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

by Aaron Dignan

We were three weeks into a project and our sponsor on the client side was looking for the plan. “I just don’t understand what’s going to happen,” he told me. “We’re meeting with teams and talking about their way of working, but when are we going to start doing the real work?” “Well,” I said, “this is the real work. We’re asking teams what’s slowing them down or standing in their way. We’re asking them what they’d change if they could. And we’re inviting them to design and run experiments around those tensions and scale the ones that work.” He looked at me quizzically and took a long pause. “Right … but what’s the plan?” His company, Control Inc., had reached out to us because they were seeking a partner to help with culture change. The leadership team was under pressure to turn the company around because growth had stalled and employee engagement was dwindling. They had rightly identified that culture was central to their predicament. However, the other partners they were considering—traditional consultants and Agile experts—made us think twice. Those were the kind of partners you chose if you wanted a concrete recommendation. A PowerPoint deck. A proven methodology. A structural reorganization. These sorts of solutions can feel comforting when you’re unsure, but over time they lead to dependence and fragility. When the one-size-fits-all answer doesn’t work (or stops working), what then? We made the case that what Control Inc. needed was bigger than Agile and more nuanced ...