by Aaron Dignan
☐ Opinions matter more than data.
☐ We have meetings to prepare for meetings.
☐ Our meetings are theater.
☐ Meetings don’t lead to decisions or action.
☐ No time in the day for actual work.
☐ Only the loudest voices get heard.
☐ Too many meetings.
☐ Not enough transparency.
☐ Information is shared only on a need-to-know basis.
☐ Lack of honesty and candor.
☐ Lack of visibility between teams.
☐ Too much email.
☐ The “why” behind decisions isn’t always clear.
☐ Outdated tech tools.
☐ Our technology and tools are not maximizing our potential.
☐ Our processes get in the way of the work.
☐ We operate like everything is a crisis.
☐ We are addicted to planning.
☐ Work/life boundaries are not used or respected.
☐ We reflect infrequently.
☐ We plan and predict rather than test and learn.
☐ We change slower than the outside world.
☐ Rigid structures prevent experimentation.
☐ Failure is unacceptable.
☐ Good ideas get lost in bureaucracy.
☐ We don’t take risks.
☐ Lack of feedback.
☐ Learned helplessness.
☐ Our people don’t have the skills we need.
☐ We aren’t self-aware.
☐ Career paths are unclear.
☐ We work in silos.
☐ Cross-functional relationships are strained.
☐ Roles aren’t clear.
☐ Everyone needs to be involved in all things.
☐ Teams are not cross-functional or cross-disciplinary.
☐ Our structure inhibits collaboration.
☐ Too many layers.
☐ Misalignment between our strategy and our structure.
☐ No alignment on strategic priorities.
☐ Priorities are unclear.
☐ We waste time on the wrong things.
☐ We spend too much time trying to predict the future.
☐ Strategy is driven from the top rather than from the edge.
☐ We don’t know how to say no.
☐ Limited resources.
☐ We don’t leverage talent across our system.
☐ We drive constantly.
☐ The budgeting process is slow and unresponsive.
☐ Politics and turf wars.
☐ We are a culture of who can get closest to the leader.
☐ Individuals over teams.
☐ People talk behind backs.
☐ Lack of accountability and ownership.
☐ People don’t do what they say they’re going to do.
☐ Lack of vulnerability.
☐ Our “professionalism” gets in the way of being authentic.
☐ We favor executing over relating.
☐ We are unable to attract and retain top talent.
☐ We avoid tough conversations.
☐ Gender balance is off.
☐ Diversity isn’t valued.
☐ Passive-aggressive culture.
☐ Our purpose is unclear.
☐ Not enough recognition or reward.
☐ People don’t feel that their work is meaningful.
☐ We recognize and reward individuals instead of teams.
☐ We are a culture of fear.
☐ Lots of effort goes into protecting and stroking egos.
☐ We marvel at our own complexity.
☐ Shareholders are prioritized over customers and employees.
☐ We prioritize the short term over the long term.
☐ We use good (or bad) results as an excuse not to change.
That’s just a sample of what real teams—teams inside the most influential institutions in the world—are struggling with. Your team has tension inside it too, just waiting to get out. It is your organization’s potential, its future, its life force. Teams that understand this approach view looping as an exercise in going from good to great. They see it as continuous improvement, rather than triage or life support. Others see the organization as an ordered system that is broken and must be fixed. To their chagrin, it never is.
For a team to start looping, they simply have to notice and name a tension. But this can be harder than it sounds. Many teams lack the safety required to even talk about their tensions out loud or in front of leaders. Beyond that, many struggle to find the words to describe what they’re sensing. To make things easier, we have developed a deck of cards featuring the most common tensions that helps teams push beyond these points of resistance. When working with a team, we’ll hand them a deck containing all seventy-eight tensions and challenge them to narrow it down to just seven. These should be the tensions they feel are most present in the team or culture and would be the most impactful to address. What’s transformative about this process is that it gives teams permission to talk about the tough stuff. The card says it, so they don’t have to. There it is, on the table, staring up at them.
During our initial off-site with Emergent Inc. we had a large-enough group to send three small teams off with their own decks of tension cards. Their instructions were to choose their top seven and bring them back to the group. As I walked past each team, I noticed that each one was taking its own approach to narrowing them down—some were reading them one at a time, while others had laid them out and were moving them around based on their feelings. These kinds of activities are such a mirror for social dynamics. We can learn a lot from how they approach the task.
When the groups returned, they lined up their choices adjacent to one another. Their next task? To narrow these twenty-one down to a final seven that they all shared. Several tensions had been selected by all three teams—those automatically made the grade. Then they began to deliberate and things got a little intense. Noticing that one of the top tensions was about empowerment, the leader spoke up. “I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but you all are empowered to make decisions,” she barked. Everyone shuffled nervously and stared at the floor. Finally, a tenured member of the group spoke up. “Yeah, I know you believe that, but that’s just not how it feels for us day to day.” After letting that breathe, I jumped in: “It’s very common for there to be a few perspectives on any issue. Our job here is not to debate whether it’s true but to recognize that it’s true for some of us and consider what we might do about that.”
2. Proposing Practices
Once a tension is identified, we can look for ways to probe it. In some ways, this is the hardest part of the process. Given the dominance of traditional management, it’s unsurprising that most teams have limited experience with alternatives from which to draw inspiration. Having never before considered new ways to make decisions, for example, how can teams be expected to suggest novel approaches on the fly?
One way to counter this is to look beyond our own walls—beyond our own industries. How are different organizations solving the problems you face? Who has tried something radical and found success? The best way to find out is to go explore. From here on out, you are a student of new ways of working and the world is your laboratory. Nothing beats going and seeing for yourself.
While the outside world is vast, there are also benefits to becoming more knitted internally. One simple approach is to set up a #ways-of-working channel on your internal messaging app (if you have one) and start sharing and discussing links that highlight novel practice. Every day stories are published that share the wisdom of new (and old) ways of working. We have to open ourselves up t
o these stories and the lessons they contain.
Inspiration aside, most teams find it difficult to pair tensions with practices that will generate learning rather than a grand vision of a fantasy future. It’s not uncommon for a tension such as “Our processes get in the way of the work” to result in a proposal such as “Fix all our processes” during a team’s first attempt at looping. It’s admirable but practically insurmountable. With that in mind, we often jump-start the practices conversation by bringing some good options to the table. In addition to our tension cards, we have also developed a deck of practice cards curated from Evolutionary Organizations and our own OS. Which are you willing to try?
☐ Craft a clear and compelling purpose for the organization.
☐ Craft a clear and compelling purpose for every team and every role.
☐ Ask teams to share their essential intent for the next six to twenty-four months.
☐ Clarify the metrics that matter and use them to steer.
☐ Recognize and celebrate noble failure.
☐ Replace “Is it perfect?” with “Is it safe to try?”
☐ Give everyone the freedom to choose when, where, and how they work.
☐ Clarify the decision rights held by teams and roles.
☐ Use the concept of a waterline to create guardrails around team and individual autonomy.
☐ Start distributing authority to the edge of the organization.
☐ Crowdsource and eliminate policies and processes that no longer make sense.
☐ Start by stopping a meeting, process, or habit that is holding us back.
☐ Leverage decision science to reduce bias and make objectively better choices.
☐ Use Integrative Decision Making for important collective decisions.
☐ Distinguish between reversible and irreversible decisions and treat them differently.
☐ Define spending thresholds below which no approval or advice is necessary.
☐ Replace the permission process with a robust advice process.
☐ Trade autocracy and consensus for governance by consent.
☐ Form SLAM teams—self-managing, lean, audacious, multidisciplinary—around critical initiatives.
☐ Decentralize some of the work of central functions to teams at the edge for greater context and speed.
☐ Abandon singular job titles and descriptions for modular roles and role mixes.
☐ Develop and define the roles and accountabilities inside every team.
☐ Invite teams to create and edit their own roles.
☐ Fill leadership roles through consent or election.
☐ Allow people to hold multiple roles on multiple teams.
☐ Move from static to dynamic teaming—a marketplace of roles, teams, and projects.
☐ Create a skills database to help teams find knowledge and mastery across the org.
☐ Ensure our project and investment portfolio contains sure things and wild swings.
☐ Trade “perfect” execution for constant learning and iteration.
☐ Use even over statements to make strategic priorities and trade-offs explicit.
☐ Trade traditional planning (prediction) for scenario planning (preparation).
☐ Trade fixed performance targets for relative performance targets.
☐ Move from an annual budget to a dynamic budget.
☐ Let people vote with their feet and choose the projects they believe in and want to energize.
☐ Start each period with a zero-based budget and virtual investment to capture the wisdom of the crowd.
☐ Set aside funds every quarter to be allocated by the team using participatory budgeting.
☐ Invite everyone to spend 20 percent of their time (or more) working on whatever inspires them.
☐ Break the work into sprints to learn faster and reduce risk.
☐ Limit work in progress to a specific number of projects, initiatives, or tasks.
☐ Eliminate all status updates, project reviews, and other bureaucratic theater.
☐ Eliminate or repurpose one-on-ones that gravitate toward permission or politics.
☐ Hold regular governance meetings to update agreements, rules, policies, roles, and structures.
☐ Elect a facilitator and scribe on every team to keep meetings productive and documented.
☐ Use a meeting moratorium to rebuild our operating rhythm from scratch.
☐ Learn and leverage proven meeting structures that consistently move the work forward.
☐ Hold regular retrospectives to build learning into every team, project, and initiative.
☐ Begin meetings with a chance to get present and check in as human beings.
☐ End meetings by observing what we—as a team—can do better next time.
☐ Take turns or speak in rounds to hear all voices during meetings and calls.
☐ Give up preplanned agendas and start building them on the fly.
☐ Create dashboards that make team activity and performance visible.
☐ Make org and team financials transparent and accessible.
☐ Make compensation transparent to everyone in the organization.
☐ Adopt a policy of “open by default” when it comes to information.
☐ Make all available information searchable and accessible.
☐ Work in public by making workflow and work in progress visible to other teams.
☐ Stop sharing files and switch to software that supports real-time collaboration.
☐ Ensure that all agreements, rules, policies, roles, and structures are transparent, documented, and governable.
☐ Phase out internal email and move to Slack, Teams, or Workplace.
☐ Institute a regular ask-me-anything meeting that’s open to everyone.
☐ Prioritize generative difference when hiring and forming teams.
☐ Stop hiring for culture fit and start hiring for what’s missing from the culture.
☐ Create a team charter for every team, project, or initiative.
☐ Create a “user manual to me” for every member of the team.
☐ Make time for gratitude, recognition, and celebration.
☐ Replace annual performance reviews with continuous feedback.
☐ Share a round of instant feedback after every sprint, event, or milestone.
☐ Ritualize and master the practice of giving, receiving, and acting on feedback.
☐ Create communities of practice for knowledge sharing and development.
☐ Transition from individual rewards to collective rewards.
☐ Conduct a start, stop, continue exercise on our portfolio of projects and initiatives.
☐ Take the time to get to know one another.
☐ Make time for fun.
☐ Create a forum for saying what needs to be said without fear of reprisal.
☐ Offer peer-to-peer master classes taught by team members.
☐ Use videoconferencing to increase emotional intelligence during remote meetings and calls.
☐ Limit teams and committees to fewer than nine people.
☐ Develop a conflict resolution process and highlight productive conflict.
These cards remove some of the friction around imagining new possibilities and trigger questions that move us forward. While sorting through the cards, someone is going to say, “Wait, what the heck is dynamic teaming?” And from that moment forward, the conversation has shifted from push to pull.
That said, the occasional push can be helpful. We have found over the years that some practices are a bit like yoga poses. They can train the mind and body even before we fully understand them. One such practice is the act o
f “checking in” to meetings with our colleagues. While most meetings already start with casual conversation, they do not formalize the process of getting present. Asking everyone to answer a check-in question such as “What has your attention?” or “What color is your mood right now?” provides two unexpected benefits. The first is that the team has time to get present in a ritualized way. Starting differently short-circuits old patterns and puts us in a headspace to behave differently throughout. But more important, checking in by hearing from everyone sets a precedent of equity of voice that is sorely missing in most teams. Just getting those with loud voices to pass the baton and those with quiet voices to use them in a meeting is a tiny revolution.
It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
And yet very few teams will naturally gravitate toward “checking in” as a practice to adopt out of the gate, because teams that are new to looping struggle to realize just how powerful a small change can be. While many practices are indeed novel and experimental, some offer more predictable benefits if the team is willing to try a proven pose. Seemingly innocuous practices that keep showing up within cultures and teams you respect are probably worth experiencing.
And finally, sometimes the best practice is no practice. In heavily bureaucratic systems, often the smartest thing you can do is remove obstacles. That might mean eliminating a policy, a layer, a meeting, a budget, or a project to see how the culture responds. So while everyone is giddy with the excitement of what we should do, add, and try, take the opportunity to ask them what we should stop doing. Strip the system down to a few simple rules with a healthy boundary, and you’ll be amazed at what emerges (often exactly what is needed).
At this stage of the loop, every team must identify not just a range of potential practices but what they themselves are willing to try. The hurdle here is about commitment. By focusing the conversation on what we as a team are willing to try, we keep the motivation intrinsic and the stakes high. This is not, like so many corporate workouts, a theoretical discussion. This is not about choosing for someone else. This is about us.
At Emergent Inc. we considered practices from outside the firm but also from within. It turned out that two divisions in Europe had already started down a path toward a more People Positive way of working, and it was paying dividends. Both units were reporting higher revenue and retention. So we decided to go to the source. As we brought more and more teams into the looping process, we routinely invited them to check in with their progressive counterparts for ideas and learnings. The Heath brothers dubbed these existing success stories “bright spots” in their best-selling book Made to Stick. This approach—of studying and replicating what’s already working for other teams inside your business—aligns well with our model for change. Beneficial coherence can happen anywhere. When you see it, seize it.
