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

by Aaron Dignan

Defaults vs. Standards. It’s easy to get in the habit of cementing practices, methods, tools, and products as standards. Standards tend to be enforced. We use this tool and only this tool. We evaluate leads using this process and only this process. And so on. The great thing about standards is that they show us a proven way to do something and they are reliable (for the most part). The problem with standards is that they undermine our ability to use judgment, innovate, and learn. Instead of enforcing standards, think about proven practices as defaults. Defaults are exactly like standards with one exception: you don’t have use them. A default says: If you don’t know what you’re doing, do this. If you don’t have time to think, try it our way. But if you’ve achieved some level of mastery in an area and you think you see a better way, feel free. Let us all know how it goes, because either you’ll generate further proof that our default is sound or you’ll sow the seeds for a new default that we can all benefit from. In the case of my firm, we maintain a default fee structure for our services. If an experienced member wants to try something different—a price premium, a discount, an equity swap—there are no rules against that, but we want to learn from it. Our members know they can take a risk and go their own way, but only when they think that we all stand to benefit.