PDF Summary:Brave New Work, by Aaron Dignan

To get the best results, leaders often try to control every aspect of an organization. However, the resulting bureaucracy and hierarchy actually prevent people from doing their best work. In Brave New Work, investor and business consultant Aaron Dignan describes how to revolutionize organizations so they can adapt to the rapid pace of change in the modern world and help employees feel more engaged. His strategies to achieve autonomy and flexibility are customizable, and they’re shaped by collective input from employees as opposed to top-down reforms.

In this guide, we’ll explain why outdated work structures are failing us as well as Dignan’s strategies for guiding your organization toward unconventional ways of working more efficiently. The guide will also examine how his ideas overlap with other books on business organization and discuss challenges of implementing these changes.

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Maintaining autonomy and flexibility is an ongoing effort. There shouldn’t be just one big overhaul implemented at one point in time, but a long-term commitment to growth and evolution. In addition, the qualities of autonomy and flexibility should guide change at all levels and among all groups within the organization. In other words, you shouldn’t have autonomy and flexibility in one department but not in another.

(Shortform note: Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer’s No Rules Rules discusses Netflix’s strategy for maintaining autonomy and flexibility. The authors identify four key conditions that enable these qualities: a high concentration of talent, an emphasis on innovation over error prevention, a loose company structure, and companywide alignment. Their main deviation from Dignan’s strategies is their recommendation for a high concentration of talent. The authors claim that Netflix can trust its employees with a high level of autonomy because they are the best in the business (not the other way around, as Dignan might suggest).)

Establish Psychological Safety

As a first step for implementing autonomy and flexibility through organizational reforms, Dignan claims that it’s crucial to make sure people feel comfortable being vulnerable and speaking up when they notice something going well or failing. Dignan’s vision for organizations depends on workers deciding for themselves how they can improve the organization. People won’t participate if they fear retaliation or feel that the leadership is not committed to the fundamental principles of autonomy and flexibility.

(Shortform note: In Reinventing Organizations, Laloux goes beyond the need for psychological safety with respect to organizational reforms and discusses the importance of fostering authenticity in individuals more generally within an organization. This means that employees can always feel safe to be themselves (quirks and all), feel respected, and not have to put on a facade of “professionalism.”)

Leaders can foster psychological safety by allowing time for changes to unfold, allowing everyone time to speak in group settings, participating actively in the new changes being implemented, and reassuring group members that there’s room for both failure and growth.

Benefits of Establishing Trust in the Workplace

For leaders, establishing psychological safety boils down to the idea of building trust in the workplace. In Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work, Paul Marciano emphasizes the importance of this concept and explains three key benefits of leaders trusting their employees:

• Employees feel more ownership over their work and are more likely to produce better results so they don’t let their colleagues down.

• Employees feel more comfortable proposing riskier ideas, potentially leading to more innovation.

• Employees are more receptive to change and feedback because they believe their colleagues have their best interests in mind.

Though trust may take a long time to develop, it’s an important foundation for a positive and productive work environment, and the processes proposed by Dignan throughout Brave New Work can all be opportunities for building trust among colleagues.

Establish a Consent Process

In addition to psychological safety, establishing a consent process is another important early step for integrating autonomy and flexibility into an organization. The consent process is meant to enable workers to shape structural change from within, rather than to create an additional hurdle for people to get things done.

To facilitate a democratic process, Dignan recommends using a consent process such as Sociocracy or Integrative Decision Making (IDM).

In the IDM process, each participant has the opportunity to speak and give input on a proposal. Toward the end of the process, participants can either consent to the proposal or raise an objection if they think the proposal is either unsafe to try or would cause irreversible harm. Any objectors then work with the proposer to edit the proposal to get consent to move forward. In a system such as this, the decision-making process is inclusive, but it’s also designed to make progress rather than having ideas thrown out if there’s no consensus.

(Shortform note: IDM is also commonly referred to as Holacracy. HolacracyOne is the company that formalized IDM, and IDM is actually a procedure that fits within the overarching philosophy of Holacracy.)

Challenges of Implementing Holacracy

Although several major businesses and organizations have experimented with Holacracy, some have experienced challenges with it that Dignan doesn’t discuss. For example, the shoe company Zappos adopted Holacracy and later offered employees severance packages if they didn’t like the self-management system or wanted to leave the company for a different reason. Eighteen percent took the severance package and 6% of employees said that Holacracy was a specific motivator for quitting.

Some people said there was too much ambiguity around the work processes and responsibilities, or that not much had changed about the way work was done despite meetings and trainings. However, it’s difficult to determine what factors may have led to these perceived shortcomings for some employees, and Zappos continues to evolve and use Holacracy throughout the company.

In another example, the publishing company Medium tried Holacracy and then ended the practice because it was too difficult to coordinate efforts for larger projects across company groups, and public perceptions of Holacracy made recruiting employees more difficult.

Meta-Decision-Making

Your decision-making process can help you clarify different levels of decision-making power: what decisions people can make independently in their day-to-day work, what decisions require seeking advice from a peer, and what kinds of decisions require the group’s consent.

For example, someone might be able to change strategies on their project or purchase a piece of necessary equipment without asking anyone. However, if a person wants to form an entirely new team to work on a project, the group may recommend seeking advice from another colleague first. And if someone wants to restructure the company’s salary system, this may require using the decision-making method described above to get the entire group’s consent.

(Shortform note: In contrast to Dignan’s preference for different layers of decision-making power, Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations advocates letting employees make any decision on their own, as long as they seek advice from the people impacted by the decision first. Laloux points out that transparent information and the advice-seeking process are key to helping people make informed decisions. Similarly, Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer’s No Rules Rules emphasizes the importance of making company information transparent so that employees can make autonomous decisions.)

Dignan points out that this consent process doesn’t have to be set in stone—using these methods, participants can also consent to a different decision-making process, like delegating authority to a sub-group.

Dignan’s Goals Parallel Those of Holacracy

The official mission of the Holacracy governance system closely mirrors Dignan’s overall vision for organizations.

Both are focused on complex, human systems and aim to decrease hierarchy management, increase employee engagement, and distribute authority widely through dynamic roles. Both philosophies recommend tailoring strategies to the unique context of the organization based on these overarching principles. Similar to Dignan’s recommendations for constant, iterative experimentation (discussed later in the guide), Holacracy recommends “incremental evolution” to adapt to new challenges.

However, Dignan also discusses more specific strategies and experiments, not limited to Holacracy, that have been successful in revolutionizing businesses. For example, Dignan recommends experiments like letting employees set their own salaries and write their own job descriptions.

Strategies for Implementing Change

Once you’ve set the stage for reform by establishing psychological safety and a consent process, you’re ready to implement Dignan’s strategies to combat disillusionment and inefficiency at work. Each of these strategies aims to incorporate his foundational principles of autonomy and flexibility into your organization.

Define a Unifying Purpose

Defining a unifying purpose is an essential step in establishing autonomy and flexibility because it enables cohesive work in a decentralized context. This should be a group effort (ideally using the consent process) to determine the overall purpose of the work, who your purpose serves, and how the purpose could be changed in the future if needed.

As individuals and groups gain the freedom to act autonomously, the unifying purpose should guide decisions and determine what organizational changes are needed. Metrics can be used to determine if the work is aligned with the unifying purpose, but not necessarily as a measure of success.

For example, if your organization’s purpose is to make access to clean water more equitable, members can use statistics on the number of new wells installed as a helpful indicator without it becoming the sole focus. Natural disasters may set back the efforts to install wells, new and improved technologies may emerge, or employees may find other innovative ways to work toward the goal of equitable water access.

Criteria for an Effective Shared Vision

Similar to Dignan’s ideas about a group’s purpose, in First Things First, Stephen R. Covey claims that organizations (as well as non-professional groups like families) benefit from a shared vision that makes everyone feel empowered and provides clear criteria on which people can base their decisions. According to Covey, the group should create a shared mission statement with the following characteristics:

• It focuses on something everyone feels passionate about.

• It comes from the employees and isn’t imposed from the administrative level.

• It’s based on universal principles such as fairness, integrity, honesty, and human dignity.

• It addresses everyone’s needs, and specifically, the four essential needs of survival, connection, learning, and giving back.

These characteristics mostly align with Dignan’s recommendation for creating a unifying purpose that contributes to human well-being and emerges from the collective of workers, though Covey’s version is more specific about the moral values it should embody.

Distribute Authority Widely

For the principles of autonomy and flexibility to be effective in your organization, authority is another important area to reform. In general, Dignan recommends giving people the power to carry out the organization’s purpose the best way they see fit, rather than workers simply following orders from a superior. Regular governance meetings and allocating resources as needed are a couple of specific ways to distribute authority.

A regular governance meeting creates a democratic space for everyone to implement the consent process discussed in the previous section. In these meetings, everyone has the authority to propose changes to structures and processes or to raise concerns about anything inhibiting their work. If your organization already has a lot of meetings, Dignan also recommends canceling all meetings for two weeks to give everyone a chance to figure out what meetings are genuinely helpful. People can then return to the governance meeting with a new perspective on what changes they want to see and what processes they want to maintain.

(Shortform note: Applied in a different context, governance meetings within families enable a more democratic style of parenting, as opposed to an authoritarian style (where parents set strict rules) or a permissive style (where children can do what they want). In democratic parenting, governance meetings are an opportunity for each family member to have a voice and weigh in on activities, household rules, and allowances. Similar to Dignan’s benefits of an autonomous workplace, advocates of this practice argue that it fosters feelings of connection, worthiness, autonomy, and courage in children.)

Since control of resources is another way to exercise authority, allowing workers to allocate resources as needed is another way to distribute authority. Rather than adhering to a rigid, traditional budget that controls the flow of resources, Dignan suggests maximizing discretionary funds and the number of people who have access to them.

More Strategies for and Benefits of Decentralizing Authority

Although the context differs from the corporate environment, in Team of Teams, Stanley McChrystal talks about strategies and benefits of redistributing authority throughout his military task force in Iraq. Despite the fact that the military is known for its rigid hierarchical structures, McChrystal found that running all decisions through the chain of command put them at greater risk because they could not act quickly in high-stakes situations.

To distribute authority throughout the ranks, McChrystal encouraged members to make decisions independently as long as the decision advanced the mission of the task force and was moral and legal. When officers who felt comfortable making decisions on their own reported on those decisions at briefings, McChrystal publicly approved of their actions to encourage more people to do the same. This decentralization of authority took more time for some people to adjust to, but McChrystal eventually noted the following benefits of this method:

• Decisions were made more quickly, making the operations more efficient.

• The quality of the decisions improved because the individuals responsible for making them felt more invested in the outcome. Instead of simply carrying out someone else’s order, they had to decide what they thought was best and eventually report on the outcome.

• The people closer to the action were making better decisions, as opposed to their superiors, who might be farther away and have less contextual information.

Morning Star Case Study

As an example of distributing authority via resources, Dignan describes a tomato-processing company called Morning Star. Morning Star has working groups annually present their ideas for the year, and they collectively build the budget based on the ideas they are most excited about. They also allow employees to annually set their own salaries and write their own job descriptions, followed by a peer review process where their colleagues can give advice. Through these mechanisms, authority that is usually concentrated at the management level is distributed to everyone. In addition, the company’s profit growth far outpaces that of its competitors with more traditional structures.

(Shortform note: Similar to this example, Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations discusses the merit of allowing employees to set their own salaries and creating a peer review system for salaries. However, there’s potential for gender inequality and other forms of societal inequality to persist in these systems. One study showed that women earn 25% less than men in self-managed teams, potentially because of the difference in their negotiating styles. Although Dignan points out that with peer review, people can encourage their colleagues to increase their proposed salary if they’re undervaluing themselves, or vice versa, mechanisms may still be needed to counteract embedded inequality in the workplace.)

Create Dynamic Teams

Creating dynamic teams gives individuals and groups within the organization the autonomy to get work done quickly as self-sufficient units (while still being united by the group’s overall purpose). Dignan argues that individuals should not be tied to a specific job title and should instead have the flexibility to join multiple teams based on their interests and desire to contribute toward the overall purpose. This results in a network of dynamic roles rather than a traditional organization chart with fixed and limiting positions.

One strategy for creating dynamic teams is to experiment with what Dignan calls SLAM teams:

• Self-managed: The team doesn’t have to provide progress updates or receive instructions from a higher-up.
• Lean: The group is small enough to make decisions and mobilize quickly.
• Audacious: The team can pursue bold activities unencumbered by outside leadership.
• Multidisciplinary: The team has the skill set to achieve its goal.

Dynamic Teams Foster Business Agility

Research by the consulting group McKinsey confirms that businesses tend to be more successful when they create flexible or “agile” teams that enable employees to pivot to high-priority tasks and form new teams as needed. Having an “agile business” means it can adapt quickly to changing conditions. In this flow-to-work model described by McKinsey, businesses get the most out of people with multiple or scarce skills because they can work on multiple projects or areas of the business, rather than being limited to a single project or department.

The concept of business agility aligns closely with Dignan’s idea of flexibility and complexity-consciousness, and it also extends beyond dynamic teaming. The Framework for Business Agility includes agile people, culture, leadership, strategy, and governance.

Practice Looping Continuously

The last strategy for achieving autonomy and flexibility is to practice “looping.” The process of looping involves experimenting with new practices and assessing how well they work for your group.

It incorporates Dignan’s principle of autonomy by giving people the responsibility for identifying areas they’d like to improve and potential strategies for making changes. It also embodies the principle of organizational flexibility because it allows you to quickly iterate different ways of doing things. Dignan suggests that looping should be frequent and ongoing to facilitate constant progress. Notably, looping can involve eliminating processes in addition to adding new ones.

Looping includes the following steps:

1. Observe areas for improvement.
2. Propose a new system or strategy to experiment with. Clarify details such as the timeframe and people involved.
3. Conduct the experiment.
4. Reflect on what went well and what didn’t work well, then repeat.

Looping as an Effective Leadership Strategy

In The Leadership Challenge, James Kouzes and Barry Posner argue that improving an organization through small, ongoing experimentation is an effective leadership strategy because it shows the members of the group that the organizational structures are rooted in proof of success rather than being arbitrary. Kouzes and Posner also point out that even if the experiments don’t go well, learning from failure is a highly effective teaching tool. The trial-by-error method works best when leaders:

• Cultivate a growth mindset in which people believe they can improve their skills through hard work and practice

• Create a culture of learning where people have opportunities to do things like seminars and online classes and can also try out new roles to develop their skills