Yeah, so I started a company called The Ready about 13 months ago.
For the 9 years before that, I ran a company called Undercurrent and the arc of my life
has been a search for the most interesting problem and I kept turning over stones and
then eventually a few years ago, I turned over ORG design and I was like, oh that's it
That's where all of our efforts as human beings come together.
Our ability to organize, to coordinate, to create solutions and get things done and now
that we're facing all of these challenges, it becomes a white hot topic for me and for
us.
I have the unique, good fortune of doing a lot of speaking and writing and traveling,
talking to people all over the world and the question I ask everybody is, basically I sit
down with leaders and teams both and say, "What's driving you crazy, what is slowing
you down, what prevents you from doing the best work of your life, what's in your way
at work," and I hear three answers remarkably consistently no matter where I go.
No joke in the last ninety days I've heard this from the Prince of Sweden and the head
of a non-profit in the Bay Area and it's 1) pace of change, both internally and externally.
Just feeling like they can't keep up, they can't process it-the meetings, the emails,
the information overload, the death by a thousand cuts of all the other people moving laterally
and vertically into their space.
There is a pace of change challenge that we all struggle with.
Complexity.
Complexity of scale or scaling.
Having no idea how to make sense of the machines that we've created, how to get people to work
and coordinate in the right way, how to navigate the functional matrix, or as I like to call
it the Rubik's cube of death and so that's presently felt by everybody.
Even really small companies now, who are going from fifty to five hundred employees in a
year.
Just feeling enormous complexity and then the last one is this sort of culture of command.
The idea that somehow having culture is about controls, predicting control, plan, hierarchical
decision making and all that sort of stuff sort of feels like a real rigid-slowing us
down, preventing us from our potential.
When I then ask teams the follow-up question, which is like, "What do we do to fix this,
whose fault is this, what's happening?"
I only get one of two answers.
When I ask the leaders, they say, it's the people.
"We have the wrong people, we need different people, our peoples attitudes suck, there's
change averse, there's change fatigue, we need more digital people, we need more millennials,
millennials are lazy, millennials are awesome."
Then when I ask the people, they say, the leaders.
"The leaders have got to go, the leaders suck, the leaders don't see the future, they're
not young enough, they're not old enough, they're not experienced enough, they're too
inexperienced, it's the leaders we have to change."
In our actual work, in the kind of coaching and changing of organizations and studying
how certain organizations have managed to change and adapt over time, we've learned
that it's actually neither one.
Sure there's probably a leader or two who could change, sure there's probably a set
of skills that might need to adjust, but by in large, the people are not the problem.
People are chameleons, people are incredibly sophisticated at echoing and absorbing and
interacting with a community, with an environment.
We often talk about ... we have this visual, I don't know if we can bring it up, but we
often talk about the environment as an organizing, operating system.
What is the OS for the organization?
If you think about-your phone has an OS, your computer has an OS.
Microsoft, obviously understands the concept of OS, but then you say, what is our organizational
operating system, what are the simple rules that are so deeply embedded and so deeply
held?
The assumptions, the practices, the principles that make up who we are.
That's the sort of unspoken, unrecognized area and what we've done over the last year,
which has been a really cool research project, is we've gone and talked to companies and
organizations that have bucked the trend, that are heavily adaptive, super fast, nimble,
flexible, human, meaningful, purposeful places and said, "What's different about you, what
would you hold up as something that is unique about your way of working and your way of
organizing?"
Every answer we get, we kind of capture and we just loosely start to collect and group
these things.What we found after looking at over a hundred examples, is that they basically
all coalesced around these nine areas.
This is not a macie framework that covers everything about how you operate, but these
seem to be the battlegrounds for the future of work.
These are the areas where big changes are happening.
Seismic changes are happening and you either are winning because of what you're doing in
these areas, or you're failing or struggling, because of what you're not doing or what you're
doing in these areas.
Basically, when we started to talk about this concept of today and creativity, we really
started to think about, what is it at the operating system level or a normal person
would say the cultural level that is either inhibiting or empowering creativity.
What is it about the way we meet, about the way we use and share information, about the
way we distribute authority or don't, about how we talk about purpose and intent?
All that stuff, that actually is either fueling and accelerating and empowering and creativity
or holding it back and so that will be the subject of our breakout.
Whatever room we're in, we'll find out-will be to probe that deeper by talking through
the areas in this framework and any other areas of navigation that we want to cover,
to get at a few key insights where we say, you know what, this is a nice big map, but
these are the three areas where we feel like right now we're really missing it when it
comes to creating more creativity, more creative hospitable work places and cultures and then
we will bring that back to the group for review and heckle