—that our stoplights are the only way to keep things in check. But when you view the world that way, today’s uncertainty and volatility become triggers for retreating to what has worked in the past. We just need to hire more capable leaders. We just need to squeeze out a little more efficiency and growth. We just need to reorganize. . . . But we know better. The real barrier to progress in the twenty-first century is us.

When it comes to how they build teams, manage projects, make decisions, share information, set targets, review performance, and set compensation, their approach is not a signal-controlled intersection but a roundabout. They use purpose, transparency, and reputation to create cultures of freedom and responsibility. They are intentional but full of serendipity. They are decentralized but coherent. Above all, these firms are People Positive and Complexity Conscious—two foundational mindsets that we’ll explore in detail.

I refer to these iconoclasts as Evolutionary Organizations because they use these mindsets to collectively and continuously improve their shared OS. This isn’t just a way of being; it’s a way of doing. It is a practice. And whether you’re leading a team of ten or ten thousand, improving your OS is the single most powerful thing you can do. That is the promise of this book.

In the remainder of Part One, we’ll find out how our way of working came to be—originating on the factory floors of the Industrial Revolution.

In Part Two we’ll learn about the principles and practices of Evolutionary Organizations through a tour of the OS Canvas, a tool my colleagues and I invented to help teams see just how embedded and interconnected our way of working really is.

In Part Three we’ll tackle the most difficult topic of all: how to change. If you’ve been burned by change efforts that have overpromised and underdelivered, you’re not alone. I’ll

At the same time, I was getting a front-row seat to how things were done in some of the largest companies in the world. And honestly, things didn’t look good. As far as I could tell, big always translated to bad. Bigger companies were slower, less innovative, and less human places. People there were constantly wearing masks that hid their true selves, trading the long term for the short term, and actively disempowering their colleagues—it was everything I didn’t want. But if we were to grow, wasn’t that our future? That seemed to be the only option on the table: trade freedom, speed, and humanity for money and scale. I could feel my definition of success changing, but to what I didn’t know.

The authors of the “Agile Manifesto” put forth a vision of a better way of developing software that prioritizes learning and agility over planning and control. The movement they spawned has inspired many people to think and work differently, well beyond the world of software. Now entire organizations are attempting to achieve “agility at scale,” believing that it will be a remedy for all their problems.

Japanese engineer Taiichi Ohno offered this advice to those seeking to learn his approach at Toyota: “Stop trying to borrow wisdom and think for yourself. Face your difficulties and think and think and think and solve your problems yourself. Suffering and difficulties provide opportunities to become better. Success is never giving up.”

Agility is a mindset, not a tool set. It’s a piece of the puzzle, not the whole thing. It is necessary but not sufficient.

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in Old Path White Clouds, “A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.” When we focus too much on the method or the messenger, we lose sight of the deeper truth. The cases and stories I’ll share in the pages ahead are fingers pointing at a better way of working. While we can draw inspiration from them, each of us must do the work of nurturing and evolving our own way.

world.

In his detailed biography of Taylor, author Robert Kanigel spelled out this breakthrough. “And there it was—the Faustian bargain in embryonic form: You do it my way, by my standards, at the speed I mandate, and in so doing you will achieve a level of output I ordain, and I’ll pay you handsomely for it, beyond anything you might have imagined. All you have to do is take orders, and give up your way of doing the job for mine.”

One Best Way -- an excellent book

Although he was well known in certain circles, Taylor didn’t truly go mainstream until 1910. During a very public legal battle between the railroads and the Interstate Commerce Commission, future Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis argued vigorously that the railroads could save more money by implementing the remarkable methods of “Scientific Management” (a term he coined to describe Taylor’s work) than by winning their case. Suddenly, efficiency was on everyone’s mind.

Implicit in these principles was the idea that the thinking (the work for which management was “better fitted”) and the doing (the hard labor) were to be separated once and for all. This is perhaps the most pronounced aspect of Taylor’s legacy. Legions of MBAs followed in his footsteps, carrying with them the sacred duty of thinking for everyone else.

Henry Gantt gave us the chart that bears his name—used to this day to illustrate dependencies within complicated projects and processes. But Gantt baked in a dangerous assumption: that the world can be predicted. In Gantt’s repetitive world of manufacturing, this was tolerable, even helpful. But as his practices fanned out into knowledge work, they became a dangerous addiction. Instead of a means to an end, hitting the plan became an end unto itself.

If Taylor worked at a multinational company today, he’d be flummoxed to find his principles metastasized into something truly inefficient. According to an employee at one federally owned corporation, toiletries have a six-month lead time. To get them, you must make a service request and get a Problem Evaluation Report. Then you need to get a work order, and a purchase order must be processed by the Procurement Engineering Group, who will then contact the vendor to ensure no changes have been made and the products meet regulatory requirements. And 180 days later, if you’re lucky, you’ll get your toilet paper.

I define organizational debt as any structure or policy that no longer serves an organization. Within that definition, we see it manifest in many different ways at many different times.

Under the guise of creating order, we drift toward the disorder of a thousand stupid rules, leaving no ability to respond to the world as it unfolds.

The point is this: to avoid the pitfalls of organizational debt, we need constant and vigilant simplification. We need to create roles, rules, and processes that are inherently agile—built to learn and change. Unfortunately, the very bureaucracy that created our org debt also stands in the way of addressing it. Org debt creates bureaucracy, and bureaucracy protects org debt. It’s a tragic love affair.

This fits with broader research recently completed by the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. In its analysis of more than 25,000 companies, it found that the half-life of all firms was roughly 10.5 years. Big business, small business, it doesn’t matter. Our days are numbered. Organizations are under siege. If we can’t learn to adapt, we may never see another century-old company.

While corporate longevity has plummeted, the average holding time for a stock has gone from eight years to five days.

There’s just one problem: mergers and acquisitions don’t work, or at least not the way we’ve been led to believe. According to one McKinsey study, almost 70 percent of mergers fail to provide the revenue synergies they promise. A similar study by KPMG found that while 82 percent of M&A participants believed their deal was a success a year after closing, only 45 percent had done a formal postdeal review to be sure. When the researchers imposed a strict objective benchmark for success, it turned out 83 percent of the deals had actually failed.

It seems likely that our economy is demonstrating what systems designers call graceful degradation. It’s functional even as parts of the system are failing us. This failure isn’t catastrophic. Not yet. But there are signs that the mindsets, structures, and incentives present in our economy are faulty. In their haste to satisfy the market, organizations are becoming bigger, less efficient, and less human-centric. But the market is us. We’re doing this to ourselves. And in the midst of that dysfunctional feedback loop, we have an obligation to stop and ask if this is really the best we can do.

We cannot do the best work of our lives under the auspices of an OS that presumes our stupidity, our laziness, and our untrustworthiness. When it comes to people, in many ways you get what you design for. Evolutionary Organizations know that if you treat people like mercenaries, they will become mercenaries. Treat them like all-stars and they will become all-stars. To be People Positive is to assume and expect the best of everyone.

Contrary to popular opinion, among people who study systems theory, “complicated” and “complex” are distinct words with precise meanings. The engine inside a car is complicated. A complicated system is a causal system—meaning it is subject to cause and effect. Although it may have many parts, they will interact with one another in highly predictable ways. Problems with complicated systems have solutions. This means that, within reason, a complicated system can be fixed with a high degree of confidence. It can be controlled.

Traffic, on the other hand, is complex. A complex system is not causal, it’s dispositional. We can make informed guesses about what it is likely to do (its disposition), but we can’t be sure.

it. Unlike complicated problems, complex problems cannot be solved, only managed. They cannot be controlled, only nudged.

Complex systems are typically made up of a large number of interacting components—people, ants, brain cells, startups—that together exhibit adaptive or emergent behavior without requiring a leader or central control. As a result, complex systems are more about the relationships and interactions among their components than about the components themselves. And these interactions give rise to unpredictable behavior. If a system surprises you, or has the potential to surprise you, it is likely complex. Software is complicated. Creating a software startup is complex. An airplane is complicated. What happens between the people on board is complex. An assault rifle is complicated. Gun control is complex. Building a skyscraper is complicated. Cities are complex.

While many of the activities and outputs of organizations are indeed complicated, the organization itself is complex. Accordingly, organizational culture isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s an emergent phenomenon that we have to cultivate.

To the legacy leader, everything still looks like a factory. And all our problems can be fixed if we work long and hard enough.

The status quo bias adds to the illusion that the current way is the only way. We strive for improvements—better bosses! simpler budgets! fewer layers!—but they’re inherently incremental. We tweak the recipe without ever questioning whether we should make an entirely different dish.

Scientific Management reveals only the best way to do what we’re already doing. True innovation often requires a departure from the safety of the status quo.

You don’t have to try everything I present to unlock a better way of working. You just have to go far enough to escape the gravity of the status quo. You have to go over backward and headfirst, even if it feels a little uncomfortable. There are ways to get the support you’ll need without politics or propaganda. There are ways to start small and strong. This is your chance to do the best work of your life. Don’t hesitate.

94% of problems in business are systems-driven and only 6% are people-driven. —Attributed to W. Edwards Deming

But through the careful collection and tagging of hundreds of unconventional practices from around the world, I found that Evolutionary Organizations are converging on twelve domains as the proving ground for the future of work.

The OS Canvas PURPOSE How we orient and steer AUTHORITY How we share power and make decisions STRUCTURE How we organize and team STRATEGY How we plan and prioritize RESOURCES How we invest our time and money INNOVATION How we learn and evolve WORKFLOW How we divide and do the work MEETINGS How we convene and coordinate INFORMATION How we share and use data MEMBERSHIP How we define and cultivate relationships MASTERY How we grow and mature COMPENSATION How we pay and provide

Each domain of the OS Canvas asks us to consider an aspect of our organization more deeply than we typically would.

Further, this canvas is not intended to be mutually exclusive or comprehensively exhaustive. From

the socially conscious and purpose-driven companies featured by professor and author Raj Sisodia in Firms of Endearment have outperformed the S&P 500 by a staggering 14x over a period of fifteen years, ten of which were after the publication of the book.

Fractal Purpose. Every organization has a purpose. But not every organization ensures that its purpose is fractal—that it shows up at every level.

Steering Metrics. Legacy Organizations are obsessed with measurement, often using it as a form of control—to find and punish weak performance. But when we obsess over metrics, we fall victim to Goodhart’s law, which states that a measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure. Why? Because human beings will manipulate the situation in order to move the numbers. Instead, we should think of metrics as guides for steering toward our purpose.

In Greg McKeown’s best-selling Essentialism, he put forth the breakthrough notion of an essential intent, a goal that sits between your ultimate vision and your quarterly objectives. He says that an essential intent “is both inspirational and concrete, both meaningful and measurable. Done right, an essential intent is one decision that settles one thousand later decisions.”

The following questions can be applied to the organization as a whole or the teams within it. Use them to provoke a conversation about what is present and what is possible. What is our reason for being? What will be different if we succeed? Whom do we serve? Who is our customer or user? What is meaningful about our work? What measures will help us steer? How does our purpose help us make decisions? What are we unwilling to compromise in pursuit of our goals? Can our purpose change? If so, how?

What does it mean to be People Positive about purpose? Recognize that motivation is connected to a sense of purpose, meaning, and belonging. Take the time to discuss the connection between each individual’s calling and the organization’s collective purpose. What does it mean to be Complexity Conscious about purpose? Accept that purpose is recursive—it shapes us, and we shape it. Purpose enables freedom and autonomy by ensuring coherent action. And yet it’s also an emergent property of the collective. It may morph and shift as we learn and grow.