Brave New Work

by Aaron Dignan

  When it comes to how they build teams, manage projects, make decisions, share information, set targets, review performance, and set compensation, their approach is not a signal-controlled intersection but a roundabout. They use purpose, transparency, and reputation to create cultures of freedom and responsibility. They are intentional but full of serendipity. They are decentralized but coherent. Above all, these firms are People Positive and Complexity Conscious—two foundational mindsets that we’ll explore in detail.

  I refer to these iconoclasts as Evolutionary Organizations because they use these mindsets to collectively and continuously improve their shared OS. This isn’t just a way of being; it’s a way of doing. It is a practice. And whether you’re leading a team of ten or ten thousand, improving your OS is the single most powerful thing you can do. That is the promise of this book.

  It was written for leaders, executives, entrepreneurs, managers, philanthropists, elected officials, community organizers, superintendents—anyone who needs a team of people to achieve their collective potential. And that potential is vast: Such as the Swedish bank Handelsbanken outperforming its competition for decades without a traditional budget. Or nurses working in teams with no managers at Buurtzorg. Or employees writing their own job descriptions and setting their own salaries at Morning Star. As we go, we’ll meet organizations that have done each of these things and many more. And you’ll see that it’s not chaos that produces these unlikely achievements but consciousness. Before we’re done you’ll wonder why anyone would want to keep working in captivity.

  But first, a preview of things to come. In the remainder of Part One, we’ll find out how our way of working came to be—originating on the factory floors of the Industrial Revolution. We’ll see how and why it’s failing us as we approach unprecedented scale and complexity. And we’ll lay the foundation for a new way of thinking about people and organizations that trades the illusion of control for something far better.

  In Part Two we’ll learn about the principles and practices of Evolutionary Organizations through a tour of the OS Canvas, a tool my colleagues and I invented to help teams see just how embedded and interconnected our way of working really is. The canvas highlights twelve domains where we most urgently need to question and reinvent our approach: purpose, authority, structure, strategy, resources, innovation, workflow, meetings, information, membership, mastery, and compensation. I won’t pretend there’s a one-size-fits-all playbook for Evolutionary Organizations here. But that’s good news. Because while we may share a set of principles, our practices will be shaped by the culture, context, and characters that surround us. And if you’re worried about the fact that you don’t call all the shots at work, don’t be. Regardless of rank, here you’ll find bite-sized ideas to change your team for the better.

  In Part Three we’ll tackle the most difficult topic of all: how to change. If you’ve been burned by change efforts that have overpromised and underdelivered, you’re not alone. I’ll present a counterintuitive yet straightforward approach to change that honors the inherent complexity in your organization. We’ll learn how to turn tension and frustration into safe-to-try experiments that move teams forward. I’ll suggest guidelines and activities for early meetings and moments in your team’s change process. And I’ll share stories and lessons from transformation efforts that struggled and those that went well beyond our expectations.

  Finally, we’ll take a moment to imagine a world in which we get this right, and organizations everywhere create fulfillment and abundance. The foundations of a new economy are slowly forming, and I’ll show you where to look to see them taking shape. In the end, you’ll have everything you need to step confidently into the future of work.

  HOW I GOT HERE

  In 2007 I was part of the founding team of a company that created digital strategies for some of the biggest brands in the world. A few years later I became the CEO. While I thought of myself as progressive, in truth I managed the company in a somewhat traditional way. I weighed in on all the hiring and firing decisions. I gave annual performance reviews and set compensation. I kept the firm’s finances and salaries under lock and key. I told people what to work on, and how to do it well. I designed the organization as I thought it should be.

  Now, to be fair, our culture was more permissive and flexible than most. We put new people in the deep end with important clients and let them figure out how to swim. We asked people for their opinions and answered (most of) their questions. And I truly believed my employees were operating at peak potential. Our firm had a patina of democracy about it. But when it came to the important decisions—strategy, design, brand, culture—I was often the one making the call.

  And if I’m being honest, we did pretty well. We grew quickly and hired some amazing people—some of the best I’ve ever worked with. Our clients were happy. Our reputation was strong. From the outside it looked like success.

  There was only one problem: it was exhausting. As it turns out, controlling everything is not really sustainable. And even when it works, it’s unfulfilling. I would lie in bed night after night, sometimes at two or three in the morning after working a sixteen-hour day, with the same thought stuck in my head: this can’t be the best way to run a business. Slowly the realization hit me. If I truly was the hero leader, the single point of failure, then what had I really built? A fragile system. In my quest for perfection I had limited my colleagues’ ability to shape and grow the firm, and it was holding us back from our true potential.

  At the same time, I was getting a front-row seat to how things were done in some of the largest companies in the world. And honestly, things didn’t look good. As far as I could tell, big always translated to bad. Bigger companies were slower, less innovative, and less human places. People there were constantly wearing masks that hid their true selves, trading the long term for the short term, and actively disempowering their colleagues—it was everything I didn’t want. But if we were to grow, wasn’t that our future? That seemed to be the only option on the table: trade freedom, speed, and humanity for money and scale. I could feel my definition of success changing, but to what I didn’t know.

  I had questions and went looking for answers. Was there a way to run a company that didn’t end in a bureaucratic mess? Was agility at scale even possible? Was growth a goal or a by-product? My walkabout led me to many unexpected sources of inspiration. I found complex adaptive systems—such as cities, ants, flocks of birds, schools of fish, immune systems, and brains—that solved problems without a leader, adapting to a wide variety of situations and challenges. I learned about radical concepts such as biomimicry and emergence, resilience and antifragility. And I began to discover a hidden-in-plain-sight collective of people and organizations that were doing things differently, some since before I was born. They represented a way of working known as self-management, characterized by a lack of traditional hierarchy and bureaucracy. These Evolutionary Organizations had been out there all along, but somehow popular business culture had managed to ignore their stories or rationalize how they didn’t apply to the rest of us. How many people have ever heard about the inner workings of a pioneer such as W. L. Gore, the makers of Gore-Tex, or FAVI, a successful brass auto parts foundry that has been leveraging decentralization and distributed authority since 1983? And yet there were dozens and dozens of stories like these, both new and old. Each with its own contribution to a growing body of knowledge about how to bring humanity, vitality, and adaptivity back to work.

  So I made a decision. We were going to change our OS. Self-management or bust. Easier said than done. I had to change my identity from a charismatic control freak who thought his job was to ensure perfect execution to someone who could let go and let come. But before I could do that I had to get everyone else on board. And that wasn’t easy, because this change affected people in ways I couldn’t even anticipate. Those who had previously wielded power had to find new ways to feel important and useful. Those
who had lacked organizational power had to step into their new authority and take ownership of their working lives. This was hard work.

  It didn’t happen overnight. We tried a handful of new practices. Some worked, some didn’t. We learned new principles and felt a little bit wiser. We argued. We debated. We became ethnographers of our own culture. One day we looked up and we were meeting differently. Deciding differently. Talking differently. Slowly but surely, we had become one of those companies that was not like the others. Were we done? Not at all. In fact, we’d realized what only those companies that really care about their way of working know—that you’re never done. You’re always learning. Always changing.

  Twelve months later, when we looked back at our financial performance, we had delivered our best year ever. The funny thing was no one knew why. There wasn’t any one thing we could point to and say, ah, that was the reason we grew, that was the reason we succeeded. It just . . . happened. And that’s when I realized that we had gone from a place where all the best ideas were trapped in our heads to a place where they were free—where the genius of the firm was happening not inside people but between people. I knew I could never go back.

  And I haven’t. Years later when I started The Ready, a company that helps organizations change the way they work, I decided to put everything I had learned into practice from day one. And the results have been truly astounding. In just a few short years the firm has grown to serve clients around the world and has helped tens of thousands change their working lives.

  Meanwhile, I spent the last twelve months writing the book you’re holding in your hands. Three to four days a week, every week, I stopped going into the office or out with clients. I wasn’t interrupted. No emergency calls asking me to resolve a crisis. I just strolled into our office one summer day and told the team, “I’m writing a book to tell the story of our work. I’ll be gone a lot while I work on this. Let me know if you need anything.” They said, “Exciting! We’ll miss you. Get lost.” Consider for a moment how unusual that is. That the founder of a new business could spend 60–80 percent of their workweek writing without the whole thing imploding. At what normal company or startup can that happen?

  Of course, I was not without my doubts. Could the culture sustain itself without me? Would performance go down? Would people stop showing up? Maybe. But I trusted the culture we’d built and jumped in with both feet. A year later, I’m happy to report that everything worked out. It wasn’t effortless or without its challenges. After all, I held roles in the company that had to be filled by new people in new ways. But in the end, our organization rose to that challenge on its own. The company actually grew, if you can believe it, in more ways than one. All thanks to our amazing team.

  Now, I’m sure some of you are wondering if I appointed an interim leader. Someone to “hold down the fort” or “make the key decisions”? Nope. Our way of working—our operating system—is built on distributed authority, consent, and agreements, so we don’t have to rely on positional leaders. The average person at our company has more autonomy than a VP at a Fortune 500. Everyone has a credit card with no limit. Everyone has complete access to our finances. Even our contractors. When decisions arise, we have processes for making them quickly and safely. When it comes to most things, I’m completely optional. And I’ve never been happier or prouder.

  I don’t say any of this to brag. There’s nothing magical about what we’ve done here. Anyone can unlock this potential. But the secrets aren’t out there in the halls of power. They’re at the fringe. They’re inside our organizations right now, in the minds of our people, trapped by decades of bureaucracy and habit. Your organization, and every other, has the innate ability to continually reinvent itself. You simply need to let it out.

  A FINGER POINTING AT THE MOON

  At this point you might be wondering how all this connects to the push for organizational agility that has been under way for the past few decades. It’s an important question. The authors of the “Agile Manifesto” put forth a vision of a better way of developing software that prioritizes learning and agility over planning and control. The movement they spawned has inspired many people to think and work differently, well beyond the world of software. Now entire organizations are attempting to achieve “agility at scale,” believing that it will be a remedy for all their problems.

  Unfortunately, in their desire to be agile (with a lowercase a), many firms have attempted to do Agile (with an uppercase A). They have traded a goal for an orthodoxy—adopting the methods and certifications but not the theory behind them. And this is fatal. Because an agile workflow is not an operating system. The common practices of Agile development offer little advice to someone wondering about organizational structure, or human development, or compensation, or a thousand other questions that will emerge as you go. And even if it were comprehensive, you cannot cut and paste an OS any more than you can cut and paste a personality. You have to do the work.

  The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.

  —Harrington Emerson

  Japanese engineer Taiichi Ohno offered this advice to those seeking to learn his approach at Toyota: “Stop trying to borrow wisdom and think for yourself. Face your difficulties and think and think and think and solve your problems yourself. Suffering and difficulties provide opportunities to become better. Success is never giving up.” Harsh but true. If you think certifying your project managers in Scrum is going to topple your bureaucracy, you’re in for some major disappointment. Agility is a mindset, not a tool set. It’s a piece of the puzzle, not the whole thing. It is necessary but not sufficient.

  It turns out agility isn’t an anomaly in this way. Many management innovations have emerged in the last half century, each promising to revolutionize work as we know it. Lean Manufacturing. Total Quality Management. ISO 9000. Six Sigma. Sociocracy. Holacracy. The Lean Startup. The list goes on and on. Each was, in its own way, a piece of an operating system. Some were misguided from the start. Others became perversions of themselves over time. And a few offered real wisdom that is yet to be fully realized.

  Thich Nhat Hanh wrote in Old Path White Clouds, “A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.” When we focus too much on the method or the messenger, we lose sight of the deeper truth. The cases and stories I’ll share in the pages ahead are fingers pointing at a better way of working. While we can draw inspiration from them, each of us must do the work of nurturing and evolving our own way.

  But to do that, to truly take responsibility for our own future, we have to understand our past. Hierarchies, functions, plans, and budgets did not spring from the head of Zeus. Long before Agile development, before management consultants roamed the earth, a generation of organizational zealots saw a better way and willed it into existence. As a result of their efforts, we inherited a world where you can buy a McDonald’s hamburger in 119 countries. But it’s also a world where two out of three people are disengaged at work. And so before we dive headfirst into the principles and practices of Evolutionary Organizations, let’s briefly take stock of how and where we went wrong.

  THE ONE BEST WAY

  The Legacy Organization was born more than a hundred years ago on a factory floor. Machinists then were an unruly bunch, employing wildly divergent customs and techniques even within the same facility. Novices learned on the job from the people around them, taking on their quirks, their tricks of the trade, and, of course, their pace. Given this artisanal flair, productivity was a moving target. No one—not machinists or managers—knew what was possible. Sure, they had a pretty good idea of how long it took to produce a specific part. But no one was asking how long it should take.

  Enter Frederick Winslow Taylor. Promoted through the ranks at a young age, his innovation was to break the work down into its smallest possible components and find the one best way to complete each ste
p. No task was too small or insignificant to provoke his scrutiny. This was a man who once made serious scientific study of how to use a shovel. His findings? Apparently every scoop should contain exactly 21.5 pounds of matter. If you think shoveling can be sufficiently done on instinct, you would not have found him sympathetic.

  In Taylor’s time, foot dragging and intentional inefficiency were so common there was a well-known term for it: soldiering. Taylor pulled no punches regarding this phenomenon. “Hardly a competent workman can be found in a large establishment . . . who does not devote a considerable portion of his time to studying just how slowly he can work and still convince his employer that he is going at a good pace.” Of course, this was the unintended consequence of a badly designed system. Employers were known to cut piece rates—the amount they paid workers for each completed part—when productivity and wages got too high, so workers limited their output to stave off any future rate cuts. Both parties found themselves in a standoff of predictable mediocrity.

  To disrupt this dynamic, Taylor did what came naturally—an experiment. And this one flew in the face of decades of labor relations. He actually raised wages. But there were strings attached. He offered groups of workers as much as a 15–35 percent wage premium to do a particular job, but they had to do it exactly as he instructed. Later they could go back to doing it their way at the old pay or continue with the surplus pay and his exacting standards.

  The question on his mind was simple: how much would it cost to get the average worker to give up their autonomy? The answer turned out to be: not that much. The implications of this mundane epiphany would change the world. In his detailed biography of Taylor, author Robert Kanigel spelled out this breakthrough. “And there it was—the Faustian bargain in embryonic form: You do it my way, by my standards, at the speed I mandate, and in so doing you will achieve a level of output I ordain, and I’ll pay you handsomely for it, beyond anything you might have imagined. All you have to do is take orders, and give up your way of doing the job for mine.”