by Aaron Dignan
Commitment
If you look at the stories of cultures that have transcended bureaucracy, you can almost always trace it back to one or two individuals who saw an opportunity to do things differently. Fed up with the old way of running an organization, and often in a moment of crisis or rebirth, they begin to ask deeper questions. They start to suspect—and then to believe—that a better way of working is out there. These catalysts are often founders or CEOs, but they don’t have to be. In fact, if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you are one. You’re about to start something, something deep and emergent.
If you’ve ever seen a murmuration—thousands of starlings engaged in aerial ballet—you know how incredible emergence can be. They fly as one superorganism, turning and diving, fanning out and changing shape, from an oval to an hourglass and back again. This phenomenon has been the subject of speculation for centuries. The ancient Romans believed the Gods were communicating with them through the movement of the birds. In the early twentieth century, it was believed that the birds were telepathic. It wasn’t until the age of computer science that simulations started to unlock their secrets. When one starling senses danger from an encroaching predator, its movement sets off a chain reaction within the flock. But how? Just three simple rules: avoidance, alignment, and attraction. Avoid crowding the birds around you, steer toward their average heading, and try to stay equidistant from your neighbors.
Our organizations are vastly more complex, and yet in order to succeed, we have to recognize that human nature and complexity call for a similar approach. In order to maximize our chances of success, the people in power have to commit to a few basic principles—simple rules for the elaborate ballet of continuous participatory change. I recognize that the principles below might seem radical or even impossible now. Use them as beacons if you’re not ready or able to use them as bedrock. But if you want humanity, vitality, and adaptivity more than you want control, and you have the power, this is how you start strong.
Autonomy. All members and teams should be self-managing and self-organizing. Members have the freedom and responsibility to use their skills, judgment, and feedback loops to steer and serve the organization’s purpose.
Consent. All policy decisions—agreements, rules, roles, structures, and resources—should be made through the informed consent of those impacted by that decision. In the spirit of agility, members may consent to using other forms of decision making, including distributing authority to specific roles, teams, or elected representatives.
Transparency. All information should be made available and accessible to all members. Individuals and teams should “default to open” when it comes to sharing data, information, knowledge, and insights.
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Once you have the commitment of the people who hold power, you need to find other catalysts—to challenge you, encourage you, and learn alongside you. If you’re a startup, that means recruiting people who are not just skilled but ready to reinvent how they work. If you’re an established organization, that means finding the rebels in the system who are already hacking the bureaucracy.
The team you’re forming is the seed of a community of practice that will eventually include everyone. They are the wayfinders who will be the first to try new things and the first to share what works. They will manage the present and nudge the system in the direction of more People Positive and Complexity Conscious practice.
“What exactly are we looking for?” our sponsor at Emergent Inc. asked me, as we started assembling a network of catalysts that could act as a launch team. “We’re looking for insurgents with influence,” I said. “People who have a dream and a team.”
I continued, “Who do people confide in? Who do people go to when they have a good idea? Who do people go to when they need to break the rules? Who is already doing things differently?”
He sat back and thought for a second. “Ah, I can think of a few leaders who would be great for this. How many do we need?”
“Only true zealots,” I said. “We’re asking people to take on a second job here—to be stewards of an emerging OS. Quality over quantity.”
Boundaries
Early in the transformation effort with Emergent Inc., we drew a circle around marketing and merchandising—two functions with common goals but very different mindsets and ways of working. If we could change how these teams organized and interacted, it would radiate out into the rest of the business. This level of focus allowed us to move quickly without distraction or scrutiny from the rest of the system. Only when others became interested in what we were doing did we expand the scope of our efforts and start scaling what we had learned.
All living systems have boundaries. There are boundaries of identity—such as who is (and isn’t) part of an organization or a team. And there are boundaries of behavior. If you break certain rules as a lawyer, you will be disbarred and cease to be a member of the legal community. In OS transformation we need a boundary to create what author Dave Gray calls “liminal space.” “Liminal” means “threshold” or “portal.” Gray calls it the “in-between space that defines two things, while at the same time being neither one nor the other.” He continues, “Change happens at the boundaries of things: the boundary between the known and unknown, the familiar and the different, between the old way and new way, the past and the future.”
One of the challenging things about the transformation effort at Control Inc. was that we never really identified a liminal space. “Where can we start?” we asked, after several weeks of talking about the kinds of changes that might ensue. Our sponsor started rattling off cities—locations that might be open to the possibility of doing things differently. “Those all sound great to us. Let’s just pick one and get started,” we said, having long ago given up on the idea that there was a perfect place to begin. Any willing team was as good as any other. “We can’t start changing things without the CEO’s consent,” they replied shakily. “And he’s going to want to know exactly what you’re going to do.” Months later, we still hadn’t found our safe space. Every possibility had a reason it wouldn’t work. Not only did we have a boundary problem, but we had a commitment issue as well, a lesson we would learn more than once.
OS transformation needs liminal space to survive. We need a place in the organization where we can say: here we’re going to do things differently, here it is safe to try. The important thing is that the space be protected—from the rest of the organization and the outside world. Antibodies and muscle memory will emerge and try to maintain the status quo. In the early days that space can be as small as one meeting, one room, or one team. In the end, the boundary of the firm won’t even contain the space you’ve created.
When working with clients, we tend to start with a boundary around a team, then two or three, and then what General Stanley McChrystal calls a “team of teams”—a network of teams bound by a common purpose. I contend that this is the ideal scale for transformation. It seems no accident that it correlates with Dunbar’s number—a commonly quoted cognitive limit on the number of people we can maintain stable social relationships with (roughly 150). In a startup this might include everybody. In a larger organization this often means a P&L, a location, a geography, or a function. It is possible to go all in and make your entire organization—even a large one—a liminal space. It just requires a greater degree of commitment and dialogue from everyone up front. Ultimately it is incumbent upon us to identify a liminal space and ensure that everyone inside it is a volunteer who feels a sense of safety and autonomy in the adventure ahead.
Priming
With a team of catalysts gathered and a boundary identified, the vast majority of change initiatives proceed with a process of discovery and diagnosis. The story we tell ourselves goes something like this: first we’ll study the culture, then we’ll figure out what is broken, and then we’ll fix it. It’s a great story. Unfortunately, it’s total fict
ion.
For starters, the vast majority of diagnostic tools and ethnographic approaches are flawed. Issues of bias, influence, self-report, gaming, and manipulation are all prevalent. Beyond that, the desire for high-level diagnosis leads to lowest-common-denominator insights that are hard to act upon. The survey says the organization has “low trust.” Okay. Now what are you going to do about it?
Starting with system-wide diagnosis also perpetuates the belief that the organization is a complicated and autocratic system—something that can be analyzed and then fixed from above. It puts the power of interpretation into the hands of the few. “We will design the survey, we will interpret the data, and we will decide what to do.” This is the command-and-control theater of change that we want to avoid.
Worst of all, discovery and diagnosis in a large bureaucratic system are painfully slow. In the time it takes to design a survey, get it approved, send it out to your employees, nag them to fill it out, get the results back, average them out, and decide on your top three objectives . . . we can help dozens and dozens of teams explore and experience their own adjacent possibilities.
Instead of diagnosis, we typically proceed with a process of experiential learning and dialogue we call priming. For catalysts, leaders, and teams who are willing, we want to challenge the basic assumptions we all hold about organizations and how we work in them. Most of us have not had the time to think about how we work, and why we work that way, in a long time (maybe ever). We’re on autopilot. And while we might be frustrated by the systems we serve, we rarely stop to think about how we would change them if we could. Even executives with enormous power end up moving boxes and lines around rather than attempting real OS change. The idea behind priming is to pull people out of their patterns and back onto a learning edge through play, reflection, and debate. To realize what it means to be People Positive and Complexity Conscious, we have to experience them.
We maintain a tool kit of exercises designed to help us create these moments of epiphany. One of our favorites is a game called Ballpoint. Originally created by Boris Gloger to deliver lessons about workflow, we use it today with executive teams around the world to help them experience self-organization. In the game, a team of twelve to twenty-five individuals is handed a bucket of ping-pong balls. A point is earned when a ball leaves the bucket, is touched by everyone on the team, and returns to the bucket. There are some rules: balls cannot touch one another, the bucket can’t be moved during play, balls must have “air time” between teammates, balls that touch the floor are errors, etc. You get the picture. Teams are allowed two minutes of play, followed by ninety seconds of discussion and retrospection to change their approach. As each round begins, they estimate how they’ll score. After every round, we tally up points and errors.
To say that teams get engaged in trying to maximize their score is an understatement. There is cheering. Hooting. Hollering. Sweating. The rolling up of sleeves. But something far more interesting than team building is under way.
As the leadership team at Emergent Inc. finished their fifth round of play, we gathered everyone into a circle for a debrief and conversation. “What did you notice?” we asked. It was quiet for a moment, and then the observations started flowing. “We had to change our approach several times.” “We needed to communicate more.” “The people on one end weren’t being heard by the people on the other end.” “We didn’t freak out about errors; we just moved on.” “Good ideas came from multiple people in the group.” “There’s no way we would have figured that out by just sitting there and planning.” “The reflection time was key.” “Performance was relative; whatever we did last time, we just wanted to beat that.”
“And who was the leader?” I wondered out loud.
“Nobody.”
“We all were.”
Many other lessons were revealed through the game, but I won’t spoil your ability to experience it by sharing them here. Suffice it to say that many of the things they needed to realize about their OS were laid bare in just forty-five minutes of play and discussion. We finished by comparing how they played as a team with how they worked day to day. Then I offered my final provocation: “You do realize that you just had more fun removing and replacing ping-pong balls from a bucket than you do on a regular day at work.” They laughed. “How we work matters, doesn’t it?”
If you’re willing to search, there are games and activities for learning or unlearning almost anything. Enemy/Defender, an improv game, shows us how simple rules can create complex behavior. The Marshmallow Challenge highlights the importance of testing and learning. The Cynefin Lego Game illustrates, in a hands-on way, the difference between simple, complicated, and complex systems. An Identity Walk can shine a light on diversity and privilege in a way that cuts deeper than any presentation on inclusion or unconscious bias. There are more good options than you’ll ever have time for.
Typical topics we like to prime include complexity, emergence, self-organization, organizational debt, agility, leanness, motivation, self-awareness, mastery, trust, generative difference, psychological safety, and more. It’s the twenty-first-century curriculum that’s never taught in business school. The more time we have, the more breadth and depth we can cover. But there’s a risk in diving too deep and missing the chance to make practical connections as we start the work of change. We aim to do just enough priming to get hearts and minds open, always linking things back to the present moment and channeling that temporary energy into change. We can always go back for more learning (or unlearning) when the need arises.
Your goal is to prime every team inside the liminal space. It doesn’t have to happen all at once. It doesn’t even have to happen before they start changing. But it helps. A few hours of play and discussion sets everyone up for success in things to come. At the end of every priming experience, you’re extending an invitation, not a mandate: Join us. Try something. Start a conversation. Ask for help. We are here for you. A whole new way of working is possible. Step into the space.
Looping
Earlier we talked about designing change to reveal the adjacent possible. Within organizations, we endeavor to do this through a process we call looping, inspired in part by Jason Little’s Lean Change Management. In our work, a loop contains three stages that are practiced recursively: Sensing Tensions, Proposing Practices, and Conducting Experiments.
The Looping Process
Looping is at the heart of continuous participatory change. Loops can happen at different speeds, at different times, at different scales, in different parts of the organization. At scale, this is nothing more than a distributed pattern of experimentation. But what it can lead to is truly remarkable. While we’re often asked to teach clients new ways to decide, coordinate, and grow, the only thing they really need to know is how to loop. If you can loop you can learn, and if you can learn you’ll figure out the rest. So let’s take a deeper look at this process and how to bring it to life.
1. Sensing Tensions
I first heard the term “tension” used in an organizational context in Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline. In it he briefly introduced a concept called creative tension. “Imagine a rubber band, stretched between your vision and current reality. When stretched, the rubber band creates tension. . . . What does tension seek? Resolution or release.” In Senge’s view, creative tension must be resolved by either pulling reality toward the vision (change) or pulling your vision toward reality (compromise). If you feel, for example, that your organization has an insufficient parental leave policy, that’s a tension. You can try to change it, or you can accept it. Simply living with tension is unproductive. While we don’t want to get too hung up on our visions for the future (remember, we are operating in complexity), there is something deeply resonant about the idea that we can sense potential in our own systems and that we need to tune into that ability and put it to use.
Twenty-five years later, the term tension surfaced i
n an organizational context once again, this time in the context of Holacracy. In his book, founder Brian Robertson talks about tension as a signal that can guide us. “When we feel that sense of frustration at a system that’s not working, or a mistake that keeps getting repeated, or a process that seems inefficient and cumbersome, we are tuning in to a gap between how things are and how they could be.”
Hearing the word “tension” may trigger anxiety, negativity, or stress, but the concept is not inherently positive or negative. It is simply about potential. Call it an idea. Call it a spark. Call it a challenge. The important thing is that we are sensing it all the time. And no matter how mature or sophisticated a culture becomes, tension is always present in every living system. Without it we cannot grow. Without tension we are dead.
Working with teams around the world, we hear about their tensions every day. In fact, we ask for them. “What’s stopping you from doing the best work of your life?” is the first question we ask at the outset of any loop. “What’s stopping the organization from achieving its purpose?” is another. The range of answers is simply stunning. We have collected hundreds and hundreds of tensions over the years. While the full breadth is vast, we have curated a list of seventy-eight tensions that cut across all twelve dimensions of the OS Canvas and provide provocative fodder for incredible conversations. Take a look and see how many apply to your team or organization.
☐ Lack of trust.
☐ It isn’t always clear who has the authority to make decisions.
☐ Bottlenecks in decision making.
☐ Too much consensus.
☐ People have to ask for permission to take action.