Aaron Dignan

Retrospectives. If you were to chart the most valuable but least practiced meetings, the hands-down winner would be something called a retrospective. A retro is simply a chance for any team to stop, notice, and learn. After a big push of work, or ideally on a regular interval, the team will gather for an hour or two and share their perspectives on what happened, what stood out to them, and what they ultimately learned. The goal is simple: to do better next time. Many forms of retrospective exist, ranging from the simple (mapping highs and lows over the time line of the project) to the more complex (four Ls: liked, learned, lacked, longed for).

Aaron Dignan in Brave New Work

Recognize that people are inherently creative given the right conditions. Trust them to sense opportunity and pursue it fluidly. A true culture of innovation is one where we can’t tell the difference between operations and invention.

Aaron Dignan in Brave New Work

Facilitators and Scribes. One of the best ways to increase meeting effectiveness is to ensure that someone is responsible for the structure, flow, and output of every meeting. Two roles that we have found to be particularly effective are facilitator and scribe. The facilitator role keeps the meeting on track, enforcing whatever format and ground rules the team has agreed upon. That could include cutting off conversational tangents, noticing when some people need to step up or step back, and even pointing out when the leader isn’t playing by the rules. The scribe role captures any actions or outputs created throughout the meeting and leverages any tools or interfaces required by the work.

Aaron Dignan in Brave New Work

Job titles mask the complexity of the roles we hold, and they limit our ability to shape them and step in and out of them freely. Instead, think of the organization as a rich network of roles that can be filled and shaped by anyone. Don’t limit yourself (or anyone else) to one static job description. Recognize that you already hold many roles in many places. Claim them.

Aaron Dignan in Brave New Work

Instead of enforcing standards, think about proven practices as defaults. Defaults are exactly like standards with one exception: you don’t have to use them. A default says: If you don’t know what you’re doing, do this. If you don’t have time to think, try it our way. But if you’ve achieved some level of mastery in an area and you think you see a better way, feel free. Let us all know how it goes, because either you’ll generate further proof that our default is sound or you’ll sow the seeds for a new default that we can all benefit from. In the case of my firm, we maintain a default fee structure for our services. If an experienced member wants to try something different—a price premium, a discount, an equity swap—there are no rules against that, but we want to learn from it. Our members know they can take a risk and go their own way, but only when they think that we all stand to benefit.

Aaron Dignan in Brave New Work

Percolate, a content-marketing platform used by some of the biggest brands in the world, it built a tool called Barista that allowed anyone in the company to ask a question and route it to people who might know the answer. Completed questions were tagged, saved, and searchable by everyone else. Instead of trying to drown a new employee in pushed information, Percolate let them find what they needed when they needed it.

Aaron Dignan in Brave New Work