by Aaron Dignan
Instead we can choose to practice sensing. Sensing means noticing—with our heads and our hearts—what’s really going on. We can sense what’s happening in the room, what’s happening in a relationship, even what’s happening in our own bodies. Avoiding a colleague because you subconsciously feel judged by them is not progress. Noticing that you feel that way, naming it, and working on it (ideally with them) is sensing and responding. While we often think of feedback as something that’s written in a survey, true feedback comes in many forms. It’s only by closing the feedback loop among our intent, our sense of what’s happening, and our actions that we can truly operate in an adaptive way. This applies at every level from the market to the miniscule. When we let go of our desire to shape everything and everyone and instead sense what is happening and what could happen, we are able to see the moves that will bring us closer to our goals, often in ways we can’t anticipate.
Start by Stopping
Human beings are naturally acquisitive. We’re far less gifted at getting rid of things. Just open a kitchen drawer, hall closet, or garage and you’ll see what I mean. We add more and more to our collections, never stopping to see what we can do without. Organizations are no exception. For every problem, we believe the solution is more. Additional employees. Another meeting. A new policy. Each one adds to the organizational debt.
At the outset, your instinct is going to be to introduce new ways of working. New meeting types. New decision tools. New structures. And while those are exciting and effective practices, you may find yourself building on an unstable foundation. If there are too many inhibitive practices already in place, it can be overwhelming to add new or contradictory ones to the mix. There simply isn’t space.
Instead, ask yourself, “What can we remove, take away, or stop doing?” Consider the tension you’re addressing from the perspective of what is preventing better behavior or practices from emerging. The vast majority of rules and process are created because we don’t trust people to do the right thing. As we move toward an organization that can run itself, we start to value the open space that allows people to exercise judgment. Once you identify something that isn’t serving you, propose to eliminate it for a period of time. Let the culture fill in the blanks. Rather than a new vacation policy, just eliminate the one you have. Tell people you trust them to take vacations responsibly. Rather than a new meeting, get rid of one that isn’t serving you. See what people miss from that meeting that they can’t get another way. The space that this creates will allow individuals and teams to find the adjacent possible more easily. Then, as it emerges, allow or even amplify a new approach that is working well.
Join the Resistance
People resist change. That’s what most of us believe. We, the enlightened few, are willing to step boldly into the future. Anyone who defends the status quo must be wrong. These luddites, laggards, and late adopters refuse to engage with our change programs. Can’t they see that this change is inevitable and better for everyone? The train is leaving the station, and they better get on board. Right?
Wrong. This cliché perception of resistance leads us astray. It’s a reality-distortion field that blunts our empathy and our humility. People can and do change. They just do so when it makes sense to them. People don’t resist all change; they resist incoherent change poorly managed. Perhaps we’re asking people to take risks while their incentives push them to avoid failure at all costs. Or we’re asking them to trade mastery in one process or tool for confusion in a new one. These kinds of scenarios cause very real, often very rational human reactions. In response, we’re dismissive. So they dig in further and shut down. And then we’re stuck.
Instead of perpetuating this pattern, look at resistance as information. People are telling you something when they resist change. Your job is to find out what. Resistance is an invitation to talk, listen, and learn. That doesn’t mean convincing or cajoling skeptics. Let them come to the work if and when they’re ready. But while you wait and hold space for them, use their insights to ensure that the change you’re driving is ever more coherent and inclusive.
SCALING CHANGE
“How do we scale this?” our sponsor at Emergent Inc. asked. We had been working in her part of the organization for a few months and there was growing excitement about the change thus far. Early positive signs had come in the form of speed and time saved. One of her top leaders summed it up by saying, “It’s actually stunning the amount of work we’ve unblocked in the last four weeks that, frankly, has been blocked for years.” At the same time, we were hearing about deeper and richer conversations. “This leadership team has talked more in the past three months than in the past six years,” another exec confessed during a retrospective.
But all that momentum was leading to a question: what about everyone else? So far we’d focused on a few hundred individuals in a business of more than twenty thousand. At this rate we’d never reach everyone—we’d all be retired first. So the question about scale was critical.
Scale is one of the most complex and contentious topics in the world of self-management. For starters, very few organizations larger than ten thousand employees can really claim to operate in a dynamic and decentralized way. There are some who doubt that it’s even possible (or say it’s not worth the trouble). Others claim that it can be done but that it requires a fractal approach—a federation of smaller groups working more like a marketplace than a traditional company. One thing is for sure: the unprecedented scale of human activity makes things harder than they need to be.
While it is undeniably easier to encode the principles and practices of self-management before an organization achieves scale, it can be done long after. What’s more, we must learn how to change at scale or we risk an unnecessary amount of creative destruction in the years ahead. Refreshing large dysfunctional systems without total system failure is actually one of the great challenges of our time. Because while you can found another startup in a weekend, creating another school system or healthcare system or government is another matter entirely.
The most confusing aspect of searching for self-management at scale may simply be definitional. Is Toyota doing it? Is Google? Is Facebook? Is Southwest Airlines? That depends on what it is. Certainly they’re each bringing some of the ideas in this book to life, but none of them has abandoned the Legacy OS entirely. And even if they did, this way of working isn’t a destination with a finish line and a winner’s circle. It’s a journey of continuous improvement and vitality. Nobody’s ever done, so categorizing organizations might not be the most productive use of our time.
Instead, if we can simply agree that toppling bureaucracy and replacing it with something more adaptive, vital, and human is crucial, the only question that matters is how to accelerate that process. We are left to wonder, What is theoretically possible?
The first thing to recognize is that priming and looping deep in the organization can lead to scale organically, but this rarely happens quickly or cleanly. Insurgence is messy. It’s going to butt up against the antibodies of the existing OS at every turn. However, each interaction that primes new thinking or triggers a change is a ripple in the pond. Every experiment has the potential to catalyze other teams into starting loops of their own. I jokingly refer to this as “looping the loops.” If the right conditions are in place, the adjacent possible will unfold.
In our work, we’ve noticed at least three positive patterns that emerge on the heels of grassroots priming and looping.
Confidence. When people are allowed to take ownership over even a small part of their way of working in a safe space, they open up. As loops compound, psychological safety increases, and behaviors change as a consequence. Trust grows. In fact, recent research by David DeSteno at Northeastern University shows that trust has a kind of halo effect that extends beyond the individual interaction that increased it. Trust begets trust. A team that has completed even two or three loops successfully without interference
or restriction will feel dramatically different from the rest of the culture. And that confidence will spread into other teams as members cross-pollinate.
Relief. It’s obvious but still powerful that when you save people time, decrease stress, increase performance, or make progress on inclusion, it’s noticeable—and measurable. When a CMO at a Fortune 10 company reported to his peers that he was saving fourteen hours a week based on changes his team had made, you could see the jealousy on everyone’s face. There’s nothing that legacy cultures love more than a measurable productivity gain, so when things do move the needle, they spread fast.
Wonder. Winning experiments reveal new possibilities. Working in new ways opens the mind to what could be. Clayton Christensen once told software entrepreneur Jason Fried, “Questions are places in your mind where answers fit. If you haven’t asked the question, the answer has nowhere to go. It hits your mind and bounces right off. You have to ask the question—you have to want to know—in order to open up the space for the answer to fit.” This is profoundly true in transformation work. We start small and expand as our hunger for more radical ideas grows. If you haven’t even tried holding a meeting without a preplanned agenda, how are you going to be open to eliminating traditional budgets? You’re not. With each loop, we take stock of the questions our colleagues are asking and meet them where they are. We know that good loops will lead to bigger and deeper questions.
We saw all three of these patterns unfold at Emergent Inc. around the same time our sponsor asked about scaling. One of their early experiments was focused on working in sprints. Project management had become lethargic and isolated, and that tension was front and center for the teams we knew. “We’ll agree to kick off a project and then wait a month for the first meeting,” a team leader explained. “We’ll plod along keeping the work in a silo until the very last minute, and then reveal the answer to the org. By then it’s too late to do anything with the feedback we get.” For the experiment, a few teams agreed to try working in one-week sprints for eight weeks, sharing their work in progress with the organization every Friday, however raw it might be.
Within a few weeks, “sprint” had become part of the vocabulary in that part of the business. Teams were reporting dramatically higher productivity, and they were finding that the feedback they got each week was far more actionable than before. We started to notice that teams who were not part of the initial experiment were sprinting on their own. In fact, the enthusiasm grew to the point that, for a while, sprints became the answer to every question. “Don’t like something? Try a sprint!” was the mantra. While this was obviously not the solution to every issue, excitement like that showed us that we were on the right track.
While that kind of progress can be exciting, starting in one function or P&L and hoping for the spontaneous adoption of new ways of working in the rest of the business is unrealistic. There are better ways to proceed if we are having success locally.
One is to use that momentum to move upward from local success toward the top of the house, ideally spanning more than one function, department, or location. When you start too deep in the business, teams may find that they lack the authority to change what challenges them most. While they often have more autonomy than they think—most teams can change how they meet and communicate, for instance—they are limited by their span of control. Teams with more power can accelerate things in a way no one else can by eliminating constraints and distributing the authority to change. They can choose to experiment with—and even remove—processes, policies, structures, and tools that inhibit everyone. Looping with senior leadership teams almost always increases the distribution of power and information in a culture. And that in turn releases energy and potential that were previously trapped.
For that reason, whenever possible, we start at the very top. Even if the boundary we set for the transformation isn’t firm-wide, having the support and curiosity of the top team makes everything go faster later on. Some communities of practice take a very hard line on this. The incredible corporate liberation movement in France, championed by Freedom, Inc. coauthor Isaac Getz, won’t let an organization join its ranks unless the CEO is fully committed to the principles of self-management. While I applaud this conviction, I’m not sure the only strategy we should employ is waiting for CEOs to come around. Actually experiencing new ways of working is the surest path to epiphany. We can always start by starting.
Back at Emergent Inc., that question about scaling was still lingering. “Rather than worry about how we scale this, let’s worry about what might stop these practices from spreading,” I said. That turned out to be a long list. Other leaders. IT policies that would blacklist our favorite tools. The urgency of quarterly goals. And a general lack of permission to try things, to name a few.
We decided to make two moves right away. First, we would take the time to do some priming work with the senior leadership team. Now that we had some early signs of life, they needed to be invited to participate in, consent to, or object to what we were doing.
Second, we had to create the conditions for sharing to occur. When you have a new approach that has become popular with a handful of teams, you want it to spread. For that to happen, teams have to feel safe, encouraged even, to notice what’s working for others and to adapt it to their context. We decided to highlight emergent practices from across the org every month during all-hands meetings. The message was “Look at what your colleagues are doing. We support them. If you see something you want to try, we will get you the support you need.”
While scaling a new way of working (and changing) can be daunting, don’t allow yourself to be too overwhelmed by it. Criticality is fractal—tipping points can occur at any scale. A person can tip a team, a team can tip a division, and a division can tip a global corporation. As the saying goes, there are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.
Epilogue
WHAT DREAMS MAY COME
The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.
—William Gibson
Deep down, I think we all have a pretty good idea of what will happen if we don’t change how we work. We’re watching it unfold in slow motion right now. Massive bureaucracies lacking conscience or purpose. Startups meant to disrupt the status quo unintentionally entrenching it. Rampant inequality. Wage stagnation. Workers displaced by technology funded with the profits from their labor. Nationalism. Hacked democracy. A stock market driven more by policy and punditry than performance. And the coup de grâce, accelerating climate change that threatens the safety and security of billions of people. All of it the result of our mindless adherence to the ways of the past—to an operating system that fundamentally misunderstands complexity and human nature. This isn’t the uplifting capitalism of a burgeoning economy, it’s advanced capitalism at best and crony capitalism at worst.
That future doesn’t work for me. Somehow we have to reconcile that twentieth-century bureaucracy and capitalism got us here, but they won’t get us where we need to go unless they (and we) evolve. We are being called to lead that renaissance. You can feel it in your gut that this is the turning point. The future is up for grabs. And what I keep wondering is, What if we get it right? We have a pretty good idea what an Evolutionary Organization looks like. But what about an evolutionary world—one that’s People Positive and Complexity Conscious at scale? That’s much harder to imagine. But it’s worth a try. In my future of work . . .
Every business, nonprofit, government, and social institution practices Continuous Participatory Change and aspires to get better every day, not just for its customers but for all stakeholders, including the community.
Purpose and human flourishing are the objectives that drive organizations. Growth is a result, not a goal.
Self-management is the dominant organizing construct, and most individuals go to work in an environment that promotes freedom and responsibi
lity.
Employee ownership and participation are expected and supported. Not every business is a true cooperative, but rewards are far more distributed. Many organizations become employee- or community-owned over time as founders and investors realize sufficient returns.
New forms of incorporation allow organizations to include public benefit as a counterbalance to their fiduciary duty. Making money is no longer the sole function of business.
More companies stay private and resist outside investment to remain free of outside influence and pressure. Those that need funding increasingly get it from their community or investors with a broader definition of return. Those that need to go public do so via new platforms that allow them to optimize for the long term rather than the short term.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are considered fundamental to success, both because they improve performance and because they reflect our values. Organizations make trade-offs in order to excel in these areas.
Innovation and experimentation are far more pervasive and distributed. It’s not uncommon to encounter a trial or test, even in well-optimized environments.
