Dignan: Replace rigid standards with flexible defaults to enable a barbell strategy
Aaron Dignan · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · Feb 7, 2023 · at 26:18
Aaron Dignan, founder of organizational consultancy The Ready, discusses how organizations can use flexible defaults rather than mandatory policies to safely foster experimentation and mastery.
0:00 / 0:57exact quote · 57.7s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So, so default says, if you don't know better, do this. And then in cultures that I work with that do that well, they have an expectation of announcing when you're veering from the default and why. So like, I'm not going to do the default workshop. I'm going to do this other design and I'll get back to you on how it goes. And so what you're actually allowing is you're allowing a system to have these veered off experimental spaces, sort of a barbell strategy, like the way to lab would talk about it. Like you have the safe bets. And then 10, 20% of your workshops are different agenda. And so you get the benefit of like, yeah, some of them won't work, but they won't be that bad because the person that veered at least knows their stuff. So they can kind of manage the fact that they improvise. And then the ones that actually work, you bring back to the whole group. Hey, I did this other module and it crushed. I tried this other way of designing and it was absolutely phenomenal. And then the team can incorporate those learnings into the default over time.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Aaron Dignan
Dignan: Command-and-control management no longer applies to the most interesting work
“Most of those contexts are well figured out and are not the center of the universe anymore. That's not where most of the interesting work is happening.”
Dignan: Leaders falsely assume the only alternative to chaos is bureaucracy
“Essentially, we lose our way because we believe in a false choice. So most people believe that the pattern of organizational evolution is from chaos to bureaucracy.”
Dignan: Corporations squash startup innovation by imposing their operating systems
“And then to finish the doom loop that we're talking about, you bring in those acquired companies with all that creativity and judgment, and you squash it by conforming them to your operating system. And then you start over. And that's essentially how the econo…”
Dignan: Government lacks feedback loops because failure does not risk defunding
“The difference, though, is that there are very few feedback loops for the government. So one of the early kind of theories that I pull from a lot of sociocracy and the guy that kind of created the modern version of it talked about feedback constantly as like t…”
Dignan: Organizations do not have values, only operating beliefs
“Because it's the reality is that human beings have values and can hold values, but organizations don't really, they have ways of operating and beliefs about how the world and reality works.”
Dignan: Leadership requires trading short-term performance for capability growth
“And now the idea is I want you to ensure continually growing capability, which is a totally different animal. And so continuing growing capability means I need a system that is learning all the time while it's executing. And that means I'm going to have to mak…”