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Everything

All posts, most recent first. Going back 20 years!

Speaking

Permission to Move

The organizations that win with AI won't be the ones with the best models or the biggest budgets, although those things will help. They'll be the ones where permission isn't something you ask for. The ones where permission is baked into how the system already works.

Essays

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.

Radar

Good Design is Good Will

Paul Rand, org designer. I also especially like how the essay's title hints at *willfulness* and the last line points at an economic outcome. #nice

Radar

Nestlé Is Eating Itself (On Purpose)

Nestlé is exiting ice cream, spinning out water, and cutting 16,000 roles...and it can do all of that cleanly because of a global ERP project that started in 2000 and took more than a decade to roll out. Technology!

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

Radar

Company as Code

Like a lot of things I write about, this is both a new and wild idea and something that's been around for a long time but hasn't really caught on. It'd be cooler if it did.

Radar

Survey on Hidden Patterns

Please participate in my survey on patterns and performance in organizations, at survey.hd-pt.com. It takes 5 minutes!

Radar

Design Feeling

Naoto Fukasawa designs objects that disappear into use. Most org design disappears into frameworks. What if we took feeling as seriously as thinking?

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.

Radar

The New Five Forces

Porter's Five Forces are worth critiquing but we've got to adopt structures that actually allow organizations to adapt to big shocks.

Radar

INSEAD: AI Changes the Org Chart

It is an article of faith among technologists that artificial intelligence will make workers more productive. A new field experiment suggests it may do something more interesting: make them more social.

Radar

Structure Is Not Organization

Going back to the archives with the original attempt to join hard and soft elements of organization design. Also, I missed a day. Oops!

Radar

Divisions as Differentiators

Every (big-ish) box on your org chart should have a connection to your strategy. (Almost missed today due to bad wifi on my United Flight.)

Radar

The Unbundling of the CFO at Coke

Coca‑Cola is radically reshaping how it leads and innovates to accelerate digital transformation and better connect with consumers—shaking up top roles and creating an entirely new executive seat to unify tech and strategy.

Radar

Great Leaders are Great Followers

...an unpopular and uncomfortable truth for the already powerful. Also: is followership a _stage_ of development or truly a permanent practice? Probably the latter, but how do we reinforce that?

Radar

Enterprise AI is getting stuck on people

AI AI AI but also can we pour one out for Mark Carney's historic speech? Hoping saner impulses prevail and as an IR major I'm very bummed about all the Melian Dialogue stuff of late.

Five Things

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 Things

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

Essays

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’

Radar

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 Things

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

Videos

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."

Videos

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.*

Videos

How to Improve Team Performance

So you want to improve the performance of your team? Start with good team design. I started doing this method with clients and teams in 2013? 2014? and it’s still the undisputed champ.

Videos

Most Teams are Low Performing

Sometimes, it's hard to get teams and leaders to understand that *most teams* have a ton of performance upside. I think that stems from thinking that the average team has pretty middling performance: not great, but not terrible. The truth is that the average team is low-performing.

Videos

Repeatable Workshop Methods

My ~sorta default setup for a workshop these days is to run these two sessions back-to-back: Future Backwards (from Dave Snowden/Cynefin), to sort out key topics that the team needs to address, then World Café, to actually work on those topics.

Videos

Use DICE instead of RACI (Video)

Don't use a RACI. If you must use something like it, use DICE (Decides, Informs, Consults, Executes). It's easier to understand, and shines a brighter spotlight on problems.

Essays

Why Nothing Gets Done Around Here

Hundreds of thousands of hours are getting wasted on bad decision-rights. It’s got to stop. (Contains at least two good ways to fix this problem.)

Radar

The Matrix Design Canvas

A tool that helps managers and individual contributors design systems that get better performance out of dual-reporting roles.

Five Things

Five Org Design Things N° 8

Turns out it's about learning, all the way down: How basic technologies shift strategy; Microsoft's org structure research; X-Teams; building Service Design capability; democracy at work

Essays

Undercurrent Story Forms

Five ways to structure your deck to be sure you're telling a story, not just writing action headlines and bullets powered by chatGPT.

Essays

Why Does DARPA Work?

A few standout practices: Opacity; Outsourcing for stronger internal networks; Deep technical reviews of ongoing programs.

Five Things

Five Org Design Things N° 6

The 95th percentile isn’t that impressive; how DRIs worked at Apple; Effective leaders decide about deciding; Rooting out bias in decisions; AI and interest rates

Radar

The Great Managerial Transfer

The coming transfer from hierarchies of individuals to networks of teams, an exploration of executive comp, and a look back to the 1950s.

Essays

Disruption is on Decline

I think it's because of org structure and approval processes. Implications for marketing organizations abound.

Radar

Are.na's About Page

Are.na is a place to collect content and work on ideas in private or with others – and their About Page is as good as I've seen.

Essays

Centralization (For Marketers)

Centralization isn't a good thing or a bad thing. It's a pendulum that swings back and forth, and the key is to centralize and decentralize with intention. And to learn from what you've done.

Essays

Pace Layers for Organization

Pace Layers help visualize, distinguish, and discuss different kinds of work and teams within an organization. Here, I bring together a bunch of great thinking into a single construct. Enjoy!

Radar

Use DICE instead of RACI

RACI is vague, hard to use, and reinforces the "what the hell is happening here" status quo. DICE is specific, easy to use, and shines a bright light on dysfunction.

Radar

Scheduling at Black Glass

I adore shared scheduling as a tool for designing business. tl;dr At Black Glass we're synchronizing five "office closed" weeks and four mandatory (at a minimum!) weeks of PTO.

Radar

Software for Scaled Organizing

TL;DR: PowerPoint is a terrible tool for organization design, and we need a trusted alternative designed to match our values. And, sorry, leader-owned maps of reporting lines aren't the answer.

Radar

The Trouble With Hierarchy

Hierarchy lets leaders learn more; it pushes the org to learn about itself, not about customers; it creates busywork. A network of teams is the answer.

Essays

Less Strategy, More Structure

Explaining why big, transformative top-down projects never seem to work, and two simple recommendations to fix the glitch: less strategy; more structure.

Essays

Rethinking Dynamism

The truth about most organizations, especially the big ones, is that they're structurally quite fast-moving and dynamic.

Essays

Onward!

I've left August to join R/GA. Some reasons why, along with a few thoughts on consulting.

Bicycles

Moots Routt Build & Review

I'm normally skeptical of any superlative description of a bike frame, but yeah, Ti really does have a glide-y feel to it.

Essays

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

Bicycles

The Waning

When the light changes, bike racing gets...prettier, but sadder.

Essays

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

Essays

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

Essays

Change Activism

“Change Activism” has been a handy if hard-to-use phrase to help me frame how I view change in an organizational context.[1] We invite teams to try simple practices that make it easier for them

Essays

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,

Speaking

On Organizational Learning for YCN

Last year while in London helping Joe set up August's London office – and to help celebrate Joe's wedding, hence the gravelly tone and greasy appearance – I stopped by YCN to do

Essays

Managing August’s Finances

Consulting is a simple business, with few logistical or financial challenges to master. Even so, we take operations pretttty seriously at August. Probably more seriously than most businesses of our size, but that’s what

Essays

Bonuses At August

Occasionally in the course of running our business, we will create excess profits. Excess? Profits? I thought we were a for-profit business! Turns out you can have too much profit. For example, if you’re

Essays

Ownership & Symmetry

Why do founders behave so poorly? Why do they struggle to distribute authority? Why is it so hard for employees to have their voices heard, for their good data from the edge of the organization

Essays

August's Starter Governance Kernel

Governance is recorded as either Roles or Policies. All of it is changeable with data on a cycle-by-cycle cadence, at open, facilitated Governance Meetings. Policies apply to teams that create them, and to any sub-teams. Everything else is up to your best judgement.

Essays

Type 2 Organizations

Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible — one-way doors — and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you

Essays

August’s Specific Public Benefit

At the beginning, August had two key goals: making a significant contribution to human productivity growth; being the fuel for meaningful innovation.

Essays

The New Model for Scaling a Company

Three old technologies (rule of law, market forces, and transparency) can help us move toward seven universal performance criteria for organizations: purpose; fitness; vitality; fairness; power; connection; safety.

Essays

Amazon & Achievement

Using Amazon as a way to understand what works, what doesn’t, and what’s got to change.

Essays

Open Undercurrent

How self-organization helped a small consultancy grow revenue, profitability, and engagement – all at the same time.

Essays

The Organization Is Broken

Are organizations degrading the human experience, or are they poised to accelerate our progress toward dignity and achievement in the 21st century? Yes.

Essays

Clarity Hurts

Watch out for approaches that prioritize clarity above all else. Clarity can make you a cog in a machine, it can stunt your personal growth, and can pressure organizations to stick to the status quo.

Essays

Show Up Whole

I spent the better portion of P1 on employee reviews. At Undercurrent, we do official reviews every four months, with the intent of doing them all in one week while we’re “closed” for renovations.

Essays

Scheduling at Undercurrent

Standardizing timing changes everything. Scheduling and resourcing used to be a complete mess at Undercurrent. Individuals and teams would be double- and triple-booked some weeks, while their colleagues had nothing to do. Building a team

Essays

Organizing Even Over Org Design

A lot of what we do these days at Undercurrent falls under the “Organizational Design” banner. But that banner falls short by failing to align with one of my most strongly held beliefs: that nobody

Essays

21 Rules for Lab Development

Innovation Labs need rules. Here are 21 that I documented in 2014 during my work inside and alongside four different such labs. They work!

Essays

Flattening

Basic premise: because technology (and other factors), firms were able to flatten, putting more managers under the direct control of a senior leader.

Five Things

Five Org Design Things N° 3

Conditions for a team; Measuring team effectiveness; Chautauqua; New customer relationships mean new responsibilities; Why do companies exist; The Shift Index.

Essays

Nine to One

For every dollar spent on hardware, companies need to spend nine dollars in software, training, and business process redesign. (I think that's way low.)

Essays

New Governance Models

I very much enjoyed this article from the FT. I am not the first person to worry about the joint-stock company. Adam Smith, founder of modern economics, argued: “Negligence and profusion . . . must always prevail, more

Essays

Join the Revolution

When every business becomes a consumer, and every consumer becomes a business, we’ll be forced to confront the fact that 50% of our waking hours just don't make sense anymore.

Essays

Four Holacracy Misses

Four things to reconsider about Holacracy: confusing word choices, a legalistic constitution; heavy dogma; a closed-source codebase.

Five Things

Five Technology Things N° 1

Laws for spacecraft design; Competing with Excel; The original iPhone prototype; Build boring features; Your app is making me fat; Rants on the future of interaction design; Why publishers hate iOS7; Big things start as toys

Essays

Four Holacracy Keepers

Four key things to keep from years practicing Holacracy: Rule of Law; Continuous Participatory Reorganization; Structured Decisions; Defined Output Formats.

Essays

Core Protocols

Most employees give themselves over to a set of rules that govern their day-to-day corporate existence. How good are those rules?

Essays

Worse Is Better

I was familiar with “Weniger aber besser”. But until I started diving into Linux vs. Unix (as a result of my week in Vegas) I’d never heard of “Worse is Better.” It’s a

Five Things

Five Practical Things N° 1

Rules for Critique Tools for thinkingAn excerpt from Daniel Dennett’s new book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, outlines seven of Dennett’s tools for thikottke.orgJason Kottke These basically work for feedback,

Essays

The Undercurrent Skills Maturity Matrix

This development tool is designed to give strategists clarity into their path forward, help them define and deepen strengths, and give managers a way to guide their directs.

Essays

Complex Good

Build discoverable complexity (otherwise known as interestingness) into your business and brand.

Essays

Forty Business Tips

These are all really two tips: focus on service and execution; if it’s not working, get out.

Essays

Objection Criteria & Strategy Reviews

Along with a few other folks in the UC “Management” crew, I spent Monday and Tuesday learning about Holacracy. It’s an interesting organizing idea that deserves a much longer set of posts, but the

Essays

Communicating Intent

Remember Commander’s Intent? Basically: a nugget of communicable strategy that helps a team make effective decisions in the face of changing conditions. It’s primarily a military thing, but since we use words like

Radar

On Advertising

There’s a lot of back-and-forth on the internet about the value of banners, the value of social, and whether or not it’s a good idea generally to advertise on the internet. I’m

Essays

On Resolution & Parameterization

Numerical weather modeling splits up the globe into a series of three-dimensional pixels. It applies a ton of math to the data representing each of those pixels to make predictions about the movement, intensity and

Essays

Aviation: Not Easy

From the chronicles of “Easier Said Than Done, Airline Edition”: five lessons on innovation and the future of organizing.

Essays

The Awesome Science of Cheetos

Lots of interesting stuff lately on the internet about food. The first is from the trailing end of a meandering piece on The Awl about a “McWorld” in Times Square. The author is suggesting the

Essays

Commander's Intent

I give you another military process that can be applied to business strategy and organization design. It’s called "Commander’s Intent" (CI) and it’s designed to create durability through simplicity and

Radar

Boris Cube

Last week, my lovely and talented colleague Vlad wrote about three steps to eliminate/mitigate risks in strategy – understand, assess, neutralize – and offered a chart that caught my eye. Vlad adapted a piece of HBR

Radar

Connectedness

Looking at connectedness is interesting. For a post on Undercurrent’s Theory blog, I’m looking at the emailing habits of colleagues as a proxy for the connectedness between people. Every pixel in line width

Essays

Redefining the Competitive Set

If you’re reading this, you know that digital technology has changed things. You know that in a single year, humans create more information than they have in all of history up to that point.

Essays

On Systems & Strategy

High-quality strategies in ecosystems offer four things: loud feedback; flexibility in acceptable outcomes; shared indicators for failure and success; recognized connection points.

Essays

Integrating Loyalty

So I’ve been thinking a bit about loyalty over the past few months. More or less, I was thinking that a new, cool perspective on loyalty programs could be made up of three important

Essays

Building People

Something I wrote but never hit publish on, back in 2011. It’s funny to read this now with the benefit of 10 more years experience and think — yeah, I still mostly believe this stuff!

Radar

Skunkworks

To spare you the extreme displeasure of going to the Lockheed Martin site to find the operating principles behind the O.G. Skunkworks, I’ve pasted them below. The bolding is mine. 1. The Skunk

Radar

Principles for Pattern Implementation

The following seven principles are from a book called A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al., and they describe the method by which builders should implement the “patterns” laid out in subsequent chapters of

Essays

Write Issue Trees

Sorta classic that in 2011, I was blogging about diagnosing business problems on Valentine's Day.

Essays

Krakatoa and Institutional Anxiety

I got back to reading Krakatoa this week – I’ve been about halfway through the book for a couple years now – and I’ve stumbled across a rather interesting passage. Bold emphases are mine, but

Radar

Make Things for People

This one’s near and dear to my heart. And it hurts when companies get it wrong. So it’s exciting to see it done so, so well. Muji’s just released a set of

Speaking

Smaller is Better: Web 2.0 2010

Alex and I were fortunate enough to be able to present something at Web 2.0 on Thursday of last week, and I’m happy to report that it went off without a hitch. We

Essays

The Social Web and B2B Marketing

So... the following is a draft for a little page-or-so thing I'm writing in re: a position on the social web and its implications for B2B marketing. Warning! There are a few buzzwordy

Essays

On Super-Users and Self-Selecting Networks

Digital Media isn't Mass Media for Cheap Desire Paths: Branding for Digital Lives Two decks that you probably ought to read. The first is from Bud Caddell. It's about a better

Essays

Narrative Suspense and Your Boring Site

Yesterday I was reading a profile in the New Yorker about Ian McEwan. He's the author of Atonement, among other works, and one of the key features of the profile was his discussion

Essays

Enough Brand-Jabber Already

Yesterday I was in a new-business meeting. We were at the offices of a local company looking to make a push in the 4th quarter; their brand has been around for a long time, but

Essays

Knowing the Tools

This one's for the AEs out there. Last night I was watching "Modern Marvels" on The History Channel. This particular episode was about copper, and the portion that caught my attention

Essays

Living Your Life Online

About a week ago, I sent a coworker a link to a photo on my Flickr account. Yesterday she reported back that she'd looked through all 2,228 photos that I've

Essays

On Interfaces

It's popular today to think that content is king. People will pay for it if it's good enough, and people will keep coming back to you if you provide "good&

Essays

On doing digital

It starts with a question. Last Friday, Scamp asked a question [emphasis is mine]: do you actually want to My guess is that you can probably ask the same question to entire agencies. And the

Essays

On Stickiness

As ad-folk, we're always trying to come up with ways to make things sticky. We want viral videos to gain traction. We want people to stick around on our site and read our

Essays

Finding and distributing meaning

Was thinking last night... When done right, advertising is really about the discovery and innovative distribution of meaning that already exists. Products, services, things and activities in the world have meaning attached to them. And

Essays

UNIQLO

When I was in New York a couple weeks back, I made a point to visit UNIQLO. It's an amazing store, and if you have an opportunity, you must visit one of their

Radar

Facebook, or, Life on the Web

Facebook is an immensely popular social networking site that works within the existing social networks that thrive in places where young people are forced to congregate: high schools and colleges. Tapping into this existing network

Essays

Collaboration & Engagement

I love the new trend toward open-source idea refinement. It's worked for Russell Davies, who has made two (as far as I can tell) presentations using ideas that his readers helped generate. And

Essays

Creating power

Power is the most fundamental part of human relationships. Platonic, romantic, sexual, political, cultural, economic, social and familial (did I miss any?) relationships are based in a simple exchange of power. One side has some,

Essays

Initially, on identity

I'm currently reading The Ethics of Identity by Kwame Anthony Appiah. I was first introduced to Appiah, I think, by Prof. Movindry Reddy of Occidental College. The book was published in 2005. Appiah

Essays

This is not an ad

So I was thinking about my previous post, and of the connotations of power in advertising. I started going through what I've learned about power, and I remembered that Michel Foucault did quite

Essays

Seduction, Power, and "Cool"

In the last few weeks I've been thinking quite a bit about what defines "cool"... I've discussed the topic with colleagues, friends and random people. While some say that

Essays

Seduction, Power, and "Cool"

In the last few weeks I've been thinking quite a bit about what defines "cool"... I've discussed the topic with colleagues, friends and random people. While some say that

Essays

First Post

exitcreative is now a part of the blogosphere. I hope people read it but I certainly understand if they don't. I'm a young account executive working at a small agency in