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
Clay Parker Jones
I lead Organizational Design at Airbnb. Previously: August, Undercurrent.
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
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
Hidden Patterns is Open for Pre-Order
Hey there! I wrote a book. It's about fixing the about fixing the invisible stuff that makes work suck. I'd be honored if you gave it a read.
The Changemaker's Skills Maturity Matrix
This development tool is designed to give change-agents inside organizations clarity into their path forward, help them define and deepen strengths, and maybe give us some shared language about what we do.
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
How to Combine Pace Layers, Org Design, and Strategy
4 ways to use Pace Layers in strategy and OD work: 🚀 As a career planning tool; 🎓 As a strategy tool; 🔬 As a diagnostic or sense-making tool; 🎨 As a design tool for value-adding layers.
Five Org Design Things N° 9
Organizational health essential for firm performance; Avinsa; the heat death of Google; team performance research; platform teams @ PepsiCo
How to Eliminate Slippery Decisions
Most of the time when I ask teams how they make decisions, I get a lot of ... silence. And then either: a) "nobody's ever asked me that"; or b) "I don't think we ever know when we are making a decision"; or c) "we make too many decisions to have a 'way' to make decisions."
High-quality mission: necessary but not sufficient
Here are four ways teams can go astray even if they have a fantastic, visionary mission – and what you can do about it.
How to Fix Your Prioritization Problem
Prioritization isn't a tool problem. Or an individual performance problem. It's a strategy problem, and not one that you can fix with a better slide deck. It's about good diagnosis, a clear guiding policy, and truly connected actions... *made memorable* and *made practical.*