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

by Aaron Dignan

we try new things, notice positive and negative patterns, amplify what’s working, and minimize what isn’t.

While we can’t pick a specific future state and realize it through sheer force of will, that doesn’t mean we can’t steer in the direction of our values. We want to create organizations that are People Positive and Complexity Conscious—full of humanity, vitality, and adaptivity. That means we should measure the results of our experiments, probes, nudges, and flips according to those ideals.

In the short run, it’s easier keeping everyone in the dark. In the long run, a little light goes a long way.

If you look at the stories of cultures that have transcended bureaucracy, you can almost always trace it back to one or two individuals who saw an opportunity to do things differently. Fed up with the old way of running an organization, and often in a moment of crisis or rebirth, they begin to ask deeper questions. They start to suspect—and then to believe—that a better way of working is out there.

Limit work in progress to a specific number of projects, initiatives, or tasks.

Create dashboards that make team activity and performance visible. ☐ Make org and team financials transparent and accessible. ☐ Make compensation transparent to everyone in the organization. ☐ Adopt a policy of “open by default” when it comes to information. ☐ Make all available information searchable and accessible. ☐ Work in public by making workflow and work in progress visible to other teams.

Institute a regular ask-me-anything meeting that’s open to everyone.

Offer peer-to-peer master classes taught by team members. ☐ Use videoconferencing to increase emotional intelligence during remote meetings and calls.

Experiment Worksheet Tension What is your tension? How does it manifest? Share a story that brings it to life. Practice What do you propose we try? What is your hypothesis? How does this practice support our commitment to a People Positive and Complexity Conscious OS? Participants Who will be involved? What are they committing to? Duration How long will the experiment last? When will you conduct a retrospective to collect perspectives and learning? Learning Metrics How will we know if it was beneficial or harmful? What kinds of stories do you hope to hear? Requirements What do you need in order to conduct the experiment, in terms of resources, space, supplies, funding, etc.? Safety What kind of support or consent do you need to make this safe to try?

Looping is an adventure in uncertainty. You’re going to learn a lot more by doing than I could ever share here. Get as many repetitions under your belt as you can. Think of looping as something you have to master through deliberate practice. Start small. Start local. Be patient. And stick with it. You are starting a chain reaction that will eventually transform your entire way of working. A more human, vital, and adaptive organization is out there, just waiting to be discovered. And once the pattern of continuous participatory change starts, it can be hard to stop.

In complexity, rules can become constraints that limit our ability to adapt. “Always” and “never” are words we try to avoid. Instead we attempt to develop principles or heuristics—guidelines that prove useful in certain situations without being overly rigid or restrictive. These somewhat counterintuitive aphorisms may help you avoid some common pitfalls.

The simple metaphor is a two-hundred-pound stone versus two hundred one-pound stones. Which is easier to move? Which is riskier to move? Which one can best leverage many hands?

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. When your team is taking smaller bites, there’s a feeling of momentum, and the electricity of that is palpable. Other teams see it. They feel it. And they want it for themselves.

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.

For every problem, we believe the solution is more. Additional employees. Another meeting. A new policy. Each one adds to the organizational debt.

When you have a new approach that has become popular with a handful of teams, you want it to spread. For that to happen, teams have to feel safe, encouraged even, to notice what’s working for others and to adapt it to their context. We decided to highlight emergent practices from across the org every month during all-hands meetings. The message was “Look at what your colleagues are doing. We support them. If you see something you want to try, we will get you the support you need.”

We have to move from a model of eternal consumption (a chart that goes up and to the right forever) to a model that is regenerative and distributive. That doesn’t mean regressive socialism or state-controlled enterprise; it means embodying new goals.

Certified B Corporations represent an operational one. B Lab, the nonprofit that developed and promotes the model legislation for public benefit corporations, is also the creator of a set of standards for social impact that make it more tangible and measurable. The idea here is to move from intentions to outcomes. Not just what an organization values, but what it does. To become a Certified B Corporation, an organization must take the B Impact Assessment, which measures impact areas such as governance, workers, community, and environment, from the perspective of both operations and the underlying business model. Applicants that achieve an impact score above a certain threshold are certified, authorized to use the Certified B Corporation language and logo, and join a community of more than 2,600 organizations that represent sixty countries and more than 150 industries.

Rochdale Principles: (1) voluntary and open membership, (2) democratic member control, (3) economic participation by members, (4) autonomy and independence, (5) education, training, and information, (6) cooperation among cooperatives, and (7) concern for community. These manifest in an organization that is essentially for the people, by the people.

The CEO who seeks to invest in long-term success (or, gasp, purpose and impact) is met with outcries from activist investors, while algorithmic high-frequency traders create and profit from short-term volatility.