Committing to a new way of working

- Over the past 10 years, I've asked hundreds of teams across 15 countries one simple question. What's stopping you from doing the best work of your life? What has surprised me is how consistent the answers have been. Too many meetings, too many layers, too many silos. We're stuck in this bureaucracy. And it's a way of working that was born on a factory floor over a hundred years ago and is still with us today. Almost everything in the world has changed, but the way we work is stuck in this traditional top-down approach that's really inhibiting our ability to realize our vision, to realize our purpose, to do what we want to do in the world. One of the reasons that organizational debt is so pernicious and so pervasive is that we misunderstand the nature of the organization itself. We mistake it for a complicated system like a watch or an engine that's causal, cause and effect inside the system. An expert understands it. If there's a problem in a complicated system, it can be solved. When in fact the organization is a complex system like the weather or traffic or a garden or a six-year-old. It's fundamentally dispositional. It has a way it's trending, but we can't be sure exactly what'll happen next. And we definitely can't be sure what'll happen if we try to change it, right? And so with a complex situation, the problem can't be solved. It can only be managed. It's like someone coming in from the garden and saying, "Honey, I fixed the garden." That's not how gardens work. And that's not how organizations work either. The solutions are not going to come in the form of single moves that we execute once and perfectly and find that the organization works exactly as we want. It's a living system, and we have to treat it as such. And that means more emergence, more testing and learning, more finding our way together. I'm Aaron Dignan, and I've spent the last decade studying organizations and the way they change. And if you join me on this course, we're going to learn how to give up on these mandated, top-down, PowerPoint-driven change plans and move to something that respects the natural complexity of the organization itself, more emergent, more participatory, more about finding our way together that will lead us to the outcomes that we want and a way of working that serves our purpose, our vision, and our basic humanity.