What is stopping you from doing your best work? Are you constantly frustrated by silo-ed functions, meeting overload, and slow decision-making? It’s not your strategy or your business model that’s the problem—it’s your Operating System.
Your legacy organization can become a smarter, healthier, and more dynamic evolutionary organization when you improve or even overhaul your current Operating System. Read this summary of Brave New Work to find out how to focus on self-sufficient teams that experiment, innovate, and ultimately allow your organization to run itself.
The Legacy organization
Legacy organizations carry a burden of organizational debt that does not serve the needs of a complex organization trying to navigate through a rapidly changing world.
The organization needs a strong sense of collective purpose, decentralized authority, and a dynamic network of small, self-sufficient teams whose members are free to organize around projects and programs.
Each team should be able to learn and change course, have control over its resources, and innovate using local methods and tools.
- Minimize meetings and make sure all information is readily available to all participants.
- Allow teams to reinvent themselves continually and to learn from each other.
- Start with a small group and give them the space to practice looping: identify tensions, propose practices, and conduct experiments.
- Start with smaller, shorter experiments and gradually expand to the wider organization.
Eventually, you can focus on sustaining a more autonomous and evolutionary organization.
Continuous participatory change
A successful evolutionary organization has to make it safe for people to fail. Psychological safety must play a major role in the Operating System transformation.
The most significant barrier to change is the leader—leadership has to recognize the importance of creating the space for change and then stepping out of the way. Don’t try to control the change.
The Legacy organization Part 2
Each team should be able to learn and change course, have control over its resources, and innovate using local methods and tools.
- Minimize meetings and make sure all information is readily available to all participants.
- Allow teams to reinvent themselves continually and to learn from each other.
- Start with a small group and give them the space to practice looping: identify tensions, propose practices, and conduct experiments.
- Start with smaller, shorter experiments and gradually expand to the wider organization.
Eventually, the change reaches a tipping point where you can focus on sustaining a more autonomous and evolutionary organization.
Complexity vs. complicated
We assume that complexity and complicated are the same things, when in fact they are not. A complicated system is something like a car engine: it is subject to cause and effect, any problems have solutions and can be fixed, and it can be controlled.
A complex system, on the other hand, is more like traffic: it is dispositional, meaning we can only make informed guesses about how it will behave, it is made up of a large number of components whose interactions can surprise you, and it is based around the relationships between its components, not the components themselves.
Assumptions
Everywhere, leaders and teams are frustrated. The scale and bureaucracy of our organizations are liabilities in the contemporary era of constant change. People insist on doing everything through channels, refer everything to committees, or haggle over the precise wording of communications and minutes.
Faced with rapid changes, they ask for caution, hold conferences, and add more procedures and clearances. All this happens because within our organizations, there is a hidden set of inherited assumptions, essentially an operating system running unnoticed in the background.
The evolutionary organization
An organization’s Operating System is made up of 12 domains. We need to question and reinvent our approach in each domain to become a people positive and complexity conscious organization.
- Purpose
- Authority
- Structure
- Strategy
- Resources
- Innovation
- Workflow
- Meetings
- Information
- Membership
- Mastery
- Compensation
How do you unleash change in a culture that is addicted to planning and control? How can you turn tension and frustration into experiments that move the team forward? A recent McKinsey study found that only 26% of transformation efforts succeed in the eyes of the people involved, with that number dropping to 6% among frontline employees.
The Traffic Signal
Consider two ways to control traffic where two roads cross: a signal-controlled intersection and a roundabout.
In the U.S. there is only one roundabout for every 1,118 signal intersections.
While signal-controlled intersections are overwhelmingly popular, roundabouts are actually safer, move traffic more quickly, cheaper to build and maintain, and still function when the power goes out. This goes to show that just because one system is more widely used does not mean it is of better quality.
Legacy organizations are like the signal-controlled intersections, the default setting that everyone uses because everyone else has been using it.
Roundabouts are akin to evolutionary organizations, a better way of doing things that requires adopting a shift in mindset and a new operating system.
Legacy limitations
Corporate longevity has plummeted—the half-life of all firms is now just 10.5 years—and the average stock holding time has fallen from 8 years to 5 days. Corporations are getting bigger but their return on assets, the ratio of their profits to what they own and owe, is trending steadily downward.
Mergers and acquisitions are creating “too big to fail” mega firms even as research from McKinsey has shown that almost 70% of mergers fail to produce the promised revenue synergies. In response, firms are cutting R&D costs, outsourcing, and laying off workers.
