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Episode Transcript
Lisa: So Aaron, welcome back on the podcast. When we last spoke, you had just launched your book “Brave New Work,” and since then you’ve been busy. You’ve launched a Brave New Work podcast, you’ve been doing all kinds of interesting things which we’ll get into later in the conversation. But first of all, I wanted to talk about this new venture of yours, which is going into the app space with this tool, Murmur. Why have you decided to do that, and what is it? What can you tell listeners about Murmur?
Aaron: Well, I think right in late 2020, when we were kind of in the throes of different lockdowns, my stress reaction, my anxiety reaction was to be very creative. So I was like, “I’m gonna diversify and start a bunch of stuff.” I started four or five projects that have the potential to be businesses, just in my stupor in this room without anywhere to go. Because you know me, I was traveling twice a week before that, and suddenly it was like, “You live in this room now.”
I started inventing, and then really closing down the things that had less promise until one was left. The thing that was left for me was Murmur. You know this because we’ve worked together and been friends on and off forever, and the idea that scaling this work is really hard when you get past a certain point. Yes, you can do it with 15 or 150 or maybe even 500 people with a great level of commitment and follow-through and time and patience. You can do it in the tens of thousands like at a Haier or a Buurtzorg or something like that, but you’re talking about decades of commitment.
We face the challenge with The Ready of you go into an organization like a Boeing, for example, or someone that has 70-80,000 people, and you work your ass off for two years, and you’ve reached 1,500 people, 5,000 people maybe. And I mean like “reached” barely, and you’ve really touched in a more significant way maybe 500 people.
I just looked at that and felt like that is never gonna really change the whole paradigm because there’s just not enough volume there to get it done. So we always had a suspicion that software was going to play a role in scaling new ways of working, and that software needed to be accessible, it needed to be scalable, and it needed to be friendly to the uninitiated, which I think is the big problem in our space. There is some tooling, but the tooling is fairly sophisticated and fairly insider.
So it was like, “We’re gonna need to make something that lands the way Loom lands,” when you’re just like, “Oh, I record a video and send it to a friend.” So that was always in my mind, and I knew that was going to cost money like serious development talent, serious design talent, serious partnership, and we didn’t have it. So it was kind of hunted and punted through the years.
I would say seven years after having that idea, the pandemic happened, and suddenly you look around and everybody’s remote-first by hook or by crook, and everybody is thinking about inclusion differently and how they work. There is a huge grand swell of new awareness around DEI, and it just felt like, “Whoa, this is the moment where the market might actually be ready for something like this, and where the funding might actually be there.”
So we went out and spun the company Murmur out of The Ready and raised some money into it under the premise that we want to make work wonderful through the power of working agreements. If you think about the role that something like GitHub plays for code—having a repository, having a method, having a way of managing and iterating and shaping that stuff—Murmur is just that for agreements.
Agreements are everything that you don’t have clarity about at work, everything that you argue about at work, all the stuff that your guests come on and talk about as these different ways of thinking and practicing. Those are agreements, either implicit or explicit, and we wanted to build a system of record for that and a place where you could do that in a remote world asynchronously, without a meeting, without a lot of training, all that sort of stuff. So that’s been what we’ve been up to for 18 months.
Lisa: Yeah, and it’s super exciting because I work so often with teams that are exploring new ways of working, and this agreements thing comes up a lot. Because it’s sort of, you know, when you start exploring different ways of making decisions or different ways of sharing information, or self-set salaries or whatever, you’re kind of rewriting the implicit social contracts between people and teams.
Aaron: Yeah.
Lisa: And what you said there was so key, I think—making the implicit explicit. I think that’s a big part of new ways of working. So I was really excited when you announced that you were working on this, because I think it’s a real leverage point for making this stuff work.
Aaron: Yeah, it can be if we can figure out how to acclimatize teams to it more quickly than we’ve ever done before as a category. I think that’s the trick. It is a wonderful promise, but the practice in the day-to-day reality of work when we have all these other priorities and all these other tensions around us, and all these insecurities and questions about how we can play… you know, can it be done without support? Without the support of a coach like you? That’s really the billion-dollar question right now.
Lisa: Yeah. I’m wondering if you could give, to bring this to life a bit, some examples of a couple of agreements. Because people have also been playing around with it, right? You’ve been piloting it, and you’ve been creating templates to help people so they’re not starting from scratch. What’s an example of a working agreement that maybe has gone through some iterations through input and feedback? You’ve got ones that you use in The Ready. What example can you give us?
Aaron: We actually just finished last night putting the kind of polish on a new—we’re calling them collections or kits—but a new collection that’s like “Foundations of Self-Management Kit.”
Lisa: Nice.
Aaron: And so it has six agreements in it, and they are what we call ready-to-use templates. One of the things we’ve learned actually doing this is people do not like to write. So even a template that is kind of a structured worksheet is a lot to ask, and actually what people would much prefer is, “Give me something that’s ready to propose, and if I want to change it, I will.” So that’s what this collection looks like. It’s a series of ready-to-propose agreements that if you want to mess with them, you go ahead and mess with them.
So there is “Transparency,” which is one about how we share information and just has three kind of principles inside of how we think about and do that. There’s one on “Consent,” which will not be unfamiliar to you or your listeners—you know, how we make decisions together. There’s one on “Autonomy,” which is really about a concept that I’ve been working on and maturing since the book, which is about cultures of constraint versus cultures of permission.
The idea that you have to choose: are you a culture of permission or a culture of constraint? If you’re a culture of permission, you can’t do anything unless you’re given permission, and that might be in the form of a promotion or a title or an explicit request or whatever, but that’s the game you’re playing. In the culture of constraint, you can do anything unless we’ve constrained it. So the game you’re playing there is more, “Let’s eliminate the areas of risk or lack of focus that we want to eliminate as a community and leave everything else open to creativity and judgment.”
So there’s one about kind of making that choice explicit. There’s one about “Roles,” which will not be surprising either, but it’s, you know, how what is a role? How do we think about roles and role mixes? Which is an idea that for most people in regular work doesn’t totally show up in their day-to-day. They have kind of a title, a job description, and then they moonlight on some other stuff, and they think of those as projects. But really having a role mix is novel.
“Agreements”—so not unfamiliar for Murmur, but we have to have an agreement about agreements, which just basically says what the hell is an agreement and why do we have them and what purpose do they serve for us. And then the last one is “Charters.” So whether you call them pods or squads or teams or circles or groups, how do you launch, how do you give space to teams in the system?
So those six agreements are kind of a package deal where we’re saying, “Look, if you just implement those, you’re well on your way, and then you can start to fill in the gaps as you go.”
Lisa: Yeah, that’s interesting. It’s kind of making me think of one of my favorite episodes that I quote all the time with Miki Kashtan, and she talked about the five core systems that you need to kind of totally present and make explicit; otherwise, you’re just going to inherit the kind of previous top-down versions of those. And they are things like decision-making, how does information flow, how are resources distributed, how do you deal with conflict, how do you have feedback loops. So that’s kind of a nice little package that hopefully could make that more explicit.
Aaron: Well, and that’s exactly the goal, right? It’s not for me to write all these collections, but actually to get people like that onto the platform as influencers and coaches creating their own collections. And then you can go in and be like, “Hey, this is the Lisa Gill collection, this is the DEI collection, this is the collection from David Burkus,” and it starts to give some personality and some lived experience to these things.
Where it’s not just an agreement that was written in a textbook, it’s, “These are Morningstar’s agreements, these are Favi’s agreements.” The little kits like that, I think, will help people look around and find people who think like them and then start to wade into those waters.
Lisa: So I have a bunch of questions about the like, in practice, and some of the kind of tensions that come up inevitably when people start playing around with agreements. One is how to kind of keep them alive and make them things that, you know, that classic thing of people don’t just go into a piece of software, put in a load of stuff, and then never look at it ever again. So how—what are you learning about making these things that people that are really kind of living and breathing that people review, that people keep alive, stick to?
Aaron: Yeah, that interestingly was a huge part of the desire going in, but it’s also been one of the hardest things to build. We knew going in that the beauty of agreements, if you do them correctly, is that they do expire, and they do have moments where it’s like, “We need to reconsider and we need to refresh this thing,” or get rid of it or whatever the case may be.
Most of the companies and cultures that I have the privilege of kind of dipping into have a lot of what I call “document debt.” They just have a bunch of agreements that are completely out of date. So when they onboard someone, it’s like, “Well, don’t look at this, and don’t look at that, and don’t look at this because that’s not right, and this is…” And that’s just hard. It’s hard to do hygiene on anything, right? I mean, I always say, go into your garage, your kitchen drawer. It’s hard to do hygiene.
So the idea of an expiration date, the idea of a feedback cycle. So when something expires in Murmur, the week before that occurs, everyone on the group that made that decision is going to get pulsed, and the pulse says, “Did we do what we said we’d do? Did it help? Did it serve us? What else did you notice or learn from expressing this?” And then, “Do you think we should refresh this for a further period of time? Should we make some iteration to it? Should we just renew it for a period of time and leave it as it is? Or should we retire it? Should we get rid of this thing because it’s not doing it for us?”
That kind of forces that refreshment, but also what’s interesting about it is it creates an opportunity for two things that I’m excited about. One is data around ways of working for the first time, really ever, at scale. Being able to say, looking at a 10,000-person group, “What agreements have the highest follow-through? What agreements have the highest satisfaction? What agreements are traveling through the ecosystem and being shared and duplicated most frequently?” There’s a lot there that you could sort of build a map of how the way of working is shifting. So I’m super excited about that.
And then more to the moment right now, that we just shipped last week, is proposed changes. So when something does reach its expiration day, being able to go in as any member of the team and propose edits and adjustments and improvements to it, and do that in a way that’s really, really visible.
We’ve spent, I want to say, close to five months engineering what is effectively Google suggestion mode, so that you can see exactly what was added, exactly what was removed, annotations for why. And then when you start the process of re-governing it, it’s so clear what the person is trying to do and what’s happened. As opposed to in a Notion, the page or, in some cases, in a Google Doc, it’s like, who knows who changed it and when and why and what was true, and you have to, like, wile your way through the version history. So having proposed changes be this on-the-rails thing is very exciting, and we are just starting ourselves to use it. So I’ve made, like, two proposed change proposals and been over the moon about it.
Lisa: That’s interesting. I was having a look at the demo video earlier, and one of the things I liked is the sort of nudges about when you get to the part about consenting to this agreement. Because I’ve had a lot of painful moments with groups in terms of supporting people with finding that right place on a spectrum between wanting people to have the courage to make objections because those improvements are important and they make things better and they increase ownership, and at the same time wanting to help people so that people don’t object when really it’s a disagree, or it’s not going to harm or…
So I like this subtle little nudging where, after you’ve kind of had some clarifying questions or input or whatever, it’s like, “Do I consent or do I object?” And then if I click “object,” it’s like, “Is it because it harms the organization, or is it because it needs improvement? And is that immediate, or is it in the future?” And if it’s in the future… it’s a really nice… what was it that drove that feature?
Aaron: Well, we’ve had a lot of debate about that, and I frankly, even within The Ready, we’ve argued about objection tests as a concept for as long as we’ve been a company. There are people in our category, as you know, on all ends of the spectrum, right? There are very open-minded practitioners, particularly in some corners of sociocracy, that are just like, “An objection is an objection is an objection, and we should just process everything.” And then there are other corners, more holocratic, that are like, “It has to meet all these criteria in order to be valid.”
We tried to kind of come down in the middle and solve that two ways. One, we did want to give people thinking tools because there’s a behavior and a mindset shift happening when you take on this kind of work, and to ignore the opportunity to tune in to yourself and ask yourself why you’re objecting felt like a miss. But by the same token, we didn’t want to be truly standoffish about it. So you can proceed anyway with an objection at any point in that process.
So if it’s asking you these questions and you’re giving the “wrong” answers, you can still object. We just want you to at least have checked in with yourself before you do it. So if you’re gonna be pedantic, you’re like, “I’m being pedantic.” So that’s the idea, and I think we’ll continue to refine that actually. I’m not sure that it’s perfect yet, but it certainly has worked well.
And I can say this: that to my knowledge, there has not been a failed agreement at the point of objection in the product. There’s been a way forward. There’s been some way to resolve these objections or resolve these tensions. I haven’t really heard a story—that doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened, but I haven’t heard a story of a user yet that’s like, “Man, we got to that round, and it just hit a brick wall, and we couldn’t find our way,” which I was surprised about, frankly, because I thought it might be messier at that stage.
Lisa: That’s interesting. And it’s sort of fun because you and I, I feel like, often enter into this debate about, “Do you change the system, or do you also need to help individuals at an individual level and the mindset and skillset shift and so on?” And listening to you now, it sounds like this is kind of a fun experiment to see how far can you go with creating a system that helps facilitate that mindset shift asynchronously and without needing, as you said, so much intervention from a coach or trainer or consultant or whatever.
Aaron: Yeah, I think that’s right. And one of the things I’m excited about is starting to integrate different forms of communication into the process. So if you do get to an objection, why not attach a little Loom bubble with your objection to add a little bit of human color and character to what you’re trying to get across? Because it can be lost in communication, as we all know from Slack—your tone is not clear.
So I think adding that would be helpful, and then even the idea of phoning a facilitator is very interesting to me. So imagine you do hit an impasse, and in one click, Lisa pops up, and it’s like, “How can I help? Let’s mediate, let’s find a way through this together.” Because I do this all day. So I think that that is also very interesting to us: a network of people that can support in real-time when it’s needed. Because it will be. But for the most part, how do we practice? How do we get more rounds of practice without having to go to the full depth of training and meditating together and all that?
Lisa: I’m curious to know—maybe this isn’t a surprising question given that you know me—but what have you learned about creating templates for agreements about things like conflict or DEI and things like that, the more kind of human, tricky stuff, if you like?
Aaron: I think a few things. One is that anything that has a lot of subtlety to it and requires a lot of expansion and expounding to really get clear and get real is challenging for people to write. They won’t see around all those corners. So I think we’ve been imagining those things more as a series of atomic agreements that get stitched together over time. Like, don’t try to eat the entire DEI elephant or the entire conflict elephant in one bite. That will be a terrible and long agreement. Instead, be like, “Here’s one little nugget of what we need or what we want to try or we want to practice.” And then as you get more nuggets, you can sort of stitch them together, and it becomes a meta-agreement that covers more ground.
So one of the things we’ve done at Murmur that I’m excited about, because I did not do this right with The Ready from day one, is we have an agreement about which kinds of conflict resolution and which kinds of personal development we are trying to build some shared language in. So having NVC right out the gate as like, “Hey, welcome to Murmur. When we get into zones of conflict, we try to lean on our NVC skills, and you don’t have to do that, but that’s kind of our default if we don’t have other skills.”
But those skills are good skills, and we have a little micro-curriculum that’s there in the agreement for, you know, one day, 30 days, one year—where to be in that familiarity. And we have informally created these monthly meetups where the group is just talking about that stuff. Like, “How is that showing up for you? How are you practicing that? What have you learned about using these techniques? What’s awkward about it?” It’s just created this conversational space in the organization that was not there before about using those skills, about conflict, about being authentic with each other, all from this little agreement that was really more about curriculum.
So I think the agreement is not going to solve the human problem, to your point, but it might be that a few agreements can be triggers for the conversations and the human connection that needs to happen to start the right pattern.
Lisa: Yeah, that’s interesting. I’m also thinking about something that Miki Kashtan again said about agreements: in her school of thought, the things that are not integrated in terms of our capacity, those are the things where we really need agreements.
Aaron: Yeah.
Lisa: And once those—once our capacity goes up, you know, maybe we get really good at something, and then we may no longer need it as an explicit agreement, and we might retire it. But the things where we’re most outside of our kind of capacity, things that are more tricky or difficult or we’re learning about, those are the ones that agreements matter the most to be really explicit about.
Aaron: I love that. And I haven’t said it that elegantly, but I often tell folks, “If it’s already happening, don’t start focusing on that. Don’t focus on the things that are already happening emergently and naturally in the organization. Focus on the things that aren’t happening or that are happening that you don’t want to have happening.”
So it is about being in the moment, and I do think with all governance, there is a Goldilocks point of too much and too little, the right stuff and the wrong stuff. And so it should be that your governance record looks really different year one to year five. It’s not just more; it’s different. And it should feel like a chapter of a book, like, “We’re in a different place, there’s a different agreement mix in play.” And of course, some of them are going to have long legs, you know, principles and purpose and things like that, but a lot of them won’t. And I wouldn’t be surprised if we notice that we’re just doing some of this organically, we say, “Let’s retire this.”
Lisa: Now I’m thinking alliteration-wise, like it’s like clarity and capacity, you know? The things where we’re not clear, and we’re always saying, “What is this? Is it that? Is it that?” And capacity, that things were like, “Oh, that’s a bit tricky; maybe we need a bit more help there.” I like that.
Aaron: Those are the two strike zones, I think, for sure.
Lisa: Someone asked on Twitter about agreement fatigue—that when you start working with teams and you start spinning out all these great agreements and stuff, then at a certain point, you can end up with too many perhaps, and then people are like, “Oh, this is too much.” Have you found any insights about the optimum number of agreements that a team can manage?
Aaron: We’ve been surprised, I think, by this. The teams that have really taken to it and have scaled with it have, you know, well north of 50 agreements. Some of them have 70, 80, 90 agreements in their workspace, which feels like a lot. But then when you really look a little deeper and you think about the fact that Murmur is organized into groups, which can facilitate your teams or your sub-circles or whatever, it’s actually not so overwhelming. You end up seeing like there’s a dozen here and a dozen there, and it’s localized and it’s decentralized.
So I think there’s a right amount for a team, probably. I’m not sure that there’s a right amount for an organization because the bigger it is, the more interesting and nuanced those corners will get, right? It’s like a city. You know, you have different neighborhoods, and the bigger it is, if you get to be Paris, you’re like, “Oh my God, we have all these arrondissements,” and each one has its own nooks and crannies. So I think that’s okay.
What we have found is useful, though, is when people get started—and I know you’ve seen this too, and I think that the person who tweeted that has as well—when you first get started and you have a hammer, you’re like, “Holy crap, everything’s a nail!” right? So you will overdo it; there’s just no question about it. You’ll create too much surface area.
But that’s the beauty of expiration dates. If you overdo it, within a reasonable amount of time—months, not years—you’re going to be called out by the system to be like, “Hey, do we still need this?” And if the answer is no, then it’s going to go away, and you’re going to get back to a more reasonable space. Also, as you scale, it might suggest groups. So if we see 20 people in a workspace without a group, it’d be like, “Hey, knock knock, this isn’t a great, super healthy team size, so maybe there’s actually a cell division that’s needed here.”
So yeah, I would say if I see more than 20 agreements in a single group, my eyebrow raises a little bit, but I rarely do.
Lisa: It’s interesting. What’s the sort of next step, then, with Murmur? What are you hoping?
Aaron: We’re obsessed right now with the cold start problem. So you have a person who really cares about this stuff signing up, they’re excited, they’ve done the homework, they’ve listened to your podcast, they’ve read the book, they’ve gone to the show. And then there’s this team, and then there’s the rest of the organization. And what we’re learning is, “Where does it get stuck? Where is it hard to transfer that excitement and that enthusiasm from one person to the next?”
And honestly, it’s not that different from other tools that have had to come out in the pandemic. I mean, Loom, as I mentioned before, is a really good example, where that first person to make them kind of is the weirdo of the bunch, and everybody else is like, “I don’t want to do this. I’m just going to write an email or a Slack message or what have you,” or “I don’t want to be on video.” But over time, people do figure out, “Oh, there’s a place for this, there’s a moment where this is faster than a meeting or better than a note, and that’s where I’m going to use it.”
So we’re wrestling with that right now and playing a lot with how to solve blank page anxiety, how to solve questions of, you know, who has the right to propose, who has the right to weigh in. And frankly, just having a lot more meat on the bone with templates and public agreements from other organizations because, at the end of the day, we’re learning folks want to land to a treasure trove of stuff. That’s what they’re telling us.
Like, they got inspired by us or someone else in the space, and they got inspired by these ideas, they hear these people on the show, and then they want to come in, and they want to have those ideas to play with. And instead, it’s like white. So a lot of our energy right now is on, “How do you land in a candy store of options and opportunities, and how do you make it easier to introduce this to others, easier to roll into a process, easier to understand why can I only ask questions right now when I really want to judge this,” you know, those moments of brick wall. That’s our full-time obsession at the moment because we want to see, like, 80% of the people that hit it be successful before we really scale. We don’t want it to settle for like, “Yeah, one in ten people gets it.”
Lisa: What does successful look like then? How will you know?
Aaron: Well, I think success to me is based on a couple things, and frankly, we’ll probably learn a lot more about this as we move further and further down the journey with each user group. But one of them is just, “Are they making agreements, and are they refreshing agreements?” So it doesn’t matter how many, it doesn’t matter what they’re about, but is the team at a place where they’ve created a space for this kind of experimentation and this kind of dialogue, and they’re actually creating the clarity that you talked about? That, in and of itself, would be revolutionary. You know, only probably 5% of companies really do that well.
Lisa: Maybe less than that.
Aaron: That’s the first thing. And the second thing, honestly, that we’re building a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff around is equity, is participation. So success to me is not one proposer proposing 10 things and everyone accepts them without comment. That’s weak. It is equal participation, equal proposership, equal weight in feedback, and really seeing patterns of participation across the system and even by identity type.
So we don’t currently collect that information, but I think there’s an interesting trade to be made where we do disclose a little bit more about ourselves to allow us then to make sure that we’re actually living that value and seeing, “How does someone with a different identity than me fair in a system like this?”
Lisa: Interesting. I want to zoom out a bit now and talk about The Ready and how you’ve been evolving. I’ve kind of been watching things unfold on Twitter, and it seems like there’s all these little things buzzing around. One of which is it seems like you’re experimenting in the DAO space as well. Can you say something about that and what you’re learning there?
Aaron: Yeah, we really got committed to exploring that this year and kind of late last year. I’ve played with and toyed with the idea of crypto and DAOs for a long time. I mean, I made the ridiculously silly mistake of buying Bitcoin in, I want to say, like 2013 or something, or 2014, and then selling it for a 10x gain.
And then, we did pay attention when The DAO came out, and in fact, we mentioned some of that in the book in the very end. But it just never quite clicked for me. And then, what I saw during the pandemic was a very different tone where people on Twitter, particularly young people, were talking about sharing power and decentralization and rewriting the rules of the economy in a way that I found really heartening.
And in the midst of that, there was a lot of criticism about crypto and web3 and inequality and carbon and a bunch of—I mean, there’s a bunch of things to be worried about. But I saw this glimmer of, “Man, there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of young people talking about governance.” That’s never happened in my lifetime.
So we leaned in and started talking to those folks. And what we found was a community with a really high level of values alignment but a very low level of practice alignment. So it was basically people reinventing a lot of stuff that we had studied and seen and been a part of for a long time, and people way before us, obviously.
So that became the start of a conversation, and then what we realized was this community and this movement of decentralized autonomous organizations could either be a real fulcrum on culture and really start to change things along the lines of what we have been hoping to see for a long time, or they could really regress and fall back to other patterns or even new negative patterns that we don’t really want to see. Like, I don’t really want to see 10,000 people voting on every decision in an organization, for example. That’s a terrible idea.
So I think we saw this potential for, “There’s a fork in the road here, and can we play a role?” So we committed to dedicating some of our resources, and Sam and Tanisi at The Ready, in particular, hand-raised to go out in the field and basically support DAOs however we can. And that includes coaching and support; that includes conversation and connection; that includes investment. So I’ve been putting a significant amount of The Ready’s treasury to work in the space. It’s whatever we can do to help and to try to move things in the most kind of pro-human direction possible. And at the same time, just learn a lot because we don’t know everything. So there’s a lot going on there technically and socially and operationally that is just different than any kind of normal organization, and so we’ve been drinking from that fire hose as well. So yeah, it’s a very, I think, high-promise, very fuzzy opportunity space right now.
Lisa: Yeah, for sure. I think I initially was, like a lot of people, a bit sort of skeptical initially. Like, whenever I heard people talking about crypto or web3 or blockchain, I was like, “I just don’t get it. Like, you’re talking about technology, but where do the humans come in? I don’t get it.” Right? And I think I’ve been kind of late to the party, really. I had a great conversation with my friend and colleague Kate Beecraft, who really schooled me on some of the basics and really kind of made me aware of some of the possibilities and potential of it.
And, you know, I’m quite interested in this sort of artist/creator space also and being able to reinvent that. And in general, I’ve been having a lot of conversations recently about, “Self-management is great, but is it kind of unfair if that also isn’t co-ownership?” So that’s kind of a big topic that I’ve been sinking my teeth into as well.
Aaron: Yeah, it is quite controversial, and it is polarizing. And I think the fact that it’s so inscrutable to the layperson is a big problem. We’ve had to do huge deep dives in The Ready, even for the people that just aren’t working heavily in the space, just to be fair to them and catch them up because there are so many concepts that you have to understand and that fit together and then get amplified with jargon and insider talk.
By the time you’re done, you’re like, “This is not inviting. This can be quite exclusionary,” just on the basis of how hard it is to understand. And I think that is, in some ways, a pattern I’m familiar with. I think when we started previous companies that I’ve been a part of, and the internet and social and mobile and other things were happening in the earliest days, they were similar. It wasn’t everybody; it wasn’t exactly clear what the potential was and how it worked. And it was limited to those that did the work.
So I think there is real opportunity there for anyone who wants to do the work. But there’s no way to figure this stuff out, in my experience, without getting your hands dirty. So The Ready went in, and we got a wallet, and we started signing up for stuff, and we started buying stuff and minting stuff and talking on Discord and basically just making fools of ourselves to try to figure out how everything worked.
And every day that we did that, we kept having these light bulb moments to your plan about your conversation with Kate of like, “Oh, that could happen. Oh, this could be possible now.” And so you start to really see the angles. And now, honestly, we’ve even had a lot of those conversations with our clients. Some of our clients, some of the biggest companies in the world, have started asking us, “What’s up with this web3 stuff?” And we start to talk it through, and they’re like, “Oh, interesting. What could we do? How could we participate?” So I am bullish, but I do think that there’s a lot of learning on both sides yet to come.
Lisa: I’m interested in how has your client work been evolving. Like, what have you seen a shift in the kinds of appetite that clients have for more progressive stuff? You know, if you’ve learned anything about how to really help them move in that direction if there’s energy there?
Aaron: Well, I mean, the first thing I’ll say is if you really want to get into the weeds of the practice, you should probably have Rodney, my co-host, on the show because she has both hands in that right now.
I think what I’m noticing, on balance, is a more senior leader power holder more committed to a more aggressive shift, at least in principle at the outset, and a lot more understanding of what we mean when we talk about new ways of working because everyone’s gone through this massive shift in where they work and what tools they use. So there isn’t there is a greater awareness, but there’s also a lot of fatigue.
So a lot of it is, “How do we make this more bite-sized and more clear?” And one of the biggest changes, I think thematically, has been—I think I was very unwilling to be dogmatic about anything in the early days of The Ready, and so it’s kind of like the world is your canvas, just tune into what’s missing and go. And I still believe that like philosophically, that’s correct.
But with this fatigue and with this overwhelm, a lot of people are coming in and saying, “Just like, what are the five things we need to do to start and just to get the ball rolling? And what are the patterns that we can install that’ll just get us moving?” There’s a little bit more desire for that. Kind of the template thing with Murmur, a desire for just, “Get us going with lower cognitive load if possible.”
And there’s, I think, a tension there because, on the one hand, we do know that there are certain practices that are needed to be successful at all and that are common to all cases of this stuff, at least at a principal level, if not a practice level. And then there is the reality that you can’t really get good at this stuff without being in the arena, and so you do have to struggle with it, and you do have to be in human interactions, and it’s not something you can just download.
So I don’t know that we’ve fully nailed that yet, but there is a shift there of, “Let’s give people foundations more aggressively and more readily so that they have the tooling in place to sense and to respond and to agree and to consent and all that kind of stuff,” as opposed to having to invent the concept of consent for themselves.
Lisa: Totally. And what have you been learning internally in terms of, you know, eating your own dog food at The Ready, in terms of org dev? I know we had a good chat on a Twitter thread recently where I was talking about a challenge that a lot of organizations have when they have working groups that are working on organizational development, but then those people get really tired. And they’re like, “How do I do this on top of the work that I’m already doing?” And you were saying that you’ve made those paid roles and explicit roles in The Ready. What are some of the things that you’ve been playing around with recently, you know, as you’ve been growing and evolving?
Aaron: We have. I think the latest sort of layering of things that we’ve played with—I mean, some of this goes back almost to pre-pandemic—but the first thing was realizing that the shoemaker’s kids have no shoes because there’s no jobs there. So having roles that are explicit, that are compensated, that are appreciated, frankly, inside the system and not treating that as the housework of the organization has been really transformative for us.
And it led to an organic thing that I’ve wanted for a long time but that hasn’t happened, which is sub-circles. So I tried to introduce sub-circles a long time ago, and it totally flopped. It was a complete disaster because I was ready for it, but the system clearly was not. And I think I just did too much. I broke my own rule about “start small.”
But then I was sort of scar tissue about that, and I did not propose anything like that for a long time. But these roles became bigger, so suddenly you had someone who was in a paid hiring role, and then that role expands and starts to have more purview. And suddenly it was like, we kind of have an informal hiring circle. And then, “Well, why don’t we just govern that?”
So in the last year, The Ready really became a multi-circle company again for the first time in three or four years. And I think it has seven circles now. So it’s quite a substantive thing. And along with that, we did our foundational agreements in Murmur that had always been a little bit in my head and sort of assumed but not really understood because I always wanted to have an OS that was informed by sociocratic and holocratic and teal ways of working but not dogmatically informed by any of those things, which meant it was always a little like… And so now it’s like, “Bam, these foundational agreements are all in place,” and it’s clear what the groundwork is for the way we work. And then the circles and the stewardship of those circles and the roles and all that kind of fell out from that.
So that’s the big thing, and then that sits as a nice kind of sister phenomenon to our initiative work. So around the same time that we started to pay for key roles, we also started to pay for initiatives. And so when we go to our retreats, we’re looking at the market, the company, the culture, the phenomenon, and saying, “What are the things that we should be investing in that were not going to happen naturally?”
To your point earlier about what doesn’t get done—what is not going to happen naturally that should happen? Now is a great example. So we were like, “We should work with DAOs, we should get in there and figure out what this is all about.” But that’s never going to happen organically. So we created an initiative and funded it at retreat that pays the people that work on that to go collaborate with DAOs. So they’re making their full default rate to do that work on behalf of the company as an initiative.
Someone else is working on an initiative around a campaign, so actually going out and doing some movement-making for The Ready and some engagement with the community work that we’ve never done before. So that initiative was created at retreat. So we get two, three, four, five of those things that are ultimately kind of proposed and consented to by the entire company and funded. And then those stewards of those initiatives have the budget to then pay themselves and anyone else that they want to throughout the course of that initiative.
The budgets can get significant. The budget for the one around campaign or movement, I think, is like 100 grand or something like that. It’s a significant budget that you can really move around if you wanted to engage others in the system. Or at least significant for us. I mean, it depends who’s listening, right? That’s the Kleenex budget for some offices, but for us, that’s a big deal.
So that means that they can actually do that, and that has changed the feeling at the edges of, “There’s just stuff happening,” and it’s directionally aligned with stuff that we’re thinking about and that I’m thinking about and talking about in the company. But it’s certainly not controlled by anyone; it’s certainly not organized in a way where people have a lot of fingers in a lot of pies. It’s very distributed.
Lisa: That’s kind of an interesting example. Someone was asking me the other day about, “How do you do decentralized strategy?” And that’s kind of a nice example of it because I know a lot of companies that, as you said, they have the ideas like, “Hey, it’d be great if someone did that,” and then maybe a voluntary working group or initiative group gets set up, and then, lo and behold, they get busy, and nothing happens. So kind of consenting on which initiatives do we want to invest in and actually putting money in them is a good way of making sure they actually happen.
Aaron: Oh totally, and I love that you said strategy because the conversations and sort of modules that happen at our retreat before those initiative decisions are made are 100% strategic conversations. It’s like, “What is going on? What matters? Why does it matter? What are the levers? What are we missing? What will we be mad about in a year if we don’t do anything about it?” And that could be fixing hiring, or it could be engaging in web3. So it’s a huge swath of opportunity, but it is very strategic, and it is about trade-offs and being like, “What if we could only do three things?”
I also really like that the initiatives are not nested in the structure. So in a traditional sense, if you want to do something and there’s already a circle that wants to do it, and they have the budget, they’ll probably just do it. Like the hiring circle has money; they might just go do what they want to do. But if something doesn’t have a natural location, or that natural location isn’t willing to do it, then they kind of hover on the fringe. And technically, I guess they’re part of our source circle, our core circle, but not practically. They’re out in the wild doing whatever the hell it is they’re gonna do with total authority. So it feels super-structure or out of the structure altogether.
Lisa: You mentioned “source circle.” Is that “source” as in Peter Koenig’s “source,” or a different thing?
Aaron: Not a direct homage, but it’s a word that got thrown around because of that work and because of that way of thinking about, “How do you refer to something that was the origination energy and the origination power of a system without saying words like ‘leadership team,’” which is what we’re trying to avoid because that’s not what it is. And so we ended up settling on that. But I really appreciate that work.
Lisa: I guess that’s maybe a good segue into your role because I’m interested to know, as a founder, how your role is evolving as The Ready’s growing. What are you spending your time on these days? What things have you been learning on a personal front?
Aaron: Well, that’s been the wildest part about this year, I think, is that I have been busy enough that I’ve been hesitant to… I haven’t made the time to actually adapt my role mix to reflect reality. And recently, I have finally gotten around to doing that. So it is nice to accept what I’m not doing because, for a long time, it was like, “Oh yeah, I’m soft-shoeing around being a steward at The Ready but also doing Murmur and holding 15 roles.” And the reality is, I’m not very good at that.
So now what it’s boiled down to is really, I mean, it comes down to zones of genius stuff, like conscious leadership stuff. What are the things that I can do that really bring me energy but that also are somewhat unique or needed in both systems? And so on the Murmur side, I’m basically holding roles around product and customer interaction and fundraising and hiring. And on The Ready side, really moving into much more focused roles. So initiative advisor, a pull resource for initiatives if they want to have someone that maybe has done something similar before to just be a sounding board, or a finance role that’s really mostly about investing our free cash flow. So really being an investment guy, which is an interesting role for me, and really letting go of day-to-day financial operations and not really touching that anymore.
So everything’s getting sharper in focus. But I really, on The Ready side, my goal is to focus mostly on new ventures and what’s next. So the mobile course that we created was very interesting to me. That had lots and lots of help; I’m not really the architect of it, but I definitely was interested in the early days. And then the DAO stuff, and now what’s next after that?
So I like to be thinking about how we diversify the purpose into different lines of business and, ideally, finding people to launch those. So I’m interested in our paper goods business, for example, and what does it look like to turn the attention and practice cards into a much more widespread set of products for practitioners in the field to use without having to call us? Things like that. So the new and the next, but on the Murmur side, just being a total beginner and drinking from the fire hose of, “How the hell do you build a product?” Because I’m a four-time service founder. So I don’t know what I’m doing; I’m learning as I go.
Lisa: What—you have a podcast of your own, and you’ve recorded like more than 100 episodes now. You guys really have been churning them out. What’s one of your favorite lessons that you’ve learned from talking to all those interesting people?
Aaron: Oh, the show is super interesting, and I’m so glad that we started doing it and that we’ve stuck with it. I think the biggest lesson for me is that if the conversation is not entertaining to me and Rodney, if it doesn’t make us laugh, if it doesn’t touch us, then it’s not going to do that for anybody else either. So really being authentic to the work and being like, “Am I in this conversation as a puppet, as an automaton, or am I in this conversation for real, and how does that feel, and what does that mean about the guests that we choose to bring on and how we choose to engage with them?”
So a big piece of it for us lately has been that, and then the other thing that I’ve learned is it’s just an extraordinary way to stay in touch with people, it’s an extraordinary way to meet people. I mean, we read “4,000 Weeks,” the book, this year, and we were both just like, “This is so great,” you know? And in a normal life, that would be the end of it for me. But because we have a podcast, my next thing was, “Let’s reach out and see if…” And so one of the members of our team—I think Zoe, who kind of produces the podcast—she reached out, and Oliver was like, “Sure,” and Rodney and I are both like, “Yeah, that’s amazing.” Little bit star-struck. So we just recorded that last weekend; it was such a joy. And that just—that doesn’t happen in the normal social world. So it feels like a superpower to me.
Lisa: I’ve discovered it’s quite a sneaky way of getting free coaching, too.
Aaron: Well, yeah. I mean, look at 20VC or look at Farnam Street podcast, you know, the Knowledge Project. Those are coaching projects, multi-year coaching projects that turn people into incredible practitioners.
Lisa: Oh, it’s really nice, though, because I can just see all of these different fires burning across The Ready that are so driven by learning. And I think that’s what I really appreciate about you guys, is sharing that learning out loud and contributing to everyone else in doing that. That’s really something that you offer, I think.
Aaron: Oh, thanks. That’s interesting. Yeah, I think we’re hard on ourselves, probably harder than most, and so it is nice to just relax into maybe a space of, “Our job is just to learn.” So I would love to try that on.
Lisa: Is there anything that you came to say that you haven’t said, or that you would really like to share with listeners, you know, given that you’re someone who has been on that journey, that knows what it’s like, the joys and the struggles?
Aaron: I mean, well, I think I have a piece of advice, and I have a request for advice. So the piece of advice would be, you know, remember to come back to the principles that you care about and use them as fodder for what’s next. Because for me, I talked about I went too big, and I forgot about “start small.” If you figure out what you care about and you encode it in principles, it’s really nice to just have those mirrors all around the room and be able to come back to them.
So it doesn’t really matter where you’re at on your journey. If you’re in the beginning of your journey, there’ll be a lot of stuff in those mirrors, but even if you’re very late in it, there are boogeyman lurking. So I love that practice of just, “Pick a word that you care about, and then meditate on it for a minute and be like, ‘How are we doing on transparency? What does that mean to us right now? What’s shifting around that?’” Etc. So I think that’s the advice to or for me.
And the advice request is, we’re very interested in getting a better sense of the tension space, the tension map for younger companies. The current tension and practice deck for The Ready is valuable to anyone at any stage, but it really was born of large systems. And so I would love to hear from listeners on Twitter or over email or what have you, what are the tensions you’re facing at one person, five people, ten people, 15, 25 people that are just super alive for you? What are the challenges? What are the opportunities in the culture and the way of working that you’re tuning into? I’d love to be educated on that.
Lisa: Yeah, me too. I wouldn’t know what people say.
Aaron: All right, we’ll find out together, then.
Lisa: Survey in the show notes, right?
Aaron: Yes, let’s do that.
Lisa: Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Aaron. I always love chatting to you, and it’s really fun to have another opportunity to geek out on some of these things.
Aaron: It is. Yeah, we’ll make it maybe more frequent this time. You should come back and hang with us on ours.
Lisa: Yeah, great. Well, anything else you want to share, links, or things that people should know about?
Aaron: Yeah, I mean, I guess if you want to get into all this, Murmur.com is where the tool is, TheReady.com is where The Ready is. We are pretty heavily active on Twitter these days, both brands and me. So engage; we write back, we respond to DMs.
Lisa: Nice, great. Thank you.
Aaron: Of course.
