Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? - by Aaron Dignan
Date read: 2020-11-12How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
Radical theories and ideas on how to reduce the bureaucracy and red tape of hierarchial organizations by reducing the top-down management approach to empower employees to be more self-sufficient and to self-govern. Similar ideas have been presented in Basecamp's "It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work," talks by Ricardo Semler, and many others. Although not feasible to implement all of these ideas into your company, it does present new ideas to address employee engagement and change management.
Contents:
- PURPOSE
- AUTHORITY
- STRUCTURE
- STRATEGY
- RESOURCES
- INNOVATION
- WORKFLOW
- MEETINGS
- INFORMATION
- MEMBERSHIP
- MASTERY
- COMPENSATION
- HOW TO CHANGE
My Notes
As individuals, we each identify with Theory Y. I want to achieve great things. I am creative. I am responsible. But what about everyone else . . . our colleagues? It’s much easier to label them as Theory X. While we have direct access to our own thoughts and feelings, we have no such window into the minds of other people. We have to judge them purely by their behavior, and their behavior is shaped (at least in part) by their environment. If you place someone in a workplace that pays them by the hour, scrutinizes their every move, and treats them like they are disposable, they may (gasp) present with Theory X behavior. So we live with the cognitive dissonance that we are (somehow) capable and others are not.
We cannot do the best work of our lives under the auspices of an OS (Operating System) 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.
“Complicated” and “complex” are distinct words with precise meanings. A complicated system is a causal system—meaning it is subject to cause and effect. Although it may have many parts, they will interact with one another in highly predictable ways. Problems with complicated systems have solutions. A complex system is not causal, it’s dispositional. We can make informed guesses about what it is likely to do (its disposition), but we can’t be sure. We can make predictions about the weather, but we cannot control it. 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.
The mainstream view is that performance is the result of compliance. If we can just get everyone to do exactly as we say, we will achieve our goals. This translates into a culture buried in governing constraints—rules, policies, or processes for every imaginable scenario that dictate exactly what should be done. But Complexity Conscious leaders view performance as the result of collective intelligence, emergence, and self-regulation. If we can just create the right conditions, everyone will continually find ways to achieve our goals. This translates into a culture that is made coherent and free by enabling constraints—agreements that create freedom to use judgment and interaction in the vast majority of situations.
Our way of working is completely made up. This isn’t the way it has to be, or even the way it always was. Our way of working was created, brick by brick, by gurus, industrialists, robber barons, unions, and universities—generations of managers and workers who came before us. We can thank them for what is still serving us, and we can change the rest.
How we orient and steer; the reason for being at the heart of any organization, team, or individual.
Essential intent - A goal that sits between your ultimate vision and your quarterly objectives.
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? Share and discuss over drinks one afternoon. Resist the urge to make them all fit together perfectly. Instead, notice and discuss divergence and convergence. Offer everyone the chance to revise and refine their essential intents regularly, and keep them somewhere everyone can access them.
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.
How we organize and team; the anatomy of the organization; formal, informal, and value-creation networks.
Which structure will make us faster and more adaptive? Whatever that is, centralized, decentralized, or somewhere in between.
Job titles mask the complexity of the roles we hold, and they limit our ability to shape them and step in and out of them freely. Instead, think of the organization as a rich network of roles that can be filled and shaped by anyone. Don’t limit yourself (or anyone else) to one static job description. Recognize that you already hold many roles in many places. Claim them.
What does it mean to be People Positive about structure? Recognize that people are capable of self-organizing if the conditions are correct. Create simple rules or agreements about how teams are formed and changed, then let people go where their skills and energy take them.
What does it mean to be Complexity Conscious about structure? Organize for adaptivity. Ensure that your structure is driven by the periphery—the teams that touch the market—rather than the teams at the center. Allow teams to reorganize continuously rather than in grand gestures every few years. Clarify and specify structure when helpful, but do so in pencil.
How we plan and prioritize; the process of identifying critical factors or challenges and the means to overcome them.
Regardless of your values, strategy is about identifying that which is critical—the factors that will make the difference—and determining how to leverage what is at your disposal to maximize your chances of success.
Legacy Organizations fall down on strategy - In their desire to be “the leader,” they try to appeal to everyone, do everything, be everywhere, and offend no one. But good strategy is about identifying critical (and often controversial) factors that are going to define the future of a category.
Try launching a red team. Gather any group of colleagues and ask them to design the competitor that would bury you.
Instead, demote your annual operating plan. Make it an annual operating prediction. Let teams take ownership of their local expression of strategy and operations. This will leave space for emergence and harness the full potential of your membership.
What does it mean to be People Positive about strategy? Recognize that sound strategy depends on our ability to perceive what’s really going on. Each of us has a piece of that truth. Create shared consciousness through forums and tools that integrate different perspectives, and question the logic of your strategy regularly.
What does it mean to be Complexity Conscious about strategy? Accept that in areas of rapid change, your strategy is only as good as your ability to learn and adjust course. Because complexity is inherently surprising, know that effective strategies may appear unlikely or counterintuitive, until they’re suddenly obvious.
How we invest our time and money; the allocation of capital, effort, space, and other assets.
Where a Legacy Organization might commit to a specific revenue-growth target for the year, Beyond Budgeting would recommend beating the average performance of their competitors. Why? Because what if the market was down 20 percent and the business stayed flat? That would be a miracle. But under the traditional approach no one would be rewarded. In an uncertain world, relative performance is the only true benchmark.
What does it mean to be People Positive about resources? Recognize that people are not resources, they are people—capable of directing their own time and attention to where they can add the most value. They’re also capable of delivering performance without fixed targets or individual incentives. Let relative targets and a share of the wealth created by the business guide behavior.
What does it mean to be Complexity Conscious about resources? Accept that you cannot predict the future. Choosing how and where to spend your money a year in advance is folly. Minimize long-term commitments where appropriate to maximize discretionary funds. Ignore annual rhythms and allocate resources dynamically based on real-time information.
How we learn and evolve; the creation of something new; the evolution of what already exists.
Next time you hear a great idea or see a winning approach, don’t roll it out, offer it up.
Instead of enforcing standards, think about proven practices as defaults. Defaults are exactly like standards with one exception: you don’t have to 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.
What does it mean to be People Positive about innovation? Recognize that people are inherently creative given the right conditions. Trust them to sense opportunity and pursue it fluidly. A true culture of innovation is one where we can’t tell the difference between operations and invention.
What does it mean to be Complexity Conscious about innovation? Accept that innovation is inherently uncertain. A healthy amount of variation and divergence is necessary if you want a vibrant ecology of self-renewal. Have the discipline to make bets in good times and bad.
How we divide and do the work; the path and process of value creation.
What does it mean to be People Positive about workflow? Recognize that healthy workflow comes from organizing around the work, not working around the organization. When our teams and projects live in the same place, relationships fuel the work. And instead of pushing for uniformity, let local methods and tools flourish.
What does it mean to be Complexity Conscious about workflow? Accept that workflow is something to be coordinated and refined, not something that can be solved. Ensure that every team has the capacity to do the work and improve how they do the work at the same time. In order to maximize the adaptive potential of the organization, create the infrastructure to support loosely coupled, tightly aligned teams.
How we convene and coordinate; the many ways members and teams come together.
Encourage every team to hold a monthly governance meeting. The goal of this meeting is for everyone to have the chance to voice their concerns and propose local changes to structure, strategy, resources . . . anything that will help the organization pursue its purpose. Thousands of organizations around the world that practice Sociocracy, Holacracy, or other forms of participatory governance are doing this today. Imagine every team in your organization continuously and deliberately tweaking, not just your products and services but the organization itself.
Two roles that we have found to be particularly effective are facilitator and scribe.
Meeting Moratorium - Instead of trying to fix all the meetings in your current operating rhythm while they’re in flight, see if your team is open to canceling all meetings for two weeks.
The questions we wanted them to answer? What do we miss? What do we need that we’re not getting from informal interactions? Based on what we heard, we rebuilt the meeting rhythm one meeting at a time, ensuring that each one had a clear purpose and matching structure.
If you were to chart the most valuable but least practiced meetings, the hands-down winner would be something called a retrospective.
Build an agenda on the fly. Rather than predict what will matter most tomorrow or next week, we’ll choose and prioritize our topics once we get in the room. If we don’t get to it, we don’t save it. Someone will bring it up next time if it’s still important.
If you’re hungry for more, liberatingstructures.com is a fantastic resource for anyone ready to move beyond conventional meetings to something more inclusive and generative.
What does it mean to be People Positive about meetings? Recognize that human beings crave connection and relatedness. Sharing the same space every once in a while matters. But rather than treating all meetings as social free-for-alls, let the purpose of every meeting dictate its structure. Some should work with our human nature, and some should help us transcend it.
What does it mean to be Complexity Conscious about meetings? Accept that coordination and shared consciousness in a complex system require high-bandwidth forums for information sharing, including meetings. Remember that uncertainty applies to meetings too. Overpreparation and overgripping can lead you to miss what’s present and critical for the team.
How we share and use data; the flow of data, insight, and knowledge across the organization.
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.
One powerful way to break patterns of secrecy and rumor is to host a regular Ask Me Anything session with your function, division, or organization.
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.”
What does it mean to be People Positive about information? Recognize that trusting people with sensitive information is worth the risk, even if the occasional breach occurs. Sharing leads to reciprocity, responsibility, and learning. Secrecy leads to distrust and suspicion.
What does it mean to be Complexity Conscious about information? Accept that no one knows what information will prove to be critical, or in which hands information might change everything. More and better information, and more and better ways to make sense of it, is the source of competitive advantage in complexity.
How we define and cultivate relationships; the boundaries and conditions for entering, inhabiting, and leaving teams and organizations.
Instead of fit, IDEO hires for cultural contribution. It asks, What’s missing from our culture? and then goes and looks for that.
What does it mean to be People Positive about membership? Recognize that everyone needs to feel a sense of belonging, both within the organization and within their team(s). Don’t build a walled garden that no one can escape. Ensure your boundaries are porous enough for the membership to continually renew itself. Celebrate generative difference and make space for people to bring their whole selves to work.
What does it mean to be Complexity Conscious about membership? Accept that a vibrant membership of commitment and participation is a prerequisite for self-organization. Don’t limit yourself to the structures and policies of the past. It’s unlikely that an adaptive and resilient system is going to look like a traditional employer filled with twenty-year veterans. Think about the movements that inspire you. Model your membership after them.
How we grow and mature; the journey of self-discovery and development; our approach to nurturing talent, skills, and competence.
Knowledge and skill becomes a fixed number of levels.
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. So we put on a show for one another (and ourselves). Our egos become inflated and fragile. And learning becomes a secret shame.
What does it mean to be People Positive about mastery? Recognize that developing personal and professional mastery is a basic human need. If you can create an environment where people grow quickly, you’ll never lack for stunning colleagues. People are the architects of their own growth. Let them solicit and guide their own feedback and progression.
What does it mean to be Complexity Conscious about mastery? Accept that competence is complex and contextual. Don’t try to reduce talents and skills to a matrix. Remember that reverence for expertise can lead to arrested development or missed opportunities. Learning agility is a far better bet. A great learner can figure it out on the fly. The world’s best hammer can only hit nails.
How we pay and provide; the wages, salaries, bonuses, commissions, benefits, perquisites, profits, and equity exchanged for participation in the organization.
Increasing salaries that are too low can reduce job dissatisfaction, but increasing salaries that are already generous won’t increase job satisfaction in any meaningful or lasting way.
Compensation is hygiene. Don’t mistake it for higher purpose.
Instead of taunting people with bonuses, pay above market for the best talent you can recruit, and get out of their way. If you really want to reward your team for business performance, do it in the form of profit sharing proportional to their percentage of the salary pool. That metric is harder to game, and it brings everyone together.
What does it mean to be People Positive about compensation? Recognize that compensation is a hygiene factor that should be fair and generous enough to not matter. Keep the focus on autonomy, mastery, and purpose—conditions that actually support motivation. If you can, move to profit sharing (or a similar construct) to connect everyone to the overall success of the organization.
What does it mean to be Complexity Conscious about compensation? Accept that no formula, leveling system, skills matrix, or series of job titles is going to sufficiently capture the complexity of a real workforce. Only transparency, dialogue, and judgment can make sense of what is fair, and even then you’ll be grappling with inherent issues of bias and privilege that will not be easily eliminated. Compensation can’t be solved, it must be tuned.
Culture can’t be controlled or designed. It emerges. It isn’t happening to people; it’s happening among people.
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.
We try new things, notice positive and negative patterns, amplify what’s working, and minimize what isn’t.
In order to maximize our chances of success, the people in power have to commit to a few basic principles—simple rules for the elaborate ballet of continuous participatory change.
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.
Transparency - All information should be made available and accessible to all members.
Once you have the commitment of the people who hold power, you need to find other catalysts—to challenge you, encourage you, and learn alongside you.
The team you’re forming is the seed of a community of practice that will eventually include everyone. They are the wayfinders who will be the first to try new things and the first to share what works.
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.
A loop contains three stages that are practiced recursively: Sensing Tensions, Proposing Practices, and Conducting Experiments.
One such practice is the act of “checking in” to meetings with our colleagues. Asking everyone to answer a check-in question such as “What has your attention?” or “What color is your mood right now?”
During the looping process we start identifying team members who are especially passionate about the practices and principles we’re exploring, and we invite them to become part of a coaching network within the organization. We’ll gather this group on a regular basis for training and reflection and encourage them to become a resource to their team and the teams around them. Over time these roles may become informal and reputational, or they may become a career path, as in the cases above.
While effective teams were different in countless ways, they all seemed to share two qualities. First, all the members of the team spent a roughly equal amount of time talking.
At Emergent Inc. we decided to build some psychological safety right out of the gate, using a technique called ICBD. ICBD stands for Intentions, Concerns, Borders, and Dreams. It’s a conversational exercise created by Alex Jamieson and Bob Gower that boosts trust within a team by asking members to confide in one another. We asked the group to sit in a circle and presented them with a question from each of the four areas. The question for Intentions was “Why do you personally want to participate in this change?” Then we heard an answer from each participant while the rest of the group listened.
Example of ICBD: “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.”
Holding space means making room for teams to figure things out for themselves—for failure, learning, and growth. You’re asking teams to take responsibility for their own way of working. They have to find their own way in order to grow. Every time you give an order or an answer, you’re either wrong and preventing them from discovering something better, or you’re right and preventing them from learning. Holding space means being committed to building the muscle, scar tissue, and resilience that can come only from walking the path.
In the early days of anything new, worrying about scale can prevent us from learning, growing, and being remarkable.
Instead, ask yourself, “What can we remove, take away, or stop doing?”
Instead of perpetuating this pattern, look at resistance as information. People are telling you something when they resist change. Your job is to find out what. Resistance is an invitation to talk, listen, and learn.