In his book, The Brave New Work: How AI and the Future of Jobs Will Create Wealth and Transform Our World, Aaron Dignan outlines how automation will change human work over the next ten years. He also explains why so many people are working without meaning in their lives as well as what we can do about it.
“Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan” is a book that has been written to help people understand the shift in how work is being done. The author, Aaron Dignan, helps readers understand how new technologies are changing the way we work and what it means for their future. This book reviews many of these changes and looks at how they will affect our lives in the future.
Are you seeking for a synopsis of Aaron Dignan’s book Brave New Work? You’ve arrived to the correct location.
After reading Aaron Dignan’s book, I wrote down a few significant takeaways.
If you don’t have time, you don’t have to read the whole book. This book synopsis summarizes all you can take away from it.
Let’s get this party started right now.
I’ll go through the following points in this Summary of Brave New Workbook:
What is the subject of Brave New Work?
Brave New Work takes an unconventional approach to organizational reform. Instead than prescribing ways for organizational transformation, the book makes recommendations.
It is entirely up to you to begin the change.
Who wrote the book Brave New Work?
Aaron Dignan is the founder and CEO of The Ready, a coaching and organizational design company with clients such as Microsoft, Airbnb, and Johnson & Johnson.
He has also served on the PepsiCo, American Express, and GE advisory boards.
For Whom is Brave New Work Intended?
Not everyone will like Brave New Work. If you are one of the following folks, you may like the book:
- Entrepreneurs that want to change their businesses
- Human resources and management specialists
- Those that are interested in the future workplace
Summary of Brave New Workbook
Introduction
Are you letting your life’s work slip away from you?
Is antiquated bureaucracy suffocating your company? Is your growth being hampered by hierarchical structures? Are you stuck in a never-ending meeting cycle?
Most employees would agree and could easily add to their list of grievances. This is why we must modify our ways.
There may be a sense of impossibility and anxiety. However, if you don’t want your firm to die on the world stage, it’s a requirement. To stay afloat, your organization must reinvent itself.
To put it another way, it implies transitioning from an old legacy operating system to a new evolutionary operating system that is more flexible, open, and human-centric.
This book does not advocate any one-size-fits-all solutions. It does not provide a definite solution to your professional quandary. Every person and organization is unique. To change, one must forge his or her own path. Consider this book a gentle reminder to keep moving forward in the correct path.
The first lesson is that traditional businesses are in peril.
Let us begin by discussing sabotage.
During World War II, the head of the CIA issued a specific field handbook for his operatives. This guidebook contained instructions on how to disrupt business and communities. It all started with a simple idea: distribute the handbook to supportive locals and launch a campaign of “simple sabotage,” according to the booklet.
A list of behaviors that disrupt organizations and production may be found at the conclusion of the guidebook.
Using complicated bureaucratic procedures to make access to work resources difficult, never permitting shortcuts that may speed up a decision or process, and scrupulously following all restrictions.
When the author reveals this list from an outdated guidebook to leaders, those who view it chuckle. The common reply is, “People at work do it too!”
What was considered sabotage in 1944 is today simply another day at the office.
Just so everyone is clear. Nobody is attempting to derail the initiative. It’s because corporations are set up in such a way that following procedures is considered sabotage.
As a result, businesses are experiencing at least three negative consequences.
As one example, company lifespans are decreasing. Historically, companies on the S&P 500 could expect to stay there for 60 to 70 years. That has decreased to about ten years now.
Second, asset returns are also declining. Return on assets measures how much profit a corporation can make from its assets. It’s a terrific indicator for measuring performance in all areas since it’s difficult to falsify. Since 1965, however, the US return on assets has fallen from about 5% to little over 1%.
The third tendency is that productivity growth is slowing. Despite huge technical advances, we are still unable to manufacture more goods per hour than we could ten or twenty years ago.
An economist is unlikely to be able to explain why businesses seem to be failing. The most apparent response from individuals on the ground dealing with challenges on a daily basis is bureaucracy.
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Lesson 2: Organizational debt is a hindrance to businesses.
Assume you’re employed at an auto parts plant. One day, while running your equipment, a hole emerges in your right glove. Your left glove is starting to fray. “It’s about time I got some new gloves,” you reason. After dropping your gloves, going to where the gloves are stored, and picking up the new pair, you’re back at your machine in 30 seconds.
What a fantastic world it would be if every worker lived there.
Here’s an illustration. FAVI is an automobile company. Unlike other European car component manufacturers, who have succumbed to Chinese competition, FAVI sells to China. However, the corporation hasn’t always been that prosperous. It has previously been hampered by bureaucracy.
Workers couldn’t simply grab a pair of gloves before the new CEO came up. The manager wanted to examine her gloves to confirm that they were in need of replacement and to grant her permission to do so.
She then proceeded to a cage containing the gloves, waited for assistance, gave the person in charge her slip, and grabbed her new gloves. She then went back to her boss to get her slips stamped so she could go back to her machine.
The whole administrative procedure took around 30 minutes. What is the price of a new pair of gloves? It’s five euros. How much does it cost to leave a machine unattended? It costs 5,000 euros.
The author refers to this sort of debt as organizational debt. Many procedures, rules, and structures in an organization no longer serve it; they may have made sense in the past, but they no longer do.
Organizational debt is often caused by automatic reactions to challenges. Our company makes a mistake, therefore we create a new policy or process to avoid it from occurring again. At FAVI, for example, someone put up a mechanism to prevent individuals from stealing gloves.
Trying to create perfect order has a downside; it eventually leads to disorder. Millions of self-defeating regulations come from these procedures, causing firms to fail.
The impulse to solve issues via the imposition of rules is centuries old. If we wish to stop the habit, we must first understand where it came from.
Lesson 3: Managers in legacy businesses are expected to think for their employees.
Every organization is built on a set of assumptions. Everything the company does is driven by them. It’s similar to an operating system for businesses.
For more than a century, almost all businesses have relied on operating systems inherited from conventional businesses. Everything we don’t see, such as structures, customs, and traditions, is the Legacy OS. The executives. Finances. Performance evaluation.
These are so ubiquitous that they are nearly undetectable. Legacy OS is seldom questioned, much alone rethought, due to the belief that popularity implies quality.
Legacy organizations, those driven by Legacy OS, have been around for over a century.
Factories were not as efficient back then as they are today. Instructions to workers were not uniform. In the past, mechanics employed specialized methods. New employees learn through doing, following in the footsteps of their elders. Production was done in an artisanal manner.
Meanwhile, they were often rewarded for taking their time. Machinists were paid a certain sum for each component they produced; but, if they produced too many parts, their employers would reduce this rate. To avoid piece-rate reduction, workers curtailed their production.
This lair of untidiness and underproduction was charged by a guy who loved to measure things. Frederick Winslow Taylor, as his name suggests, transformed the world of labor.
Taylor was unconcerned with the time it takes to make a certain component. He was more concerned with calculating how long it should take. As a result, each stage of the construction process was meticulously documented. Following that, a frightening experiment was carried out.
Workers were given a raise. However, there was a catch. To obtain the increase, employees had to strictly follow his directions (between 15 and 30 percent). It was as easy as that: employee autonomy was traded in exchange for a greater salary. The birth of legacy organizations.
Legacy OS became conventional sense in the decades that followed, with managers doing the thinking and employees doing the labor.
Organizations are not complicated systems, according to Lesson 4.
Without giving it any consideration, does an automotive engine appear intricate or complex to you? What about a mechanism for a watch? Do you think it’s complicated or complicated? What about the weather or traffic? Do you think one is more complicated than the other? Or both? This is beginning to get difficult.
The majority of your responses were arbitrary. What exactly is the big deal? Aren’t complicated and complex synonymous? With a pencil and paper – or a notepad on your phone – you can receive a crash lesson in systems theory.
When we talk about intricate systems, we’re talking about causal systems. The system’s component pieces have causal links. If you take a cog out of a watch, it will stop working. The machine will start operating again once the cog is replaced properly.
In causal systems, there is predictability. By removing a cog, a clock will not do anything unexpected, such as run backwards or play a Beethoven sonata. It’s the same with an automotive engine.
A dispositional system, such as traffic or the weather, is a complicated system. It’s feasible to guess what they’ll do, but there’s no way to know for sure. Making predictions requires an understanding of them. Discover their peculiarities and how they behave in different circumstances. There are no instructions to follow.
Legacy operating systems have a basic flaw: they approach organizations as complex systems. It is assumed that there are laws out there, and that a scientific explanation of work is possible.
That is not correct. When you combine individuals, you have a complicated system. The challenge with complex systems is that it cannot be solved. They are merely manageable.
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Lesson 5: An evolutionary organization should operate in a circular fashion.
Which would you prefer to face when driving: traffic lights or roundabouts?
Traffic signals are more comfortable and familiar to people. In the United States alone, there are about 300,000 traffic lights. Roundabouts, on the other hand, are uncommon, with just one every 1,118 junctions.
In our example, traffic lights indicate Legacy Organizations. As we’ll discover, they’re not the most effective, despite their popularity.
However, there is a better method to organize things. We call these businesses Evolutionary Organizations.
Signals and roundabouts were created to address the same difficult issue: traffic flow. Each one improves traffic flow while reducing collisions. Even still, the assumptions underlying both systems are essentially different.
People need to be informed what to do, which is why traffic lights exist. Stop is indicated by the red light. Go when the light turns green. The reverse is true in roundabouts. Two of the guidelines are to follow the flow of traffic and to yield to automobiles already in the circle. Nonetheless, it is the responsibility of drivers to follow these guidelines and navigate the junction safely.
You may believe the traffic signal is significantly better, given its popularity. Roundabouts, on the other hand, are more efficient in general.
Traffic delays are reduced by 89 percent; annual maintenance costs are reduced by $5,000 to $10,000; fatal and injury crashes are reduced by 90 percent and 75 percent, respectively; and, on top of that, they remain functioning when the electricity goes out.
Traffic lights exist simply because they are the standard. They’ve become routine for us. They’re rather common. As a result, we think they are likewise effective.
Legacy Organizations, like traffic-signal operating systems, are prevalent. People are presumed to be untrustworthy. People must be guided at all times in both circumstances. Stop is indicated with a red signal. A green indicator indicates that it is safe to proceed.
What would happen if this system was abandoned? What if, instead of prescribing activities categorically, imposing hierarchical structures, distrust, and micromanagement, we built an operating system that enabled employees to operate more freely and utilize their own judgment to cope with complicated workplace challenges? That is the Evolutionary Organization.
Lesson 6: Complexity and individuals are important in evolutionary organizations.
When you attempt to change from heritage processes to evolutionary ones, it takes more than “making your organization more roundabout-like.”
When switching your company to a new operating system, you must remember two words.
The first feature of evolutionary organizations is their awareness of complexity. They take into consideration global complexity in general and human complexity in particular, in addition to acknowledging that business is a complex system.
The second feature of evolutionary organizations is that they prioritize individuals. They feel that empowering people in the workplace will help them cope with the complexity.
What are the manifestations of these two qualities? When David Marquet took command of the underperforming USS Santa Fe, he achieved similar outcomes. Prior to Marquet, the USS Santa Fe performed worse than any other submarine in the navy. The Santa Fe, on the other hand, became the greatest submarine in the fleet under his leadership.
That success was achieved using an unconventional strategy. Rather of giving orders, Marquet described his vision for the ship. The crew was at first perplexed by the commanding officer’s invariable reaction to their requests for orders: “What are you planning?” With time, though, the crew started to think for themselves and take responsibility for the submarine’s operation.
They were allowed to explore and learn in a safe setting as a consequence. He allowed his team to come up with rapid and effective answers to complicated challenges by decentralizing control. His staff accepted responsibility for their efforts as well.
In a nutshell, he was a People Positive and Complexity Aware person.
If this advise doesn’t seem any more useful than instructing your firm to model itself after a roundabout, please accept my apologies – but yes, it is on purpose. It is impossible to go from legacy to evolutionary in one step. We’re breaking free from the dogmatism of legacy operating systems. There is no one solution that will work everywhere. Companies must choose their own path.
Lesson 7: Reconsider the structure and purpose.
Organizational evolution has been effective in a few areas. Marquet, the submarine commander, determined to modify the way he handled authority in the previous chapter. Everyone was astonished by his reaction.
How would you feel if your supervisor told you one day at work, “Hey, you should draft your own job description and determine your own salary?” ?
Morning Star Company, a major tomato processor in the globe, does just that. Every year, Morning Star’s 400 workers prepare a paper outlining their duties to one another. Colleagues then review the paper and provide comments for improvement. Community proposals are offered instead of top-down commands.
You may determine your own compensation at Morning Star, but it is subject to peer assessment. Morning Star, which produces $700 million in yearly sales and has been continually increasing for 20 years, has had great success with this strategy.
Morning Star was able to effectively rethink the structural domain.
Here is an example of rethinking structure in a different approach. Despite having a core workforce of roughly 50 nurses, Buurtzorg employs over 14,000 nurses. What is the key to successfully managing 14,000 nurses? There isn’t any.
All 14,000 nurses were organized into 12-person teams that basically ran themselves, including scheduling and recruitment. Bürtzorg is essentially a group of small enterprises united by a same goal: to offer high-quality, personalized care for the elderly.
Let’s speak about the goal now. Your organization should first and foremost fulfill a eudaemonic mission, which is to relieve human suffering and promote human flourishing.
Tesla’s purpose, for example, is to “accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” While this seems uplifting and eudaemonic, it has a flaw. It’s basically ambiguous. That would be tough for an engineer to translate it into real work.
It’s a terrific method to keep Facebook’s mission aspirational and actionable. The company considers where it wants to be in 30 years and then considers what it can do in the following six months to get closer to that objective. With this method, you may simultaneously zoom in on the present and frame the large picture.
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Lesson 8: Rethink the areas of meetings and membership.
The author’s team decided to end its monthly plan review after a lengthy and fruitful discussion. For far too long, the team kept the reality from each other; no one enjoyed the strategy review, much less found it useful. Imagine how much these worthless, boring sessions cost. Approximately $3 million each year.
Employees squander around half of their time in meetings, and the typical employee attends 62 each month. However, you should pay attention to how meetings are run. These divisions serve as a microcosm, a small representation of the whole organization.
The meeting moratorium may be useful in reducing the number of superfluous meetings and implementing better meeting practices. For the next two weeks, all meetings should be canceled. It may seem rash or perhaps impossible.
However, the author found it to be effective. He previously worked with a leadership team that spent 45 hours a week in meetings. They completed what had previously taken 45 hours in 18 hours after resuming meetings after a two-week vacation.
After canceling all of your appointments, you have two weeks to concentrate on the pain spots. What exactly is missing? What issues must be addressed?
It is now possible to reintroduce meetings. Meetings, like organizations, should be organized around a specific goal. Otherwise, it isn’t required.
Also important is the membership domain. Which members have been accepted and which have been rejected? Which members of your group are welcome?
Examine the employment methods to find out. When onboarding a new employee, the company’s goal and culture should match their personality and interests.
However, don’t employ primarily on the basis of cultural compatibility. Despite being an excellent predictor of success at the outset of a firm, it may lead to long-term underperformance. As a result, rather than merely fitting in, recruit personnel who will add to your company’s culture.
Lesson 9: Change is a process, not an event.
What does it mean to change? Change is often seen by leaders as a journey — a journey from point A to point B. Leaders have a plan that includes milestones and a clear aim. However, that metaphor is deceptive.
Change is not a trip, but rather a series of events. One foot leads to the next. Change, on the other hand, is not a linear process. A map cannot be followed.
Fill a cup halfway with milk and set aside. The two liquids’ hues shift from black to brown very instantly. Change should resemble this — a total integration – rather than well-executed planning.
However, in order to achieve such a shift, you must alter the way you change. Stop forcing change from on high. There are no CEOs prescribing what ideals the company should follow. A bureaucratic hierarchy cannot be changed in a hierarchical, bureaucratic forge.
What modifications should you make? You must implement continual and participatory reforms.
Using a method known as looping, it is feasible to assure continual change.
The three steps of the loop include identifying tensions, suggesting practices, and executing tests.
Loops might be big or little, rapid or slow, big or small. Consider a loop that happens inside a team as an example.
A pre-meeting check-in helps alleviate the concern that “only the loudest voices are heard.” Assume the group senses a tense situation in which “only the loudest shouts are heard.” “How do colors reflect your mood?” you might inquire of the team.
Now go ahead and try it! Let’s walk around the room in a circle and observe how everyone reacts. Is it about bringing people together and allowing their opinions to be heard? Experiment until the tension goes away. If not, continue to propose ideas and undertake trials.
There are too many conflicts in the world to name them all, and what works for one team or organization may not work for another. Complex systems necessitate complex responses. You’ll be well on your way to accomplishing the finest job of your life if you keep this in mind and enable your colleagues and coworkers to do the same.
Final Thoughts
Organizations must adapt to the current world. The majority of them run Legacy OS, an operating system inherited from 19th-century manufacturers. More control is thought to result in better outcomes.
Organizations should be patterned around roundabouts rather than traffic lights to decrease control. If you use this method, your organization may become an Evolutionary Organization in no time. The initial step is to choose which domain to target.
Additional Reading
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The “Brave New Work” is a book written by Aaron Dignan. The book talks about how the world of work has changed in recent years. It discusses the effects that technology and globalization have had on the labor market, as well as what to do about it. Reference: murmur aaron dignan.
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