I design organizations for human creativity—and the performance gains that follow
I'm Clay. I lead Organizational Design and Development at Airbnb, co-founded August (an employee-owned OD consultancy) back in 2015, and wrote Hidden Patterns.
About My Work
At Airbnb I lead a team of 30 in Organizational Design and Development. It's the latest stop on a path I've been on for fifteen-plus years, and it's the first time I've gotten to try something I've been thinking about for a long time: bringing two traditions that have mostly talked past each other (the structuralists and the mutualists, if you want the short version) into a single, working practice.
I found my way to this work through practice. When I moved to New York in 2009 to join Undercurrent, we were a practice focused on helping the world's biggest, most consequential firms figure out how to market in a post-digital world. In 2009 we were pushing the rock uphill, but by 2012 we started to realize that the world didn't need guidance on marketing or "digital" strategy, it needed to figure out how to reorganize to take advantage of the productivity gains made possible by new technologies.
So the work changed. We were focused on getting new stuff to market – new products, new initiatives, new services – and we stopped telling people what to do, and instead helped them get it done with new ways of working and organizing. We tried labs. We tried separate business units. Sure, we got stuff done, but nothing really worked until we started to change the firm itself by changing its foundational methods: how decisions got made, how work was prioritized, how work was assigned and assessed. It felt like we'd stumbled upon real magic.
In 2015, along with a few friends from Undercurrent, I started August. We pushed the OD magic as far as we could. August is employee-owned, self-organized and self-managed, transparently operated B-corp. It turned 10 last year, which still feels improbable. And cool!
In 2019 I left August and joined IPG: first to R/GA, then to help start Black Glass. The operating systems we set up are working: in 2023 Black Glass was named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies. At the end of 2024 I moved on from Black Glass and joined Airbnb to build the Odnd function from the ground up. Which brings me back to where I started this section.
The Book
Hidden Patterns is a playbook for more human workplaces: 75 interconnected design patterns across six sections, distilled from fifteen years of practice. It's the closest thing I have to a complete account of how I think about this work.Get a copy.
Most-Read
If you've never read me before, these are the pieces people return to most:
- The Undercurrent Skills Maturity Matrix How to become a great strategist. By far the most-shared thing on the site.
- Use DICE Instead of RACI Why the standard responsibility matrix is broken, and a better one.
- Pace Layers for Organization Stewart Brand's pace layering, applied to how companies change.
- John Collison on Stripe's Org Design A close read of how Stripe's co-founder thinks about organization (it's teams!)
- NEW AND HOT The End of Role Clarity On why pinning down "who does what" is a trap, and what to do instead.
Or browse essays, Five Things, Radar posts, or everything — most recent first.
Other Stuff
I love to cook, ride and work on bicycles, and play tennis. I have a cat named Ian, and I live in Boerum Hill (a neighborhood of Brooklyn) with my wife, Emily.
Speaking
I keynote and run workshops on organization design. Recent stops include SupernovaFest, plus a long list of corporate offsites, podcasts, and conferences. Details, talks, and booking on the speaking page.