The End of Role Clarity
Role clarity is a symptom of relational poverty, and small team with real trust are going to out-deliver our absorptive capacity unless we do...something.
Clay Parker Jones
Essays and occasional newsletters about the future of organization design.
The Book
Hidden Patterns
Essays
When It Starts Feeling Like a Video Game
The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
The Hidden Patterns Gift Guide
Gifts for the systems thinker/tinker-er in your life. Or for yourself, if you fit that description!
Super Performance
TL;DR: We lack a shared, rigorous way to assess an entire organization – most tools either miss key drivers or apply only to specific domains. By meta-analyzing 102 criteria from 14 seminal sources, from Rams’ Design Principles to the Agile Manifesto to Jane Jacobs' Generators of Diversity, this post
Five Things
Five OD Things N° 13
Company as code; a city is not a computer; AI as cybernetic teammate; a field experiment rewires the org chart; when it starts feeling like a video game
Five OD Things N° 12
Selling personal super-intelligence; trust & safety heading for the exits; raw compute vs. the junk drawer; Wall Street loves shrinking payrolls; the first targets are email jobs
Five OD Things Nº 11
Krugman on enshittification; a mission-driven reset at Microsoft; how Y2K wasn't a thing because of massive multiplayer cooperation; Medium's reboot story; Figma's S-1
Five Org Design Things N° 10
Pattern languages and org analysis; RTO is bad, even if offices are good; old maps made 3D; diverging values worldwide; exit interviews
Five Creativity Things
Challenges facing creativity; owning ideas from beginning to end; opinionated palettes; are we doing zines again?; randomness that didn’t fit in the first four categories
Radar
Daily observations on organization design.