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

by Aaron Dignan

“What’s stopping you from doing the best work of your life?”

We don’t have enough time to do our work, but we pack our days with endless meetings. We don’t have the information we need, but we are buried in emails, documents, and data. We want speed and innovation, but we run from risk and inhibit our best people. We claim to work in teams, but we don’t really trust one another. We know the way we’re working isn’t working, but we can’t imagine an alternative. We long for change, but we don’t know how to get it.

Our organizational operating system—the practices, policies, processes, procedures, rituals, and norms that shape our day-to-day reality—is so prevalent we almost take it for granted.

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.

“Stop trying to borrow wisdom and think for yourself.7 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.

London Business School professor Gary Hamel has taken up a crusade against bureaucracy by trying to put a value on our lost time and energy. After a broad workforce analysis, Hamel and his coauthor, Michele Zanini, claim that roughly half of the 23.8 million management roles in the United States are unnecessary.16 They found that a new wave of companies (including many featured in this book) have managed to cut their manager-to-employee ratio in half while keeping performance up. It follows that if the market could leverage the methods of these pioneers, 12.5 million managers would be free to do something more productive.

I define organizational debt as any structure or policy that no longer serves an organization.

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.

Between 1973 and 2016 net productivity rose by 73.7 percent. What do you think happened to wages over that same time frame? If you guessed that they were stagnant, you’re catching on. Wages were up just 12.5 percent over those same forty-three years, meaning that productivity has outpaced pay by 5.9x. Meanwhile, the ratio of pay between the CEO and the average worker went from 22.3:1 to 271:1.

Over many years of collaboration and study, their groundbreaking work evolved into self-determination theory. They proposed that we have three innate psychological needs that drive and shape our behavior: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

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.

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

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.

If we can just create the right conditions, everyone will continually find ways to achieve our goals.

“It’s often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better …. Because when you’re working to make things 10 percent better, you inevitably focus on the existing tools and assumptions, and on building on top of an existing solution that many people have already spent a lot of time thinking about … But when you aim for a 10x gain, you lean instead on bravery and creativity—the kind that, literally and metaphorically, can put a man on the moon.”

A great purpose is aspirational, but it’s also a constraint. It focuses our energy and attention. It places a boundary around our efforts by saying, Here is where we will build our dream. Too mundane (e.g., shareholder value) and we lack meaning. Too vague (e.g., change the world) and we lack focus. Too concrete (e.g., a computer on every desk) and we can find ourselves rudderless after the moment of victory.

Ask every team in your organization to articulate their essential intent. What has to happen in the next six to twenty-four months to keep us moving toward the organization’s purpose?

Clarify your purpose so that you can see it three decades down the line. Then tighten up your road map for the next half year.

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?

Evolutionary Organizations ensure that everyone has the freedom and autonomy to serve the organization’s purpose. The default assumption here is that you can do anything, unless a specific policy or agreement prohibits it.

“Policies are organizational scar tissue.11 They are codified overreactions to situations that are unlikely to happen again. They are collective punishment for the misdeeds of an individual.”

What’s the smallest amount of policy required to protect us while preserving the flexibility to learn and act with judgment?

The final round is the breakthrough: someone who objects to a proposal cannot simply veto it but must try to shape it further to make it safe to try.

Integrative Decision Making Process

Here’s a simple process for creating (or refining) your decision stack collaboratively. Gather everyone on your team together and dive in.

At The Ready we’ve seen teams use it descriptively, to articulate their way of working (or someone else’s). We’ve seen teams use it diagnostically, to explore a positive or negative pattern they’ve noticed (e.g., why do new hires feel so confused about our onboarding process?). And some use it aspirationally, to imagine ways their firm might evolve.

Culture can’t be controlled or designed. It emerges. It isn’t happening to people; it’s happening among people.

we experienced new ways of working through activities and exercises designed to challenge assumptions, and we talked about what we noticed. We moved as much as we sat still.

The problem is that we mistake the organization for an ordered system. And so we oversimplify. As a result, we tend to force whatever is happening in the system—in the hearts and minds of our colleagues—into that framework.

The truth is that in an increasingly complex world, plans are lies committed to paper. They’re mere horoscopes drafted by the people furthest from the action that diverge from reality the moment they’re published.

Managing the present to actually create a new direction of travel is more important than creating false expectations about how things could be in the future.”

we’re not just changing the organization; we’re changing how we change the organization.

You can’t blow up bureaucracy with a bureaucratic change process. You can’t build a culture of trust with a program full of oversight and verification. Start the way you mean to finish.

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.

six such patterns that, held lightly, are worth encouraging: Commitment: When those with power or influence commit to moving beyond bureaucracy. Boundaries: When a liminal space is created and protected. Priming: When the invitation to think and work differently is offered. Looping: When change is decentralized and self-management begins. Criticality: When the system has tipped and there’s no going back. Continuity: When continuous participatory change is a way of life, and the organization is contributing to the broader community of practice.

Autonomy. All members and teams should be self-managing and self-organizing. Members have the freedom and responsibility to use their skills, judgment, and feedback loops to steer and serve the organization’s purpose.

Consent. All policy decisions—agreements, rules, roles, structures, and resources—should be made through the informed consent of those impacted by that decision. In the spirit of agility, members may consent to using other forms of decision making, including distributing authority to specific roles, teams, or elected representatives.

Transparency. All information should be made available and accessible to all members. Individuals and teams should “default to open” when it comes to sharing...

assembling a network of catalysts that could act as a launch team. “We’re looking for insurgents with influence,” I said. “People who have a dream and a team.”

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. The important thing is that the space be protected—from the rest of the organization and the outside world.

When working with clients, we tend to start with a boundary around a team, then two or three, and then what General Stanley McChrystal calls a “team of teams”—a network of teams bound by a common purpose.

It seems no accident that it correlates with Dunbar’s number—a commonly quoted cognitive limit on the number of people we can maintain stable social relationships with (roughly 150). In a startup this might include everybody. In a larger organization this often means a P&L, a location, a geography, or a function.

Instead of diagnosis, we typically proceed with a process of experiential learning and dialogue we call priming. For catalysts, leaders, and teams who are willing, we want to challenge the basic assumptions we all hold about organizations and how we work in them.

The idea behind priming is to pull people out of their patterns and back onto a learning edge through play, reflection, and debate.

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.

Typical topics we like to prime include complexity, emergence, self-organization, organizational debt, agility, leanness, motivation, self-awareness, mastery, trust, generative difference, psychological safety, and more.

Your goal is to prime every team inside the liminal space. It doesn’t have to happen all at once. It doesn’t even have to happen before they start changing. But it helps. A few hours of play and discussion sets everyone up for success in things to come. At the end of every priming experience, you’re extending an invitation, not a mandate: Join us. Try something. Start a conversation. Ask for help. We are here for you. A whole new way of working is possible. Step into the space.

In our work, a loop contains three stages that are practiced recursively: Sensing Tensions, Proposing Practices, and Conducting Experiments.