The Bosshole® Chronicles

Aaron Dignan - Brave New Work

October 04, 2022
The Bosshole® Chronicles
Aaron Dignan - Brave New Work
Show Notes Transcript

What a fitting guest to have for our 100th episode!  Aaron Dignan joins us in the TBC studios for a glimpse into his extraordinary perspective on not only the world of work but HOW we work and what he and the team at The Ready are doing to reinvent the WAY we work.  From his best-selling book to his software platform Murmur, Aaron offers up the kind of transformation organizations need right now.

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Visit us at www.realgoodventures.com.  We are a Talent Optimization consultancy specializing in people and business execution analytics.  Real Good Ventures was founded by Sara Best and John Broer who are both Certified Talent Optimization Consultants with over 50 years of combined consulting and organizational performance experience.  Sara is also certified in EQi 2.0.  RGV is also a Certified Partner of Line-of-Sight, a powerful organizational health and execution platform.  RGV is known for its work in leadership development, executive coaching, and what we call organizational rebuild where we bring all our tools together to diagnose an organization's present state and how to grow toward a stronger future state.

0:00:05 - John
The Bosshole Chronicles are brought to you by Real Good Ventures, a talent optimization firm helping organizations diagnose their most critical people and execution issues with world-class analytics. Make sure to check out all the resources in the show notes and be sure to follow us and share your feedback. Enjoy today's episode. Welcome back to the Bosshole Chronicles. Everyone, Everybody out there in the Bosshole Transformation Nation, it is so good to have you here. We're very excited. I'm always excited about this because I get to do these podcasts with my amazing and wonderful friend and business partner, Sarah Best. It is so good to see you. How are you doing today? 

0:00:46 - Sara
John, I'm great and I think today we are elevating the podcast to a whole new caliber and level. I'm really thrilled to be here. Good stuff ahead. 

0:00:57 - John
No question, we are entering a new stratosphere as far as the Bosshole Chronicles are concerned. Let's not delay this any further. Please tell us about our special subject matter expert today. 

0:01:10 - Sara
I am so happy to tell you about our guests today. First, let me just welcome you, Aaron Dignan. Welcome to the Bosshole Chronicles podcast. 

0:01:17 - Aaron
Thanks for having me. I was excited to meet you all and find out about this. 

0:01:21 - Sara
Well, the work you're doing is amazing and incredible. Let me just tell our listeners a little bit about you. If I may, I'm just going to read right from this information I have here. It's pretty profound. Everywhere he looks, Aaron Dignan sees the same phenomenon Our most trusted and important institutions business, healthcare, government, philanthropy and beyond are struggling. Indeed, they are. They're confronted with the fact that the scale and bureaucracy that once made them strong are liabilities in an era of constant change. 

For the past 10 years, Aaron, you have studied organizations and teams with a new way of working that prioritizes adaptivity and autonomy over efficiency and control. I know that is either groundbreaking to some or music to others ears as they listen to this. You contend that teams everywhere need to join in the future, this new future of work. In fact, the book you wrote in 2019, Brave New Work so simple to follow, the instruction and the data that you provide is so groundbreaking. You are the founder of the ready. Let me tell our listeners that the ready is a global organizational transformation and coaching practice. You help companies of all sizes adopt new forms of self-organization and dynamic teaming. I had the chance to hear you firsthand a few months back. These words are resonating deeply with me, and you gave so many examples as you do in the book, about what we mean by self-organization and dynamic teaming. Your clients include Johnson Johnson, Charles Swab, Kaplan, Microsoft, Citibank, Boeing, Macy's, MailChimp, Airbnb, New York Public Radio, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, Dropbox we could go on Also. 

You're the founder of this amazing SaaS startup. By the way, for our listeners who don't know what SaaS means, it's software as a service. You're the founder of Murmur. You first told us about this a few months ago. I'm amazed and really excited to have you share this with our listeners that you help teams improve through the magic of working agreements. This platform allows teams to connect and define the ways in which they share and do their work. There's so much we have to dig into with that. You also are the co-host of Brave New Work podcast. I was looking on there today just to. I've listened to your podcast, but the topics that you're covering in this podcast are relevant for any organization that is struggling in the ways in which we described earlier here in your introduction, which is retention, engagement, bottom line results, ability to innovate you name it. We're all struggling, and for the same reasons. Aaron, thank you so much for giving us your time today and for sharing your expertise with us. 

0:04:13 - Aaron
I'm so happy to do it. I want to thank everyone for listening to all of that. It's too much intro, but it does maybe help set the table. 

0:04:24 - John
Let's start with Murmur, if that's okay, because you shared this a little bit more about it. When we were in Boston we had a chance to talk, set the stage for us, give us some context of Murmur and what that is all about. 

0:04:37 - Aaron
Yeah, I think the thing I've realized building businesses I think I'm on my fifth or sixth now and working with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of companies is that scaling culture is really, really hard. It is hard to take what is special and interesting and distinct about a group of people when you're five or 10 or 15 people and preserve that magic and that lightning in a bottle when you are a thousand or 1500 or 15,000. One of the reasons for that is that the way we show up to work, the way we work, the company itself really is just a collection of agreements. It's a collection of implicit and explicit agreements, things that we have said or true and are written down somewhere, and things that we just know as the social storytelling of the firm. This is who we are, this is how we work, this is what makes us us. 

Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of systems in place right now to actually make those agreements. We don't have systems in place to make decisions and we certainly don't have systems in place to do those things together. When I tell folks that one of the keys to creating a culture of agreements a culture that is highly adaptive and fulfilling and meaningful and connected one of those keys is being able to let everyone have a voice in how they work together. It sounds great Everybody sort of wears the t-shirt but nobody knows how to actually do that day to day. How do you give everyone a voice without slowing down, without becoming a bureaucracy, without dying in consensus, theater or whatever can happen when we try to include too many people? 

Most management experts would say, no, let's make sure that we're all just going fast and that leaders are making decisive, critical decisions and we're all just following in their footsteps. I actually feel like there's a third way here, and that's what murmur is all about. What it represents is a system for making agreements together with your colleagues Could be in your team that you work with most, could be across teams, could be across individuals, but making working agreements about everything from policies to processes, to norms, to your purpose, your principles, the meetings that you hold, the roles that you hold, the charters for the teams that you operate All those things are agreements and they can be documented in murmur. Importantly, murmur allows you to make an asynchronous or a decision without a meeting together in the tool, by going through what we call the murmur method, which is basically just a consent-based decision-making approach that has been proven over the last 50 to 60 years to be a really great way to operate a self-managing or a self-organizing system. 

0:07:20 - John
You've given us some great context. Any entrepreneur, you have this moment and take us back to that moment or when murmur really started to take shape for you up here I'm pointing to my head, but it's Aaron's head from that point in how it sort of hit this genesis and then move forward. 

0:07:39 - Aaron
Well, it's funny. The idea has been in my head for close to a decade. We have been talking about having a place on the web to share how we work Colleagues and I for years and years and years. Right, there's a GitHub for code. Everybody shares their code and brought in forks and branches and advises each other on their code, but there's no GitHub for how we work. There's no GitHub for decisions. There's no GitHub for working agreements. I think that's weird in 2022. And so we've always longed for that, but it has not felt like the right moment for a different way of thinking about that. It felt like maybe the market wasn't quite there and it was too fringe an idea. And then 2020 rolled around and there were 4 to 5 billion people suddenly doing remote work overnight and there was a great resignation and there was a lift in DEI topics at work and there was a Web3 movement in an ownership economy and crypto happening and suddenly I was like this looks like the wave I was waiting for. 

0:08:36 - John
This is the event. 

0:08:37 - Aaron
Yeah, yeah, there's a real gross dissatisfaction with the work status quo, and I think there's an openness now, a different kind of openness to trying something new. So that was a piece of it. And then, candidly, the other piece of it was that I was trapped at home for the first time in years. I mean, I was on a plane every week doing speeches all over the world and really engaging with teams all over the world, and suddenly I was trapped at home. So I actually started about four or five different new projects when I was in this room during 2020. And this was the one that really caught, but I was in a like be creative to stay sane mode, right. 

0:09:17 - Sara
Thank God for that. 

0:09:19 - Aaron
Yeah. 

0:09:20 - Sara
Yeah, scaling culture is hard. We have all kinds of data about our employees. And what we don't have is a way to highlight and magnify how we work, or to even profile, like let's come together or let's share the unique and different ways in which you know it's the voice you're talking about. 

0:09:39 - Aaron
Oh yeah, Well, that's my favorite. That's my favorite question, right as you, you introduce this idea to a team or a group and they're like that sounds interesting. But I think we kind of have all that figured out and so I'm like great, let me sit with your team for five minutes. Who thinks they have total clarity on the roles that they hold and the decision rights they have in those roles? No hands go up. Who thinks they understand all the major processes in this team or this company around how we hire, how we fire, how we make decisions, how we allocate resources? No hands go up. Maybe there's room for some agreements. Yeah, you know, like we're not, we're not nearly as clear as we could be. 

0:10:13 - John
And, as Sarah says we are, we are all about objective data. I mean, whether it's engagement data, behavioral leadership, dna, psychological safety, I mean real good ventures. We have, you know, three or four platforms on which we base our work on gathAarong objective data, but one of the things that we always would get back on engagement work was you just said it decision rights. You know, what voice do I have, what input do I have? And while that was really valuable feedback from an engagement assessment, nobody could figure out how do we actually make that happen? What are the what's the vehicle or the channel and it sounds like murmur is how you make that happen. That's how it actually takes, takes on a life of its own, so that people can contribute and do have that input on decisions and just the direction of the organization. 

0:11:07 - Aaron
Exactly. Yeah, I mean, one of my friends in the field, ted Rao, has a book entitled who Decides, who Decides, and what I like about that is that there is there are a series of core decisions that you make when you start at any human institution, a business being one of them. That's where it starts right. It's like what is our decision-making approach going to look like? What I like about starting with consent, which is the way Murmur works, is that it just says whoever's already around the table needs to agree that it's safe to try to proceed as we are proposing. What's cool about that is that you can start with just that simple idea and say, great, let's build some infrastructure. Then I think John should have the right to decide when the podcast goes live. Do we all agree that's safe to try? 

Yes, now we've consented to a non-consent decision space for John. We've given John the right to just make that call whenever that role that he holds wants to. That was an actual agreement we made, but we made it with consent. It's like the glue, it's the foundational Lincoln logs of a governance infrastructure, to just say we're going to start with who's around the table, we're going to make decisions with consent, we'll create the structure that the company sits upon and the decision spaces and decision rights and roles that hold those. Then we have the ability to steer continuously because all those things exist, because it's very, very hard to do a V2 of a book you haven't written yet. 

But if I have an agreement that says John holds the podcast role and John decides when the podcast goes live, now we can iterate it if we decide that that's not the best way anymore. Now we have a shared piece of property. That, to me, is the big jumping off point for consent-based governance, and using a tool like Murmur is let's build with building blocks and then now we have something we can look at. Murmur has, I think, close to 60 agreements. Now the Ready has almost 100. Our entire operating infrastructure is there for anyone to see. 

0:13:07 - Sara
That's incredible. You can almost feel the clarity and what that clarity would provide for people. You could feel the space open up. Yeah, totally as far as freedom and activity. This is pretty cool. That's a real practical example. Aaron, would you be willing to share other examples of how Murmur has created that opening or that clearing and that clarity to boost engagement, to boost fulfillment? Where have you seen it? What has it done? 

0:13:33 - Aaron
Yeah, well, it's interesting. It actually in some ways is a mirror for what's going on. If you roll out something like this to a team that is unhealthy, you may notice that they don't contribute as much, they don't participate as much. Maybe they don't feel safe to propose new agreements or to propose changes to agreements. The activity and system tells a story. The story is like something isn't right here. 

What's cool about watching the product is, as you lean into that, as we all do, even Murmur, the company has had periods where it's like Aaron's the only one writing agreements right now. But we know that and we can tune into it and say why is that? Well, is it because we don't have enough time? Is it because we're feeling too much pressure? Is it because we don't feel safe? Is it because we don't feel it's our place? By diagnosing those things, you get these resurgence. Right now we're in a big resurgence in Murmur where people are writing a lot of changes and proposals that are some of which are quite provocative To me. 

That's like the sign of success Is I see someone who would be completely marginalized in a traditional system provoking and promoting an idea that is like core or design for the company. That's just all. That's the thing. You don't really see anywhere else. So I think it's noticing the lack of that, but then also, when you do see that behavior, really encouraging it and really leaning in and saying like this is what we want to see more of, because we need the whole system learning and thinking in order for it to be maximally adaptive. 

I don't know everything, I can't know everything, I can't see everything. I know that. So when there's a little bit of humility at the top, you realize you need everyone else engaged. And the cool thing about making agreements is engagement is actually measurable, not just in I feel engaged, but actually when someone makes a proposed decision. I ask questions, I offer suggestions, I object or consent, I make proposals of my own. Those are behaviors that we can measure and actually track right down to the individual and say this team has a lot of equal participation and that team doesn't. 

0:15:37 - Sara
Yeah, oh, that's fantastic. 

0:15:39 - John
Yeah it's pretty cool, so that's one way to keep well, to help managers stay out of the boss hole zone. I mean really, I mean because, ok, so this is in all practical terms. If we're an organization that's using Murmur, this becomes just a place I am on my computer. It's a piece of software that is constant, correct, I mean it is, there's a flow to it. But if I'm really kind of rooted in those traditional ways I don't even have been trained it and I've got to believe that using it is pretty, pretty easy I can't imagine you would create something that isn't very easy and approachable. That's got to speak back to the manager. I mean, if I'm not willing to really open myself up and encourage my people to do this, I may just be living in the boss hole zone and stifling that kind of activity and that kind of decision making and communication. 

0:16:33 - Aaron
Well, and that's, that's the one principle the product holds. That is kind of an opinion that you can't get around, which is when you invite people to the table to make a decision or, you know, review a proposal to to become an agreement, everybody has equal footing in Murmur that you choose to invite. So so if you're of the mindset of like I want to hear everyone's opinion that I'm going to decide, that's not a murmur decision and there's no way to do that in Murmur right now, and that's OK, I think if you already have the decision right from a role that you've been given to do something, knock yourself out Like there are plenty of roles I hold. 

There are plenty of roles I hold where I like, seek advice or don't, and do whatever the hell I want, but I got those rights legitimately from the team and from my and from my you know my circles that I participate in. What I think is challenging for for leaders sometimes is they look at the system and they're like, yeah, but how do I override, how do I force something to happen? And the point I try to make is it's not that you can't stop something terrible from happening because you can in in Murmur. You can object and say this is not safe to try as it currently is written, but so can everyone else. So everyone has that, you know, that ability to object. What nobody has the ability to do is to force, and so I think that's a trade off and there are real tradeoffs inside that that I think you know leaders will will accept or deny. 

But in my case, the, the legitimacy that that gives the group and the collective buy-in that that creates far outweighs any mandate requirements that I might have. And in fact, the more people trust into a system like that, the more they listen to the people who have believability and mastery and expertise in certain situations, because it's not a performative followership, it's a reputational one. So when I say to the group today hey, you know, I'm considAarong this fundraising decision and I'm kind of leaning this way, do you all feel like you want full consent on that? And the team goes we trust you. It's because they know they have the right to not trust me, they don't want to, right, and so and so there's a reputational reality there that I find far more enlivening. I would rather be air quotes in charge because I have a reputation, a trusted reputation, than because I have the right hat or the right, you know, shoulder hardware on my military vest, right. 

0:18:53 - Sara
Well, and that speaks to the humility you mentioned earlier, which I think about vulnerability. You know leaders who are willing to say I don't have all the answers, it's not up to me entirely. Look at all these amazing people around me. So, Aaron, what happens when there isn't consent? 

0:19:08 - John
I was just going to ask I'm thinking of a couple of CEOs that if you were to present this to them and the level of accountability associated with this is like I don't like that. So, yeah, back to Sarah's point. 

0:19:19 - Aaron
So, first of all, let's say we've chosen a decision space that we do choose to share, so no individual role has the right to take action, which is not every decision Right. So if I look at a stack of all the decision spaces that we have inside our company, 50% are probably just anybody can do it take out the trash, decide to use their car to buy lunch. Maybe 30% are decisions that are held by roles, with or without advice, and maybe 20% or 10% even are collective decisions that we've said no, this sits in the collaborative space, this is not going to be decided by an individual. And so if let's say we're talking about one of those types of decisions, for example, and someone has an objection, they're going to say I object in the system. The first thing the system is going to do is ask them to think about why they're objecting. Are you objecting because this is going to cause harm or because you prefer it would be different? That's interesting. I prefer it would be different. 

Well, the system will say objections really should be about like this is going to move us away from our aim, away from our purpose. It's going to do harm. Let's say you choose harm. Is the harm going to be now or in the future, in the future, okay, so you're predicting things. How good are human beings at predicting things, are you sure? And then, oh, it's going to cause harm. Now, cool, is the harm reversible or irreversible? Can we steer once we see the harm, or do we have to actually like is it going to devastate us? And none of those things are going to prevent someone from objecting, but they are thought exercises to be like. Why am I doing? Am I being pedantic here? Or do I have something that is really important, legitimate, yeah, yeah. And if I have something legitimate, by the way, it is fantastic to object. Objecting is caring for the system's purpose, it is caring for the safety of the home, but it needs to be somewhat, you know, tested with your own ego and your own reality. So let's say I have a real, valid objection. 

The next thing the system is going to ask me to do is say can you propose an adjustment to this agreement that would make it safe? So it's not just, it's a no, because I've been in so many committee meetings over the years in big systems, fortune 100 systems where people work for three months to make a proposal, they bring it in, they trot it out in front of the committee Committee says no, and that's it. Right, what a waste of energy. Right With, somebody is sensing something happening in the world at the edge that needs to be responded to. Now, they might be misunderstanding what's going on, but they are sensing something. That's why they're making this proposal and so by asking the objector to modify it in some way. 

So, for example, let's say, the proposal said I think we should open a Taco Bell in Albany. Taco Bell, you know, folks are like that's a two, three million dollar decision. That seems really dangerous. We don't know if that market's good for us. I just don't feel right about this. This feels like it could be a problem. 

Okay, what's the counter proposal? I think we should do a pop up at farmers markets in Albany for three months. We just pop up. It's a tent costs us 10 grand, 50 grand. We get a bunch of market data. Do people come over, do they buy, do they ask questions? How does that sound? 

Now, what's beautiful about that adjustment is the person who proposed Albany is tuning into something in Albany. The person who objected is tuning into the bank account. But by doing the pop up they get data on their Albany suspicion and I get you know, to save the, the capex of building out a Taco Bell, everybody wins. Right, we're moving forward. And then if we find that we're overrun at the farmers market and people can't get enough of the tacos or the chalupas, then let's open up or let's lean in or let's go bigger, right, but if, but, if the data we learn is like this is a terrible idea, then the person who had that instinct is going to learn something critically important and so, and that, actually, that value of that learning to me as a founder is more important than telling them no. 

0:23:03 - Sara
That's right. 

0:23:04 - Aaron
I would rather have them be learning by doing rather than learning by listening to my old babble. 

0:23:10 - Sara
I mean the fact that it just reorders the thinking and calls out what is so standard in the way we meet and discuss and shoot ideas down. As the queen of pedantics and preference, I come to find out. I love the fact that I would be challenged to really remove, just because I like it better this way. I have that preference, or you know? That's profound. 

0:23:35 - Aaron
Oh, I die when I see a typo in the last round of this decision process and I'm like, is that an objection? Not really. 

0:23:42 - Sara
Oh, well, and there? 

0:23:43 - Aaron
are people in the list and? 

0:23:44 - Sara
the audience are going exactly, if you're not going to cross your T's and dot your I's and spell it correctly. If you haven't done your homework, you don't count. 

0:23:51 - Aaron
Exactly, and I think the important point here is like look at the early story of any startup and how rough it was. What was important was the one thing that was important, not the rest of it. Right, they got the one thing right and everything else was on fire as they figured out the business. That's true of so many things here where it's like yes, it matters to me because of the way I was raised, that the punctuation is right, but does it matter to the sensing and responding of the business? No, like the agreement is just an abstraction of the reality, which is like we're all saying there's something here, let's go do something and let's go learn something. I think that's far more valuable. So I'm working on it, I'm doing my therapy, I'm doing my breathing exercises, but I'm not all the way there yet, sarah. 

0:24:36 - John
And we will be right back. 

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0:25:50 - John
Okay, let's get back to the program. 

The word learning. 

You have used it a number of times, and what comes to mind for me just something we've been working on lately, Aaron is certification around a psychological safety diagnostic, and this is based on the work of Dr Amy Edmondson from Harvard. 

Just amazing stuff, but it's really interesting because they talk about when you have a team that has a high degree of psychological safety and a high degree of performance accountability. That's when they are actually in the learning zone, and every time I hear you talk about people contributing, challenging, safely challenging and arriving at and hammering out a bed maybe not hammering out, but at least collaborating to getting to a better solution, whether it's a tent, pop up, tent for tacos or whatever it may be. That's the learning zone, though, and you really, when you think about healthy teams where the leader and the team members feel that interpersonal safety to be able to challenge and share and push against the status quo, that is truly when learning takes place. So I mean, in my head, I'm sort of making that connection to the teams that are really strong and have that safety within them. I think could use this, could use murmur and use it to its fullest extent and pull all the levers in it. 

0:27:12 - Aaron
But why it matters so much at a context level that I think folks forget is we come from an age most of our ways of working come from an age where the job of leadership and management was to ensure perfect execution. That was the job. The job is the size eight shoes always need to be size eight, corn flakes always need to be crunchy. We were dealing with what I call complicated problems, right, problems that are predictable, knowable, linear, cause and effect problems, and so the whole way of working was invented around that idea is that factory model. That was the job, and so, of course, you want to have a kind of a leadership in that context where you're like this is what's going on, this is the diagnosis, this is the action. 

But now I would say you know, 50 to 75% of the economy is focused on creativity and judgment and creating the new and intractable problems like the climate and fixing politics and all kinds of stuff. And so the economy. None of those systems are corn flakes or size eight shoes. Those are all complex systems that are highly emergent and adaptive and unlikely to play out the way you expect them to play out. They're going to surprise you. So the only teams that really are successful now are learning teams, because they're dealing with a three dimensional chessboard that's constantly changing and so that's just not going to work to apply that old model of like. You know what does it mean to be consistent every day with a checklist? There is no checklist for most of the missions that I hear from teams. You know they tell me what they're working on. 

0:28:44 - Sara
You know I was thinking is you're so easy to listen to? I just wish people would stop what they're doing and tune in to the the do ability of this. Like the mindset is the first part, and then there's things you can be doing. 

0:28:57 - Aaron
The frustrating part of all of it for me, honestly, is that it is. It's one of those things that's simple to say, hard to do. 

And so it does. It does sometimes get glazed over like so much wisdom that you hear when you're in your teens and early twenties and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, life is short. But then when you really sit with it later you're like, oh my God, life is short, it is a lot of that kind of stuff. Is these aphorisms that? Now, that's very simple, that seems very obvious and intuitive. It is. But then you get, you know, in the Monday meeting and everybody forgets everything and burns the house down. 

0:29:27 - John
They go back to their old model. Yeah, and I mean that is what you talked about in Boston and highlighting your book A Brave New Work. What I thought was just so awesome about that, Aaron, was you give so many examples of the old model versus the new model. I mean, even to Sarah's point, you know this is this is not an abandonment necessarily of the old model, but truly a transition from it to the more trust and autonomy, understanding that things are very complex, just as you described them. And we believe we actually believe that in order for organizations to be successful, we have to think about the manager differently. We believe that a reinvention of the role of the manager. It is a different manager than the ones we were cultivating and building and churning out back in the 80s and the 90s, where it was more command and control. And actually I mean again, we talked a little bit about this in the pre-discussion before the podcast. 

0:30:32 - Speaker 4
I mean, I think we're bearing the fruit now of those 80 and 90 leaders. 

0:30:37 - John
They were all command and control and we're wondering why people are leaving their organizations in droves. But then when you hear about those managers and leaders and supervisors that get it and understand this is a people thing, this is a people play, and I got to bring humanity. We have to bring humanity back into the workplace. Those are the ones that are being transformative. 

0:30:59 - Aaron
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, you know, is it a different manager, is it no manager? We can debate that, I think no, no, no, go with that. 

0:31:08 - John
That's interesting. What do you mean by? 

0:31:09 - Aaron
that. Here's what I noticed happening at a Mac. This is going to be very wonky, but I'm sure some people listening will enjoy it. Okay, at a macro level, what I think is happening to work is that all the things that we used to have in monotheistic pillars are being atomized and broken into pieces, and so what you see is, you know, it used to be one handbook, now it's all these blown out agreements and murmur. It used to be one manager, now what we're seeing is actually a manager is a collection of roles six, seven, eight roles. There's. No, I don't want those roles to go away, I just don't think they all need to be in fill. You know, they can be spread out and so we can get mentorship roles and set budgets another way, and we can. You know, there are ways to take all the things that we got from the previous system and atomize them and get them in different ways and from different places. 

And, quite frankly, even the idea of leader to me is a misnomer. I don't see leader as a noun, I see leadership as a verb and I see it as something that people do all the time and, for example, if we're in a conversation about, you know, making a pizza, I'm not a leader. If we're having a conversation about org design, maybe I am. There are people in my organization that step forward when the conversation turns to different topics. As an example, when we're talking about diversity, equity and inclusion at work, guess who's not the first person that should be standing up on the podium? It's this white guy. And that's fine. That's the beauty of it, right? When you atomize leadership and you atomize management, you get a living system where you know the birds in the flying V. 

It's not the same pattern all the way to Canada. They rotate, they rotate and play different positions. And I think the same thing for us. In different contexts. We have different kinds of leaderships playing roles. In different contexts we have different role mixes that accomplish those same objectives. Sometimes, when I'm trying to plan for the future, I'm doing it by myself. Sometimes I'm asking the team to vote with monopoly money on what they sense and experience in the world around them. So I think that's the. That, to me, is the big shift that's going on as we keep breaking things down into smaller pieces so that we can get more out of our systems. Right, there's more when there's more Legos. You can make a higher resolution piece of artwork, and so the smaller the pieces are, the more we can do. 

0:33:23 - Sara
Well, and so not only do you have you provided a roadmap and countless examples in the book Brave New Work, people can actually read the book and begin to understand and frame out how this might be possible in their own organizations, and you now have a software for people to implement to begin to really engage people in a different way and to use the voices in a different way. I think it's amazing, and I don't even. 

0:33:49 - Aaron
I mean, frankly, like it's lovely when people use our tools, but that's not. You know, my mission in the world is not just for people to use our tools. My mission in the world is for people to just ask the question what's stopping us from doing the best work of our lives? And then, when they hear the answer, trying an experiment, trying a new agreement, a new alternative way to address that. So it is about just tuning in. 

There's a section of the book where I talk about how this was all made up and I think a lot of young people come into the workforce and they just assume you know, budgets were done by the pharaohs and they're. You know, the idea of the Gantt chart has been around forever and we have project management institutes and that's just the way the world is. It's not the way the world is. We invented all this shit in the last 110 years. All of it, and the vast majority of it, was invented at or near a factory floor. 

So you do not have to accept the way things work today as just the, you know, platonic ideal of what work can be. I think instead you can just ask yourself what is serving us, what is not serving us and that's what I talk a lot about in the book and in the pot is like just paying attention and saying we deliberately chose the way we work. We did not just inherit it from the boss's leaders, managers and media that came before us. We did not just watch devil wears Prada and go I guess that's what a boss looks like. We actually thought about it and talked about it as a community of human adults and said this is what we're going to do, this is how we're going to play the game. 

0:35:13 - John
So, Aaron, to your point. Well, first of all, listeners, as we always do, we're going to put you know links for Aaron's book murmur the ready, the ready. Yeah, we're going to put it all on the show notes. But for those that are saying I'm intrigued by murmur I mean, what Aaron is talking about is is really resonating with me what would your suggestion be for them? Just starting to build an understanding of what it offers and what it can do for them? 

0:35:40 - Aaron
Yeah, well, I think I mean the first thing is there are plenty of things that you can, that you can read about ways of working, new ways of working that could be useful to you. Certainly, brave new work is one of them. I think Ted Rao's books are fantastic. I think there are I mean, there are 15,000 other things that can get you started on that journey. In terms of murmur, you know, go to go to murmur.com and sign up for the waitlist. Shoot me a DM on Twitter I'm Matt Aaron Dignan and tell me that you did so, and we'll try to get you off that list before the rest of the group gets there, cause it is getting pretty long. I think it's 2,300 teams or something like that now. 

Wow, so, but, but I think this is a learn by doing game, and so the teams that are having the most success right now are not the ones that are like, oh, I don't know, I'm going to wait until I can see exactly how to do it by the instructions. It's people that are like I'm just going to throw some out there, I'm going to take something that's going on for us. That's kind of getting stuck in our teeth. They're getting us debating or getting us talking, and I'm just going to send an idea out to the team in the form of a couple paragraphs and just see what it kicks loose, that they don't hold it so heavily. So I think that's the place to start is grab an hour with the team, get on a whiteboard virtual or physical and just ask the question where's the tension in the system right now? What's unclear, what is debatable, what is challenging? Let's talk about what that stuff is. Are there things we could try? Yes, great, you go make a proposal about that. You go make a proposal about the other thing, I'll make a proposal about this one and we'll just try some stuff. Let's get loose, let's get experimental. 

That's the key is not to overgrip with the knowledge that this is the beautiful thing about all agreements done well In a culture of agreements. If you do something and the next day you realize that was dumb or that didn't work or that's illegal, just propose a change, just tell everybody hey, I just realized something, this is not a good idea anymore. I'm going to propose this change and then you know, five seconds later everybody can say I consent, sounds good. That's what. That's why we don't have to wait for the lawyer on Friday when they're out of town. That's why we don't have to wait for the CEO when they're not in town, when they're not present, when they're stuck on the other meeting. We just make decisions, we make commitments, we go and then, if anybody realizes that something's off track at any time, at any level, just propose a change. That is the big. That's the big deal. 

0:38:01 - Sara
Sounds a little bit like a roundabout versus a stoplight. 

0:38:03 - Aaron
Well, there you go, yeah that's one of my favorite metaphors. It's awesome. 

0:38:09 - John
Aaron, we can't thank you enough. This has been just so great and I hope we have you back I hope when your schedule may allow it we'd love to have you back in the Bosshole Chronicles and, like I said, everybody check the show notes. There will be plenty of links there, but if you can watch Aaron see him speak, he is absolutely a stellar presenter and his ideas are so, so practical but also just so powerful, and it's been an absolute pleasure. 

0:38:38 - Aaron
Thank you. Yeah, this has been incredibly ego affirming for me, so I needed it today. I appreciate it. 

0:38:44 - Sara
Oh thanks, Aaron, you're a game changer, keep up the great work, likewise, likewise. 

0:38:47 - Aaron
We'll see you soon. 

0:38:48 - Sara
Yeah, see you next time on the Bosshole Chronicles. 

0:38:54 - John
We'd like to thank our guests today on the Bosshole Chronicles and if you have a Bosshole Chronicles story of your own, please email us at Mystory@thebossholechronicles.com. Once again, Mystory@thebossholechronicles.com, we'll see you again soon.