by Aaron Dignan
Of course, some people also choose to play it safe. That’s to be expected. So I kept reminding this team, “You get what you give here, folks.” But I couldn’t do the work for them. What I could do was model the vulnerability we’re looking for. So I consciously chose to say the things coaches and consultants don’t say out loud. “My intention is to create a case study here that I can use in my book. My concern is that I won’t be successful in getting this group to open up. My border is that I leave work at 5:00 P.M. every day to spend time with my family. No late-night emails or calls with you just because we’re under contract. My dream is that this will spread to other parts of your organization.” You could see the whites of everyone’s eyes. But it helped. Others stepped up too. Somebody went ahead and said, “I’m here for the money.” And they meant it. Somebody else confided, “I used to have fun at work, and I want to find that version of myself again.” For a group that had barely been speaking the day before, this was progress. Body language started to change. People leaned in. This was strong stuff!
After nearly ninety minutes of ICBD, I turned to the group and asked, “Who thinks we’re ready to do the real work now?” I paused. “And who thinks that was the real work?” I let that hang in the air for a while. I could tell they weren’t quite ready to say it, so I said it for them. “Sometimes the soft stuff is the hard stuff. You need to get comfortable with that if you’re going to lead this change. Some things we can write down. And some things happen in the space between people. Everything is the work. And you can’t predict where it will lead.”
THE ROLE OF THE LEADER
One of the questions I hear most frequently from leaders is “What are the conditions for a successful transformation?” And the inevitable follow-up “How can I ensure this goes well?” These are incredibly important questions. Because your role in changing your OS is different from any change you’ve led before. This is not the time to bang the drum and march your team into the future as you always have. OS transformation is about distributing power, and while you might want to do that with one grand gesture, it actually happens one interaction at a time.
Man has no greater enemy than himself.
—Petrarch
The biggest barrier to change, believe it or not, is you. If you’re the founder, the CEO, or the team leader, you hold a disproportionate amount of power in your organization. People look to you for many things. For decisions. For permission. For attention. For feedback. For signs of what’s to come. If they look at you and see the same behavior, they’re going to dismiss this as another fad. That means you have work to do. Work to master your ego. Work to quiet your voice. Work to step out of the way. You must become a paragon of trying new things. Starting new loops. Asking big questions. Don’t stay stuck in the habit of evaluating and judging the work of others. Go find something to do.
Your new job is to ensure that the conditions for change are in place, not just now but in perpetuity. While you won’t be doing as much “leading” in the traditional sense, you’ll be doing something far more rewarding. You’ll be creating and holding the space for change.
Creating Space
We create space at the dawn of something new. Once upon a time, someone (maybe you) had an idea. When the pursuit of that idea became a real business, a beacon was lit. That beacon gathered like-minded people to the cause. Space, in this sense, is both physical and conceptual. It is brought to life by the intent (and often the means) to serve a specific purpose. This purpose is the force that binds an organization or team together.
For example, if you want to ensure that everyone in the world has access to clean water, a nonprofit called charity: water is one of just a handful of organizations that have created space for that work. When its founder, Scott Harrison, looked at the water crisis ten years ago, he didn’t see an organization approaching it the way he wanted to—as a storyteller. So he started from scratch. charity: water would become the place to participate in the reinvention of philanthropy. Early innovations like being able to see where your money went in the field—knowing that a particular village or individual was drinking clean water because of you—electrified a new generation of donors. Today more than seven million people have clean water because Scott planted a flag and made some space.
When you commit to changing your OS, you’re taking on the challenge of creating a liminal space. And as we’ve discussed, continuous participatory change requires a boundary in which everyone can feel both safety and disruption. That space could be as small as a cross-functional team or as large as an entire firm. But drawing a circle around a group of people is just the beginning.
Creating space means ensuring that everyone on the team is committed to taking risks together and supporting one another. As wonderful as your culture may be, it’s best to assume that some people in your organization don’t feel safe. They don’t feel safe to be themselves. They don’t feel safe to tell the truth. They don’t feel safe to fail. Even if you think they’ve got it wrong—you and your team have work to do to make it right. Ask people in the organization about the consequences of taking risks. Listen not just to what they say but to how they say it. And then begin to change the dynamic. Let people see risk taking and failure recognized and rewarded. Let them see empathy. Let them see inclusion.
Creating space also means making time for change. Because most teams simply don’t have it. They are constantly being asked to one-up themselves, delivering more and more performance in the never-ending quest for growth. But they’re juggling too many balls. To make up for what is effectively a dysfunctional operating system, they’ve had to adopt an unsustainable pace of work. Long days. Few breaks. And so most teams are one emergency away from total exhaustion.
One of the most self-destructive tendencies within teams is to get so busy that we believe there’s no time to get better at how we work. One of my favorite comics of all time illustrates this beautifully. A few people are struggling mightily to pull a cart full of stones up a hill. The cart is outfitted with surprisingly square wheels. Another man who has happened upon them offers an innovation: round wheels. “No thanks!” they say. “We are too busy.” That is your team. That is almost every team I’ve ever worked with.
In order to do the work of change, we need to make time for it, and we need to be supported in that process. Continuous improvement is not magic; it is a discipline. It is a thing we do. And like all valuable things, it takes time. The average team doesn’t spend even thirty minutes a week reflecting on how they work together. They are going to need your help to stop this pattern and clear a path. Because we can’t learn if there’s no time to think. Teams need time for retrospection. They need time for personal reflection. They need time for deep work. They need time to run experiments and find a better way. You can create these opportunities for them, or you can empower them to create them for themselves. Either way, you’re going to have to hold the entire system (and its hunger for short-term results) at bay. If you were starting to worry that self-management might make you irrelevant, think again. You are a space maker.
Holding Space
Once the space for change exists, your second task begins: holding it. Many forces exist that will try to undermine an OS in transition. People who have a vested interest in the status quo will try to preserve it. People who don’t understand something new will try to resist it. But the hardest part about holding space for change is that you can’t fill it. Your organization is going to encounter so many questions: How should we restructure this team? What metrics matter? Who is right for this role? How should we allocate these resources? And you’re going to feel compelled to speak up, because you’re not used to letting questions linger. You’re used to having all the answers. For as long as you can remember, your job has been to catch mistakes before they happen—to save the team from themselves. But in a future rich with complexity, that’s no longer what’s needed. Your new job is to ensure ever-growing ca
pability—a culture that gets better and more resilient every day. And that won’t happen if you’re playing the hero.
Holding space means making room for teams to figure things out for themselves—for failure, learning, and growth. You’re asking teams to take responsibility for their own way of working. They have to find their own way in order to grow. Every time you give an order or an answer, you’re either wrong and preventing them from discovering something better, or you’re right and preventing them from learning. Holding space means being committed to building the muscle, scar tissue, and resilience that can come only from walking the path.
Does this mean you never interject? Never prevent catastrophe? Of course not. You, like everyone in a self-managing system, have a responsibility to speak up if you see something that is unsafe to try—something that will do irreparable harm to the organization or the people in it. The wisdom to know the difference—between the reversible and the irreversible—is what is asked of everyone in a self-managed system. But you can show them the way.
The duty to hold space never ends. You need to be sure, before you begin, that you’re willing to defend your way of working from all enemies, foreign and domestic. When Jan Wallander took over Handelsbanken in 1970, he helped the distressed bank implement a decentralized approach that completely changed its future. And this approach kept evolving and growing, with staggering results, for more than forty-five years. Yet when Frank Vang-Jensen took the reins as CEO in 2015, the system was once again at risk. Vang-Jensen immediately began to centralize power back to Handelsbanken headquarters, frustrating a culture grounded in decades of independence. Sensing the need to protect the model that had served the company for so long, Chairman Pär Boman and the bank’s board moved to replace Vang-Jensen after just eighteen months. In a press release related to the dismissal, Boman explained, “All managers at Handelsbanken—particularly the branch managers—must have a very high degree of autonomy. Being the most senior manager at the bank therefore requires a special type of leadership—considerably more complex than traditional management.” Ever vigilant, especially when it mattered most.
Creating and holding space is hard work. But here’s the good news. As your organization and OS mature, a growing number of people will join your movement and connect their calling to its purpose. A new network of values, intent, and meaning will emerge. And an idea that once lived with you and you alone will make its home among other people. The purpose and space you’ve made will become community owned. It won’t be yours anymore. You’ll be part of something bigger than yourself.
PRINCIPLES FOR CHANGE
Practicing continuous participatory change over and over has surfaced some valuable lessons about how to do it well. They’re not rules, mind you. In complexity, rules can become constraints that limit our ability to adapt. “Always” and “never” are words we try to avoid. Instead we attempt to develop principles or heuristics—guidelines that prove useful in certain situations without being overly rigid or restrictive. These somewhat counterintuitive aphorisms may help you avoid some common pitfalls. While you’re living in the now, managing the present, and revealing the adjacent possible, remember these ideas. When you feel stuck, they may help you find a path forward.
Through Them, Not to Them
Organizational change is high stakes. It brings out the control freak in each of us, particularly leaders who are accountable for results. That’s why the vast majority of culture change efforts are driven from the top. While everyone sees the opportunity for change, only leaders (often the very top leaders only) have the power to do anything about it. When their need proves great enough, they spring into action and a change process ensues.
Mistaking a complex system for a complicated one, leaders try to control the change. They decide who will be in the know. They review and approve everything as if they were building a custom home. They review survey results and filter which parts managers get to see (some) and which parts everyone else gets to see (far less than that). They envision the future and then demand that the system conform to that vision. Which is too bad, because all the information about how the system needs to change in order to achieve their goals is out there, in the system. Change, for most people in most organizations, is effectively an announcement: effective today, things are different. But they know better.
Instead we encourage participation and ownership from the earliest days of any transformation effort. Long before anything is decided, we invite everyone who will be affected to join in. This entails some risk. Every member within the boundary we select has a seat at the table and the ability to know what is going on from day one. They are “looping without supervision.” This is an intensely uncomfortable proposition to leaders. They immediately fear a variety of negative outcomes: that teams will unleash chaos, that candor and transparency will create panic or negativity, that they won’t be able to control what unfolds, and of course the shadow fear—that they aren’t really needed at all. They have to let these fears go. The more they trust, the faster the right change can occur.
Start Small
Inside large organizations, moving the needle requires big moves—big programs, big campaigns, and big acquisitions. As a result, many leaders dismiss small moves as inconsequential. Projects and programs often end up with overly ambitious goals and time lines. Big wins delivered in the short term. Could anything be more challenging? Almost every idea for a new product, new process, or new tool is met with the same question: “How will that work at scale?” As if we were going to go from zero to one hundred on it. As if it were binary. And if it does seem promising at scale, then we default to a scaled implementation. Massive funding. Umpteen approvals. Project managers. Rollout plan. And on and on. In a simpler world, that might make sense. But in a complex world, things can change rapidly and unexpectedly. Focusing exclusively on scale slows us down, creates risk, and eliminates possibilities. The simple metaphor is a two-hundred-pound stone versus two hundred one-pound stones. Which is easier to move? Which is riskier to move? Which one can best leverage many hands?
Instead, start small. Involve fewer people. Change one part of a process rather than the whole thing, or change it for one group but not another. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to scale something that has been validated and improved by the people who have to use it every day. When your team is taking smaller bites, there’s a feeling of momentum, and the electricity of that is palpable. Other teams see it. They feel it. And they want it for themselves. None of this is to say that scale doesn’t matter, just that it’s not our first priority. Paul Graham, one of the cofounders of the startup incubator Y Combinator, advises his startups to “do things that don’t scale.” What he means is that in the early days of anything new, worrying about scale can prevent us from learning, growing, and being remarkable. Think systemically. Act locally. And let scale happen.
Learn by Doing
We are all experts in our current way of working. After years or even decades of practice, we know how to play the game, even if the game is flawed. And we have been rewarded for that expertise with position and privilege. Is it any wonder that trying something new triggers fears of inadequacy and uncertainty? Who wants to feel like a beginner? Who wants to be uncomfortable?
When we can’t be vulnerable, these feelings manifest as skepticism. We want to analyze before taking action. We want to study. We want time to think of all the angles and ways it could go wrong. We want to be sure that this is the one best way before we try. In corporate culture, the default question is “Is there any risk present here?” This is a defense mechanism designed to protect the status quo. Because there’s always something we can point to as a reason not to try. But this is incompatible with complexity. We can’t know without trying. This is akin to thinking you can improve your swing by reading Golf Digest. You might get some good ideas, but that doesn’t mean you’ve mastered them.
Instead encourage teams to experience a
nd experiment with new ways of working rather than discussing and debating them. If the time frame for the experiment is reasonable, we’ll just try it without any fanfare and then reflect on how it helped (or didn’t). We do this for two reasons. First, the amount of data you have after you try something is infinitely more than the amount you have beforehand. And second, most changes to a way of working are, in fact, safe to try. The worst-case scenario is we all look at one another and agree: let’s not do that again. Even that lesson has value.
Sense and Respond
The typical mental model for leadership includes the notion that we must manifest success through sheer force of will. We commit to an objective and then we barrel ahead, oblivious to detractors or resisters who might stand in our way. As a result we often engage with the world around us through the lens of what we want. We try to shape it to match our wishes. This applies to the way we develop people, products, markets, and everything else. The shadow side of this intensity is that we often forget to listen. We forget to sense what’s actually going on, and we miss the signals and feedback that can help us navigate. Have you ever been in a daylong meeting where the leader in charge vigorously enforced the agenda even though it was clear the conversation needed to go somewhere else? That’s shaping behavior. It happens in product development too. If you’re on a team that doesn’t have direct, unfiltered contact with your customers or users, you have no hope of empathy. Internally or externally, if you ever ask yourself the question “What am I missing?” the answer is “Probably a lot.”
