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

by Aaron Dignan

A true culture of innovation is one where we can’t tell the difference between operations and invention.

Improving workflow, the way value is created, is a continual source of advantage for the firms that do it. They gain speed, quality, efficiency, and in many cases simplicity. Yet it’s routinely overlooked in favor of cosmetic changes to structure that rarely change how work gets done.

When you nurture large functions—engineering, marketing, human resources—you create an environment where important projects have to cut across the matrix and necessitate the participation of a wide variety of disconnected people. In terms of workflow, that’s like salmon swimming upstream. So how do we make sure these people do what they’re supposed to do? Enter project management. Since the team working on the project isn’t really a team, we appoint a project manager to shepherd the herd. Of course, they lack the authority to really lead the effort, because all the participants’ allegiances lie with their functions.

Instead of one massive ocean liner winding its way through a series of functions, Spotify’s workflow looks more like a regatta of speedboats heading in the same general direction.

Cleaning the bathroom as a task is disempowering. But the “clean bathrooms for our guests” project creates possibilities. Can we automate this? Can we design our bathrooms differently so they’re easier to clean? Everything is in play. Of course, this doesn’t mean tasks cease to exist. Just that they are often (and possibly always) in service of a project, consciously or unconsciously.

sprints force decisions. Rather than debating or agonizing over what could be, the constraints mean it’s safer to make a choice than to wait. If we show our users or customers that week’s work and find out we missed the mark, so what? We spent one week to invalidate a direction that might have soaked up months of time in a previous regime.

Not just sprints but all self-imposed deadlines

And remember, if a new request comes in that you agree to tackle, something else has to go back on pause.

There’s a lack of clarity about bandwidth because everyone is maxed out.

How do we handle projects that are too big for one team?

Break it into pieces, I guess. Easier if the pieces have to be put together in a sequence, more difficult concurrently.

healthy workflow comes from organizing around the work, not working around the organization.

The Braintrust has no authority. The goal of the meeting isn’t necessarily to solve problems but to shine a light on them, to trace them to their source, and give the creative team the perspective they need to start fixing them.

Like postmortems

When members lack the authority to make decisions, these meetings become the only mechanism for moving things forward. When members lack the ability to resolve conflict, these private audiences with the leader become a forum for politicking. Great one-on-ones can provide feedback and mentorship, deepen relationships, or give us a chance to collaborate on the work. But if you notice they’re becoming a venue for other unmet needs, pull the rip cord and bring those conversations into the light.

The best kind of retrospective? The one that happens. Most teams have an abysmal track record of protecting the time for these sessions. Moving on to the next thing is too tempting.

liberatingstructures.com is a fantastic resource for anyone ready to move beyond conventional meetings to something more inclusive and generative.

Check

Within most Legacy Organizations, information is power. We hoard it to elevate our status, create job security, and protect ourselves from its misuse. Information is guarded and shared on a case-by-case basis. This perpetuates the power structure and creates opacity that allows bias and misinformation to thrive. Unchecked, this almost always leads to scandal and missed opportunities.

Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not mastery. Mastery is not wisdom. These are important distinctions that can help shape our approach to individual and organizational learning.

It’s difficult to overstate the degree to which Evolutionary Organizations value and practice transparency.

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.

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.

Public Slack channels.

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.

You can still have a private conversation, or even a private channel, but that’s a choice, and you have to ask yourself, Am I sure no one else would benefit from this discussion? Nine times out of ten the answer is no. Work in public.

One of the most common mistakes I see is teams taking a swing at empowerment before ensuring transparency. What happens? People make decisions without the benefit of crucial information (about intent, strategy, customers, prior learning, etc.), those decisions are subpar, and leadership goes, “See! People can’t be trusted to make decisions.” Avoid this by focusing on sharing early and often. Make it safe. Make it habitual. When shared consciousness is high, everything else gets easier.

Online retailer Zappos feels the same way. They famously offer new employees $1,000 to quit after their first week or so. Why? Because they want only team members who are passionate about being there. Amazon, which acquired Zappos in 2009, liked this program so much they made it an annual offer within their fulfillment centers, upping the ante to $5,000 for longtime employees.

It’s unlikely that an adaptive and resilient system is going to look like a traditional employer filled with twenty-year veterans.

The japanese would probably disagree

One of the consequences of weaponized Taylorism is that work has become a place to perform, not a place to learn. Confidence and equanimity get promoted. Humility, vulnerability, and struggle get labeled weak.

Here we see the connection between mastery and maturity. Talent and skills don’t matter if we don’t have the maturity—the courage and humility—to welcome the conditions for continuous growth.

Locus of control, though, is of particular interest as we explore mastery. The concept was developed by psychologist Julian B. Rotter to describe the degree to which people think they can control the outcomes of events in their lives. People with an internal locus of control believe that they have a high degree of influence over what happens to them. People with an external locus of control believe the opposite, that fate and other people shape their lives.

Maybe a more commonly used term for what I've talked of as agency

Of course, what matters here isn’t which perspective is right but which one produces the most beneficial outcomes. And in that context internal locus of control and growth mindset win, hands down. When you believe that your choices and attitude matter, you show up in your own life. You strive to make things better. You reach for your dreams. You never give up. This leads to more practice, more failure, more learning.

An ever-evolving spectrum of knowledge and skill becomes a fixed number of levels, each with its own qualifications. These models promote conformity to dogma and reductive criteria that can quickly become the focus instead of actual competence. In order to attain this rank you must know these things.

Luckily, it’s easy to abandon the exhausting administration of these models for deliberate practice and knowledge transfer between masters and apprentices. It’s harder work, but we can stop chasing colored sashes and start getting good at what we do.

But how do you manage compensation then?

Anyone who thinks that a multiple-choice exam about unconscious bias is going to eliminate racism is kidding themselves.

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.

We need to accept that we cannot distill or transfer knowledge completely. We need to create work environments with high social density where members with different levels of knowledge and competence can work and learn together. We need to enable individuals to pursue roles and projects where their skills are stretched and flow is achieved. And when we do stop, we need to create safe and open spaces for experiential and self-organized learning, where memorization is replaced with dialogue and epiphany.

Compensation is hygiene. Don’t mistake it for higher purpose.

If you hold power over other people—in business, in philanthropy, in education, in public service, in your community, or even at home—it is your responsibility to increase the humanity, vitality, and adaptivity of that system.

people keep coming to me with interpersonal problems that they believe are caused by our structure. I’m wondering if I should just make those changes now and solve their tension.” “What would happen if you stopped playing the role of fixer?” one of my colleagues asked. “I don’t know …,” she said. “I guess they would have to figure it out for themselves?” We all looked at one another and smiled.

As leaders, we have been told we have to imagine a compelling future and drive everyone toward it. While this can gather people to our cause, it doesn’t do much to further it.

Because world is more complex than what you can vision and simulate in your head

As leaders, we have to accept that we can’t control whole communities of people—we can nudge them only in directions they are disposed to go. When attempting culture change in complexity, Dave Snowden says, “we manage the emergence of beneficial coherence within attractors, within boundaries.”6 That’s a mouthful, I know. In the common tongue it might read something like this: we try new things, notice positive and negative patterns, amplify what’s working, and minimize what isn’t.

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. 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 have a name for what happens when everyone in an organization is engaged and empowered to shape and reshape its operating system. We call it continuous participatory change. Continuous because we need to break the habit of treating change as a rare and hallowed thing. The inertia of the status quo has made change a last resort. We can make small local changes routine and find that progress compounds. And participatory because we need to break the habit of centralized, top-down transformation. We can distribute authority and encourage everyone to steer the organization in service of its purpose. Every OS transformation is ultimately about achieving that state at scale. Because no matter how brilliant your principles and practices may be, the world will turn, and the organization will need to respond.

Quality over quantity.”

A false dichotomy

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.

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.

One of our favorites is a game called Ballpoint. Originally created by Boris Gloger to deliver lessons about workflow, we use it today with executive teams around the world to help them experience self-organization.

Consider

If you’re willing to search, there are games and activities for learning or unlearning almost anything. Enemy/Defender, an improv game, shows us how simple rules can create complex behavior. The Marshmallow Challenge highlights the importance of testing and learning. The Cynefin Lego Game illustrates, in a hands-on way, the difference between simple, complicated, and complex systems. An Identity Walk can shine a light on diversity and privilege in a way that cuts deeper than any presentation on inclusion or unconscious bias. There are more good options than you’ll ever have time

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At Buurtzorg, the roughly one thousand self-managed teams are supported by a network of eighteen coaches.13 Spotify has employed a similar approach. In these and other cases, teams that are struggling have the ability to engage a coach (rather than a boss) to get unstuck. The greatest athletes in the world have coaches. Why wouldn’t the greatest teams?

High coach per coachee ratio may be ok

Even a small improvement in overall psychological safety can lead to breakout results. A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other. —Simon Sinek

The biggest barrier to change, believe it or not, is you. If you’re the founder, the CEO, or the team leader, you hold a disproportionate amount of power in your organization. People look to you for many things. For decisions. For permission. For attention. For feedback. For signs of what’s to come. If they look at you and see the same behavior, they’re going to dismiss this as another fad. That means you have work to do. Work to master your ego. Work to quiet your voice. Work to step out of the way. You must become a paragon of trying new things. Starting new loops. Asking big questions. Don’t stay stuck in the habit of evaluating and judging the work of others. Go find something to do.

One of the most self-destructive tendencies within teams is to get so busy that we believe there’s no time to get better at how we work.

Your new job is to ensure ever-growing capability—a culture that gets better and more resilient every day. And that won’t happen if you’re playing the hero.