The correct answer to a question about the level of distributed authority doesn't just respond to the will of the people, or to some theoretical norm – it has to be in conversation with the market dynamics of the industry and the company's position in that market.
I'm Clay Parker Jones. I'm an organization designer, speaker, and cyclist in Brooklyn, New York. Glad you're here.
Latest Posts
Competitive Intensity, Business Models, and Distributed Authority
The Trouble With Innovation
Several years and one company ago, I found myself in a mid-project meeting with a group of clients from a large hospitality company.We were sat in an innovation room that could have been plucked directly from the d.School…
21 Rules for Lab Development
Something that I wrote in 2014 when I was in the middle of working on a number of in-house innovation labs: 1 Start small. Everyone should agree at the outset to limit the scope of what the lab aims to…
Cooperation & Discord
I'm going back and reading through my old Diplomacy & World Affairs texts. They're useful: Cooperation is contrasted with discord; but is also distinguished from harmony. Cooperation, as compared to harmony, requires active attempts to adjust policies to meet the…
Creating The Conditions
This is what I delivered yesterday at a corporate offsite in beautiful Calistoga, California. It was a one-day session; the ask from the client was to get the team to think big and consider their business from a clean sheet.…
Small Experiments With Radical Intent
Several months back, Erica and I were doing an introductory session with a Global Operations team inside of one of August's larger clients. We started with a quick retrospective to understand the issues facing the team. Along with the usual…
Change Activism
“Change Activism” has been a handy if hard-to-use phrase to help me frame what we do differently at August.[1] We invite teams to try simple practices that make it easier for them to change actively, on-purpose, and informed by…
Peeling Carrots
As I was peeling carrots for soup last night (snow day!), I realized that I always do it the same way: by doing the big end first. If you peel the carrot the other way, starting with the skinny end,…