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

by Aaron Dignan

“When we feel that sense of frustration at a system that’s not working, or a mistake that keeps getting repeated, or a process that seems inefficient and cumbersome, we are tuning in to a gap between how things are and how they could be.”11

we have curated a list of seventy-eight tensions that cut across all twelve dimensions of the OS Canvas and provide provocative fodder for incredible conversations. Take a look and see how many apply to your team or organization. Lack of trust. It isn’t always clear who has the authority to make decisions. Bottlenecks in decision making. Too much consensus. People have to ask for permission to take action. Opinions matter more than data. We have meetings to prepare for meetings. Our meetings are theater. Meetings don’t lead to decisions or action. No time in the day for actual work. Only the loudest voices get heard. Too many meetings. Not enough transparency. Information is shared only on a need-to-know basis. Lack of honesty and candor. Lack of visibility between teams. Too much email. The “why” behind decisions isn’t always clear. Outdated tech tools. Our technology and tools are not maximizing our potential. Our processes get in the way of the work. We operate like everything is a crisis. We are addicted to planning. Work/life boundaries are not used or respected. We reflect infrequently. We plan and predict rather than test and learn. We change slower than the outside world. Rigid structures prevent experimentation. Failure is unacceptable. Good ideas get lost in bureaucracy. We don’t take risks. Lack of feedback. Learned helplessness. Our people don’t have the skills we need. We aren’t self-aware. Career paths are unclear. We work in silos. Cross-functional relations...

To make things easier, we have developed a deck of cards featuring the most common tensions that helps teams push beyond these points of resistance. When working with a team, we’ll hand them a deck containing all seventy-eight tensions and challenge them to narrow it down to just seven.

One simple approach is to set up a #ways-of-working channel on your internal messaging app (if you have one) and start sharing and discussing links that highlight novel practice.

In addition to our tension cards, we have also developed a deck of practice cards curated from Evolutionary Organizations and our own OS. Which are you willing to try? Craft a clear and compelling purpose for the organization. Craft a clear and compelling purpose for every team and every role. Ask teams to share their essential intent for the next six to twenty-four months. Clarify the metrics that matter and use them to steer. Recognize and celebrate noble failure. Replace “Is it perfect?” with “Is it safe to try?” Give everyone the freedom to choose when, where, and how they work. Clarify the decision rights held by teams and roles. Use the concept of a waterline to create guardrails around team and individual autonomy. Start distributing authority to the edge of the organization. Crowdsource and eliminate policies and processes that no longer make sense. Start by stopping a meeting, process, or habit that is holding us back. Leverage decision science to reduce bias and make objectively better choices. Use Integrative Decision Making for important collective decisions. Distinguish between reversible and irreversible decisions and treat them differently. Define spending thresholds below which no approval or advice is necessary. Replace the permission process with a robust advice process. Trade autocracy and consensus for governance by consent. Form SLAM teams—self-managing, lean, audacious, multidisciplinary—around critical initiatives. Decentralize some of the work of ce...

Seemingly innocuous practices that keep showing up within cultures and teams you respect are probably worth experiencing.

So while everyone is giddy with the excitement of what we should do, add, and try, take the opportunity to ask them what we should stop doing.

The worksheet below contains the key questions that will push a team for clarity on what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. We recommend individuals or teams take the time to fill this out carefully before sharing it with those who will be impacted by their proposal.

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?

If your stakeholders are ready to move to a decentralized network of autonomous teams working transparently toward a common purpose, your loops may be more radical, progressive, and concurrent. If you’re on a more incremental path, they may be focused and sequential.

we use the term criticality to refer to the moment in an OS transformation where enough people are sufficiently committed to the ideals of self-management that going back to the way things were is impractical. The operating system has undergone a phase transition and is now something else entirely. It is, for the organization in question, quite literally the point of no return.

If you see the language changing at scale, that signals criticality. Because language is how we make meaning.

When the boundaries start to blur, it means the work is emerging under its own energy, and that means, at least in your corner of the org, things will never be the same.

Following system-wide criticality, the culture has in effect taken responsibility for its own development. The operating system—previously a black box—has become facile and fungible. It is now a form of commons, owned by everyone, and everyone must maintain it.

in years to come, we will see more congregations of Evolutionary Organizations, coming together to talk not about the latest trend in technology, but about far more fundamental questions of how to create an ever better future.

cultures that don’t value and nurture openness and connection become dysfunctional and eventually toxic.

the members of the team spent a roughly equal amount of time talking. The technical term for this is equality in distribution of conversational turn taking. Second, the members of the team displayed fairly good intuition about what the other members were feeling. This is referred to as high average social sensitivity. Equal talk time and emotional intelligence.

A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other. —Simon Sinek

ICBD stands for Intentions, Concerns, Borders, and Dreams.

The question for Intentions was “Why do you personally want to participate in this change?”

“My intention is to create a case study here that I can use in my book. My concern is that I won’t be successful in getting this group to open up. My border is that I leave work at 5:00 P.M. every day to spend time with my family. No late-night emails or calls with you just because we’re under contract. My dream is that this will spread to other parts of your organization.”

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.

You’ll be creating and holding the space for change.

Creating space means ensuring that everyone on the team is committed to taking risks together and supporting one another.

Creating space also means making time for change.

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. You can create these opportunities for them, or you can empower them to create them for themselves.

Through Them, Not to Them

Start Small

Sense and Respond

Start by Stopping

Join the Resistance

When people are allowed to take ownership over even a small part of their way of working in a safe space, they open up.

There’s nothing that legacy cultures love more than a measurable productivity gain, so when things do move the needle, they spread fast.

“Rather than worry about how we scale this, let’s worry about what might stop these practices from spreading,”

In my future of work … › Every business, nonprofit, government, and social institution practices Continuous Participatory Change and aspires to get better every day, not just for its customers but for all stakeholders, including the community. › Purpose and human flourishing are the objectives that drive organizations. Growth is a result, not a goal. › Self-management is the dominant organizing construct, and most individuals go to work in an environment that promotes freedom and responsibility. › Employee ownership and participation are expected and supported. Not every business is a true cooperative, but rewards are far more distributed. Many organizations become employee- or community-owned over time as founders and investors realize sufficient returns. › New forms of incorporation allow organizations to include public benefit as a counterbalance to their fiduciary duty. Making money is no longer the sole function of business. › More companies stay private and resist outside investment to remain free of outside influence and pressure. Those that need funding increasingly get it from their community or investors with a broader definition of return. Those that need to go public do so via new platforms that allow them to optimize for the long term rather than the short term. › Diversity, equity, and inclusion are considered fundamental to success, both because they improve performance and because they reflect our values. Organizations make trade-offs in order to excel in t...

Enter the public benefit corporation, a relatively new form of incorporation that allows an organization to prioritize a purpose or mission—beyond profit—that provides a benefit to society. By encoding this right and responsibility into the legal structure of the business itself, the public benefit corporation allows an organization to protect and nurture its mission, even as a publicly traded company.

Co-ops generally embody a set of ideals known as the 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.4 These manifest in an organization that is essentially for the people, by the people.

In this century, for new forms of incorporation that prioritize purpose and public benefit to work, we need new investors and investment vehicles that align with our values.