50. The Ways of Working Movement Failed. Now What?

It can be helpful to remember that a lot of the ideas that we're talking about is that we didn't come up with them in the 20 teams. Like it's from the 50s and the 60s like my parkour fallet. Like these are ideas and like in the ether for a long time and there's been lots of cycles and they will continue to be lots of cycles into the future. Hey everybody this is Outwork with Ready, a podcast about work design and how organizations can make change work in their favor. I'm Rodney Evans and I'm here with my co-host Sam Spurlin. Companies are facing more change than they were built for. The problem is organizations are still running on management ideas from a completely different era. Rodney and I work with leaders and teams who are redesigning how work actually gets done so change becomes fuel in the tank instead of sand in the gears. On this show we share patterns that we're seeing inside of organizations, what's working, what's getting in their way. Today we're taking a slight detour from the usual and we are talking about the failure in many ways of the ways of working movement and what we are seeing around that and digging into why that has happened. But first we will check in because how you do something matters just as much as what you do. Well this new way of working we are sticking with which is the check-in question. I'm still on the long on the check-in round. Yeah me too me too. What was your first music purchase with your own money? So Sam I am an only child and if there is one skill that I developed early in my life it was hustling my parents for things that I wanted. I was spoiled as shit. So I was being rewarded for something I had done probably grade or cello related. I was like six or seven. I was given the money to buy a tape because I am that many years old. Just real quick a peek behind the curtain my first draft of this check-in question say what was the first CD you ever bought? Wait a second. You're like she's old for that. That might not work. Yeah that's fair. You were right. My mom took me to Bradley's which was like the target of my day. Okay. All right P Bradley's and I only had enough money for one tape and I couldn't decide between Michael Jackson's bad and Madonna's I'm gonna say it was what was Madonna's first record? Was it called material girl? You're asking the wrong guy. Okay someone out there is screaming the answer into the air right now. It might be the one screaming into the air right now. Fair. Anyway with my newly formed skills of manipulation I convinced my mom to give me enough money for both of the tapes because I pretended that I couldn't decide and therefore was so paralyzed that I could have neither and she finally gave in and so I got two tapes with my own quote unquote money right out of my mom's wallet at the Bradley's and that is what about and man bangers both. Yeah all right nice. I'm looking up for a problem because we need to know. Yeah of course we can't have that lingering just unknown in the world. It was just called Madonna. Okay. All right. Yeah that's right. Anyway that was it. What about you? For me I'm pretty sure it was 1997 which would have made me 10 and the memory that I have is it must have been like birthday money or something because I had enough money to buy my first CD player like personal CD player and I got three CDs to go along with it. This CD player was bright yellow and it was a piece of shit because if you looked at it the wrong way yes it was. Yeah obviously. And the three CDs that I got one was just some like generic instrumental piano CD that I wanted to like be able to listen to what I was doing home work or something. You're so cool. And then the other two one was a Lannismore set, Jagged Little Pill, Sack, and Hanson Bob. I don't really know why or how those were the ones that I wanted. I don't remember if I went into the store being like this this is what I'm gonna buy or I would like Bob browsing. So I was just browsing and was like yes this is what I want. Because my my other like musical memory and I didn't buy these these were gifts but I had tapes I've had a James Taylor tape again I don't really know why but I was pretty into James Taylor as a small child. And then I had a same a a dire straits tape as well. And of the dire she's perfect still hold on. I mean it was fine. Of these four musical artists that I have mentioned I don't know that they would crack my top 100 anymore but for whatever reason they were my initial musical thoughts. I love this checking question. Also how funny is it that like several generations grew up being like James Taylor's my guy. Yeah because that that smooth guitar. Dude he's smooth. He's like the Mr. Rogers of folk music. That's very accurate. Yeah. All right Ronnie why the heck are we talking about the the quote unquote failure of new ways of working. And again one other like small peek behind the curtain. This has kind of been on the list for like a long time. Yeah. But something about this week when we were looking at topic ideas you were like yep we're doing this I got a thing like all right you're coming in. Yeah. Coming in hot. I am coming in hot. So really the reason is I was speaking at something very recently that was attended primarily by practitioners and had really grown out of the agile space. So it was a lot of very like well-known agilists. Do you call them that agilists? I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Like I think one of the people who worked the manifesto is there maybe all of them. I don't know whatever. And I was in several conversations with people who had been in the Agil like office or the Agil transformation you know team inside of large organizations that have since been eliminated. And so throughout the people but the whole the whole Agil like office. The whole thing including the people. Yeah. Yeah. And so throughout the day I just was having conversation after conversation with people who are like I was an internal coach. I was an internal scrub master. I was an internal transformation person and it all got shut down. And I was like this is really interesting to me because on the one hand we are seeing the rise of a clear need and a recognition frankly of the need for good organizational and good work design because of AI. And this is right on the tail of sort of the extinction of that kind of work in a lot of organizations. And because of both that and some internal conversations that they're ready recently. And you know I've just been less and less convinced of ways of working as the thing on their own. Now we are like Twilight Zone OGs you are never going to catch me saying that the ways of working that we have taught all of you about on this show are not evergreen and valuable and impactful. And I am now of the mind that they are necessary but insufficient to actually do anything really important anywhere. And that's why I wanted to talk to you about it. Okay. Okay. Cool. Yeah. I mean that certainly tracks from from my experience as well. Maybe maybe the way we can dive into this being the consultants that we are. I want to challenge the premise of the question or maybe just clarifying the question which is just what like what do we actually mean by failure? I don't I'm not arguing that there has been like kind of a overall failure of new ways of working to like change the world. And is that is that what we mean by by failure at this point? I guess when you think about kind of the failure of this why that word. Yeah. I mean we never thought that there was like an end state to creating an evolutionary organization and so so so few companies are actually built to benefit from change. And if you look at like we are looking at the same case studies of the truly adaptive organizations that we were looking at 10 years ago. Thanks so. Morning, sir. Higher. Yeah. I mean bear is coming under bill which is great. But like they're just they're they're just still feels like more participatory more like complexity conscious more like progressive like more progressive organizations especially US based are still very much the exception not the role. And given where things were you know even five years ago. But it's I mean five years go during the pandemic like there was a real momentum around new ways of working. But you know I would say 15 years ago to five years ago there was like a real decade in there that was like command and control is not the way bureaucratic systems are crumbling. There is a better way to do this. We should all be trying it. And I think there was a groundswell that I would say on balance failed to get a footing and certainly failed to become the default like yeah yeah. Birds or or higher or those companies did not become the default for how organizations operate. Yeah. Not Not even close. And also, there's not a general awareness of those companies that they should be anything but what they are. Because the other way of looking at what you just said is like, oh my gosh, we have more work than we could ever do in a lifetime because all these companies are like, oh, we're not the way we want to be. Like come help us fix ourselves. And like, no, I mean, the righty's doing work, I'm doing work, people are doing work, but it's not like, I know for a fact, we're not just like trying to like, bat people away from trying to work with us because they don't know how to do it. Like there's not even an awareness that like there are alternatives to what they're doing. That's right. That's right. Yeah. So that's what I mean by failure. Like I think I held an assumption in 2012 or 2013 when I was relatively new to this work that eventually the world would have an awakening and the future of work would be progressive, adaptive organizations. And that future has not arrived in 2026, 15 years later. Yeah. I wonder not to go like to sociology on this, but I'm wondering if the kind of like zero interest rate phenomenon of the late teens, 20 teens was connected to this optimism that we had around like, oh, there are different ways to work in different ways to organize. And now that we're very well past this zirp moment, if like, yeah, it's even coming back around even harder than maybe we expected. Mm, say more about that. Just that I think things were more free and easy in the 20 teens, late 20 teens pre-COVID. And I think there was more openness and awareness and money, frankly, floating around to do this sort of things. And then COVID was its own beast that had its own very acute moment that needed to be navigated that was actually very much in the wheelhouse of kind of like new ways of working, but nobody was doing that by choice. It was pure survival. They had to. Yeah. And then coming out the back of that, money's not, you know, interest rates are up, money's not free organizations, maybe made some questionable decisions during COVID around how they grew. Totally. And it's a big swing back toward kind of autocratic leadership in organizations and the world. And I think it runs counter to a lot of the stuff that the ready and others were kind of proselytizing 10 years ago. I think that's right. And, you know, obviously the markets are all over the place right now and just like irrational in many ways. And I think that in external environments that feel chaotic and I would argue that that is the environment we are living in right now, like we have tipped from complexity into chaos because there's like things don't actually feel dispossitional. They feel random at this point. It's not that surprising that the power has shifted back to centralization and to the companies. So to your point, in more abundant times where more people were experiencing more growth and more opportunity, there was more power in the hands of employees. It was much more of like a worker-led market. And so companies were responding in many ways to that by saying if we want to be a great place to work, if we want to get the best talent, if we want to keep the best people, if we want to have the brightest innovation, we have to be a place that creates human driving. And now in chaos, there is much more of a return to traditional ways of thinking and managing which is we got to lock this shit down. These people are lucky to be here. Everybody's going to be out of automated out of a job in 10 minutes. We can do whatever we want with them. The market is flooded with smart people looking for stability, etc. So like I think you're right. Sam, I think the pendulum has swung and I don't think that the philosophical shift is unrelated to the macroeconomic shift that has happened in the last 10 years. Yeah. And I think the optimistic take for me on that is just the reminder that things are quite cyclical and we'll swing back the other way, hopefully at some point. And that doesn't mean that when you're in this moment that you abandon the larger project of what we're trying to do, but just kind of keep it in perspective that maybe the arc of transformation that we're talking about is longer than we want to admit. I mean, and I think it's it can be helpful to remember that a lot of the ideas that we're talking about, it's like we didn't come up with them in the 20 teens. Like it's from the 50s and the 16th like my parkour fallet. Like, yeah, these are ideas and like in the ether for a long time. And there's been lots of cycles and there will continue to be lots of cycles into the future. I think that that's very true and I am also like optimistic in the long term because I do feel like both philosophically and from a data perspective. Like we know that just like extraction and overly managed systems that are too tightly controlled don't thrive. And like I do think that companies are rational in general over the long term. And like when that fails there will be some kind of return. But one of the things that I really wanted us to talk about today is like kind of all of our part in this as practitioners. Because on the one hand, like talking to some of these agile folks, it's very easy to do the game of like they just don't they like the man just doesn't get it. And I'm like, that's true and and that's true and there is a part of what we have said and practiced and done also that has not helped. And I also want to talk about that because everything that you and I are saying right now about the broader environment is fair and what we also know is that if shit works super, super well in an organization, it tends to stick around. Yeah. And so like I am curious like if you take the market out of it, what do you think the ways of working movement just got wrong? Well, I think quite a few things. The first thing that comes to mind for me is just something around this tension between truly complexity, conscious, organizational change and all of the gnarliness that entails and the very real challenge of packaging and selling things that companies will buy. And I mean, totally encompasses lots of different things. It was a evergreen topic of conversation at the ready. I'm sure it still is. Yeah. I think I'm thinking about all the time because when you're truly like truly in that space of talking about what complexity consciousness looks like and you start talking about how that shows up in organizations like you can lose folks instantly. You can't only folks with responsibility to spend money and make things happen in an organization, you can get pretty squirrely, pretty quickly with them if you go hard into that. So rationally, there's a packaging of the ideas that need to happen that is understandable and more bite size and something that you can like really sell and talk about and go do and point to as a thing that has been done. And I think there are ways to do that more or less complexity consciously. But having to do that at all inherently is a kind of a just a requirement that doesn't necessarily help the work but needs to be done. And that's just a difficult place to be in, I think. I mean, I think this happened absolutely with the Agile movement, but I think it happened in ways of working stuff as well, which is basically like you have to sell a sunshine zone product. Like you have to sell a playbook or an artifact or some shit because that's what companies can buy. Like they want to buy a widget. And first of all, selling that then does not set you up well to do the work that's required because like then clients are unpleasantly surprised that that's like the beginning of the conversation, not the end of the conversation. And it's just like, there's, I think in the ways of working movement, there's all these mismatches. So there's that mismatch, which is the sale is for in many cases for the buyer, they want the sunshine zone thing, but the work is the twilight zone work. And that's a mismatch. And then there's the mismatch between like what the buyer wants and what the users get. And in many ways, like the buyer who's often a senior person because they have the money and they're an executive, like they want outcomes, like they want systemic measurable outcomes. And they think of a better employee experience through partnering with us as like sprinkles. But they don't particularly care. And so there's a mismatch also there because a lot of times the people that we're interacting and engaging with inside of clients are like, this has like changed my team's ability to like communicate and execute and make decisions and create value. But like the COO is like within one month, I haven't seen the numbers yet. And like there's a mismatch in timescales and a mismatch in altitudes. And so it's like there's all of these mismatches between how the work gets bought, how the work gets delivered and how the the work gets measured, that I don't think most of us did an amazing job of closing. Yeah, I think that's right. I don't even know how close a bull that even is. It might just be inherent to the nature of this system. Because I think if I had to simplify the approach that I have seen early days of the reddit take and other organizations, other folks on the practitioners doing new ways of working, there was this kind of bottoms up to a false kind of ad hoc practice adoption that the complexity conscious view of it was something like start anywhere, start with anything and follow that energy and follow the deeper tensions that you uncover and build this muscle experimentation, which I'm not even saying is necessarily wrong. I think one failure mode that I saw was very few situations that I see where the starting with something and then continuing to go and do the next thing. Like that didn't do too many cycles before it had kind of just fallen apart. And if you're kind of just picking a random thing and maybe only doing a couple iterations on it, you never really get into the meat of what we're trying to do. And of course, no kind of systemic change happened because you ran a different meeting like three times and it didn't solve everything. Well, you're not going to get out from that. Yeah. And I think that like especially, I mean, I don't think this has been true at the ready in a few years. But like, I feel like early days, even projects that I was a part of, as I came from more traditional consulting, I would be surprised by people I was working with from the ready who would like straight up refuse to like write down outcomes or like create a roadmap with the client or like, and we're just so sort of puritanical about like empowerment and emergence and letting the team figure it out and ball ball. And it's like obviously a lot of things have changed, or the world have changed. But I look back on that like 10 years ago. And I'm like, I wouldn't have let those people into the ready to do that now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was why that was like wild. And obviously, everybody was like a bit drunk on like the new ways of working cool, including a lot of buyers. And a lot of really good work happened. I'm not discounting that. But I'm also aware that like, you know, systems do fight back and a system that is designed, especially like when you're dealing with executives who have a publicly traded company, a system that is designed to produce quarterly results is not a system that can tolerate like put it in the hands of the teams. Good things will happen on some timeline. Just hang in there guy. Yeah. Totally. Well, and I contrast that with something like holocracy or sociocracy, which is a entire bundle of logic that in that you can theoretically install kind of soup to nuts to encompass everything. And that also has not been the answer. We're not in a world where every other organization is a holocracy or a sociocracy. So it's not even it's not as simple to say, well, like, you know, if you got to come in with a complete theory of how everything works and then work to install that, I would definitely not advocate for that either. Well, I think you're hitting on something that like I really wanted to talk about, which is when people think about transformation, particularly like ways of working transformation as it was called for a long time, there's an assumption that we're like replacing an old way of doing things within new way of doing things. And like, I haven't been close enough to a holocracy transformation to actually know if that's how it goes. But mostly my experience is like, you're actually adding a new system onto an old system more than you're ripping out an old system. And that's like, you know, if you're an agilist, it's like you're still dealing with like the sort of executive level desire for waterfall type reporting and planning. Or if you're like, you know, into the self-management school of this stuff, like you're still working in a company that has like a performance management system and individual compensation. And I guess this is like a flavor of agile. But if you look at things that became popular for a minute, like the Spotify model, it's like, you know, you and I can put people in squads. But like, there's still a fucking org chart shaped like a pyramid that exists like things are not being blown up and then cleared away and then rebuilt in these large organizations. And so I think that like on the one hand, there's always an opportunity to do things better. And that assumes that those are things that you have to do anyway. And that assumes that there's some capacity to actually learn how to do something better. Like, there was a time. And I think this was related to what you were saying before about there just being more abundance in general. There was also a time where I think there was more attention and interest in learning. Like, there was a real moment there where we were like growth mindset learning organizations. That's the shit. People do not want to do that now. Like, my clients do not have the capacity to do hard shit period. They want the answer from me. They want me to do it for them. And then they want it to be done without having to learn one thing about it. And I'm kind of like, that's your right. And like, if you if you want to pay just to have this go well without learning anything about how that shit happens, I think that's fair enough. Yeah. And you probably will pick up some residual learning just by having it go well and be around. Therosmosis, et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. But I think that like, I'm sort of talking about two shifts in one, which is very long winded. And now I'm going to lose my voice. So I'm going to have to stop talking. But like, there's the one shift, which is like this was predicated on a stupid idea, which is that the old system wasn't there. And we weren't putting something on top of it. And then there's also the secondary thing where it's like, nowadays, even if you wanted to do that, there's no internal capacity to do it. And clients are not asking for capability building around this stuff mostly. Some still are. Some still are. And those clients tend to be the ones that are like experiencing abundance for whatever reason. But most companies now are just like, do the hard thing for me. I don't care how it gets done. Yeah. No, that tracks. I wonder if there's something about really just leaning in much harder to the pure like or debt removal, getting rid of shit that doesn't make sense, simplification without actually necessarily doing it much or anything in new ways of working. Let's just strip out the shitty old ways of working that can be removed without, because they're not load bearing in any way, even though you think they are. And I think bringing in somebody to help you see things that are not actually load bearing and can be removed and just freeing up some of that time and attention and hopefully money to redeploy elsewhere, I think still remains an interesting line of work and service to provide to organizations particularly in this moment. Well, yeah, and I think that a lot of what you're saying now is what the AI transformations that we're part of are about. It's about removing unnecessary process and then automating what remains, which is really interesting. I also just think that I wrote a very long thought piece internally, which maybe I'll ship to the world sometime. And the metaphor that I used because I love a metaphor, Sam, is like the ready and companies like it were born on sort of the motion of playing tennis, which was like being a great tennis coach or practice partner means being on the court with the client and just like anything they served you smashing it back to them. And what that looks like is like hopefully upskilling a little bit as we go. We're all like they're learning to play tennis better. But basically you're responding to what they serve up. So they're like, I'm not happy with how this team is communicating where these people are really laggy and their ability to ship or this group is really slow in doing anything cross-functional or whatever. And you're like, okay, serve it to me and I will like give you an answer that you can go and try. And to be fair, that is what clients wanted five years ago. Like I could not show up to a board room in maybe longer. No, like I couldn't show up to a board room in 2020 and be like, listen up, this is what we're going to do. Like executives would be like, who are you? Get out of here. Now the posture that my clients want looks much more like golf than like tennis and the role that I consider myself to be in is much more like a caddy. Like I know where we are going, even if they don't. I am coaching them. They're still taking the shot, but I'm like use this club. This is what the wind is doing. This is what This course is like, but there's a sand trap over there. You can't see it, but I know what's next. Also, you don't have to know this whole course because I know this whole course and I can see where we're gonna, what 18 looks like and how we're gonna end up there. And the reason that the metaphor works and I love it is if you fold one because tennis courts are basically tennis courts no matter what. They're all the same. They're all the same and it doesn't really matter as a tennis coach if you know a particular tennis court. Like, the geometry stands. And two is because in tennis, essentially, every time you react, you are putting the work back on them. You are saying back to you boss until you get it back to me over the net. And in this golf metaphor, the idea is that I am kind of responsible for moving them toward an outcome that I see for them and that I know is going to work for them. And it's not so, so important that they become better golfers. I just want them to win. And it's not so important that they buy in to the strategy for getting there. And it's not so important that they learn all of the moves. Like, I just want them to make great shots and get to the end as quickly as possible. And it is a different mindset. - Well, I love that. And I think the thing that I love even more about this metaphor is that in the tennis one, you can be very well approximated by a brick wall. - Sure. - Like, that can do 90% of kind of what you were doing in that situation. So like, how much, how much defensible kind of moat is there for you as a professional or as a business? Whereas, a caddy, like, that's a very expertise required experience required. You got to know the course. There's some like real human stuff around calming your golfer down when they're just losing their shit because they made three bad shots in a row. Like, there's a lot of, it's much more, may I say, complexity conscious. - It is. It is. I think golf is a more complex game. And I think that like, one of the reasons that people at the ready, like, you know, in olden days, were more hesitant to play golf is because we really relied on the idea that like, we're not experts in your business. We're experts in how work gets done. And we're the containers in your the contents. The reality is though, we are in and around a million companies and we see these patterns again and again and again. And we do have opinions on how it should go. And we do know when we hear a bogus strategy. And we do know when they're flapping around with something that's not going to work. And we do know when they are doing a bad job making a decision because we've been in 25 other leadership teams and seeing how this goes and what the long term results are. And so I think that like some of this is remaining like humble to the idea that like, I'm not a subject matter expert in the logistics business that like my client is in. However, I have been in more companies in his space than he has. And I have been in more executive teams than he has. And I have the benefit of seeing a million patterns play out over time that no executive that has any tenure in their company is ever going to have. And like, there's value in that. My clients appreciate that. And there's not really a reason not to bring that expertise to bear if it's helpful to them. Yeah, I definitely kind of remember the shift that we made internally at the ready from like the dawning realization that we could be a little bit more prescriptive than zero prescription. Nobody's made the work. I think a lot better and made it more fun. It felt like you made progress in ways like, all right, I've done enough projects where I know we start with these three things. I'm not going to let you like spend a month figuring that out on your own. I'm just going to tell you like, we should probably start here and let's get a move on. And we can save the more kind of co-creative stuff for the things that truly need to be co-created. Yeah. And these days like even when it's co-created, I generally am like, I'm bringing a draft. By co-created, I'm like, here's the starting point. It's 80% done. Because like, again, people aren't dummer than they were five years ago, but they are more taxed. Like nobody I know has more space in their day. Nobody I know feels like a head in their role. And so giving people answers to respond to, not to necessarily like prescribe, like it has to be this way, but giving them answers, giving them options and saying like, look, I know you're full up. I know your brain is full up and your day is full up and you don't have a lot of time to sit here with me with a blank mural board and come up with shit. Here are the three things that we could do to get to the next tool I'd suggest this one. It's just like, it's better for everybody. Yeah, yeah, I completely agree with that. Let me throw one other thing that's kind of bouncing around in my head right now. And you can tell me if I'm just, if it's a cope or there's something actually there too. I've become more okay with the idea that making things better locally in a huge organization is nothing to sneeze at. Some of these organizations are so huge. Like we're talking, you know, 100,000 people, tens of thousands of people. And the idea that this thing is going to become a completely new type of thing because of working with us is borderline farcical. But the idea of a group, a function, a product team, a set of teams, a team of teams, crafting their own subculture within the constraints that they have in this organization. Like I have seen people light up. I have seen work get better even if it is just part of a larger beast. And I've chosen to become more okay with the idea that is worthwhile work to do. Yeah, I'm not going to argue that doing that work no matter what. And people having a year of a better working experience and seeing a better way of working and probably doing better work and getting better results is not worth doing. Like you're already more beneficial and productive than 80% of consultants in the world just by having that impact. I think the thing that I am no longer convicted about is whether the subculture of that pocket can hang on if that leader doesn't stay. Yeah, yeah, I'm with you on that. So that's the only part that for me has become a hinge. I'm like, I have had too many projects of my own where the believer and I have done some like awesome shit. And their organization is outperformed. Their pure organizations, et cetera, et cetera. And the second they leave, it gets snapped back to the way the rest of the company works. Yeah, yeah, I'm right there with you. And the other part of that that I choose to think has an impact, I don't know if it actually does, is that the people who experienced that who now are kind of forced to snap back, to the extent that they stick around, maybe they're a voice of potentially bringing some of these ideas wherever they are. If they're leaving, which I think is a very common pattern, a group really gets deep with the ready or someone like the ready, things are really good. And then it snaps back when everything leaves. They're like, oh, I don't actually have to accept this. I can go. Yeah, hopefully, there's hopefully kind of the start of a chain reaction where those folks can go off and bring some of those ideas to other organizations. And I've certainly heard from enough former clients over the last 10 years who are no longer at the organizations they were at when we worked together, who still talk to me, who are still doing things that there's at least some evidence of that I cling onto like a life raft when things get a little bit grim. 100%. Well, and I would say that like the idea for this episode was about the failure of the movement, not the failure of the moves. Good point. So good distinction. I still like, there's no part of me that thinks you don't need an operating rhythm to get shit done in a company or that you don't need feedback from multiple sources to become a better teammate or you don't need a strategy stack to steer your business quarter on quarter and month on month. Like I am still like fully allegend to the ways of working. I am more curious about the ways in which the systems have fought back and those things have not become defaults in part because they feel like such like no shit solutions to me. And because when I'm in an organization for whatever reason that doesn't have them, it's like actually the lived experience of nails on a chalkboard where I'm just like, oh my god, how do you guys function like this? It's fucking chaos and I cannot do anything meaningful here. This is insane to me. So it's like, I'm more curious about why new way of working and a new way of organizing didn't become the way. But yeah, I agree with you. And also it's like, you know, there are clients that I have worked with who have left their organizations who are like, I am a changed person because of our experience together. And I'm like, that's not not worth something to me. Like that's still, like I'm still proud of that work and I still would go do it again, even if their departure meant that that company undid a lot of what they had done. Yeah, for sure. Okay, Sam, now that we have explored the death of agile and ways of working as being, you know, the possible accepted future, at least in the short term. Let's talk about ideas for what to do because they're still so, so much to do, that's really worth doing. Why don't you kick us off? All right, my, my first thought, and this is really kind of speaking to the practitioners out there, external internal, it doesn't really matter. But if you find yourself kind of advocating for new ways of working, here's my challenge to you. Make sure you can go deeper with any of these practices. I think there are a lot of folks out there who are kind of in this world who can, you know, talk about or introduce an action meeting or a strategy stack or an operative, all of these things, like the surface level moves. But the surface level moves are the least interesting parts of these things. So the example that I always kind of go to is like, we don't do an action meeting like for fun or just for like some of the surface level things that you get from it. I mean, we do, but the actual more interesting thing is how do you help a team start to navigate the realizations they're having around power on this team? Or how do you help them navigate when they start asking for the first time, well, what is our shared work or what should our shared work be? Like that is where you start to make the move beyond this very surface level easy to understand sort of practice into the actual kind of fascia of the organization, like the actual deep parts where you can start to make some of these system level changes. And I don't know that all practitioners have the experience or the deep understanding of how to get to that. So if you're hearing yourself in that, I would challenge you to go deeper in these practices so that you can get beyond the easy stuff and start doing the more interesting things. Yeah. And like, don't be confused about the two because I, you know, I still have conversations with people that are like, it's facilitation. That's what you see. That's part of what you see. That's like not 90% of it. That's the tip of the iceberg. All right. What do you got? Like slightly opposite end of the spectrum, but this is just something that like I've been really leaning into for the last year, which is just orient to the outcome. So like, if what the client wants is growth in a new product line or to reduce op-X or to see a cross functional initiative come to light, I don't really bore them with the details of how that's happening. I'm like, I'm going to do all the things that I know how to do because I know that that's how you get great outcomes. But I'm not really going to bother being like, first we're going to get clear on leading and lacking indicators, then we're going to do roll work. Then we're going to deal with decisions that I'm like, I just like do not concern them with it. I'm just like, what is it that we are aiming for? Got it. And then the ways of working to me, the work design of it all is basically like secret sauce. It's not the product. Like what they are buying is the outcome. Maybe that's like AI adoption or workflow automation or something else very specific. But like I basically do not try to enroll them in the philosophy or in giving one single shit about how we get there unless they're curious. And to your point, it often rubs off on people and people do often say, why are we doing it this way? And then I am very happy to tell them, but I don't spend nearly as much time trying to get people interested in this shit as I used to. Yeah. I think that as much as that breaks my heart because you know, I'm a super nerd about this. And I want to tell you all about why it's really cool that complicated and complexity are like different things and like why it'll unlock a lot of us. And yeah, if you spend more than about 30 seconds on that, it's probably a waste of time. Yeah. Totally. I'm realizing that my other idea is actually the same thing that I already said. So I'm going to come up with something a little bit on the fly here. Fun. I have become much more open to the idea of creating roadmaps around what it is that we're doing and how things are going to fit together. But leaning into kind of like the scenario planning version of that. So it's not like here's the one roadmap, but here is the branching roadmap and the decisions that we will have to face going forward. And we will like prune this roadmap down to our reality as we move through the work as opposed to me just kind of like recreating a roadmap over and over as the context changes around us. So I think it has been useful for thinking about how do these things actually fit together. Like what are we likely to learn from this first batch of work, which then means we're going to either do this or we're going to do this or we're going to do this. And like here's how we'll kind of make the decision when we get to that point. That has been, I think it's easier to tell the story of the larger thing that we are trying to accomplish and how things fit together when you are willing to kind of play into that space. And in my very early days of doing this work, the idea of me trying to predict the future is like, oh, you can't do that. Like, well, no, I've seen enough of this how this goes. I can tell you what are kind of paths that we will get to choose down the road. Do you have one more, Ronnie? Yeah, I have one more and it's kind of a macro idea, but I think it's really important. And it's very related to my tennis versus golf metaphor. So ways of working and tennis were always somewhat reactive in nature. It was always fundamentally about how to like sort of cope as things changed or things happened, whatever those things were. And it was like, how do you kind of like meet the moment that is happening and make it through? And I'm actually seeing a lot of similar language around AI. It's like, how do we, how do we survive as these things happen to us as this new technology is happening to us? And that's fair. Like, you know, I get that that's why the response is what it is. But I think that the golf posture is about creating organizations that benefit from change that are built for change. And if you don't start from that perspective, if you don't start from the perspective that the promise of work design is an organization in which change itself is the asset and your ability to use change as fuel is the only differentiation you have. That is a very different case for designing work differently than how do you cope with whatever the environment throws at you without becoming completely overwhelmed or paralyzed or sunk. And I think that even though that's a little bit like softer than some of the other things that we've talked about, I would like to say, I think especially for leadership teams, if they can start to even inquire about what would it look like for this company to be built to benefit from change? To believe that that benefit is our only differentiation now that everybody has access to the same competitive analysis, to the same technology, to the same tool. Now that like AI is going to democratize so many things that were strategic advantage before, what if this is the one that's left over and what if we pursued it doggedly? I think like that shift is actually the unlock to everything else that we're talking about. I really like that and I'm thinking about the golf metaphor and I'm wondering if it's something like the best golf players don't just walk up to the ball and hit it as hard as they fucking can every time. That's not actually how you play a golf. You have to know when to use the various clubs in your bag, know your tendencies with each club. I always hit my seven iron this far for whatever reason I hit my five iron like 10 yards further than people think I should. I think kind of the thing that you're talking about. Yeah, rather than it being like, oh man, they mode this morning. I wasn't expecting that. Be the kind of player that's like, they mode this morning, that's going to fuck somebody else's game up. But for me, that's going to make me better. Yeah, that's cool. All right. I feel rejuvenated in my chosen career. Thanks, Rodney. Good. That's what we're here to do. Rejuvenate you. That's right. All right. We're always looking for new topics for the show. So if you have an organizational pattern that you're having trouble changing, shoot us a note at [email protected]. This show is edited and mixed by Taylor Mervin at Coupe Studios and produced by Jack Van Amberk. Outwork The Ready is created by The Ready where we help organizations around the world change the way they work. Thank you for listening. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]