by Aaron Dignan
Portfolio/Penguin
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Copyright © 2019 by Aaron Dignan
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Dignan, Aaron, author.
Title: Brave new work : are you ready to reinvent your organization? / Aaron Dignan.
Description: New York : Portfolio/Penguin, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018045611 (print) | LCCN 2018046614 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525536215 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525536208 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525542834 (international)
Subjects: LCSH: Organizational effectiveness. | Organizational change.
Classification: LCC HD58.9 (ebook) | LCC HD58.9 .D544 2019 (print) | DDC 658.4/06--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045611
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate internet addresses and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Version_2
For Huxley
May you inherit a world in which everyone finds fulfillment and prosperity at work. And if you don’t, may you help build one.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraphs
Part One
THE FUTURE OF WORK
Part Two
THE OPERATING SYSTEM
Part Three
THE CHANGE
Epilogue
WHAT DREAMS MAY COME
Acknowledgments
Appendix
Notes
Index
About the Author
People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.
—Artemus Ward
Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.
—André Gide
Part One
THE FUTURE OF WORK
The beginning is the most important part of the work.
—Plato
We were packed into the back of a black car, on our way to a celebratory dinner. The energy was electric. My clients and I had just spent the last eight hours talking about the things teams never get a chance to talk about, starting with the ultimate question, “What’s stopping you from doing the best work of your life?” Pent up for so long, the possibility of actually addressing what held them back had awakened something deep within this team. The banter from the room had continued into the hall, the elevator, and now the car. “What about our monthly strategy review?” one of them said. “Does anybody actually get value out of that thing?” Those words hung in the air for a few seconds before everyone snapped back, “No!” The team leader turned around from the front seat and looked everyone in the eye. “If you don’t need it . . . I guess I don’t need it either.”
Well, that did it. From what I could gather in the commotion, this leadership team and the people that reported to them spent an inordinate amount of time each month preparing for and attending what essentially amounted to a glorified update meeting. I took the bait. “How much time, ballpark, would you say you spend on that meeting?” They started doing the math. First they had the cost of the meeting itself, which was more than three hours long and included almost forty people. Then there was preparation time for those senior leaders—they had to be sure they knew what they were talking about when questions came up. Add to that the time their teams spent preparing the material—hundreds of pages of PowerPoint, many of which routinely didn’t get used or seen. And so on. They rattled it off and I tallied it up. By the time we got to the restaurant we had a good back-of-the-napkin estimate. The annual cost of the meeting? Close to $3 million. Their minds were blown. “We are spending $3 million to have this shitty meeting?! What should we do?” “Well,” I said, “why not just cancel it and see what happens?” You could almost see the gears turning in their heads. If meetings could change, what else was up for grabs—budgets, approvals, structure? This was a team about to reinvent their way of working.
WORK ISN’T WORKING
No matter where I go in the world—and my work has taken me to fifteen countries and five continents—I meet leaders and teams who are frustrated. We are all confronted with the fact that the scale and bureaucracy that once made our organizations strong are liabilities in this era of constant change. We are beset on all sides by pressure—to grow, to deliver, to execute at all costs, and to do so with our arms tied behind our backs. We are being asked to invent the future, but to do so inside a culture of work that is deeply broken.
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.
Today we face an array of systemic challenges—in our economy, our government, our environment—all stemming from our inability to change. We are addicted, in spite of ourselves, to the siren song of bureaucracy. Gratuitous hierarchies, plans, budgets, and controls abound. But they aren’t working like they used to. In the face of complexity, our Legacy Organizations—the traditional institutions that make up much of the modern world—are failing us, and we know it. Yet we do nothing, paralyzed by the fear of losing whatever control we have left.
SIMPLE SABOTAGE
Think back on your career, whether that’s a few years or a few decades. Think about the things that have frustrated you. What has held you back. What do you wish you could change. Now read the following instructions and see if you recognize them. Have you ever seen a colleague behave this way?
Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences.
When possible, refer all matters to committees for “further study and consideration.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible—never less than five.
Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
Haggle over the precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to reopen the question of the advisability of that decision.
Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
Be worried about the propriety of any decision—raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some hi
gher echelon.
When training new workers, give incomplete or misleading instructions.
Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, paychecks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.
Apply all regulations to the last letter.
Are you laughing? Most of the leaders I know can’t make it through that list without howling. They’ve seen it all before. Hell, they’ve seen it this week. Now, perhaps you’ve spent your career in startups and none of that struck a chord for you. That’s good. But read on, because this is a cautionary tale—a glimpse of what’s to come if you’re lucky enough to scale.
The obvious question: who wrote these? One plausible answer is that these are behaviors I’ve observed over many years of working with large clients. It’s a field report. A sad bureaucratic ethnography. And while that is certainly possible—I have seen all this and then some—the actual source is far more unexpected and profound. In fact, it’s almost unbelievable.
In 1944, at the height of World War II, William J. Donovan was the director of the United States Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA). He was looking for ways to undermine and destabilize enemy states, particularly those that figured prominently in the war. To that end, he commissioned a new field manual to be developed by the agency. The manual would be provided to ordinary citizens inside enemy territory who were sympathetic to the Allies. It would have a singular focus: helping these citizens carry out acts of “simple sabotage” that would destabilize their own communities and businesses. When completed, the so-called Simple Sabotage Field Manual was wide-ranging. It covered everything from damaging buildings and infrastructure to interrupting supply lines. But there at the end was a little section focused on disrupting day-to-day business operations.
As you may have deduced by now, the instructions in the list on the previous page—the ones that sound so eerily familiar—were copied verbatim from that manual, written in 1944. And yet here we are. We see our organizations in those instructions. We see our colleagues. We see ourselves. Somehow, in less than a lifetime, modern work has become indistinguishable from sabotage.
Early on in almost every client relationship, a leader will pull me aside and ask, “Honestly, are your other clients as f@#%ed up as we are?” Whereas the saltiness of the language may vary, the theme remains constant. Their question betrays a paradox at the heart of our struggle with work. Either everyone else has it mostly figured out, and we’re alone in our bureaucratic melancholy, or we’re surrounded by firms facing the same challenges, and the world is deeply dysfunctional. Both would be bittersweet. Of course, I simply tell the truth. “We see this all the time. Everyone is in the same boat.” They visibly relax. Misery loves company.
EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED, EXCEPT MANAGEMENT
For five years, I’ve opened nearly every speech I’ve given with a picture of an org chart. I ask the audience what year it’s from. Here’s the thing: nobody has any idea. In every country, in every setting, I hear dates ranging from 1800 to yesterday. People call out haphazard guesses, laughing under their breath, because they know the truth: it could have been made at any time. It looks exactly like the org chart in their organization. And I’ll bet it looks exactly like your org chart too.
The one featured here happens to be more than a hundred years old. It’s a railroad org chart, published in 1910 as the Operating Organization of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific Systems. What’s really shocking about our inability to “carbon-date” this document is how easy it would be if it were a picture of almost anything else. If I showed you a house, a car, a dress, or a phone from 1910 and asked you whether it was modern or antique, you’d have a pretty good idea. Because almost everything has changed. But not management. Not really. Information flows up. Decisions flow down. A place for everyone, and everyone in their place.
Somehow, amid a period of relentless innovation, including the internet, mobile computing, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, and rockets to space that can land themselves, the way we come together as human beings to solve problems and invent our future has stayed remarkably constant. Which means one of two things is true: either we’ve perfected the way we organize, and we should all submit to the power of the pyramid, or we’re stuck in a Gordian knot of our own design, unable to break free and realize a better way.
HOW TO CROSS THE STREET
What’s hiding inside each of our organizations is a set of assumptions that we rarely notice or reconsider. We’ve inherited them from those who came before us. These assumptions, and the practices they inspire, are kind of like an operating system (OS), running silently in the background, the foundation upon which everything else is built.
Operating systems are all around us. Take intersections. Two roads crossing present a deceptively simple challenge: how do we prevent cars from hitting one another, while maintaining the maximum flow of traffic?
One of the most popular solutions to this problem is the signal-controlled intersection. With an estimated 311,000 signals in the United States alone, nearly everyone on Earth is familiar with this approach. Now, if we consider this as an operating system, we can ask, What are the assumptions behind it?
People cannot be trusted to manage the intersection on their own. They need to be told what to do.
Complex problems must be managed with elaborate rules and technology, in the form of cables, lights, switches, and control centers, programmed to optimize the flow of traffic.
We need a plan for every possible scenario, with multicolored signals, arrows, the ability to switch from solid to flashing lights, and so on.
Less prevalent, but still well known, is the roundabout. Here cars enter and exit a shared circle that connects all four directions of travel. This too represents an operating system—one that holds different assumptions about people and the problem.
People can be trusted, and will trust one another, to use judgment and do the right thing.
Complex problems can be managed with simple rules and agreements that leave room for judgment: give the right-of-way to vehicles already in the circle and go with the flow of traffic.
Many scenarios will unfold in the roundabout, but social coordination will be sufficient to handle them.
What stands out for you about these two approaches? Did you notice that the signal-controlled intersection doesn’t require much thinking? Only compliance. The roundabout, on the other hand, requires drivers to be present and responsible for their own safety and the safety of others. One allows for a surreptitious text message or two while we wait. The other one keeps things moving. One has a huge apparatus behind it, with control stations and staff monitoring the situation constantly. The other is left to its own devices.
We have precious few roundabouts in the United States, about one for every 1,118 intersections. So you would assume that the signal-controlled intersection is superior. But which operating system actually produces the best results? Let’s test our intuition:
Which one is safer?
Which one has higher throughput?
Which one is cheaper to build and maintain?
Which one works better when the power goes out?
The answer to all of the above is the roundabout. They reduce injury collisions by 75 percent and fatal collisions by 90 percent. They result in an 89 percent reduction in delays. They are $5,000 to $10,000 cheaper to maintain each year. And of course, they work normally during power outages. And yet which one are we more comfortable with? The signal-controlled intersection. Surprising, right? We confuse popularity with quality.
These two approaches are a surprisingly good metaphor for what’s happening in the world of work. The way of wo
rking that we know best isn’t serving us, but it’s hard to trust the alternative. 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. But if you’ve ever stopped to wonder why we need managers, or budgets, or performance reviews, you were questioning the operating system—the Legacy OS—without even knowing it.
There’s no word for accountability in Finnish. Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.
—Pasi Sahlberg
If the assumptions baked into our OS are invalid, then no amount of commitment or resolve is going to make things better. We are addicted to the idea that the world can be predicted and controlled—that our stoplights are the only way to keep things in check. But when you view the world that way, today’s uncertainty and volatility become triggers for retreating to what has worked in the past. We just need to hire more capable leaders. We just need to squeeze out a little more efficiency and growth. We just need to reorganize. . . . But we know better. The real barrier to progress in the twenty-first century is us.
THE FUTURE OF WORK
What if your organization could run itself? What if your corporation, your startup, your restaurant, your school, or your church were able to get better every day, without you having to move mountains to make it so? What if you could stop giving orders? Stop checking in to see how things are going? Stop obsessing over your budget, your plan, your next quarter? This is not only possible; it is already happening inside organizations around the world.
