by Aaron Dignan
Start meetings by checking in. Beginning with a question allows us to connect on a human level. We want to hear from everyone. Typical questions include: What’s on your mind? What are you looking forward to? What’s the biggest risk you’ve ever taken?
Speak and participate in rounds. When we want to prioritize speed and inclusion, we’ll go around the table and give everyone one chance to provide updates, ask questions, offer feedback, or give consent, depending on the type of meeting we’re holding. Everyone else is invited to listen respectfully and wait for their turn to speak.
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. The website, app, and the book that inspired them provide a menu of thirty-three methods for activities such as brainstorming, problem solving, and sensemaking, complete with instructions for how to facilitate them.
Meetings in Change
Because they’re both so poorly run and the primary forum through which teams interact, The Ready’s early work with organizations often starts in meetings. Small changes here can lead to breakthroughs in transparency, trust, time savings, and speed that create momentum and space for other, bigger moves. Perhaps more than anything else, meetings bring together the other dimensions of the OS into one shared experience. Don’t hesitate to start here and use meetings as a microcosm of the bigger picture.
Questions on Meetings
The following questions can be applied to the organization as a whole or the teams within it. Use them to provoke a conversation about what is present and what is possible.
What meetings do we require to do our best work?
Does each of our meetings have a clear purpose and structure?
How are meetings facilitated and documented?
How are meeting outcomes and output shared?
Which meetings are recurring and why?
How does our meeting rhythm enable (or disable) the work?
Do our meetings require any special tools or materials?
How do we improve or eliminate meetings that are no longer serving us?
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.
INFORMATION
How we share and use data; the flow of data, insight, and knowledge across the organization.
When General Stanley McChrystal became the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, an elite group of special operations forces including the Navy’s SEAL Team Six and Army Rangers, he had his work cut out for him. Their mission was nothing less than to fight and defeat al-Qaeda, in Iraq and beyond. The problem was their opponent was unlike any they’d faced before. Decentralized. Networked. Empowered. Committed. And fast, very fast.
The military was none of those things. Hierarchy, secrecy, and security were in its DNA. Information was protected at all costs. After a series of challenging missions were thwarted by lack of information and speed in the field, McChrystal and his team had an epiphany. Their policy of “who needs to know” no longer worked, because they didn’t know who needed to know. On more than one occasion they were this close to capturing or killing someone, only to find out that the target was working undercover and they were on the same side.
With everything on the line, they completely changed their stance on information. In a recent TED Talk, McChrystal shared what they learned. “What we found is we had to change. We had to change our culture about information. We had to knock down walls. We had to share. We had to change from ‘Who needs to know?’ to . . . ‘Who doesn’t know?’ and we need to tell them, and tell them as quickly as we can.” The JSOC literally did knock down walls, creating a new open command center that featured a wall of screens front and center with live updates of ongoing operations for all to see. They started including other leaders and teams on emails if there was even a chance the subject matter might impact them. They embedded liaisons across their network of agencies and locations. They transformed a daily videoconference called O&I (operations and intelligence brief) into a massive information-sharing session, inviting an unprecedented number of attendees, who were encouraged to speak with candor in a forum that had historically seen little of it. JSOC’s new guiding principle was “Share information until you’re afraid it’s illegal.” By the end of McChrystal’s tenure, every agency involved was reporting massive benefits from the new culture of transparency, and wins were materializing on the battlefield as well, including the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. For McChrystal and his team, getting information to flow was the only way to win. We too are trying to outsmart a network (the market) with a hierarchy (our organizations) and losing. And just like JSOC, we need to become intelligence-led.
Until very recently in human history, all information was trapped—in someone’s head or, at best, on a piece of paper. This has led to a scarcity mindset when it comes to information. That, combined with a couple centuries of free-market competition, has made us wary of sharing. Within most Legacy Organizations, information is power. We hoard it to elevate our status, create job security, and protect ourselves from its misuse. Information is guarded and shared on a case-by-case basis. This perpetuates the power structure and creates opacity that allows bias and misinformation to thrive. Unchecked, this almost always leads to scandal and missed opportunities.
All living systems, at some level, are information processors. Starve any living thing of information and it will quickly perish. Professor Melanie Mitchell defines a complex adaptive system as “a system in which large networks of components with no central control and simple rules of operation give rise to complex collective behavior, sophisticated information processing, and adaptation via learning or evolution.” In this way, a complex adaptive system is a kind of hive mind, capable of solving problems the individual agents cannot. Organizations are no different. Every single activity we conduct at work—recruiting, sales, accounting—is dependent on information processing and knowledge transfer. If we can tap into our collective intelligence, we can accomplish amazing things. And so it’s somewhat surprising how little time we spend on our information architecture—our approach to discovering, storing, and sharing what we know.
Data is not information. Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not mastery. Mastery is not wisdom. These are important distinctions that can help shape our approach to individual and organizational learning. With deference to these distinctions, when using information as a dimension of the canvas, my intent is to include anything that can be transmitted or communicated. Everything from a raw data file to an email to a methodology to a conversation over coffee has a place in this dimension. If we intend to build vibrant, knitted, and networked cultures of learning, it all matters.
Thought Starters
Transparency. It’s difficult to overstate the degree to which Evolutionary Organizations value and practice transparency. In complexity, as McChrystal and the teams inside JSOC discovered, insight can come from anywhere, but
only if information reaches the right person at the right time. Because we can’t predict when that will be, we have to aspire to what economists refer to as information symmetry—a condition in which all relevant information is known to all participants. This is a continuation and expansion of earlier concepts such as open-book management, in which employees have access to financial information such as revenue, profit, cost, cash flow, and expenses. The primary resistance to transparency stems from two beliefs: the Theory X notion that people can’t be trusted and the scarcity-driven assumption that information is power. Today, companies such as Patagonia, Everlane, and Buffer are challenging all that. Patagonia offers public transparency about its supply chain through a video series called Footprint Chronicles that allows a customer to trace any item of clothing all the way back to its source—from textile mills to sewing factories. Everlane goes one better. In addition to a transparent ethical factory network, on its website it shares the true cost behind each of its products, from materials to labor to transportation. The Everlane T-shirt I’m wearing as I write this cost $1.81 in materials, $5.60 in labor, and $0.13 in transport. And Buffer, the creator of a social media management platform, takes radical transparency to a whole new level, sharing everything with everyone. Its website (buffer.com/transparency) shows employee equity, salaries, real-time revenue, pricing breakdown, funding, values, reading lists, a log of every email sent, diversity metrics, their open-source code, the product road map, and the editorial backlog. Beat that.
Push vs. Pull. One reason we hesitate to adopt a more transparent approach to information is that we fear being overwhelmed. We’re already swimming in a sea of messages and news feeds. Researchers at UC San Diego found that the average person is confronted with thirty-four gigabytes of information every day. The idea that we should all share everything all the time seems crazy. But that’s only because we misunderstand how to share information—the difference between push and pull.
Legacy information sharing is “push,” meaning that the information is delivered to us without our consent. When information is pushed, we have to wade through it and separate the signal (what we need) from the noise (what we don’t). But when information is abundant, a “pull”-based system where information is tagged, stored, and ready to search is far superior. Email is push. The internet is pull. A single-track conference is push. A multitrack conference is pull. 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.
Working in Public. When a culture is risk averse and teams lack the authority to make decisions about their work, a funny thing happens to work in progress. It goes underground. Why? Because teams know that if they share incomplete or imperfect work, leadership will likely poke holes in it and question their competence. So we end up with cultures where everything has to be perfect before it’s shared. This leads to information silos that hurt everyone. Two teams working on the same thing won’t know about it until it’s too late. Leaders who might have helped shape early work in progress can only approve or deny. Anyone wanting to know the status of a project has to hope they know the right people and catch them on a good day. And anything and everything that could be repurposed and reused is trapped in place. Or we can work in public, which is shorthand for developing our work in applications and environments that are visible to and searchable by everyone in the organization. On day one at my company, a new member can search, find, copy, and reuse the active and prior work of the entire organization. Does that mean nothing is ever under lock and key? No. If you’re legally obligated to keep certain information protected, you can adopt a policy of default to open. That means everyone starts with the assumption that all work should be open and searchable by default, unless there’s a good reason to secure it.
Organizational Git. Even if you’re not a developer, you may have heard of Git, an open-source version-control system created by Linus Torvalds that makes it easy for many people to work on the same piece of software at the same time. The magic of Git is in how it enables distributed collaboration. Every project has a master repository of its code that is protected from reckless or duplicative changes. Contributors to the project create branches off the master that allow them to augment the code without changing the original. If their contributions are accepted, their branch can be merged with the master and available to everyone. Developers who want to create entirely new projects using an open-source master repository as their starting point fork the project, creating a copy they don’t intend to merge. In this way, a single project can be improved continually and used as a basis for other projects around the world. It’s the ultimate protocol for networked creativity. Now, imagine taking a similar approach to all the information, knowledge, and products in your organization. A master repository for customer insights. A master repository for product development. A mastery repository for your approach to feedback. And countless branches evolving in teams around the world, all with the potential to merge with the master for everyone’s benefit. Imagine being able to search and borrow new ways of working from hundreds or thousands of other organizations. Curious about Patagonia’s vacation policy? Why not fork it and give it a try? While it’s just a dream today, the seeds of this idea are starting to grow. Several organizations, including Enspiral, Crisp, GitLab, and my own, have started to host their organizational “code” online. We use a service called GitBook that makes it easy and accessible. Will you join us?
Information in Action
Kill Email. Despite decades of innovation, email is more popular than ever. Some 269 billion emails are sent and received every day, and that number is going up by 4.4 percent every year. The average employee checks their email thirty-six times per hour and receives 304 emails per week. With all this email changing hands, we should have all the information we need at our fingertips, right? But that’s not the case, not by a long shot. And the reason isn’t that we’re bad at email; the reason is that email is a completely inferior way to share information within an organization. It has three fatal flaws. First, email defaults to privacy rather than transparency. When you send an email, you have to decide in that moment who needs to know. Forget to include people who need it, and they’ll be clueless. Throw caution to the wind and blast everyone, and you’re wasting precious time and attention. Second, email is an information sinkhole. Sure, you might be able to find the email you need when you need it, but what about someone who never got it? What if a new employee joined your team today? Do they get the benefit of the thirty thousand emails buried in your inbox? What if you quit? What happens to all that information then? And finally, email is context free. Every email, regardless of whom it came from or how important it is, lands in your inbox in the exact same way. You want to know what it’s about? You have to read it. If you’re Seth Godin and you’re sending your thoughts to hundreds of thousands of people, send an email. If you’re trying to ensure information symmetry with a thousand trusted colleagues, you need a different approach. That’s where messaging apps like Slack come in. These tools organize conversations into channels by topic, such as #marketing or #onboarding, and allow anyone to join or leave channels as they see fit. If you’re looking for the status of your recruiting efforts, just go to the #recruiting channel and see what’s going on. Conversations, files, and integrations with other software are all there in one place. You can still have a private conversation, or even a private channel, but that’s a choice, and you have to ask yourself, Am I sure no one else would benefit from this discussion? Nine times out of ten the answer is no. Work in public. But here’s the thing: messaging apps don’t
work if you keep email flowing. The inertia of what we know is just too strong. So here’s what you do: get everyone’s consent to ban email internally. You’ll still get email from the outside, but at the rate teams are joining Slack (it’s the fastest-growing workplace software in history), you might find them in a shared channel before you know it.
Multiplayer Software. Traditional files are information traps—passed like hot potatoes and then lost in obscurity. If you’re still exchanging documents with names such as “presentation-v32.7-final-ad-final-final.ppt,” you’re missing out on the cheapest productivity boost in the world: multiplayer applications. Apps such as Google’s G Suite, Office 365, Dropbox Paper, Box Notes, Quip, Trello, Evernote, Basecamp, Asana, and Parabol allow multiple users to create and edit documents, files, and data simultaneously. Instead of information flying from inbox to inbox, everyone shares a single source of truth that is always one click away. Teams can coauthor presentations, documents, and even entire projects synchronously or asynchronously, in the same room or remotely, for less than you spend on printer paper. When media company PopSugar switched to G Suite, the average time to go from an interview to a published piece went from twenty-four hours to less than two. Market research company Forrester found that organizations that switch to G Suite experience a 213 percent ROI over three years. Multiplayer software is now a prerequisite for efficient information flow. If you’re already using it, double down. If you haven’t tried it yet, start today.
