Aaron Dignan on being complexity conscious and people positive

Lisa: So Aaron, first of all congratulations on the publication of Brave New Work. I already had the chance to read it and I thought it was great. What is your kind of greatest hope with the book? What do you want people to think, feel, and do as a result of it? And what is the kind of core concept of the book for those who aren’t familiar?

Aaron: I think the core concept - I’ll start there - is really just that the way we work is fairly broken for both us as individuals and us collectively, that bureaucracy has become something that’s a little bit out of control and really quite dehumanizing and quite immobilizing, and that it doesn’t have to be that way. That there are many organizations all around the world that are doing things differently, that have kind of flipped the table over and started with a blank sheet of paper and created or modified some really incredible ways to work. And that we’re sort of called to do that - that as leaders, founders, managers, team members, we’re called to change the way we work. So that’s the core concept of it, and it gets into obviously the nitty gritty and the how-to quite a bit.

And my hope for it - I mean, what’s interesting about the book is there’s very little in it really that’s completely original. A lot of it was learned from these other organizations, from other thinkers, from trial and error, etcetera. The challenge is not that the right things haven’t been said, it’s that they haven’t been heard. And so my hope was to sort of package something that was a pill that would go down easy but also do some real deep change while it does, and to create kind of a packaging of these ideas that would motivate and accelerate this pattern of change. Because right now it’s less than 1% of organizations think and work in new ways the way we would define it, and I think that we need to get to a tipping point. I mean, we need to see 10 or 20 percent of organizations thinking and acting this way in order for culture to really change. And so to me this was like, can I accelerate that? Can I put some oomph behind that?

Lisa: What do you think is stopping organizations then? Because as you say, a lot of this stuff isn’t new or groundbreaking, but why is there such a big gap between the theory and practice do you think?

Aaron: I think there’s a lot of barriers actually. I mean, the first one is that one of the byproducts of working in a fairly hierarchical, top-down bureaucratic way in a market that prizes never-ending growth is that you’re very busy. You don’t have time to think, and so most people are going from meeting to meeting, from email to email, from project to project with very little time for reflection. And so even if we did have an intuitive sense that something was wrong, there’s no time to fix it. So I think that’s one thing that helps us kind of keep our heads down - it’s just we’re just pushing through to the next thing.

Another part of this, of course, is that there’s a big ego component to this. And as leaders and founders and managers who have a lot of their identity wrapped up in being the hero or being the micro manager or being the detail-oriented one or being the one that kind of sees the big picture, that is controlling the marionette if you will - I think that becomes a part of our identity. And it’s really not a pleasant thing to part with unless we really have a chance to think deeply about it and do some of that personal work to identify, “Oh, I’m not giving up control, I’m trading it for a different kind of control. I’m not giving up who I am, I’m actually deepening who I am and how I can really contribute in the actual work, not in the theater of work.”

So I think those things are creating resistance. And then the fact that it’s so fringe I think also matters. I mean, people routinely ask me, “Who else that looks exactly like me in my category in my country is doing this?” And often the answer is that there’s no answer to that. There’s nobody. And so then it feels like, “Well, am I the first and how scary is this?” It must be so scary. So I mean, it’s one of the reasons I called the book Brave New Work - it’s not just new work, it’s actually acquiring a kind of courage, and I think that is in short supply.

Lisa: Two of those little phrases that I really liked in the book were “complexity conscious” and “people positive.” What do those terms mean to you? Can you say something about what those phrases represent?

Aaron: Yeah, so when I started working on the book I had this pipe dream that I was gonna create like an integrated theory of all these different alternative ways to work. So you look at agile practice and lean practice and teal and open organization - all these different kind of grand theories about how we work. And they each have their own lexicon and their own principles and mindsets and all this. And I felt like it’s too much to bear. Like when I made a list of them, I mean, they’re 48 or 50 principles that suddenly become overwhelming. And how could anyone be sure that they’re in alignment with them on a day-to-day basis?

So the thought was, how do we boil that down to its essence? And so I did a little bit of the madman’s weekend of connecting the thread between a bunch of different things. I built a mind map of what they all were and how they interconnected. And when it basically went down to was that one side of the story was about what do we believe about human nature, and one side of the story was about what do we believe about the world at large and how it works. And if you connected all the dots, you ended up with these two kind of fundamental mindsets from which everything else can spring.

So “people positive” was the first, which is the idea that it’s sort of aligned with self-determination theory and a lot of other psychology that just tells us a story of people being generally trustworthy and good and motivated and wanting to learn and grow, wanting to take responsibilities, seeking out opportunities to learn, feeling like mastery and autonomy and purpose are really at the center of what moves us. As opposed to the other theory which is the determinist behaviorist, “we’re all rats in a box that are waiting for a pellet,” we need carrots and sticks to be told what to do, we’re lazy, we’re untrustworthy, etc. Right? So there’s sort of two worldviews there. The people positive one is probably the positive one in my view.

And it also acknowledges that people are chameleons. So if you put someone for whom that is their nature in an environment that rewards individual performance and privacy and secrecy and politicking and planning and doing everything by the book and risk avoidance, in 30 years they will look like someone whose true nature is different than it actually is. They will appear to be not getting it and not being of this world and of this way of work. But what I found through actual experiences is when you even for three or six months put that person in a different environment, in a different aquarium, suddenly they start to change and you see that true sort of nature starts to reveal itself again - if there’s enough psychological safety, if there’s enough space, if there’s enough kind of reinforcement.

So I think that’s the people positive side. That’s sort of at the root of all of the humanist thinking about work. And then the “complexity conscious” was really more about the systemic understanding. So in Systems Theory, there are lots of different kinds of systems - simple systems, complicated, complex, chaotic, disordered, etc. We really as a culture think about everything as complicated. So a watch is complicated, an engine is complicated - they can be fixed, they can be predicted, they can be controlled, an expert knows what’s going on with them. If there’s a problem in a system like that, you can fix it.

But the reality is that organizations and different problems that we solve within organizations are across the spectrum of different types of systems. And one of the most common now that we see in a world of rapid change and dynamics and thousands of people bumping up against each other is the complex system. And the complex system is like traffic or weather or raising a six-year-old or gardening. And that is more unpredictable, it has the potential to surprise us, it has a disposition, it has a way it’s trending, but we can’t be exactly sure about what will happen if we do this versus do that. And so the only way to understand a system like that is to interact with it, is to nurture it.

Nobody ever comes in from the garden and says, “Honey, I fixed the garden!” - I like to say. That’s just not a rational thing to say. But we do talk about organizations that way mechanistically. We’re gonna put in this person, we’re gonna do this new org chart, we’re gonna introduce this new policy, and everything will be perfect. And so complexity conscious is the mindset that says the world is dynamic, it’s unpredictable, we’re moving fast, and in fact, we’re also people in a system inside that world. And so we need to be conscious of the fact that complexity requires a different approach. And that’s where things like test and learn and emergence and waiting and seeing and continuous steering and all those ideas come in. You know, companies, startups that push code every 10 seconds - those are all the ways to try to deal with that complexity and try to make sense of it.

So I think those were really the two foundational mindsets. And if you look at them, they can actually be in tension with each other, which is really cool. So the complexity conscious mind might lead us to do experiments that have real costs - experiments where people fail, where people have to be fired, where projects end and people lose their jobs, where we do whatever it takes to succeed in the market by doing all this testing and learning. I mean, look at something like Facebook or Amazon right now, right? That it can be taken to an extreme.

By the same token, the people positive one can too - we can have these incredibly humanist organizations that are not profitable, they can’t survive, that don’t have an interesting product and have kind of a very banal offering. And so what’s really interesting is when they’re in dynamic tension with each other, and most of the organizations that we cover in the book do a pretty good job of that. And they kind of hold each other in this balance, in this harmony. So that was really an exciting point in the book where I was like, “Okay, two mindsets - we can do that, people can remember that, they can understand that.”

Lisa: Yeah, I think they’re very catchy. It helps that it’s alliteration too - the catchy little phrases. I’m such a sucker for alliteration.

Aaron: Yeah, we all - I think the human brain just likes it.

Lisa: I think the first time I came across your work and The Ready in general was reading about the OS Canvas, and that was when I first heard about this kind of model of organizations and their operating system. And I think a lot of people I talk to in this field are familiar now with that terminology. I think it’s a really helpful way of looking at it. Can you say something about the operating system of an organization and what the OS Canvas is designed to do?

Aaron: Yeah, so I mean in theory, the goal was - people that start to engage in this work think about, “I’m gonna change the way I work.” How overwhelming is that, right? So you sort of are like, “Well, where do I start and where do I end and what are the edges of the space?”

And so what I wanted to do was create a thinking tool to help people focus a little bit and understand both where they could start but also what are the connections between places that they might play? Because the reality is it is a complex system, and so if you pull on this, you’re gonna accidentally tug on that at the same time. I wanted to acknowledge that there’s not gonna be any perfect framework, there’s not gonna be any kind of clean lines around this stuff. So it was a little bit of a challenging project.

But what we ended up doing is just going and looking at and talking to all these organizations that do work differently, that have sort of given up on bureaucracy and tried alternative approaches, and just ask them what’s different about them and how they work. And when they tell us the answers - the practices, the principles, the policies, etc. - we just pinned them to the wall, both virtually and physically. And as they begin to coalesce around different groups, we realized that those were kind of spaces to play.

So for example, if you talk to almost anyone in our field, they’ll talk about autonomy or distributed authority or empowerment or agency or they’ll have a word for it. They’ll have an idea of like, “How do you give teams at the edge more power? How do you share power?” And so that becomes the authority space, right? And it’s not to say that there’s a right answer or a wrong answer. In the frame, the OS Canvas is just a box that stares at you and says, “What do you believe? What do you do? When it comes to authority, what do you believe? What do you do? And is it serving you? And then what else does that connect to? If you have a certain practice about authority or an opinion about how we make decisions, how does that influence the way you share information? How does that influence the way you structure teams? How does that influence will you think about mastery and growth?”

So the goal of the canvas was basically to identify these spaces. And we now, at least for the addition that we created for the book, we have 12 spaces, which I think is plenty - it could be 50, right? So it’s just like these are good places to start, these are big buckets. And they’re presented in such a way where we can kind of see, “Okay, these are all the spaces where I have to check in with myself and my team and make decisions, and these are all the places where I have to think about how they relate to each other, how they reinforce each other.”

It’s not uncommon to hear people that work in the change field talking about antibodies or reactions in the system that kind of resist. And often it’s just because we don’t understand the connections between these spaces. So we give a bunch of empowerment out without sharing information, people make bad decisions, and we turn around and say, “Oh, they can’t be trusted to make decisions,” when the truth is we just didn’t share the information they needed to make good decisions. So that’s kind of the gist of it, and I think this version is sort of the simplest and the cleanest. I mean, these are all single concepts, things that we actually do inside the organization that the organizations that we look up to are changing quite rapidly.

Lisa: What were some of the - because I know you did a lot of research of organizations, and obviously you have a lot of experience yourself working with organizations and using the OS Canvas and various other tools. What are some inspiring examples of organizations that are doing things differently or really kind of putting into practice some of these ideas around people positive and complexity conscious?

Aaron: Yeah, I mean there are quite a few. I think we covered - we ended up collecting close to 68 cases for the book. The more famous ones are quite interesting - someone WL Gore or Buurtzorg or FAVI or whoever. They all have a lot in common.

I mean, WL Gore, they talk about the water line, which I know you’re familiar with. Things that happen that might be below the water line would be things where a hole in the boat would sink the boat. Above the water line, of course, you can patch it when you get back to shore. And so in a place like WL Gore, which is the makers of Gore-Tex for listeners that haven’t heard that name before - they make decisions all the time, and if they think that the decision is above the water line, it’s not a problem. There’s a lot of empowerment, a lot of autonomy. If they suspect it might be below the waterline, then they engage in an advice process.

And we see that actually throughout a lot of the cases that we looked at - this idea of kind of a decision stack, almost like things we’re all allowed to do, things that we’re allowed to do with advice, things that require an integrated decision where multiple perspectives consent to the decision. So you kind of focus on the decisions themselves rather than a hierarchy of people.

In a traditional system, the hierarchy of people says all decisions are made at the top and progressively fewer and fewer decisions at the bottom. And in a model like this, it’s more like actually there’s a hierarchy of the types of decisions. So most of them you can make yourself, and then some of them you need advice, and a very few you need a more integrated take on it or you need a very particular role to weigh in. So I think that’s quite profound.

And then there are other little things. I’m a big fan of Jason Fried and DHH and the people at Basecamp, and they have this take on policy which is “don’t scar on the first cut.” So if you have a mistake or a problem or something that happens that you don’t want to have happen again, don’t overreact and create red tape that affects everyone. So one person steals a computer, don’t put a $15,000 security system in place and make everybody badge in and badge out and lock the computers to the desks. The cost in bureaucracy will be far greater than the cost savings.

And there’s an example in the book from FAVI in France where management came in to find that people were waiting to get permission slips and waiting up to 30 minutes for new work gloves. And the cost of the downtime of the machines was in the thousands of euro, and then the work gloves are five euro. It’s like that’s a scar on the first cut. Somebody stole a pair of gloves, they freaked out, they put all the equipment under lock and key.

So I think those are the kinds of stories that really compel me because they speak to the fact that out of our good nature, out of our desire to try to make things work better, we create these systems of control that actually end up backfiring on us. So it’s not as if anybody woke up one day and was like, “I want to, in a Machiavellian way, put everybody under my boot.” It’s actually more like, “I want to ensure that we’re successful, and to do that I’m gonna make some choices that ultimately bite us.” So yeah, that’s the kind of stuff that gets me excited.

Lisa: And what are your thoughts about - as you write about how organizational change needs to change really - that kind of top-down, plan everything out kind of strategies of change just don’t work anymore. So what is the alternative, and what have you learned about how to - I mean, organizational change is hard, but what are some things that we can do to avoid pain that could be avoided?

Aaron: I think there’s a few things. I mean, one is that we misunderstand the system when we look at most change frameworks. So back to the complicated and the complex, you see a lot of frameworks that go through like five steps or eight steps or whatever. And the idea is somehow, in theory, that we as a group of 10,000 people are in the same moment at the same time, which is completely crazy. I mean, that is like go to a football stadium and ask if everybody’s in the exact same state of mind or in the same stage of life - that’s crazy.

So to do that and say like, “We’re in the burning platform stage” or “We’re in the experiment stage” - some of us are, some of us are way ahead, some of us are behind, some of us are left, some of us are right. The context is different for some of us. I mean, most companies I work with are in 20, 40, a hundred countries. So then to say that the cultural identity and context of each team is the same - I mean, it’s just so far-fetched I have a really hard time with it.

The downside of course of that approach is then when you do believe that you’re in a phase and things aren’t going as planned and you’re trying to figure out why, you’re so frustrated. So I think the reality is that we first have to accept that systems are complex and that we can’t treat them as sort of monolithic things that are in a single stage of reality.

The second thing is the narrative about change itself is pretty messed up. So most of the change narratives I’ve seen and heard look like stages of mourning. I mean, they’re effectively like, “Some really bad is coming, so we’re gonna change. You hate it, you resist it, you trip and fall within this context of the change, and then eventually you pull yourself back up again. And if you’re lucky, you end up on the other side of the valley and now we’ve made the change.” And so that’s the metaphor. And so of course we then are not surprised when people resist and don’t like it. It sort of plays into that narrative of like, “Of course people are resisting. Of course the laggards don’t get it. Of course everybody needs to be told what to do and how to change.”

But the reality is, my experience has been that people resist change done badly. People don’t actually resist all change; they just resist change that doesn’t make sense to them, that they have no agency in. I mean, if I went into any company in the world and said, “I’d like to buy a new car for everyone,” that’s a change everyone would be totally fine with. It would be a widely approved change. So it’s not change itself that’s the problem, it’s the way it’s being done and the way it’s being characterized. And when people don’t have agency in change, then it’s happening to them rather than through them. And I think that’s really at the essence of what’s wrong.

So we tend to go in with the perspective of we want to create continuous change so that we’re not doing this once every four years org chart stuff that tries to treat it monolithically. It’s happening everywhere - it’s distributed. And we want to create participatory change so people are actually driving their own adaptation, their own needs are being met, their own sensing of what’s going on at the edge and in the work and with their customers is being reacted to.

And so what we’ve looked at is how do we just ask the question that starts a pattern where everybody’s changing in the right direction? And the question that we’ve come to is, “What’s stopping you from doing the best work of your life?” So if we just ask that question to every team, whether it’s the top of the house or the edge, the answers will tell us where to go. And so then we just follow the curiosity, we follow the tension, and we invite teams to start to address that stuff.

And what’s so surprising is they’ve so rarely been even consulted, much less invited to drive that. When they have small wins of little changes that can make their lives better and their work better, people get quite animated and quite optimistic about what’s possible. And suddenly the change narrative is not one of a valley, but it’s actually one of like, “We can just walk to the better place together.”

So to me, that’s some of what’s broken. Obviously there’s a lot of nuance there that you’ve seen in your own work, but those are the things that are most broken I think about our thinking on change.

Lisa: I know I know you’ve heard me talk about this before in The Ready community in various places, but I have this interest in human skills and how we relate to each other and mindset and how do all of these things need to shift and what do we need to learn and unlearn in order for these new kind of principles and practices to really take hold. What are your thoughts on that?

Aaron: I mean, it’s an age-old debate in our world, and it certainly comes up at The Ready from time to time, which is, “Do you work on changing the individual or changing the system?” And in my view, first of all, they’re really hard to pull apart - they both happen all the time. And secondly, there are some challenges I think with focusing just on the individual, both in scale and in nature.

So the challenge in scale, of course, is that it’s very difficult to coach 300,000 people. So that’s quite an ambitious undertaking to say that we’re gonna actively intervene and change the mindsets of 300,000 people in a one-to-one basis. So that’s hard.

On top of that, there’s been some arguments put forth that I think carry some weight, which is that it might be colonialism. Like, it might actually be dangerous for us to say, “We know better what your mindset should be, so we’re gonna come in and we’re gonna actually change your mindset. We’re gonna change the way you think and what you value and how you show up.” And obviously good coaches don’t do that - they participate in a dance. But like everything in the world of consulting and change and advice, things get weaponized. And so I worry about individual change moving in the direction of like, “Let me change you the way I think I need to change you,” or “Let management hire me to do that,” which is even worse.

So there’s a challenge there. What I do think is true is that if you change the environment, if you change the context and the container, then personal change is bound to happen, and the invitation for it is bound to happen, and the pressures that creates are bound to create growth.

So I often joke onstage like, “It’s not the fish, it’s the aquarium.” And I think that chameleon nature that we talked about earlier is part of this. So yeah, if I want you to be maybe a more inclusive leader, I could talk your ear off about it and we could do a lot of coaching or even therapy, and we could get really deep. I could do unconscious bias training, all this. Or I could design meeting structures and hiring structures that have inclusivity at their core. And then whether you believe it or not, you’re doing it.

And so then the question is, does that actually start to change you through experience and through kind of the lived reality of an environment that rewards and values a certain set of practices? And so this is the debate we have all the time, and I don’t think you can have one without the other. I think it is a chicken or egg problem in many cases. You can’t start the work until a leader has had some awakening and realizes they want to share power and all that. And that often comes from personal work, from a walkabout or some personal crisis. So that’s there.

But I think for us, if we can change things in the system that affect everyone at scale, that start new patterns that reinforce the kinds of mindsets and identities that we want as a collective, that we all believe are going to serve us better, then they can kind of pave the path for that personal development, which then happens and then invites more practice and better practice.

And I think we see this happening even in our own company. I mean, you start with a bar here and like bad bureaucracy and a work environment that’s filled with misogyny. But then even when you elevate to a completely different level, the new consciousness now thinks of other things that are still wrong and that still could be better. And so you then continually raise the bar.

So I think there’s a dance between system change, individual consciousness, and then further systems change that goes on. I’m only advocating that the first moves that can often really make things go faster are often systemic. So that’s kind of the way I think about it, but we still debate it and we still play with it and we still nurture different sides of it in different projects. And it’s messy - complex topic, I think.

Lisa: Yeah, for sure. And what about your own personal perspective? Because you’re a founder and a leader yourself, and The Ready is growing. What have been some of the challenges for you, and what have you learned personally about leadership and working in this way with others?

Aaron: Well, this has been an interesting one for me because The Ready is the first time I’ve done this from scratch. With my former firm, we kind of transitioned to this way of working from an older way, and that had its own challenges obviously, but we sort of navigated them. With this one, I think it’s been a different set of challenges because the identity of the firm and the community and the boundaries and kind of all that stuff that gets formed over time was fluid and actually was co-owned from a very early stage.

And so what I’ve learned is that you can have a commons, you can share a commons and have self-organization and self-management if the initial kind of intent and boundaries and simple rules are in place to protect and preserve the membership. If you don’t have that stuff completely baked, if you don’t have the rules of the community garden on the wall before you walk in, there can be too little structure. And so there’s always this inhale/exhale of how much structure and what’s the minimum viable structure and intent and clarity and identity as a community that’s needed for something to kind of hold and to be a thing rather than just a collection of people doing work.

And so with The Ready, what I’ve struggled with is when can I step back and when do I have to step forward to define that minimum clarity and define that minimum structure and the minimum kind of boundary space around what it is and what it isn’t. And I think if anything, I’ve erred on the side of being back too much. So I’ve actually, in my zeal for kind of openness and participation and equity, there’s also been a little bit of kind of not being present in the shaping or not being as clear as possible about what it is and what it isn’t. And I think that has been - that’s sort of done people a disservice because without a little bit of that, we can then get lost in a debate about what it could and should be rather than being part of something with an intent and then going out and manifesting that intent together through self-management.

So that’s one thing I’ve struggled with - sort of like when to be heavy-handed and when not to, and what is the work of a founder or a creator in doing the initial conditions for success in a self-managing system versus the steady state that comes later. And I think I have misread that in the past. So I’ve sort of been like, “Oh, we’re there,” but we’re not quite there. “And now we’re there,” well, we’re not quite there in this other area. And so I think I keep waiting for the moment when I can say like, “I’m done, I don’t have to be the leader anymore, and now it’ll just work.” But the reality is that that does take some time and some care and some nurturing.

So that’s been fun. And then I think just in general this idea of leadership - I mean, understanding in what context is someone a leader and what does it mean to have leadership in the system that are emerging all the time. I think that there’s still a lot of bias and sort of narratives that we tell ourselves about leadership being a permanent state. And so everybody’s like, “Is this person a leader? Is this person a leader?” As opposed to saying, “Is this person a leader in this situation?” And what about in another situation they’re not?

And so we’ve started playing with ideas of thinking about different skill domains or spaces of the work or even badges - not as a framework to constrain everybody, but more to just say like, “Here’s someone that you could go to on design. Here’s someone that you could go to on coaching.” Because they have a practice and they have a mastery in that space. And so it creates leaderships rather than this like, “Well, this person’s been here for five years, so they’re the leader. So I’ll ask them about everything.” It’s like, there are definitely people who are very senior quote-unquote at The Ready that you should not ask about certain things, and people who are very junior that you should definitely ask about others. And I just mean in their career - senior and junior in their experience and in their journey.

So I think that’s a hard one to sort of break the habit of. Beyond that, it’s really just about - you kind of get what you give. I mean, we have a remote culture, and we’ve learned a lot that if you don’t care for the garden, if everybody just goes back and cooks dishes with vegetables, then it can lose something. And so there has to be investment. And the investment is easier in person, it’s harder remotely, and it’s harder to ask for investment when everybody has autonomy and freedom to do what they will and have different relationships with the firm. And so I think I’ve also learned that there are times we need to ask for that, there are times we need to expect it, make agreements around it. But we do need to care for this thing in order for it to stay vibrant.

Lisa: Can you share some examples of practices or ways of caring for the garden, so to speak, that you think might be helpful for listeners facing the same challenge?

Aaron: Yeah, so one of them is just showing up. So if we have a monthly meeting that we all come to to share and half the people don’t come, that has a cost. It’s not that anybody’s wrong, it’s not that anyone needs to be punished, but we’re all punished essentially - we all miss something. And if there’s a meeting that’s not serving us and we don’t redesign it, that has a cost. But redesigning that meeting is not what we’re getting paid for - we’re getting paid to do client work. So it’s sort of the shoemaker’s kids problem of the work on the organization and in the organization has meaning.

So there’s that. There’s mentorship - I mean, in a system where you don’t have formal line managers, how do people get counsel? How do they apprentice to different skills and different stories? How do they get feedback? So having a generous feedback culture is an investment that matters.

Creating products and services and productizing things is an investment. So we created these tension and practice cards, but this was the work of like half a dozen people over two years. I mean, it was an incredible lift of effort to make it happen. Now everybody can leverage it, so it’s this great commons. But there are a hundred products like that inside The Ready in different stages of development that if they’re not fed, they don’t go anywhere. And if you do an incredible workshop and you never share the agenda with your colleagues, if you never package it or share the lessons from the conference you went to, then we all miss out.

And so I think we’re always in this judgment space of, “Is what I’m doing worth sharing? Is that thing that is in need worth my investment?” There’s a little bit of a phenomenon that happens in self-managing cultures of waiting for someone else to get to it. Because if it isn’t a role that we’ve defined, if it isn’t an agreement we’ve made, but it’s needed - if not me, then who? And instead people are kind of like, “Oh, I’m sure someone will get to it. Wouldn’t it be nice if we… We hear this a lot - wouldn’t it be great if somebody created a thing that did this or did a case study on that?” It would be great, it would be great, but just saying that doesn’t make it happen. And because we don’t have those traditional structures to force it to happen, there has to be a kind of conscientiousness. So those are the kinds of things I’m thinking about.

Lisa: Just for the benefit of the listeners, can you say something about the tension cards and what those are designed to do?

Aaron: Yeah, so I have them right here actually. These are the minis. So these are - for those that happen to watch or see a clip of this or see a picture of this - these are the mini cards, and there’s 78 cards that each contain a tension. So these are little things that we - there’s a personal favorite of mine right here: “our meetings are theater.” So these are the most common tensions that we’ve seen and heard in organizations around the world. And there are 78 of them, so it’s about the same thickness as a tarot deck, but it’s not gonna predict your future or anything - but it has that feeling in your hand.

And then there is another deck of practice cards which are things that we can do differently. So the one that we featured today online was “stop hiring for culture fit and start hiring for what’s missing from the culture,” which is actually something that Adam Grant talks a lot about.

And so the idea with the cards was - people struggle for both the safety and just the awareness of how to name everything that’s going on. And then they also struggle to invent what could be next when they’ve been inside a traditional system for so long. So you say, “What are your tensions?” They’re like, “I’m not really sure how to put my finger on it,” maybe because I haven’t thought about it that long, or maybe I don’t want to say it. I want to say that gender diversity is not valued, but if I say that out loud and it’s my idea, maybe I’ll be punished for that, or there’ll be some consequence.

So what the cards do is that we put the tension cards in front of a team at any level. The cards say it for you. So all you have to do is say, “Is this true?” And it’s already there - we have to confront it. So that’s been helpful in giving permission and giving language to what’s going on.

And then the practice side is sort of the same - we don’t know what we don’t know. And so it’s fun to, instead of trying to invent work from scratch, it’s fun to look at 78 practices from firms around the world that have really wrestled with this stuff and figure out like, “What matches with our tensions? What are we willing to try that have already been somewhat proven?” Maybe they won’t work for us - we’ll find out - but they have been somewhat proven, and we can pair those with our tensions.

And that’s the basis of your first experiment. So a lot of teams that we work with pair a tension, “Here’s a few practices we’re willing to consider.” Now you have everything you need to go do an experiment. Who will try that? How long will they try it for? How will you know if it worked? And so then the wheels have been put on the bus and we can move.

So the cards were one way to get at that, and we have a bunch of other things that we’ve tried and developed that scratch those same itches. But the cards are great because they’re so portable and anyone can use them, and they sort of give you enough structure as a team to find your own way. So I’m excited about that, and we’ve been giving them out. And then the large format ones will be selling soon, which will be our first for-sale physical product.

Lisa: Yeah, I really like the tension cards because I find that people in organizations also sometimes have this like - it’s on the tip of their tongue, there’s something that isn’t quite right, and it’s not until you see the tension card we’re like, “Oh, that’s what it is!” It’s what it is - think about the reason all meetings feel so shitty, or it’s something about a dynamic that I couldn’t name until I’ve seen it written down.

Now it’s also cool to see multiple people pick cards that are very similar but with different languages - shows our diversity of thought and perspectives. So like five different people picked something about meetings being bad, but slightly different takes on it from the deck. And now we can see that we actually are on the same page even though maybe we wouldn’t have talked about it that way before.

Or sometimes we’ll have - we have a large enough group of like a top 40 leader group or something - we’ll have three different subsets that I group, each with their own deck, do the work, and then compare. And the comparison can be so interesting because you’re like, “Whoa, they’re seeing the company completely differently than we are.” And what does that tell us about - exactly my point about change management, right?

So we work in - like my least favorite thing in the world is we do the analysis and the diagnosis of the company through some big assessment over three months, and then we say, “The five biggest challenges are lack of trust and lack of this and lack of that,” because those were the average winners. But I love the old joke like, “Jeff Bezos walks into a bar and the average income is a hundred million dollars a year” - but that’s not true. That’s not what’s really going on in the wild.

So when we choose these average tensions, these average outcomes as our goals for change, we’re just whittling off all the rich complexity that’s going on. Whereas the cards will show us this set of leaders thinks it’s this, this set of leaders thinks it’s that. It’s not a competition - they’re both right. And so then how do we deal with that? How do we address the system in its richness, which I think is fun. And the cards just show that for people in a way that maybe what I’m talking about just sounds like heady theory, but then they’re like, “Oh wow, we’re living in two different worlds.”

Lisa: Yeah, totally. What advice then would you give people listening who are in an organization that’s maybe curious about becoming self-managing or they’re wanting to do things differently in the organization at whatever level they are in their company? What advice would you give them in terms of starting points and what sort of pitfalls could they - there’s no way to avoid all the pitfalls, but most of them?

Aaron: I think a few things. So one is don’t think about it as binary. There’s a habit in this industry to think about it like you’re either teal or not, you’re doing holacracy or you’re not, you’re in or you’re out, we’re gonna flip it. Don’t do that.

I think you can have moments where you make big changes. There’s no problem with that at all - I’m a big fan of open space technology and open space beta and thinking about like, “How much can we do, how fast?” But this idea that somehow like we’re gonna wake up tomorrow and it’s different - it’s just not true. It’s gonna be - you’re actually buying into a pattern of continuous improvement that never ends. And whatever you do first is whatever you do first.

So the question would be, “What’s present for you right now that you can step into? What’s the adjacent possible that is just one adjustment away?” If we can align on those mindsets, if we can align on a belief in people positivity, in complexity consciousness, if we can have a principled take on what work should be, then it’s really just about arrangement at that point. It’s really just about like, “How do we untangle what we’ve tangled, and how do we find our way to new things?” And that’s gonna be a journey that goes on forever.

So to me, I would spend time on mindset. I would spend time on theory and discussion of the nature of work and the nature of people. I would try things - start small and learn by doing. So try a new meeting type, try a new way to make a decision, borrow a practice from one of these firms that you’re seeing in a very small, safe-to-try, tightly constrained place you can, because you’ll learn so much from doing that. You can’t learn from discussing. And then when you find things that serve you, of course scale them - bring them to life.

And so I think it is about - I always often joke like, “Start by starting,” which is just do something. Start that looping process of going from tension to practice to experiment to learning to what’s next. And then keep following the thread. And if you find that you and your team or you and the community is ready to do something big, do something big. But just don’t do it until the readiness is there, until the understanding is there.

The other trick, which is the opposite advice which I love - these binary dynamic things - but start by stopping. So instead of starting by adding some new practice or some new-fangled policy or some new people or whatever, what can you take away? So most of bureaucracy is actually things that are in the way - structures, roles, rules that are in the way. If there are things that are holding you back that you could get rid of and not replace, what a powerful experiment that is.

So let’s not do this stupid meeting. Let’s not have this policy that doesn’t trust people. Let’s not - and then see what fills the space. And if we treat people with trust and respect and we have transparency, often what fills the space is a fine solution that we didn’t have to create.

And so I think that’s another place to start - is just start by stopping. It’s a great thing to do when you’re beginning because you already have all this organizational debt built up, and you can make some space for thinking. And once there is some room for thinking, people will come up with incredible things to do next. But they often can’t do that when they’re bogged down in the day-to-day shenanigans. So those are some thoughts.

Pitfall-wise, my biggest problem has been always doing things that are too big, too fast, without enough testing. So whenever I try to roll something out that is too big, too bold, untested, I regret it. I’m like, “I wish I thought harder about the decision or done a smaller version of it or testing it or gotten advice” or something else. So I think make decisions when you have to and start experiments all the time.

Lisa: Great, well that seems like a good place to end our conversation. Thank you so much.

Aaron: Yeah, thank you, Lisa.