by Aaron Dignan
3. Conducting Experiments
With our tension identified and a sound practice in mind, it’s time to get our hands dirty. But remember, this isn’t about implementing your perfect vision; it’s about living in the now. Our goal isn’t to make something work; it’s to learn, to see what’s possible—what emerges. To that end, we’re going to take a moment to design a thoughtful experiment.
It’s easy to say, “Let’s try it!” It’s harder to define what that means. Who? Where? When? So while there’s some value to going with the flow, we have found that teams new to continuous participatory change do better when they take a moment to answer these questions thoughtfully.
So what do we need in order to proceed? The worksheet below contains the key questions that will push a team for clarity on what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. We recommend individuals or teams take the time to fill this out carefully before sharing it with those who will be impacted by their proposal.
Experiment Worksheet
Tension
What is your tension? How does it manifest? Share a story that brings it to life.
Practice
What do you propose we try? What is your hypothesis? How does this practice support our commitment to a People Positive and Complexity Conscious OS?
Participants
Who will be involved? What are they committing to?
Duration
How long will the experiment last? When will you conduct a retrospective to collect perspectives and learning?
Learning Metrics
How will we know if it was beneficial or harmful? What kinds of stories do you hope to hear?
Requirements
What do you need in order to conduct the experiment, in terms of resources, space, supplies, funding, etc.?
Safety
What kind of support or consent do you need to make this safe to try?
With these answers in hand, an individual or team can propose their test and seek consent. Depending on the authority and autonomy present in that team, that might mean in-group consent (we as a team commit to try this) or it might mean obtaining consent from a superior or another function. Since that can be challenging, we advise using the consent process outlined on page 70. Once a team has consent to proceed, we are off to the races!
Experiments will be as varied as the tensions they aim to solve. The important thing about an experiment is that we’re working on a real issue while working as a dynamic team. One might involve using video for conference calls, which is technologically easy but behaviorally challenging. Another might eliminate a meeting but trigger new tensions in the system—things people need that they’re not getting. The task is to introduce or remove the practice clearly (and often repeatedly) and notice what happens.
Smaller, shorter practices—such as the check-in process mentioned earlier—might be easy to try and iterate over the course of a week. Larger or more complex ones—such as a new way to allocate resources—might require a little onboarding time and several weeks or months of support to see them through. Your ability to be successful in any loop is directly linked to the degree to which participants are committed to trying.
However, after reasonable exposure, be careful about forcing additional practice. While all potentially beneficial practices should get a fair shake, you also need to let behavior speak for itself. Are participants demonstrating pull—a desire for more of what you’re doing? Is the practice spreading to other teams without your help? These are sure signs you are on the right track. This is where judgment comes in. When met with resistance, it can be hard to tell if a breakthrough is around the corner or you’re barking up the wrong tree.
There is one very real challenge around looping that I want to make you aware of. Operating systems are interdependent and self-reinforcing. That means that an isolated experiment might not work. Not because the change was ill conceived but because it relies on a broader context to be successful. The classic example is a culture that suddenly empowers everyone to make decisions without considering the rest of the OS. What happens then? Lacking the information, tools, and sense of security required to take action, people hold back. “Nobody is stepping up and making decisions. They must not be natural leaders,” management observes. But what actually happened was that they skipped ahead of the adjacent possible.
What this means is that we have to adjust our expectations to match our context and commitment. If your stakeholders are ready to move to a decentralized network of autonomous teams working transparently toward a common purpose, your loops may be more radical, progressive, and concurrent. If you’re on a more incremental path, they may be focused and sequential. Sometimes we have to change small things now in order to change big things later.
Looping is an adventure in uncertainty. You’re going to learn a lot more by doing than I could ever share here. Get as many repetitions under your belt as you can. Think of looping as something you have to master through deliberate practice. Start small. Start local. Be patient. And stick with it. You are starting a chain reaction that will eventually transform your entire way of working. A more human, vital, and adaptive organization is out there, just waiting to be discovered. And once the pattern of continuous participatory change starts, it can be hard to stop.
Criticality
One of my clients spent nine months looping with a diverse group of teams, and a few leaders had emerged that were actively pushing the culture to move faster. But it was unclear just what the level of commitment really was. Were we going to go all the way? Or was incremental improvement in pockets of the organization enough? I was hiking with my team in the hills of Santa Cruz when I got a call from one of our earliest adopters there. He was hoping for a breakthrough.
“Aaron, I feel like we’re stuck. How are we ever going to achieve self-sufficiency at this rate?”
“You’re right. We’ve dipped our toes, but now we need the leadership team to jump in on transparency, autonomy, experimentation . . . all the principles and practices we’ve been exploring.”
“If we can’t figure this out, I don’t know if this is the place for me anymore.”
In physics, the moment of transition in which a system is halfway between one phase and another is called the critical point. Malcolm Gladwell referred to the social variation of this phenomenon using a different name: the tipping point. As it turns out, there also exists a class of systems that appear to have what is known as self-organizing criticality. Rather than needing precise conditions for the transformation to occur (the way water does to boil), these systems naturally evolve to that other state.
With a wink to that concept, we use the term criticality to refer to the moment in an OS transformation where enough people are sufficiently committed to the ideals of self-management that going back to the way things were is impractical. The operating system has undergone a phase transition and is now something else entirely. It is, for the organization in question, quite literally the point of no return.
If a firm that has reached criticality reverses course and starts reintroducing bureaucracy or autocracy, a mass exodus often ensues. As you transform your organization, this phenomenon is something to be mindful of—at the team level and beyond. Curious and engaged people will connect with this work and drink it up, and eventually it will become a part of them. In our experience, the people and teams who reach criticality are often the best and brightest, which means that you’re taking a real risk. Lose steam for the transformation, and your best people start looking for greener pastures.
I say this not to frighten you but to clarify the importance of commitment at the leadership level in work that rewires an organization’s OS. This is open-heart surgery. Proceed accordingly.
What are the signs of criticality? There are many. Two that stand out are language and spread. Language is an interesting aspect of this work because our vocabulary for descri
bing culture and ways of working is limited in popular business culture. Just as the Inuit dialect has fifty-three words for snow, as your teams’ depth of knowledge grows, so too will their vocabulary. “Meeting” becomes too generic. What kind of meeting? “Complaint” becomes too passive. Process that tension. Soft words such as “safety” and “sensing” and “wholeness” start to show up. And in many cases the culture makes up a few words and phrases of its own. At The Ready we call our weekly all-hands meeting “Full Circle,” which has specific meaning to us and no one else. If you see the language changing at scale, that signals criticality. Because language is how we make meaning.
The second and perhaps more powerful sign is what we refer to as spread. This is what happens when the practices you’re introducing travel beyond the boundary you’ve set. You hear about other groups doing things differently—borrowing tactics and methods that have worked for you. Your team gets invited to share and advise other parts of the organization, or even the whole thing. When the boundaries start to blur, it means the work is emerging under its own energy, and that means, at least in your corner of the org, things will never be the same.
Continuity
The final pattern in transformation—insofar as there is an end to this process—is what we call continuity. Following system-wide criticality, the culture has in effect taken responsibility for its own development. The operating system—previously a black box—has become facile and fungible. It is now a form of commons, owned by everyone, and everyone must maintain it.
While we often refer to organizations at this stage as self-sufficient, that doesn’t mean teams don’t need help from time to time. In fact, at this point we encourage teams to build that help into their structure. At Buurtzorg, the roughly one thousand self-managed teams are supported by a network of eighteen coaches. Spotify has employed a similar approach. In these and other cases, teams that are struggling have the ability to engage a coach (rather than a boss) to get unstuck. The greatest athletes in the world have coaches. Why wouldn’t the greatest teams?
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.
Embedded coaching is just one more way to ensure that the continuous participatory change process is alive and well. While it may surprise the many fans who look up to these businesses and their leadership, cultures in continuity are the first to say “We are not perfect. We are not done.” In fact, it’s one of the primary ways to spot an organization that has progressed this far—the acknowledgment of perpetual public beta. Part of reaching this point in a transformation or the evolution of a new organization is recognizing that change is a constant. Due to internal or external forces, conditions keep changing, and the operating system has to keep pace.
That’s why a community of practice is emerging among self-managed and agile organizations. They tend to share more about what they are doing, how it’s going, and what they’re learning. And they tend to be curious about how others are resolving the same tensions. Openly publishing the Netflix Culture Deck was an unusual move at the time the company did so. Now it’s a recruiting technique used by brands around the world. I expect that in years to come, we will see more congregations of Evolutionary Organizations, coming together to talk not about the latest trend in technology, but about far more fundamental questions of how to create an ever better future.
PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY
“We don’t want to spend too much time on the soft stuff,” a leader at Control Inc. told me before kickoff at a team off-site. “We want to get into the real work.” To most executives that means messing with the org chart, accountabilities, or metrics. Those things feel like serious business. They support our view of organizations as machines. By focusing on these tangible objectives, we can almost forget that we are dealing with human beings.
This reaction is extremely common. Many leaders have been trained to believe that making time for emotional and relational development is optional or even counterproductive. This is reinforced by a cultural narrative that says we should keep our personal and professional lives separate. Even the statement “be professional” is laden with expectations about putting on the corporate mask. Just do your job. Keep your feelings to yourself and your head down. As if we were still on a factory floor at the turn of the last century.
One of the reasons we don’t like to get into the “soft stuff” is that it makes us feel vulnerable. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned climbing the corporate ladder, it’s this: don’t appear weak. If you’re exposed, someone else might take advantage of you. Or you’ll be shamed. Or worst of all, you’ll be fired. And so we’ve actually built up antibodies to honest human conversation at work. Sure, we might let the truth fly over drinks after hours, but in a meeting, in front of everyone else? Not a chance. This translates into an aversion to risk of any kind. If we can’t even be real for fear of the consequences, what are the chances we’re going to swing for the fences with our next disruptive idea?
Unfortunately, cultures that don’t value and nurture openness and connection become dysfunctional and eventually toxic. Control Inc. was no exception. While some of the leadership felt that working on operational efficiency was the priority, it was obvious to us that employees had been traumatized by a revolving door of layoffs and dismissals. The pressure to deliver results in a bad year had become pervasive and suffocating, stealing nights and weekends, causing last-minute shifts in priorities and resourcing, and generally wreaking havoc on the team’s mental state. Employees were constantly looking over their shoulders, waiting for someone to change the game on them. In a team check-in one Monday morning, one employee actually said: “I considered getting into a car accident this morning on my way to work, just so I’d have an excuse not to come in.” There was not a drop of sarcasm in her voice. Those are the moments when you know you have triage to do. Because a system in trauma can’t transform. If we’re not safe, we can’t trust. If we’re not safe, we can’t risk. And nobody does their best work scared.
In 2012, a team within Google launched an initiative called Project Aristotle. The aim of the research was to use data from actual Googlers to determine what influences team performance. The question they hoped to finally answer: What makes a great team? Observing hundreds of teams over several years, they tracked hundreds of traits to test their correlation with team performance. What surprised them was that almost nothing seemed to be predictive. Performance seemed to be almost completely contextual. What mattered in one team didn’t matter in another. And they thought they might have hit a dead end. Until they noticed that, 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. The technical term for this is equality in distribution of conversational turn taking. Second, the members of the team displayed fairly good intuition about what the other members were feeling. This is referred to as high average social sensitivity. Equal talk time and emotional intelligence. It was the so-called soft stuff!
A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other.
—Simon Sinek
As team members on Project Aristotle wrestled with how to describe these insights and the conditions they created within a team, they came across the work of Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, a pioneer in studying and defining a social context known as “psychological safety.” Edmondson describes this as a “shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.” The researche
rs at Google realized that Edmondson’s work correlated perfectly with their data. The equal talk time and emotional intelligence they were seeing were leading to the phenomenon of psychological safety. That’s what made them great. Google has since tried to operationalize and scale this concept within its ranks. At that scale you can be sure this isn’t easy, but the payoff is huge. Even a small improvement in overall psychological safety can lead to breakout results.
The role psychological safety plays in OS transformation work is profound. As we saw with Control Inc., if you’re living in a state of constant fear, you’re unlikely to take a risk on a new approach, break with protocol, speak your mind, or act outside the chain of command—all things we’re going to ask people to do in this process. In other words, an organization’s capacity to adapt and evolve to meet new challenges is inversely proportional to its employees’ degree of psychological safety. And that means the soft stuff is often job one.
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. Over the years, I’ve seen this process elicit reactions ranging from solemn silence to full-on tears. It can be deeply emotional. Teams report feeling more connected and eager to continue having honest conversations.
