YouSaid · the spoken record

Aaron Dignan

lines on the record: 87
first: 2023-02-07
most recent: 2023-02-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I mean, there's no such thing as a big company, really. I think the main thing I deal with when folks ask me about doing this at scale is like, there's no such thing as Apple or Amazon, right? Like that's not actually a real thing. There are groups of 150, 300, 500 people that live their whole lives with each other and just like very rarely interface with other divisions and units. And kind of, you know, it's 50 small companies that are just under the same banner with a set of shared principles in a marketplace with each other. But the reality is day to day, the Dunbars number phenomenon kind of defines our working lives. And you can work with about 150, 250 people. And that's kind of it. And that's your company. That's your culture. That's your environment. And so, yeah, if I can get a few dunbars to shift and change and see the difference between a roundabout and a traffic light, I'll take it.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“May or may not support those ideas. And that's enough. Like if 300 people or 500 people or 1,000 people or 5,000 people can change the way they work materially, it's enough to, A, really start a pattern in the business. And B, to me, my bigger ambition is even if they leave or when they leave in their career shifts, they are dandelions that are just blowing out into the work culture that we have, bringing some of these ideas and a lived experience of them working with them. So I think in timescales of decades, not years or months, because we're in such an uphill battle against this other system. But I do see hundreds of people or thousands of people every day at work get it right, even in the midst of a system that is dealing with a bunch of shareholders or a board that doesn't get it or a government that doesn't get it. So it is possible to be a rebel, but the most”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sorts of companies and working with their support team, their technical support team in house, one of our teams was in there for a while and really just, you know, kind of button up against it. It's not immediately obvious that it's going to work, but people were kind of into it and that maybe the top leadership was not aware or totally supportive of what they were doing, but they started to play with, can we make our own schedules? Can we make our own teams? Can we make our own solutions about how we solve these problems and try to drive our support score up from where it was to a higher number? And we had them on our show like two years later. We hadn't talked to them in years and years. And it was like, man, a fire had caught. They leaned in on all that stuff. They practiced. The performance got worse before it got better. But in the end, they were getting like, they were having like 99th percentile outcomes after two years of fighting. And they're this little pocket inside this bigger system that.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think you see a combination of things. Number one, you see what's possible when the leader gets on board, which is hard enough. The example of like the transformation at higher in China is a super profound one because it was a traditional system and it became non-traditional. And that was wild and super hard at that scale, 60,000 people. But by the same token, you see little changes every day in the companies that we work with. So, I mean, we work with everybody from the CDC to the Fed to Lockheed Martin to Boeing to GE in the past, et cetera. And, you know, you never see the whole system change on a dime, of course. You never stand back two years later and you're like, wow, 100,000 people work differently. But what you do see are entire functions change. So as an example, we worked with a company called Bloom and Brands. They're a restaurant chain that owns Carabas and Outback Steakhouse.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe look at greener pastures. And if there's any pull at all, that's the spark, and one can become two and two can become ten. And we have found that you actually need a surprisingly small percentage of the organization to get hip to this stuff for it to really start to turn. It's not even 20%, like 5% can be enough to really change the story.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Option is going to be worth. And now they start to interview for like is this a culture of permission or constraint? They like change the orientation of their approach. So that's a piece of the puzzle. And also you can engage people in conversation and you can be a thought sharer in a system like that in a way that's really quite useful. So just sharing examples of companies where you're like, hey, look what Patagonia did. Look what Hire did. Look what Buffer did. Look what Bridgewater did, look what Burning Man does, look what Mondragon does, look what WL Gore does or Pixar or Netflix or Morningstar or Bert's. I mean, it's just like you go down and down and down the list and people start to see a pattern. And then maybe you find a leader. Maybe it's yours. Maybe it's someone else's who's like, I kind of see the same stuff. Like I'm kind of interested in the same stuff. I'm a rebel too. And that's where you start. That's the spark. So you kind of have to start by sharing and see if there's any pull at all. And if there's no pull, then.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Differently with other teams, it spreads like people want to know when you see a really good dish go by you at the restaurant. Everybody's like, what's she having? Like people want to know what that team is doing. And they start to ask questions that allows you to engage them in a dialogue about, hey, well, what's stopping you from doing the best work of your life on your team? What's stopping your team from doing its best work? And then they say, and you're like, well, we did experiment around this. You should try and experiment around that. So you sort of open up the aperture. If you're an individual player, if you're like an IC, I think you have some choices to make, really important choices. One of them is to decide if you think the people in power around you are going to be open to any of this or not. And if they're not, then I think you have career choices to make, assuming that you have the privilege to make career choices. And often people will jump. They will think about like, where can I actually bring these ideas to life in a more meaningful way? And it changes the way they interview. You know, they used to interview for just like what are the stuff.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a great question. We get this a lot. And the reality is that a few things are true. The first is that most people underestimate their power actually, even in cultures of permission. They have been told no so many times they just assume the answer to everything is no. But if you sit down with the team and you're like, let's list everything we can decide as a team without talking to anyone else. It's a surprising number. It's not 100%, but it might be 30% or 40% of all the possible things. And certainly they can decide how and when they meet and how they treat each other and how they talk to each other and how they make decisions together and what their interpretation of the mission is. And like they have, they have more territory than they think. So at a minimum, if at least you're a leader of a team anywhere in the hierarchy, you have a large menu of options of things you can do. And we have found through trial and error that when those individual teams start to operate differently and then interface.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or the fabric of the team as a result of that retro in two or three small ways. And then you've got your juice for the squeeze. And then if other things change too, because individuals take action, that's great. Like we always want to hope for that. But if I don't get two or three agreement shifts out of a retro, I'm really disappointed”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Step back or put on music, or who knows what, right? But you got to do something. And then the last bit, which is the one I'm most obsessed with with what we're building and thinking about, is what do you do with the insights? And that's where most teams really fall down. So they have good inputs, they have good sorting, they have good conversations, and they really come up with some cool ideas. Like, we need to change the way we do this process. We need to change the way we pair program. We need to think about this customer issue that we didn't think about this time. And then it kind of goes to die. Like it kind of just goes on the cutting room floor because we don't have a way of operationalizing that stuff. And that's where it can be really, really cool to have a culture of agreements already in place is that you know what to do with it. You're like, oh, this feels like an agreement that we need to make, or this feels like we need to change an agreement we already have. And so it moves into the governance space instead of the like to-do list space. And you actually change the fabric of the company as a result.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they have software that does this, but the prompts are really, really good. And that helps to make the conversation more profound. And in fact, the answers people give when they first feed the beast of like noticings and observations, that's sort of important. But it's actually the conversation that happens as you start to group them and talk about them and theme them and figure out what went on that's most important. So it's the group sense making that matters most. So if I don't see conversation happening when I'm facilitating a retro, that's my first clue that we're not doing the right stuff. And so I'll try to figure out why is the conversation not happening? Is it not, and it's bubbliness, it's burstiness, I think, is what Adam Grant would call it. Like, you want burstiness in the conversation where people are talking over each other. They're so excited to share what they're noticing about that particular issue or area. If you don't see that, then you may have to change the question or you may have to change the participants or have some people step forward.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then, when you get to the big one, it's kind of like a little bit of the air's out of the balloon, and you have a little sense of where your colleagues' heads are at and where you're at. So now it's safe. And now it's like, all right, let's actually make sense of this thing. So that's sort of the before aspect is coming in with a little bit of flow already happening, not clenched. The middle part is about having the right questions and the right structure. So it's really easy to have a retro that is boring and stale and asks a question that doesn't provoke. And ideally, you want to have a retro that really challenges you. And so a friend of ours.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's probably three things about retrospectives that are interesting. It's the before, during, and after aspect of it. So the before aspect is if you don't have a culture of communication and authentic communication, what Jim would talk about, right? Like really, you know, Jim Defmer talking about like being conscious and authentic and being in that kind of connection. If you don't have that, then you can show up to the retro and everybody's clenched. Everybody's tight because we haven't, we have no information essentially about how we did. And so we're just waiting to see what negative or fearful or challenging or threatening things might come up. But if you have a culture of feedback and constant flow, if you have, we do my co-host, Rodney talks about him as hot washes, like a hot wash after every engagement, every major milestone, you sort of say, like, hey, what do we notice? What stood out? What would we do differently next time? Just micro retros.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like a lot like exercise, honestly. Most people that I know, there are exceptions that I'm very jealous of, but most people that I know are like, I kind of don't want to go in when I get to the gym. Like I'm not, I'm not pumped to go work out. But when they finish, they feel great. Like they walk out and they're like high on life. You know, walking on sunshine. Like they're so proud. They feel good. They've got those endorphins running. Same thing is true of retrospectives having facilitated. I don't know. ungodly amounts of them. Everybody coming in is like, we could be doing real work right now. And instead, you're making us do this. And then coming out, everybody's like, why don't we do that more often? Why don't we do that more often? And what I find is wild is that that pattern persists long after people know better. Like even after you've done a dozen retrospectives monthly, you still go in like, oh, do we really need this today? Do we really need this today?”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Design, we would be very well off. Like product is so much more oriented, right? We figure out what we listen to customers, figure out what's important. We make a bet, we build it, we ship it, we instrument the hell out of it, we study what worked and what didn't based on what outcomes we want. And then we come back and we riff again. And we actually look at like, did that feature work? At least good teams do. I mean, not every team does, but I would say more than half the teams in the SaaS game are like doing that every day with their product, but they're not doing that with their decision making. They're not doing that with their cultural apparatus or their agreements or any of that stuff.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't even look back on that stuff very often. The number of firms that look back and really analyze the M&A activity of buying another company and did it work and was it a good idea is vanishingly small. Like two years later, it's basically just like, that was somebody else's decision and somebody else's problem. And it's just like, I guess we bought Tumblr. And they just kind of roll with it as opposed to really learning from those decisions. So having the right structure going in, having the right method for making the decision, it should this be collaborative? Should it be individual? Should it be with advice? Should it not be with advice? Should it be, you know, a collective consent-based decision based on the risk profile? We don't do that. And then when we do have the right way of making it, we often don't have the right structure to think about it. And then we very rarely look back on it. So it's a whole apparatus. And frankly, if we just did what we do with product in decision making and in culture.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That iterative mindset around decision making is important. And then the last thing is we just don't have a lot of practice or experience with decision science. And so we haven't spent a lot of time learning what makes a good decision or a bad decision, how to think about building context, how to think about risks and assumptions and alternatives. And so really building the proposal for a decision in the right anatomy. Like we have the context or the tension that's driving this, the recommendation, the risks, the assumptions, the alternatives, the ways to know if this worked. That structure is not intuitive for most folks. And so when they make a decision, they just make it. They're just like, blue. And then we make the decision and then we never go back. And in fact, when I was studying some of the biggest decisions we make in companies, I did a big analysis on M&A for the book.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the first place that we make mistakes is perhaps not understanding our own freedom. So in systems like that, what tends to happen is people are hesitant to make a decision because it doesn't feel like I should be able to. So there's a lot of blaming the system and a lot of looking for guidance and permission and all that kind of stuff that still exists. When it's like you can just go do what you need to do. You can go play and you can deal with consequences. So that's one piece of the puzzle. The other pieces that we're not great at telling the difference between type 1 and type two decisions, the kind of one-way door, two-way door metaphor that people use just on balance, folks struggle a little bit with like, how would I roll this back versus how is that something I can't roll back? We like to believe that every decision we make is like the end of the world. And it just really is not. Even things that feel really final are just not final. And so I think getting into.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's not even relevant. Like, that is the symptom of the problem. But the actual problem is what kind of decision culture do we have and how good are we at architecting it?”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At a time through consent, which then allows us to create other ways of deciding we can consent to a vote, we can consent to a roll that has total authority, we can consent to a decision that has to be made by bingo winner. We can do whatever we want, but we're building that lattice work one step at a time. And when you then look five years later, you have one system here on the right that is like really spacious, only has the minimum viable agreements necessary to de-risk it, and has a lot of agents in the system that have had a lot of voice and understanding and commitment to that operating system. And you have another system that is basically the vision of one person expressed through their minions in a way where everybody's waiting for orders. And that is really the delineation between the two, and that creates the decision ecology. And so when I first work with teams, I kind of have to start there because how we made XY decision is not even foundational yet.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Buy a Ferrari. We're going to get rid of all the blast radius, all the risk, and then just focus on the decision space that's left, which is all this rich creativity and judgment that people can hold. And along the way, if we're creating teams and we're creating roles, we've also done a pretty good job of concentrating authority to make different kinds of decisions. So the person that got that marketing role doesn't have to come back to us and do the whole consent dance to get a decision about that marketing spend. We gave that right away. So now they are going to be able to execute quickly and effectively. And if they do something we don't love or they fail in that role, well, we can propose to change the agreement and change the nature of the role and what power it has or what focus it has. We can propose an election to change who holds the role. We have a lot of levers at our disposal, but essentially we're building the operating system of the company. One agreement.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Decide this particular decision. And if I don't list it there, it hasn't yet been concentrated. So we make a role together as a set of founders and we say, marketing's a role, here's all the details, here are the qualifications, here are the evaluation criteria for that role. We've now created an agreement. It's written down. And now we put Sally into it and we elect her into it even, let's be really radical. So we don't even just pick, we elect who's going to fill the role. And now Sally has an agreement that is a constraint on the system. It's actually constraining our energy around marketing into that role with that person in it. And it was done together collaboratively fairly quickly, maybe in the space of, you know, a half an hour or 15 minutes. It could even be done asynchronously. And now we have clarity there. And what we're going to do in this constraints game is we're going to keep making decisions that way to clarify the territory to concentrate authority where we need to to eliminate risks of ridiculous things nobody's allowed”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know what we're all trying to do marketing. Not very many of us are good at it. Sally is best at it. Let's make a role for marketing. And we would actually write that role as an agreement. Here's the purpose of the role. Here are the responsibilities of the role. Here are the decision rights of the role importantly. So like this role can choose what we spend on marketing or can do whatever, right? We're actually concentrating that authority and not to get too inside baseball. So like unpack this with me if I'm being too ridiculous. In the permission based economy when I give you that role, those decision rights are something I'm giving you you didn't have before. So I'm actually saying you can now decide the marketing spend. And in a constraints-based economy, I'm actually doing what's called concentrating the authority. So I'm saying only this role can decide what we spend on marketing. Before it was everybody, before it was a free-for-all, it was a shit show. Now only the marketing role can”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And perfect and genius. That's a small circle. The thing you can tolerate is a bigger circle. And then there's things you can't tolerate. If I was just like, we're going to change the name to the Aaron Project. You'd be like, cannot tolerate that. So that's the biggest outside circle, right? Or rather, that's the smallest inside circle, excuse me. So now we both have those planes and they're running into each other. We have two Venn diagrams. They're kind of being created here. And in the middle are things that you and I both tolerate. where it's like, you know what? That seems safe to try. That's interesting. That's intriguing. We might learn something from that. So that's the bar for this collaborative decision making that we do in the company. And actually, that's what the product murmur that we built is literally like the tool to do that with. So we're making an agreement and we're making it with consent. And so we might clarify that set of priorities. We might clarify a role, for example. We might be like,”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And worst of all, it makes the idea average. So a camel is a horse designed by committee. I don't know if you ever heard that, but it's like, yeah, the rounded corners of everybody putting their mark on something slowly makes it average. And so when you have a consensus operation, you basically have a bunch of average ideas doing average stuff for average people. That's how you end up with some of those companies that are just like, man, it must be boring to work there. You know, that's really, really wild. And then the third option is consent. And that's the one that we advocate for, at least to start. And the idea of consent is, is it safe to try? Is it good enough for now safe enough to try that all of us agree? So if you think about your zone of tolerance, you have some put a circle around it. Like this is everything you could tolerate if I was like, let's change the knowledge project in this direction. You'd say, all right, I have a range of things that I could stand. And then I have my preference. And my preference is a smaller circle, right? So like the thing you want to do, the thing you think is smart.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which tool should we use? That's a debate you might hear. Or you hear confusion like I don't know what our priorities are this quarter. I don't know what to focus on. I know we're trying to like build electric cars, but what should I be focused on right now so you hear the confusion or the lack of clarity? And so another agreement is called for. And you have to figure out a way to make it. And so what we do is we talk about consent-based decision making at the earliest days of the business, consent not consensus. There are many ways to make a decision, autocracy, monarchy is kind of one way, which is like the boss says. So the CEO just makes the final call. And that has some pros. It's fast. Often it's innovative, but it has some cons too. It's often biased and it's often wrong. And so it's also a little disheartening for everyone else that just kind of has to fall in line. So there's a challenge there. The consensus view is great because it feels like family vibes. Everybody weighs in. Everybody shapes it. Everybody touches it. But it's slow.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, in the constraints based system, we need to create constraints. And so if you think about when you create a company, when you founded your business, et cetera, at one point, there's just the founder or founders. So there's a handful of people around the table and there's no constraints effectively. And the first constraint we're going to create is like, what are we here to do? Or what are we trying to do? So you might make a purpose or a mission statement or something like that. It's your first agreement is what it is. And so that idea of making that agreement, now you've put down the first constraint. And what you're going to do is you're going to then operate everyone's making decisions, having conversations, you know, socially coordinating. And then you're going to get to a point where you run into another unknown thing or a thing that needs to be clarified. And usually that shows up in either debate or confusion. So people will be like, we're arguing about what our engineering standards should be, which stack should we use?”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then we know how to approach decision making for the next layer of the cake, and that starts to set up the possibilities.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But anything under that, it's like use your human judgment. We trust you, do what's best for the business, right? Spend the money like it was your own. So somebody engaging with that who's coming from a permission culture is like, I need a new computer. What can I spend? And they freak out. And they literally freak out and they start like trying to talk to other people and they're like, can I get the MacBook Pro? Can I get the extra RAM? Like what should I do? Give me permission. And the system is like, no. There's no permission for that. You already have permission to do that. You only need to seek advice if you're over a limit. You just need to use your own judgment. And it's this first moment often in many people's careers where they're like, holy shit, I'm 100% trusted. And I don't even know how to operate in this judgment space of like, how much should I spend? So they didn't really answer your question yet, but that's the bedrock of the answer to your question is once we know which of those lanes we're in, permission or constraint,”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And use creativity in solving problems is just massively higher. And they get to navigate that. Now, they're not used to that. So for an example, like we have a constraint in our system that if you spend more than $10,000”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Vector of this company is towards we're going to be the world on electric cars. So that I've de-scoped the rest of the stuff that we could do. We're not going to make mops. We're going to make electric cars. I've sort of focused our energy. And a hiring process is a constraint where I say instead of doing all the possible ways of hiring, we're going to hire this way. a policy about harassment, anti-harassment policy is a constraint. It's basically saying don't do this. So I've eliminated this option from the surface area of all possible options. What's cool about building a constraints-based culture is when you eliminate all those risk surfaces that are what we call not safe to try or like fatal, what's left is all this space, all this space to think. So if I say it's not MOPS and it's not cars, you get everything else. And so the room for people to innovate and use judgment.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our money in, but that's still a form of permission. It's still me giving you this position that I have deigned to put you in. Permission cultures tend to have a problem, which is that they then have to define everything. Because, to your point earlier about judgment, there's no room for judgment in a permission culture unless you have the permission already. So you get a lot of people sitting on their hands. And these are the sorts of cultures where a leader will walk into the room and the trash hasn't been taken out and people will say, not my job. It's not my job to take the trash out. It's her job to take the trash out. So I'm not going to do it because I only do what I'm told. So that's one option. The other option is the culture of constraint, which is the absolute inverse. So you can do anything unless we say that you can't. So now our job with our agreements and our policies and our processes and our roles and our team structures is to clarify what the edges are, to actually constrain the system in some way, shape, or form. So when we create a purpose statement for the organization in a constraint culture, we're actually constraining directionality. We're saying like the”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great question. And how long do you have? I think the first thing about decision making is actually to talk about what kind of decision-making culture you're going to have, what kind of agreements culture you're going to have. And there are effectively two options. You can have a permission culture or a constraint culture. So a permission culture is a culture where you guessed it. You have to ask permission to do anything. So the default assumption is you can't do anything until you're told that you can. So the bathroom pass that you had in school, perfect example of a permission culture. You can't even go to the bathroom without asking. That's how badly we're going to drill that into your head. And so that way you understand that that's how the world works. And there are so many examples of this in the form of instructions and protocols and guidelines and manuals and all that. And permission can come in many forms. It can come in the form of like a promotion. Like now you're the head of marketing. So now you get to make choices about what we invest.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The thing people often mistake when they hear me talk about this stuff is like, I'm just trying to create a full consensus culture, which is nothing could be further from the truth. That's absolutely obnoxious. What I'm talking about is creating an environment where people create the conditions for success together through consent. So if we choose to give me total privilege over our marketing decisions, that's fine. I can go do that and I can go be the king of marketing. But we made that choice together through consent by perspective taking to make sure that it was the right choice in the way we confined it and constrained it was the right way. And then it's off to the races as opposed to all these decisions being made by fiat.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. And there are very basic versions of this, like in Wisdom of the Crowd, James talks about guessing the weight of a cow. And the reality is any one person guessing the weight of a cow is rubbish, but a thousand people guessing get within like a half an ounce. You know, it's just the nature of how these things work. And the same thing is true of managing complexity. Now, that doesn't mean that we don't have moments of leadership, moments of driving things, moments of innovation that not everybody agrees with. It just means that we perspective take before we do that stuff. So if there's an opportunity to get advice and to understand the bigger picture a little bit better before I make a call, I'm going to do that. And if it's a decision that we've all chosen to make together, it's an agreement we made that we're going to make this kind of decision collectively, then we all agree to show up and do that. So it depends on the nature of the problem.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time was a really strong predictor of team success because it's actually a bunch of different perspectives weighing in on what's going on in the world, what's reality. And what we know about complexity versus complicatedness is that we can't describe complexity from one perspective. So if you try to describe how the world works or the political situation or how to win the Olympics from one perspective, you're going to fail. But if you actually bring multiple perspectives to the table and they integrate themselves, your likelihood of describing reality goes way, way up. Actual reality, not your reality.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little bit of both. So, certainly having everyone, if you invite someone to the conversation, which is the choice you should make right out of the gate. So way too many meetings have way too many people, right? Like if I consciously am like, I'm going to invite Shane to the meeting, then there must be a reason. And so I need to make sure that we have ample opportunity for that reason to manifest itself. So that could be through questions, that could be through suggestions, could be through decisions we make together. We do want to have the opportunity to contribute, be present. We build all of our agendas on the fly so we don't have pre-planned meeting agendas that are politically aligned with whoever sidled up to the leader to get the time on the agenda. We just build the agendas on the fly. We sort them on the fly. So a lot of things to try to keep that contribution open. And then to your point about equal talk time, it doesn't always happen and it doesn't always need to happen. But on balance, when they looked at the research in Project Aristotle, having equal share of voice over.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time great ideas can come from multiple places. So you sort of force that lived experience and that learning of that new behavior through a practice and a ritual instead of taking that leader aside before the meeting and being like give other people a chance, Phil. Because like that's never going to work, but a really solid practice with a high level of structure works a charm. And after the third or fourth time, the suffering ends and the insights begin and then it becomes second nature in its ritual. And now I swear to God, if you'd show up at any meeting at our companies, any day of the week, anywhere in the world, the first thing you'll hear is, hey, welcome to the meeting. Let's check in. It's not even a question. And so it just becomes second nature.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They give their suggestions, and then the next person starts, and they're like, but, and you're like, I'm sorry, it's like it's not your turn. It's their turn, and then theirs, and then theirs. And you kind of had your chance to talk for this round. And you can see him squirm and man, when I learned this, I squirmed. Like I was so miserable, so uncomfortable not being able to correct things I heard and build on things I heard. But in the end, what you find is like the quality of decisions goes up, the quality of participation goes up, the share of voice stays equal, and we know that that's a predictor of team success. So you end up realizing like, wait a second, me saying every single thing that I think in my head is actually not important, which is a wild revelation for someone that has been like the center of the universe leader for a long time. And you realize like, actually, the 20% that I offer is really important. The other 80% is not. And I heard several things from the group that I wouldn't have heard had I took the stage and owned it the whole time.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This week, whatever it might be, getting everyone to answer in turn starts a pattern. And the pattern is everyone's talking. So the very first thing that has happened in this meeting is it wasn't the EVP talking for five minutes. And then we started meeting. It was everybody talked for a few seconds and now we start a meeting. And so the pattern has already been disrupted. And what we find is that empirically, for the rest of the meeting, that equal talk time plays out. It carries through. And another example of a ritual we do in meetings is called rounds. So it's the same idea but applied to different things. So we might be making a decision and we'll do a round of questions or a round of suggestions or a round of objections. And the rounds again reinforce this idea of equal talk time so that you'll have a leader who's used to being a blow hard and talking all the time and you're coaching them in this setting and you're like, all right, it's time for a round of suggestions.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the moment of holding it in your head, can you really do it? But we have this practice that we use on the podcast and with clients and in our own organizations that is called the check-in round. And we do it at the beginning of every major meeting and of every podcast with the guest. And the check-in round is a very simple idea. It's just we're going to ask a question. Doesn't really matter what it is, but could be interesting, could be boring. And everyone's going to have a chance to check in in turn and answer the question in a few sentences. Seems like such a fundamentally simple and boring idea. You're just like, yep, everyone's going to answer a question. And it's almost reminds you of that bad trope of like the corporate meeting where it's like, I'm Phil and I'm the VP of Finance and I like, you know, the color red, but actually done well when the question is like, what has your attention today personally or professionally? Or, you know, what's your favorite season? What's something that has surprised you? What's something you're looking forward to? What have you learned?”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I love it. I mean, change the system, not the people, is definitely our battle cry. And my favorite example of this is probably in the DEI space where you see a lot of people talking about inclusion and share of voice and bias and things like that. And it's like, we got to make sure that we give part of the stage to other people and people that don't look like us. And what is so challenging about that, if you think of it from a change to people side, is you're like, okay, great. I'm just going to go coach Shane and Aaron until they stop talking so much and stop, you know, jumping in front and having ideas and whatnot. And the reality is like, if you've done that before, good luck. Like it works okay for a minute when you're being watched and when you're reminded of what's happening, but you go back to your natural way of working real fast because it's hard to hold all that in your brain and still execute at the same time. It's like when you're trying to change your golf swing or how you're jumping on the trampoline with a technique.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's astounding, yeah. And I'm thrilled to hear you say that because it's been an opportunity, I think the pandemic has been an opportunity to play with these ideas. But hilariously, a lot of the ideas that I'm talking about around sociocratic operations were actually born in a school. The Netherlands. And so it was actually a school environment where Endenburg went to school and experienced making decisions by consent. Operating in linked circles, having transparency, having agreements. All that stuff was present in the education. And then he brought it into his engineering firm and brought it into the professional setting. So it's been a long history, actually, of school being kind of a breeding ground for new ideas for this kind of stuff.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the reality is like every kid in the class is gifted at something. What are they gifted at? And we just don't have any modality for that in our education system. Our education system is monolithic because it was designed to produce people for that system I told you about at the beginning of our conversation. It was designed piece by piece to produce factory workers. So of course it's going to reinforce those same ideas.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's even worse than that. So, the old one is wrong, and the new one is wrong. It's not true that nobody's gifted. It's also not true that being gifted is only about math and reading.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fired because they're too radical, or they leave of their own volition because they're like, I can't make the kind of bets here that I want to make in my career. So I'm going to go to a place that is willing to take bets and try to actually change things. It's a talent leakage. So I do, yeah, I think it's a mix of like the nurture that tells us that it's so bad, which is really just moving away from a growth mindset. I mean, the number of people now who are 18 who don't have a fundamental growth mindset, who believe that their skills and their capabilities are fixed and the skills and capabilities of systems are fixed is pretty high. It's kind of staggering, actually. So we have a ton of work to do to kind of rewrite that script. And that's what we tend to have to do in these systems is like rewrite it one experience at a time.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a combination of things. I think number one, there's just an emotional lower brain component to this that has been beaten into us over the years. You get F's in red and school, you get punished, you get sent to the corner, you get sent home. You don't get a trophy. There's just a lot of things that are reinforcing the importance of winning in a young person's life. And so I do think you come with baggage day one. But then there's also just the incentive side of the game. And I can't remember the name of the guest, but you had someone I was talking about this not that long ago, which was like when you play by the rules, if you don't take a risk and you don't fail, the consequences are X. But if you take a risk and you fail, the consequences are much, much higher. And so you end up just the odds don't work in your favor in a system that doesn't recognize this principle. And you end up in a scenario where you're the rogue or the vanguard. And those people often leave. They either get...”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is a totally different animal. And so continuing going 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 make trade-offs in terms of the short-term performance for the long-term performance. And so that is, and again, that's part of so many stories of turnarounds where we had 50% performance. The leader comes in who understands this principle, implements a bunch of things that are challenging for the group socially and operationally. It gets worse. The board freaks out, the market freaks out, and then the big arc up starts to happen. And then it goes to 90, 95, 99%. And you see the turnaround. And basically people are like, oh, they're so brave to hold fast through that downturn. But really, they just understand the nature of learning.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, failure is, as you know, and you've talked about it on the show quite a bit actually, failure is perceived as this real death of the ego. Like it's a toxic, terrible, scary, horrible thing, and nobody wants to fail. But then whenever you hear anyone who has achieved anything, they always talk about learning and failure and how they go hand in glove and how important that is. And so you have to have a culture where failure, we call it noble failure, is understood and appreciated as a necessary ingredient in learning. And you have to have a culture where the idea of what it means to be a leader is not about ensuring perfect execution, which is what that tailoristic version of management was. That was, you ensure perfect execution. That is your job. And now the idea is I want you to ensure continually growing capability.”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, there's a lot of argument and thinking going on about this right now. Amy Edmondson kind of coined the term psychological safety that was then used in the Google project Aristotle research that like teams that have psych safety tend to outperform ones that don't. And psych safety was defined essentially as you can take interpersonal risks at work without fearing for your very existence, fearing that you'd be unduly criticized or even let go. So it's about people taking risks. And the way we tend to do this is by recontextualizing failure”
2023-02-07 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Aaron Dignan: Change The Way You Work · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT