 We are recording So our home book today is actually an essay But written by a poet, so we'll consider it poetry This is from David White's consolations It's called beginning Beginning well or beginning poorly. What is important is simply to begin But the ability to make a good beginning is also an art form Beginning well involves a clearing away of the crass the irrelevant and the complicated Define the beautiful often hidden lineaments of the essential and the necessary Beginning is difficult and our procrastination is a fine ever-present measure of our reluctance in taking that first close-end courageous step to reclaiming our happiness Perhaps because taking a new step always leads to a kind of radical internal simplification where Suddenly very large parts of us parts of us. We have kept gainfully employed for years Parts of us still rehearsing the old complicated story are suddenly out of the job There occurs in effect a form of internal corporate downsizing Where the parts of us too afraid to participate or having nothing new now to offer are let go With all of the accompanying death-like trauma and where the very last fight occurs a rear guard disbelief That this new less complicated self and this very simple step is all that is needed for the new possibilities ahead It is always hard to believe that the courageous step is so close to us That it is closer than we could ever imagine that in fact We already know what it is and that the step is simpler more radical than we had thought Which is why we often prefer the story to be more elaborate our identities clouded by fear The horizon safely in the distance the essay longer than it needs to be and the answer safely in the realm of impossibility I Love David White So our guest today Aaron Dignan I've been a big fan of for four years and I think this Reading from David White today came to me Because Aaron has been performing helping organizations perform new beginnings That create a level of system change but from a new perspective Experiments throughout the organization to see what catches and and what creates new momentum So I Think Aaron rather than starting with the work itself. I'd love to start with why Why have why is this your calling and what has led you to this point? Yeah, that's a great that's a very important question I think for me the story is one of kind of searching for the most interesting and meaningful Question or problem space so I sort of bounced around throughout my career Trying different things out, you know looking at Technology looking at psychology looking at science looking at you know what I can What I can learn from each of those things and where I've sort of nest like when I sort of got down to the bottom of the ice cream tub What was there was sort of how humans come together to do their most important work It actually brings all those things together. So how we organize And how we come together and how we collaborate is really at the heart of Both our greatest achievement and some of our greatest gaps. And so, you know for me It was very accidental to sort of end up doing organizational development design whatever you want to call it but But it makes a lot of sense because as I look out the window There's an environment in crisis a political system in crisis a school system in crisis and You know a corporate sort of economic operating system in crisis and the reason they're all in crisis is because they can't adapt They can't learn they can't change they can't grow to serve the needs of their membership They have been in some way shape or form hijacked by the few at the expense of the many And so I think for me sort of unlocking potential and Unlocking the potential of what we can do when we come together to do our great work is really what it's all about And it just happens to be that you know the place I sort of focus that is in a in a work context But I'd be just as happy to help an individual at a coffee shop figure out what they're you know what they're capable of So I want to apologize because we had included a link to the now soon-to-be defunct OS canvas in the email But I would love to for the group to see the new OS canvas you've been working on if you have it prepped Yeah, I should like share it and people can screen shoot it. That would be just fine with me Yeah, Jerry if you can hand over control that I think it'll just let me do it. Yeah, here we go. All right, so There you go, so that now is the is anything in the way or can you see all 12 boxes? I See all 12 we see all 12 so talk us talk us through How this is used and also how it is evolved? Yeah, yeah, so I mean, you know essentially when we Started doing this work. We were looking at the delta between kind of the accepted way of working and what teams were doing at the edge and and a lot like the Concept of a brand or a personality. It sort of turns out that you know every every organization has an operating system It has a way of working in a way of organizing kind of whether it wants one or not and whether it you know Manages and grows it with discipline or not And so we started just looking for well What what what is the nature of those differences and we really came to this conclusion that like every organization has an operating system? the question is just how they answer these questions and so we we basically looked at the practices we went to I don't I think there's in the book. There's like 80 or 100 organizations that are sort of known for Really flowing out bureaucracy and thinking differently about a human way of working And we just asked the question of them directly or looked at their you know case history or literature and asked the question what's different about the way you work and The answers that come in are things like we pay differently or we organize differently or we team differently Or we communicate differently or we make decisions differently and there's some you know some thesis about the way they do that Some principles and some practice and every time that we collected one We kind of pinned it on the wall without an organizing construct and we started to pin like with like and so on the one hand You hear you know someone like Stanley McChrystal talk about how in the joint special operations command They had to have total transparency and push information to the edge And on the other hand you hear Ray Dalio talking about how at Bridgewater They have to have radical transparency in order to grow and so you kind of put those two things together on the wall And over time groupings formed in the original version of this we did a less exhaustive search And so we had a simpler framework Well, I think it was actually more complicated, but it looked simpler. It was nine spaces and the groupings were Combinations of things so it was like strategy and innovation or meetings rhythm and communication Those kinds of things and and so in one way it looked simpler But in another way I felt like it always bothered me that there were multiple topics inside a space And even though I am not a big believer in mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive frameworks because all models are wrong But some are useful. I Just wanted to have simplicity in the spaces so that we could have a more focused conversation so in the second round when I started working on the book I I did a much more exhaustive Analysis and and tried to really focus on pulling things apart and came to these 12 spaces as the spaces where it seemed like the kind of Struggle for the future of work was happening where companies that were really shaking things up were doing things differently and Where companies that were really having trouble in one way or another maybe stuck in the past And so these kind of became those spaces some are very self-explanatory Purpose is not one where people are scratching their heads anymore and wondering what goes in that space But some of them like membership or mastery Ask a little bit more of the viewer and and we tend to have Richard Hilox about In this analysis process that you went through What surprised you Can we mute cabin There you go. Um, what surprised me. I think two things surprised me one The degree to which companies in dramatically different industries and geographies and and even ages of existence Have arrived at very similar themes in these spaces So the way that they approach, you know strategy or resource allocation or meeting or authority There's a lot of you know, even while there's a lot of divergence in the world at large there's a lot of convergence in the you know, kind of edge cases of of companies and organizations and institutions that think of themselves as Agile adaptive human teal fill in the blank Um, that there's there was a lot of convergence. I mean just like straight up You know very similar themes and coming from companies that in some cases don't even know that the other one exists So it seems like the the kind of test and learn. Let's just flip the table over and try things Model is is leading to very similar conclusions. So that was That was surprising because I expected a lot more variation in in approach and in practice um The second thing that was surprising was just how interconnected these spaces are when you try to write about them So I I I sort of serve two masters One is the master that says if you can give people a framework where they can kind of hang their hat and their coat In different places and look at their the way they work as a system of things that interact with each other Then it helps a lot of people get over the hump from The way we work is some inherited thing that we don't really think about to being more conscious on the other hand It's this is not real like this this representation is a terrible representation of reality reality is like This is a three-dimensional sphere and these things are all connected in every which way and they're blurry and they overlap and there's language barriers and I mean there's a lot of Nuance there. So I think what I found surprising is just how interconnected they are and how difficult it was to write about them as a result So like where do you start? You know, do you start by telling the story with authority and the idea that all these organizations are committed to Distributed authority and to you know more more democratic ways of being and working Or do you start with purpose and the fact that all these organizations are Inexistence in the first place because they want to have some kind of dent in the universe they want to bring meaning to their community and to their membership and You know, there's really good arguments to start with either one and it leads you down a different path So I found that just the narrative of talking about these was was challenging and the measure of interconnection is fascinating So if you start with any tension or phenomenon or practice, it's going to leave you, you know, all over the place Which I think is why? bureaucracy and sort of inhuman ways of working are so resistant to change Because they're so deeply embedded not just within the operating system and the construct We have the work but within the broader economic operating system that wants, you know Growth at all costs and that you know is basically run in a very particular way with a very particular kind of market for Raising funds and using those funds. And so it's all sort of and in a cultural context, right? So there's just so much interconnection that you're like you need a machete to get through it Well, I'm sure that Now that people have had a chance to look through these 12 boxes. There's some questions from our members Christina, were you raising your hand? Yes, I am Hi, Erin. It's great to see you and hear you You too I'm really I'm really curious if you could speak to uh the sort of line between the living and the non-living of what can be designed and grabbed onto as a non-living thing we can mold versus The dynamics of a living system and the stuff that we can't design that we really need to hold lightly So that it can thrive Yeah Yeah, and I've been doing a really similar. This is fascinating to see this canvas because I've been doing similar work at the community level For climate change. How do we actually wrangle climate change as communities? So I you could also talk about the difference between a community and an organization That would be awesome. Yeah That's awesome. Okay, so uh start with the first one. So I think um The living non-living thing one of the things we tried to do with this framework as opposed to our sort of general thesis about About doing this work in the world is really just focus on principles and practices. So things that can be held Uh and can be either described or known by the community So, you know principles can be things that we use consciously or unconsciously But if we sit down and talk about it We can suss our way out to what's going on and we can be descriptive about The principles that we're using in terms of how we operate in a space and what we sort of believe And I think that there is often a delta between the story We tell ourselves in our head and the story that's being lived in the living system So there's a little bit of a of a gap there that this can help to reveal actually when we say like oh Yeah, our approach to authority is we're very empowering and then we ask the entire population how that's going You know what the real approach is it's like the real approach is not that at all So that kind of helps identify that And then the practices are things that again can be described and codified. They can be prescribed But we we take a pretty um emergent lens on all this stuff. So we don't We don't and we would never sit down with a leadership team or a founder or someone in power and say Let's design all these things until we're happy with it and then we'll roll it out and won't life be grand Instead we go to the edge to the source of Of the energy where the living system actually is and we take more of a you know complexity approach, which is What's true? What's the adjacent possible? What's kind of what's the next thing that we could try that we could step into that is Possible from where we stand now. So kind of managing the present actively by trying things So you you know ask a team what's holding you back from doing the best work of your life And they start mentioning things and we pin them to the wall here And then we say what are some things we could try that might you know alleviate those tensions and and move us into the future And we consider things that they you know know exist and we offer and and consider things that maybe they don't know exist And then we try things and when things Show up in the right way in the living system Then we feed them and if they show up in the wrong way or they don't show up at all then we start them And it's really just you know, it's a process of interacting with the actual living system as opposed to Trying to guess what it needs to be or prescribe some big grand answer or what have you Obviously some of these spaces structure resource allocation being examples Can have some pretty big Consequences time horizons, you know, there are moments where you have to make choices that are bigger and grander But we try to delay those choices until the last possible minute when we have the maximum amount of data And we try to like wait for the system and the people in the system to To call for that to demand that Uh, so, you know, for example, I worked with a client in the educational space that was you know, a couple thousand people And we didn't mention budgeting at all for a year And then at the end of the year the ceo was like, yeah, but why do we do budgets once a year? Doesn't that seem silly and I was like doesn't it? And so then you know, then they're ready to kind of when the curiosity is there they're ready to to open that um that chapter So we we just sort of try to meet systems where they are and just Not even be guides to an answer But be guides to making space for thinking for considering what's serving us and what isn't serving us And then once that consideration is a is a muscle that they have and they have a A power to use that muscle then we can kind of get out of the way and we know that they'll figure it out They'll keep figuring it out and as the world changes and they need to change They'll keep using that muscle to stop and retrospect and consider what's serving us and what isn't and then changing Changing what needs to be changed. So I think that's the that's kind of the answer on the living Stuff at least as far as organizations are concerned. There's a much bigger Obviously environmental story that you alluded to that I think we could spend a full hour on Um, and then on the the second question, which was one of now I've forgotten it actually what was the second question? So versus communities Yeah organization versus community. So when we wrote about a membership in this You know in this round of the work We started to really think about all the different kinds of membership that there are and the idea that is, you know You can be a fan. You can be a customer. You can be a community member You can be a board of directors member You know, there's a lot of different kinds of membership in the world and the false boundaries around organizations that we imagine are Exactly that and so if you look at a traditional corporation like a hotel chain They think of like, you know, anyone that's not an employee of our chain. It's not part of our community And so that there's a very distinct boundaries around that space Whereas if you look at a more modern organization, um, like an airbnb for instance, uh, you know, they're not Perfect, but there's a lot of good things going on there and one of the good things is that it's really hard to know where the Boundaries are so if I'm a member if I'm a customer and I also rent out my house as part of the solution now I'm part of the I'm part of the team creating the platform itself in a way And I'm you know, and I'm visiting another location that I'm renting an airbnb And so I'm sort of like I'm part of this very permeable space where I'm playing with and for Uh, you know the airbnb membership So I sort of think about community that way like there are lots of different kinds of community And the question is what is the nature of the membership? What kinds of agreements have we made to be in membership with each other? What kinds of boundary conditions are there are there expectations of certain traits you have to have or commitments You have to make to be in the space. How do I move between spaces? Um, so looking at like, you know burning man is another example You know, it's a community that exists all year round But is located in a place that has different levels of intensity of membership But ultimately it's like a very fluid thing that people really identify with So yeah, so I think it's it's just about defining and understanding. What are the conditions of this membership? It's a community garden, you know, does anyone who lives here have a membership? Does membership mean you have to show up that you have to do work that you have to care take? Are there conditions that we've all agreed to so I sort of think about like the You know comments work around what are the what are the basic rules that we have to have in a in a shared space in order to protect it from the Tragedy of the commons, which is not, you know, not always a thing that has to happen Um, so yeah, that's kind of those are some like top of the mind thoughts on community so Aaron I'm guessing that within this canvas Uh, when you're on a client engagement You don't go in really knowing In which parts of the canvas you're going to start Can you talk us through kind of the sorting out process of Where the beginnings occur? Yeah, I mean, I think that uh You don't know where you're going to start and even within an organization. I think one of the funniest Kind of misunderstandings we have in the world of traditional change management Is that if we're doing change management at a big company then we're doing it once and for all Um, and the reality is like there's no such thing as you know, the IBM culture like there there are 500 microcultures phenomenologically happening all the time there So the the reality is like we might start over here for one group and over here for another group and over here for one team And they meet in the middle So we don't we don't come in with strong opinions about that and instead We really just start from from what's present for them and and we might identify where that leads But frankly once we have someone understanding that these things are interconnected and that we're not there to just do Training or strategy or a reorg or what have you we kind of put this away And we really just focus on on the active process of doing the You know kind of turning the soil around what we're working on. So as an example like Where are we here? Yeah, this this is what we spend most of our time living in Um, it's just this loop. So You know for any team at any level, what's the tension? What are you noticing? What's what's holding you back or what's present and potential that you want to access? What do you what practice will you consider and then what experiment will you will you do? What will you try? What will you experience and we just do that over and over again? So yeah, sometimes that starts with Things that are easier to start with like Meetings for example meetings are a really interesting starting point because they're terrible Where's too many of them? There's very little discipline in them. They are the main kind of social construct in organizational life and There's just a lot of easy head room there Like you can bring a good facilitation technique to a meeting and people can have a great meeting So it's a lot easier than say blowing up the annual budgeting process, which is you know a nightmare of complexity So so there are common starting points and you see, you know meetings is one information flow is one Just thinking differently about authority inside a team level is one Doing some structural work inside a project team, you know, those are common starting places but But yeah, it's honestly it's all over the map and people move at different paces too. I mean I've had clients that are like Done after six months and they've they've chewed it all up And they're they're having a great time and I've had clients that you know two years later are still kind of Scratching the surface on on some of the first big moves that they really want to get to at scale. So It's yeah, it's I mean it's like working out. I I like him what we do to You know therapy a lot because there's like an emotional side to this But honestly a lot of it is a lot more like a personal trainer Like people say I want to be you know, I want to be so muscular great See at 5 a.m. With the gym on Thursday and like if you show up if you bring it Then you get amazing results And if you're not intentional and you're not deliberate and you're not accountable to yourself then you won't And a lot of a lot of our work kind of maps to that where clients will Say they want it and they desire it greatly and they're fed up with bureaucracy and hierarchy and all the shenanigans and then you know when we're like Hey, great. Can we make 90 minutes a week to work on this? They're like, oh no way So, all right. Well, you know, you can't you can't grow muscle if you don't go to the gym. So Aaron How do you deal with toxic cultures like What's your approach to them? What do you think makes a toxic culture? How would you kind of characterize that? Um, often it's a culture that doesn't realize what they're doing. That's that's toxic So so they're like, well, this is just the way we are and they don't necessarily realize the effect they're having on participants or on their stakeholders or Or other sorts of things and it tends to be sort of a refusal to countenance that what they're doing could be wrong Uh, and it can get very actively toxic in the sense that you could have You know sniping triangulation a whole series of you know dysfunctional family behaviors But happening at a large scale inside an organization that can happen too Sometimes toxic cultures are set up on purpose like contention management Which used to be the way IBM and microsoft worked like on purpose, right? They they designed their systems to do that on purpose uh, and then sometimes toxic cultures are just a department that Just wants to be the way they are right now and doesn't see that they might be part of a problem and doesn't want to change anything I think those are those are various forms of toxicity that I Uh, I've sort of seen flowed by Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, cool. So, um, I guess three there's three sort of different ways to Transulate that one is I think in general we don't engage if there isn't one seat of power in a system That is has the self-awareness to at least say what's going on or to sort of start to identify like We're not happy with the status quo and we do want, you know, we do desire change That doesn't have to be the ceo. That doesn't have to be the board But there has to be a pocket where we can play where there's a measure of self-awareness and a measure of Disatisfaction with that toxicity if it's present If that's not there, we don't really engage. That's not our that's not our bailiwick and obviously the name of the firm Is no accident. I mean the ready is the name of my firm and If you're not ready, then Then you need to do do some of the work yourself or you need to hit those twins of frustration where you're ready To to change and and take on what's what's to come because this is hard work The second thing that I find just sort of neutralizing to that is Because we often start with tension and we start locally and we start with questions about what's holding you back I very very very rarely meet a team or a team leader who's like We're great. Everything's perfect Like there, you know, we're in late stage advanced capitalism now in a lot of places around the world And almost every leader I meet is frustrated by either a lack of speed a lack of humanity A lack of learning a lack of just engagement and and satisfaction with the nature of the work itself Like it's very rare that I meet someone that's like a died in the wall You know finance person who's just like I just love pushing numbers around telling people what to do and everything's great So um, so when we start with what they need instead of what the rest of the system needs um People step into the work and then through doing, you know a couple rounds of revolution They do start to notice the connections and realize some of the other opportunities. It's not It's not sure fires. I would I would be lying to say that it works every time but it does It blends some of that sense of like resistance because we're not we're not coming with anything other than You know asking do you want to make space to do things? differently in a way that serves you do you want the organization to change in a way that would that would serve you better So that's kind of the Yeah, yeah when you say start with what they need um, and I'm looking here at the transformation loops You have in front of us. Can you just give a story about what that smells like in practice? Yeah, totally. So we'll um We'll engage with the team and put in front of them Certainly that question which is interesting But I find that when you're not thinking this way or you haven't had the time or space to to get good at this Sometimes prompts can be helpful. So we have um tension cards that we use. There, uh, like 78 tensions We've collected over the years around the world that seem to be really universal And are just present for present for a lot of teams in a lot of different ways. So actually I'll show you one of them right now. We'll get interactive So these are Some examples here, let's see Yeah This is excellent. So Dave gray. I don't know if you know Dave gray, but he created Diagnostic cards years ago that sound like what you're about to show us. Yeah. No, Dave's a good friend. He's awesome So this is a sheet of them as an example, but like these are about to be cut But things like um failure is unacceptable or we reflect infrequently or we plan and predict rather than test and learn or Uh, work life boundaries are not respected or the why behind decisions isn't always clear or too much email Or we operate like everything is a crisis Or lack of visibility between teams, et cetera, et cetera, right? There's 78 of those and um, somebody You know identifies that one of those things is true and they call it out and the team discusses it And when they arrive at some things that they all agree are true Then we have a sense of like these are these are opportunity spaces So they might say, you know, we have we have meetings to prepare for meetings and it's and we hate it And so um, we had a client in uh, and I actually mentioned this in the book but we had a client in on the west coast that We did a session with and they got really excited about this potential to change things and On the way to dinner, um, one of them piped up and said, you know, we do this monthly meeting We do this monthly review with leadership that kind of basically neutralizes the whole company for days because everybody has to prepare All their powerpoint decks and all their, you know Reporting and reviewing and then, you know, everybody does all that work They prepare all these decks and then the leaders that are going to present them have to spend time learning them because They're not down in the work So they have to figure out what's actually going on and be ready for any question that might occur because god forbid The CEO asks a question and someone doesn't know the answer if we don't know the answer to questions Then what why are we even here? We should be fired immediately And so they had this whole apparatus around it and they were describing it and everyone that was in the In the vehicle was like, this is not adding value And so then he asked the leader that holds the meeting and she said actually it doesn't have that much value for me either It's just something we've done here for a long time So, uh, we added up the cost of the meeting on the back of a napkin in in the car And it was about a three million dollar meeting Um, and so we just said what if we didn't have that meeting next month and just see how it feels Like what do we miss? What what hurts if we don't have that meeting? And they were like yeah, let's do that. So so we started there. So we actually started we jokingly call that starting by stopping So we started by stopping. Uh, let's stop doing stuff that's not helping and we'll just leave the space and see what happens with the space And so I find that, you know, nine times out of 10 when you just get clear some space People know what to do with that extra space and they can find better ways to add value And then if you do make space and you're missing something so we did that with another team We had a leadership team that was doing 45 hours a week of meetings. That was their average Hours of meetings per week. This is uh a company on the east coast And 45 hours a week of meetings as the average on the counters, which meant they were working through lunch They were they were always in meetings And it was because there was a one-on-one culture where every function and every p&l met with each other One-on-one to do their politicking Um, and then they had all the regular operatum stuff So we killed that dad and we said what if we took a two-week moratorium on meetings and just see what you actually need And so they did that and then what they did after that is they rebuilt their operating rhythm with things that they really really Needed deliberately and they ended up with about, you know, 18 hours a week of meetings instead of 45 Which is you know, it's not world-class, but it is um It meant that they suddenly had like 25 hours a week to eat and sleep and you know do their actual work So that's those are a couple examples of just in the meeting space kind of what that looks like and then you can imagine You know, there's a million other things about how we show up and check in as human beings and How we do feedback and how we you know review how we do performance management Like there's a lot a lot of places to start but people often start with just what's what do they feel right now And then once they make the space then they realize there's all these other things that they feel and notice But you can't notice that budgeting is broken When you're doing 45 hours a week of meetings because you just your your hair's on fire all the time. So it's like a continual unfolding That's perfect. Aaron. Can you un-share your screen so we can see more of each other and I'll pass I would love to do that Thanks Sure, there's another question Yes, go ahead um, I just had a Quick question about signaling among teams um, that seems like uh As as digital effective is starting to wrangle with collaboration not fail Especially in road teams Knowing when to tell a larger group what you're doing and knowing when to signal and and if you're outside and even kind of a larger group Listening for signals coming from smaller teams I would love to you to hear you talk about that. That's also on the community Like how do we get coalitions of organizations to work together towards? You know better climate futures That's the same problem in a different space in a more physical space with with less tech savvy So if you could speak to that that would be Fantastic. Yeah, can you just so I know I'm talking about the right thing. Can you give me an example of signaling? um let's say the Well two examples that within an organization uh, maybe there's a governance working group team that is really going to dive down into um, some sort of policy or procedure and then they come up But they want to get input throughout because we want to do it iteratively But we we need to respect the cognitive space of the people who are not on it Right because we don't have any cognitive space left and then at a community level there's a way to Strategize and maybe there's like a strategy working group around the food security coalition But not everybody can take that along again because of our limited bandwidth and cognitive space So it's sort of like how do you how do you have a sense when your nose is close to whatever blackboard? It's close to for your work of when to signal up And if you're not close to that particular blackboard, how do you know when to listen? That makes total sense So yeah, so it calls to mind a couple things for me. I think it's That's such an interesting like nuance space and I think in this moment when we're in between technologies where there's still an email culture. There's some working visually culture There's some new emergent, you know slack and real-time real-time and asynchronous messaging And collaborative tools like google docs and things like that. There's very much like a transitional Or what Dave Gray would call a liminal space that we're in right now. So I think that That's just true. So just taking that as a given for a second. I think the concepts I think about are push versus pull So most of what we're used to doing an organizational communication in the factory floor model is push it's Team meeting where the you know floor form and yells at everybody. It's information you can't miss It's you know, you're going to get this in your inbox. You can't say no to the information because the information is coming at you and And you know push information flow matches to hierarchical authority structures because the people with the right to push are the people in power So so if you need a message shared you have to kind of go through the the hierarchy to get a chair Pull is the opposite model, which I think is more kind of how the internet was built Which is it's available if you need it, but you have to go get it so if you want to know what's happening go look And the only way to make pull possible is if we work in public So we call it kind of working in public meaning we work in open by default Forums so when I have a team doing, you know a trello board that shows where their work is and what's in progress And what's done and what's what the status of things is You know, we're doing it in a in an open trello board inside the organization not just because It's a new tool and because can ban and kind of limiting workflow and whip and stuff like that is important But also because If the boss is like, hey, what's going on with that project? Our new answer is here's the link. I'll have a look We don't have to have a meeting. We don't have to have a review. We don't have to have a check in and importantly Us checking in with you or us signaling to you is not an invitation for your opinion Right, like we're empowered in the in the system And so we're you know, we're if you need information, you can get it But that's different than asking for advice which is different than asking for permission And so I think working in public and sort of thinking about push versus pull We're just very careful now in the systems we advise about when to push and mostly we default to Building pull systems that are really Well organized So if you you know, if you want to know what teams are doing at the ready, for example, all of our workflows in trello All of our projects have a slack channel that's open to you for you to join All of our google docs are default open for the organization, which by the way The world is so bought into the idea of privacy and security that even for google You have to go in and basically hijack the system by making a folder that you declare is organizationally open You can't even set your google instance as open by default Even if you're the administrator of a google organization, which I think is bananas So so that's kind of the the state of the pull pull thing and that way everyone knows and we also use a system called get book That I know a few other teal organizations use for putting their kind of governance and their policies and things online So that if someone's wondering, you know, what's our approach to Travel or whatever they can just go to the get book and read the policy And if they want to know more they can add a comment if they want to suggest a change They can suggest a change just like you would in a github environment So that's kind of the the one side of it the other side of it. I think is the difference between Kind of advice based Projects or problem spaces or decision spaces and spaces where we just don't have clarity about who has authority So a lot of the signaling issues Are issues of I think I need to signal because I need information or I need advice But we don't parse very well the difference between I'm socializing this to get consensus or buy in or air cover To sort of cover my ass versus I'm socializing this to actually get advice from people I want and seek advice from and so I think a lot of it is also about chasing out those narratives of What I have to check in with the head of this and the head of that and the head of this because otherwise my when my thing Goes sideways, I'll be fired and instead go to like whose advice do you need to make this safe to try? Like whose advice do you actually require? Whether that's a customer or or an executive or a peer or somebody at the edge So I think that that's another thing that we play a lot with is like What do you have? What's your decision stack and what percentage of decisions are out there trying to signal and get what they need? And hopefully the answer is like not that many I mean, I would love to see 80 of all decisions and organizations at least be either role role decision Right, you know decisions where the person in role can just do it or just full on member rights Like if you're a member of ritz carleton, you can spend $200 a day to make a guest happy That you know everybody has that right I think those That should be a big part of our stack and the advice process and the integrative decision making and these types of things should be like The exception and then advice You know and getting signal from other team members or from customers should just be built into the innovation rhythm And the way that we kind of test and learn and you know approach Projects in an agile way where we're never we're never long starved for data from the people that matter for us But there's a big difference between a customer or a user and All the other constituencies that somehow need to be you know bought in so yeah super complex But I think we just try to oversimplify it with those Uh approaches Susan you're on mute You're still on mute Susan Indy I have a question about um boundaries um Not just not just the formal boundaries and organizational boundaries that are that are sort of public Uh and involve you know the hierarchy, etc. But you know organizations are full of all kinds of Invisible boundaries, although they're usually visible to the people who are in them and and And they're they're they're thick on the ground uh overlapping often we go in and out of them all the time Do you have any special um treatment? I mean to call people's attention to those to to deal with them to understand a that they're there be how to work in that kind of a system uh Yes, say say a little bit more about the kinds of Boundaries that you have in mind. So maybe like a story or an example just to give us a little bit more color And then I'll say what I think I was gonna say Well, there are two There are many kinds of case but but two of them are a You know the sort of the old-fashioned Now I think uh community is a practice idea in its original sense where Uh, the the community of practice is is the unit social dynamic that has the social dynamics for for the foster or inhibit learning right And so people, you know, run recognizing when you've run into a wall um So for instance, I mean they're they're full on like there's there's uh huge aerospace has people who Happen to know how to get things to stick on the outside of satellites And for test purposes and even whatever they come out of the woodwork right when they're needed Um, but if you're a new person in the organization, you might not know they're there Um, so it does have to do with trust but it also has to do in this case with practice with the way in which people do their work um And and the organizations are just full of those so they're they collide right like the The famous semiconductor national semiconductor case with the analog and the digital um engineers who were at each other's throats and had had uh Had ways of actually throwing um Well, they'd throw computers out of the second floor story The guys for parties, right? But they had to work together and sort of knowing where those boundaries were knowing that they were there um And it wasn't most you know in a in a way management doesn't do a lot to work with those because it's not as aware Unless it's grew up there of those That makes sense. Yeah Yeah, so part of it is how do you work those things? How do you okay? Here's a good example. Sorry. Yeah, sure so If you're uh in and drug development, um What one of the places that discovery is supposed to happen Is in the early stages and has to do with a uh, you know getting getting your molecule getting the chemical composition of a new drug And that usually kicks off the process to get to the point where you fall uh go to the fda for instance You have to usher I mean your your molecule has to make it out of the chemistry into the toxicology community into the uh The physiological community and then you know through various communities of expertise of practice across the organization and and there was an example years ago at rush which Uh in which somebody got through in two years Lark instead of the usual 10 or 12 but largely because they were ushered through by someone who knew the whole system Right a broker a broker who was known in inside and out So these are highly structured systems They are in some ways how things get done Uh more effect more Get get accomplished. It's at work. Um and can be very useful to be able to read that Yeah, okay, cool. That makes a lot of sense. So I think what you're what you're touching on for me is both structure and membership and workflow And the reality is that I think most organizations right now are structured around what, uh My buddy neils flagging would call the formal authority structure. So it's You know who reports to who in the oracle system so that if we get sued by the federal government We know whose fund needs to ring and and then what we do. I think out of Habit and just bad practice is we sort of try to operate in that same structure So we actually try to create value in the same structure that we that we have we hold our formal authority Which you know in in a co-op obviously is very flat, but in a you know, corporation might be very very deep And and so what I when I talk about a lot and think about a lot is actually just Tracing that line of how we create value for any given user Through the organization and where we see a great deal of complexity and interconnection and handoffs Thinking harder about whether that's actually the best way to create value So although it is although it requires many different skills to create something that is richly You know complex and valuable and like a drug or an airplane or what have you Whether or not those skills need to be co-located and operationally siloed and treated as boundary spaces I think is a great debate to have and there's not always a right or wrong answer But one of the default assumptions I have going into these types of environments is You know if you were working more cross-functionally around projects rather than around functions You the workflow and the value creation structure would be more on the forefront So that's kind of that's what we advocate for and the way to find out of force is just to try it So we say great Let's try to let's try to cast this the way Hollywood casts a movie And say we're going to need a director of photography and we're going to need an editor and we're going to need a You know marketing person or and let's just put them together And yes, if it's a long if it's a two-year processor if you're developing the 787 dreamliner at Boeing There are going to be handoffs But if the nature of those handoffs was an augmentation of the organism of the project rather than a project getting Changing who owns it and the ownership structure itself It's more like what happens on a movie when it goes from production to post production, right? Some of the members carry on and some of the members augment over time And so one of the firms that we that we look at from time to time for innovation around this space is Spotify and they have a little innovation framework that they've cooked up called You know, basically like, uh, you know dream it build it scale it tweak it or would have you and the idea is that The very first stage of a project is going to be about invention and Figuring out what the prototype looks like and then you're going to move into building it Which is more about building an mvp and making a working piece of software And then you're going to move into scale it where the job is to reach 100 of the user base at Spotify Which now is tens of millions of people and then in tweak it You're going to go into that ab mode that you know the amazon buy it now button is in we're like god If we change the color of the yellow from one pixel here to one pixel there It's a hundred million dollar difference or whatever So those stages are cool because the way they do their talent deployment Is it's a talent marketplace. So if you're the kind of person that likes to do Build it over and over again and build mvp is you might spend three years of your life going from project to project to project Playing that role and if you're the kind of person that has a lot of heart for a particular project And you want to ride it all the way through The um the scaling process then you ride it all the way through So I think uh, obviously in regulated spaces and high-risk spaces We have to be cautious about making sure that the right expertise and and Perspectives are at the table at the right moments But I do I do think we kind of have to blow up the traditional structures that make it You know hand off after hand off after hand up and start thinking about these things as movies, right? And I think that that's that makes a big difference Yes, that's a good way to think about it. I think they um I think having worked in this kind of a space for for a long time Um part partly just to be able to be aware that you will run into those things And that's what the glass ceiling is and that's what um, you know, if you want to get in and learn something Um, they have to want you and you have to want to want to be part of them Totally And I think we um, we conflate membership with role In traditional structures too much So people have this notion in their head of like if I'm not the vp of marketing for Oreos Then I don't work in Nabisco and it's like well, that's just because that's our construct right now Or we think we're filling parking spaces with cars But if we say that we have a membership over here that's dictated by our finances And we have roles over here that we need to fill then we can do these more Hollywood style deployments of projects because You know this person's a lawyer and they're looking for the next gig and it's a marketplace model And if we don't perform in the market well enough then obviously we can hold fewer members But that's that's part and parcel with the reality and actually this is a fun has nothing to do with us, but Gary Hamill wrote a great article of a hire in this month's Harvard business review and hire has gone from a very functionalized appliance manufacturer to a company with like 4,000 independent teams that are running this marketplace model And they are the most successful and fastest growing appliance company in the world I mean they're killing it And it's just because they got rid of that and they just said like how do we how do we sort of set how do we go from You know big cruise ships to speed boats here and the way to do it was just to sort of blow up those those boundaries Yeah, and there's a new boundary, which is are you on the project? Yeah, two two quick thoughts that I'll pass it to bill who I think is wants to jump in one is that um, I just heard an interesting thesis that completely makes sense that uh, Donald trump is treating the presidency as a reality tv show Where where his secretaries are that's casting he's casting them for their telegenic presence Where he sees the the the white house and all the other things as sets to be played He's hired in is his communication director a showrunner from fox I mean it all I can think about it that way It's a bit of a dark thought but but boy it plays out really really well That makes you realize kind of how he prioritizes what he's doing in different ways So that's interesting and then completely on a different on a different topic Although Wait before you go to that next topic. I mean that that is the dark side of running the hollywood model. Yes, of course It creates incredibly strong in crowds Among other things exactly. I mean, there's there's 1200 implications from that little little scenario just described And then separately from that. I also want to put in something That's spinning in my head through this whole call that we don't have time to really tackle But april is reading the body keeps the score by vessel vander koak Which is about trauma and how trauma is held in the body. It's a brilliant book I'm waiting for her to finish so she can hand it to me so I can read it and One of the things I'm wondering as we're sitting here talking is how do organizations hold trauma And how does that? How does it manifest like what it what it? How do we scale up vander koak's observations to an organizational or a cultural level above organizational? So I think I think what's happening a lot is that we're having a collapse of scale Where the same things you know the same phenomena happen at all these different scales and how And does that affect your work and how do you deal with it? Can I add to that real quick? I wasn't planning on making a comment And I realized this is a little bit of a I don't know we're like taking we're veering off course here a little bit but I was actually Gifted the book the body keeps the soul the body keeps the score cannot recommend it enough By a friend of mine who actually his expertise is Negotiation and mediation at the highest levels right now He's helping to negotiate the india pakistan border conflict around water rights So I mentioned this because he's like what do you do? When you've got in one way he read the book like what are you doing? You have ptsd at a society-wide level Which took us into all kinds of different Conversations way beyond what I do or what I know about but I share that only because I think it does resonate at some level with this conversation And Yeah, I'll leave it there Erin, this is great. Thank you. Yeah. No, this is a this is a cool twist actually so Where to begin a couple thoughts so one is we talk about kind of organizational scar tissue or organizational debt as the as the result of Things that are no longer serving us or things that are reacting to the micro as if it's the macro So somebody steals a computer and we create a you know Wild security system that everybody has to punch in and out of and a sense that we're all being watched right like over one Minor infraction and so suddenly we have this scar tissue around that or some you know There was a big layoff three years ago And so now we have a narrative around why that happened That is perpetuated and that forms a kind of a debt because we won't try certain things take risks You know step into spaces where we could be valuable Because because that lesson created a kind of a learned helplessness or or learned You know avoidance. So I think that's one thing we talk a lot about is just like How do we refactor organizational debt? and I think the way we do that both in companies and in society is by Focusing on participation. So I actually think most of PTSD is about losing control And and and when we lose control and we lose kind of our our you know Sacred space around our own, you know lives and bodies then You know, we can go through experiences that really scar us and and to me The way to get that back is to is through participation and that means figuring out at what scale can we offer control again? So I just go to teams and be like, yeah, you know, you've been traumatized because you haven't had a consent right You haven't had a voice in what happens to you So what if we carve out a space now where we get the consent from the system that you're going to have that right? And that's part of the experiment So when we go into the spaces and talk about do tensions and find practices and do these experiments It sounds very scientific, but it's also very emotional and it's very much about saying like within this experimental space We all have a consent right. We all have the right to say yes and no to things to what happens to us We have a right to act on our intuition about what needs to change and just by sort of acting locally We can re-engage that that sense of self in that sense of like Internal locus of control. So if I'm in a community, I'm saying yeah, don't worry so much about the presidency Worry about your community garden or your community election like participate where you have a consent right and if you And if you're operating on an organizational scale like yes, we'll figure out how to you know Blow up the the budgeting process, but not today today Let's focus on when you as a team come together and start a meeting You do it terribly and you don't honor each other and you don't like create You know space to to be present with each other So we could do that like we can we can choose to do that and if we do that And we can choose not to do that we can choose to say we're not going to do that experiment and instead of having some OD work foisted upon you like you're driving I think that's that's the way to do the healing and unfortunately Because people have been given so few consent rights and so so little participation historically there can be a lot of False starts and kind of getting that going. So a lot of the work is just about like making the space modeling the action of participation and that's what I was going to say as well as kind of building on that and navy jerry this is more your thing but And not to go too deep into the like other kinds of trauma around abuse And you know, there's a very different experience for somebody who's been at war and then somebody who's been You know, I hate to say it raped as a child kind of thing but it's like the book covers all of that as well and the other key piece coming out here, which is How sometimes people can feel on the one hand just so numbed Even if they had and I think there is an organizational equivalent of it where they're numbed To recognize that this might even be an option. But even when then when you prime it and sort of say Let's put in place, you know, let's try some different things the ability to trust And that's what like that this action I think part of that's really a default starts But part of that also is how do I know that this system isn't just going to actually Fail even more, you know, not misery and traumatize me again, right? Like I'm just burned out on that Yeah, 100% that is so present Let's afford a bill for a second. He's trying to jump in Let me throw in a concept that you probably run into air and out there that there's one of the groups that's Works with something called the 15 commitments Oh, yeah Is very consciousness oriented, but the fundamental thing that we're not talking about here Is where you're starting from in other words, if somebody's got they quote toxic culture or issues PTSD fill in the blank. It's basically coming from a victim Personality, in other words a sense that somebody's doing something to you It's sort of like when when something happens with the revenue model And and you have a meeting of marketing production, you know everything. It's everybody's pointing a finger It's his fault or her fault or whatever. So there's a sense that blaming and Shannon and structuring out of fear Is what's driving the whole machine And one of the things that I just sort of posted with Jerry before we had this was to to try and raise the concepts of There's a there's a physicist by the name of thomas cambell Who talks about virtual reality and and how if you really accept that You've got a choice as to whether or not you're going to come from fear or basically care compassion and love Because if you come from that other side Every time there's a problem you all stand up and try and help that person solve that problem It's no longer blaming no longer victim no longer a sense of shame And no longer a sense that we're not in this together because we really are I mean do you ever get anybody? I mean you mentioned in your Ted talk thing the the Burt's Ark bottle which to me is sort of like a Starting point for that in other words where you sort of shift everything to the local nurses so that they can manage Their their day without some sort of overlord telling them that they should only be doing 15 Minutes for for a change of a bandage Yeah, yeah, totally totally I mean look, I think There's you said so much that I can't react to all of it at once but I um This idea about blame and fear Comes from both a kind of belief system about who human beings are as people So we I talk a little bit about the difference between like being people positive and people negative You know are you do you believe kind of the in the behavior behaviorist empirical notion that we are You know just trying to avoid pain and seek pleasure and we're completely, you know Moldable by by our context or do you believe that there's some you know natural desire to Fulfill our potential and self actualize and take responsibility and be present at the same time I think we a lot of people in our industry at least Play a little bit of a game of like the early adopters and everybody else or the people that get it and the people that don't Then I kind of come down the side of like it's not the fish is the aquarium And being in a system where you have a consent right and where you have an internal locus of control is actually a privilege It's a form of privilege that not everybody gets if you're if you're born into you know war torn country acts You have a different set of rights than someone who's born into a democracy And and I think for a lot of people, you know, there are reasons of economic disadvantage geographic issues, etc That have led them to take positions in places where they don't have the same rights as others And so so I try not to blame for that lack of internal locus of control, but focus more on You know, how do we how do we create enclades within these systems? Where they can reclaim that and through reclaiming it start a revolution a little bit and kind of start to turn The tides because nobody's happy in those systems, including the people that own and run them And so but part of it is about taking the time and awareness to just check in with that unhappiness So to your point about the body keeping the score like But you know, I have literally met billionaires who are super successful and super miserable in their body but they never stopped to To check in with that and so they don't know that that they have kind of a a deeper desire to kind of Unwind the systems that they've built and have them work differently And then you meet other people that have you know have found that calling much earlier or at a much different scale So anyway, I mean this is everything you were saying, but it's that's a big one. In fact, real quick if I may um Let's see I learned a new word today. No, let me late. Um, it's exactly from this book. The word is called um alexa themia. Does anyone know what it is? No, but I want to alexa alexa themia It's a greek for not having words for feelings And when people when you say how does this make you feel and people go Uh, you know, if if a bus if a bus were to run over, how would you feel? They're like, I don't know I'd get out of the way kind of thing Now a very funny thing too. I just said alexa themia and alexa pipes up in the background and it's like, what can I help you with? What do you mean? Would you like to buy some tissue? Anyway, there you go. There's a word for the day for everybody. That's awesome Thank you So much, Aaron. I I'm sure that we can go another two hours. You can also buy Aaron's book in february So that will be out You're going to order it now or you can just send me an email. I'll send you one Definitely Yeah, very very generous I'm I'm going to close this out by reading just a portion of david white Going back to beginning Todd Before you jump in there. I have to leave. I'm actually five minutes late because I didn't want to leave But I want to tell erin. I'm making a map for dug rush cough of the team human podcasts And I I want to act We're working with the fellas who work with him with the podcast to actually make a tool to activate team humans So that you can go and engage like call us to action there You'll be on that map because you were in our early episodes. So I'll give you the link It's just a demo map now. There's only about five, but once we get it on i'll ping you there Thank you. I'm sorry. I can't see And Bye Perhaps because taking a new step always leads to a kind of radical internal simplification We're suddenly very large parts of us parts of us. We have kept gainfully employed for years Parts of us still rehearsing the old complicated story are suddenly out of a job There occurs in effect a form of internal corporate downsizing where the parts of us too afraid to participate Or having nothing now to offer or let go with all of the accompanying deathlike trauma and where the very fast last fight occurs A rearguard disbelief that this new less complicated self And this very simple step is all that is needed for the new possibilities ahead Thank you, erin. Yeah, thank you all Thank you for joining us. Todd. Thank you for inviting erin into the conversation Uh, I think lots of fruitful things came out of this erin. I will post this on youtube so you can refer people to the conversation um Etc etc etc and uh, I don't know. I hope other things generate from this. Thank you Yeah, likewise. See you all soon. You're in you're in new york Uh, I was I actually just moved my family back to colorado after 11 years in new york colorado Uh, i'm in denver We get there often. We have family there too. That's where I grew up Shoot me and out. We're here all the time. Okay. Great. Love that All right, glad I have it. Bye. Thanks everybody