118. Finding Your Operating Rhythm
About this episode:
Original Air Date: March 21, 2022We’ve talked a lot about action meetings on the show. And retrospectives. And governance. And strategy sessions. Maybe you’ve wondered, “What do these meetings have to do with one another? How do they actually interact? Do they?” We’re glad you asked. Because when woven together, they constitute an organization’s operating rhythm—or heartbeat. And sweating the design of that pulse—intentionally building the structural relationship from beat to beat—is what allows teams to unlock their most important work and make progress.
In this episode of Brave New Work, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans break down an OG operating rhythm’s fundamental parts, explore how it enables a system to move work forward, and dish about the fruits (greater clarity, efficiency, and accountability to name a few) of this labor.
Mentioned in this episode:
“action meeting episode”: BNW Ep. 80 with Sam Spurlin
“retrospective episode”: BNW Ep. 10 with Jordan Husney
Ted Rau and sociocracy: BNW Ep. 73 with Ted Rau
“consent-based decision making: BNW Ep. 43
“async work”: AWWTR Ep. 7
In this episode:
Aaron Dignan
Rodney Evans
Listen now:
Episode transcript:
Aaron Dignan:
To me, this is the equivalent of the great idea you write down when you wake up from a dream, and then you look at it in the morning. And in the dream you're like, "Oh my God, I've solved the fucking world equation." And then you wake up and it's coffee cups that are taller.
[Intro music]
Rodney Evans:
Hey, everybody, welcome to the show. This is Brave New Work, a podcast about reinventing our organizations and the search for a more adaptive and human way of working. I'm Rodney Evans and I'm joined as always by my co-host, Aaron Dignan.
Aaron Dignan:
Salutations.
Rodney Evans:
On today's episode, we are going to talk about one of my most favorite things to talk about, which is an operating rhythm, also known as the recurring meetings that are like the heartbeat of your organization. But before we unpack that, we're going to do a check-in round, which incidentally is part of a lot of meetings.
Aaron Dignan:
That's right. That's right, at the front end of most of the pieces of the op rhythm, and I'm going to do it today. I brought in a fun question, but a challenging one as well, which is what is a lie that you tell yourself? So we'll start with you and then I'll break it down.
Rodney Evans:
It's so hard. Do you find it hard to know when you're lying to yourself because I do?
Aaron Dignan:
Until I do it over and over again. It doesn't pop up until I'm like, "Oh, I do that a lot."
Rodney Evans:
Because it's like, what's an aspiration that I'm holding and what's just a myth? Those things feel very closely connected to me. Okay, a lie that I tell myself frequently is about working less. It's not number of hours it is, I will go through a phase of shedding things that I don't feel like are important and really clearing space in my day to work on things I do think are important. And the lie that I tell myself is often that I will stick to that forever. I'll step into that new thing and I'm like, "This is my life now forever." That is a lie. And what that lie prevents me from doing is looking critically at when that's no longer the case.
Aaron Dignan:
That makes sense. That's a good one. For me, related, it is work related I think, although just general life as well. It is, I'm going to catch up with my to-do list. I hold out hope. I have held it out for years, decades even, where I'm like, "You know what? I'm just one good couple days away from inbox zero on my task list." And it's a total nonsense lie because I create more tasks for myself than anyone on Earth.
Rodney Evans:
Sure.
Aaron Dignan:
Because I'm always trying to start stuff and if you didn't start stuff, there wouldn't be no stuff.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, you're both the rabbit and the greyhound.
Aaron Dignan:
Exactly. Yeah. But I do still believe, even today as I say this, I'm like, "You know what? I am going to get it. I'm going to catch that rabbit."
Rodney Evans:
April's the month where that to-do list is going to be empty. All right.
Aaron Dignan:
This is it. This is it, baby. It's like a lotto ticket.
Rodney Evans:
It'll probably happen this time.
Why every team needs an operating rhythm
Aaron Dignan:
All right, so today's topic is, as you said, how to think about an operating rhythm for your team or team of teams or organization. And I definitely want to start by asking you and you alone, what is an op rhythm and why do you never shut up about them?
Rodney Evans:
It's a fair question and I don't, and I'm not going to because it's so important. Okay, so I learned about operating rhythms from people who had been in the military at my former job. And the way that I learned was this is the heartbeat of a team. And if you don't have these routines that are really held dear and protected at any cost, you can't ever perform as a group.
And to be totally honest, I was probably a little skeptical because I was like, "Wait, are we just talking about meetings? Are you guys just talking about weekly meetings?" But what I learned over time and we'll get into in this episode is ... Here's the image that just this moment popped in my mind. You know when you're redesigning a room in house or a whole apartment when you're living in New York and you only have two rooms?
Aaron Dignan:
I'm familiar.
Rodney Evans:
And you don't have a first thing to anchor to.
Aaron Dignan:
Yes.
Rodney Evans:
And so you're like, "I don't know, should we paint it blue? Or should we get a geometric rug? Or should we do a fresco on the ceiling? Or should we knock out a wall?" And it's like, you have to pick something to start with that you can design around. And to me-
Aaron Dignan:
The rug really ties the room together.
Rodney Evans:
The rug really ties the room together, but more importantly, the rug is the thing that tells you what everything else is going to be that will be tied together. That's what an operating rhythm does. It's like, it is the rug that then you're like, "Okay, now I know what paint color and I know what couch and I know what furniture." And without the rug, you'd just keep swirling around of being like, "I don't know, should we start with sconces?"
So that's why it's so important because it's the routine that keeps us on the rails and it's the place where we know we can get our needs met and it's like the lifeblood and you can't work without it.
Aaron Dignan:
How do you find most teams are doing on this? So in terms of having some kind of a heartbeat, some kind of a structural recurring rhythm to the way they meet, do most teams have any patterns around this or do you find that it's like the Wild West?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, they do have patterns but they're garbage.
Aaron Dignan:
Okay, garbage patterns.
Rodney Evans:
But I also want to hear your answer to that same question. So here's what I see. I see schedule, like I see recurring meetings, but it's not rhythmic in nature. And to me what that means is we have time together once a week and we fill that time with a bunch of stuff. And for the most part, we keep that time, though I've certainly worked in organizations where that time is a moving target depending mostly on the leader's whims.
But it doesn't feel like, "Oh, if I miss this meeting, I am not going to be a part of an important decision, or I'm not going to learn what we're doing next, or I'm not going to get a decision or a need met." Usually those meetings feel more to me like just a bucket of whatever is on people's minds or the leader wants to say. So it's a routine kind of, but it's not a rhythm that drives us. It's not a drumbeat that is underneath all of the music we play.
Aaron Dignan:
Yes. I think my take on this is if you were to look at a calendar, you would think, "Oh yeah, everybody has an op rhythm because I see recurring meetings and I even see recurring names of meetings that look like they might be meeting types."
Rodney Evans:
Okay, yeah.
Aaron Dignan:
But then when you get under the hood, there's no difference in structure or participation or facilitation between the strategy meeting, the tactical meeting, the weekly stand-up, the free-for-all, the ad hoc. It's all the same thing under the hood, it's just that they put a different badge on the top of it and some of them happen forever.
Rodney Evans:
I think that's exactly right. And yeah, there's not different practices within those things.
Aaron Dignan:
Exactly.
Rodney Evans:
I think to your point, the name and maybe the audience or the participant list or the length is a little different. And maybe we're clear that some are in person and some are not in person, but it's not like, oh, okay, we're doing generative work and generative work requires this kind of structure and this kind of tool and this kind of facilitation.
Aaron Dignan:
Yes.
Rodney Evans:
Okay, now we're doing deciding work. And so first we decide how we're going to decide, then we decide who's going to decide, then we're going to use this method in this meeting for decision-making. I think that's what I want to get into because I agree that's usually missing.
Aaron Dignan:
Those are the norms that drive me nuts actually are the norms like every meeting should have a pre-planned agenda where essentially the way they're trying to fix meetings is by treating meetings as a monolith. Like all of our meetings are leader facilitated or all of our meetings are jump balls or all of our meetings are agenda driven, but there's no structure under the hood.
It's just solving one aspect of the problem instead of thinking of them as meals or as components on the plate where it's like, this is the starch, this is the protein. There isn't any of that. It's more just who puts the plate on the table and then whatever's on it is just like it's buffet.
So I do think that when you say operating rhythm, the thing people latch to is the rhythm part, which is of course important, but I think when you say operating rhythm and when you're beating your drum on your soapbox about it, a lot of what you're getting excited about is structure. And so I wonder if you would walk through what your basic op rhythm set of patterns are.
Asking for agenda items in advance won’t fix your meetings
Rodney Evans:
I will, but before I do that, I actually LOL'd as you were saying that, as you were talking about the sort of "we have to have an agenda", because I do feel like that's often the first move.
Aaron Dignan:
Yes.
Rodney Evans:
People are like, "No, no, no, I get what you're saying." What we're going to do-
Aaron Dignan:
That's fixing meetings.
Rodney Evans:
What we're going to do is we're going to call for topics beforehand.
Aaron Dignan:
Done.
Rodney Evans:
But you know what's also funny is what happens when you do that, which I've been in the team that did that thing, rather than having a design that we always use, we have agenda items that we adhere to, is then the group norm for behavior gets applied no matter what the agenda item is. And I was in a team once that was just full of really, we were actually lovely and interesting people as individuals, but when we were together, we were a wolf pack who just would tear the flesh off of anyone that came near us.
And I only say this to say our agenda often had like, "Oh, the person from learning and development is going to come and talk to us about talent strategy." And Alison would show up with her deck about talent strategy and guess what the wolf pack did? Fucking tore Allison apart.
Aaron Dignan:
Right. Right.
Rodney Evans:
Because there was no design that was like what we're doing here is consenting to this strategy or giving advice on this strategy or talking about how each of us needs to operationalize this strategy. It's just like, "Allison is here to feed you guys, to feed you hungry wolves."
Aaron Dignan:
She's the object, now do whatever it is that you do.
Rodney Evans:
You guys just do what you do and it's like, "Spoiler alert, we do the same thing with everyone. So come on in, guest speaker, and get ready."
Aaron Dignan:
Wow.
Rodney Evans:
So yeah, it's the what and the how, always.
What meetings belong in your operating rhythm
Aaron Dignan:
So let's circle back to the patterns. What are the patterns that you've seen work time and time again?
Rodney Evans:
Okay, I'm going to tell you my current default boilerplate foundational operating rhythm, and I want you to tell me whether you like it.
Aaron Dignan:
Okay.
Rodney Evans:
No, you can just tell me how much you like it.
Aaron Dignan:
Okay.
Rodney Evans:
You can tell me how smart it is.
Aaron Dignan:
Yeah, is this great or greatest op rhythm?
Rodney Evans:
Am I the best or am I the best? Okay. So current basic operating rhythm for any group of people who shares work, we actually do shit together and there's some level of interdependence between us, if that doesn't exist, I don't know, we have to make another episode for you. This is predicated on the idea that we actually have stuff to do.
So number one, weekly-ish, probably weekly or biweekly action meeting. You can hear an entire episode on action meetings with our friend Sam Spurlin. Action meetings are about unblocking work, quick project updates so that we know what's changed week to week. And the vast majority of that meeting is about getting the needs met of every single participant through triage. Numero uno.
Number two, retrospectives. I think retros are the easiest thing to ignore in an operating rhythm and it will fuck you the worst when you do that. So retrospectives are a time to reflect and to sense-make and to learn and to notice patterns. The worst you are at those things, the worst your retros are going to be at first. But you have to just keep at it until you develop some skill in learning as a group because then magical things happen in retrospectives. And I am the person who's always like, "Do we have to do this? I don't want to." And then I'm always the person in the closing round that's like, "There was a lot of insight today and I'm really glad we had this conversation."
Aaron Dignan:
This meeting is the one meeting type that has slipped at Murmur and we're bringing it back because-
Rodney Evans:
Tell me why.
Aaron Dignan:
... we know how to play the game. But no, just exactly what you said, it's the easiest thing to put down when you get busy and you're just like, "Do we really need to do that?" Yes you do.
Rodney Evans:
You really do.
Aaron Dignan:
You do.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. And it feels very obvious to me why it slips because I'm doing this work all day every day. I think I know what's going on. I don't think I need a meeting for us all to sit around and talk about what's been going on. I was fucking there. I think I got it.
Aaron Dignan:
Right.
Rodney Evans:
But you miss insight.
Aaron Dignan:
It's so counterintuitive to at least Western business culture because it's the only meeting in the op rhythm that looks backward, and we want to go, go, go, go, go, go, go, get, get, get, get, get, win, win, win. And it's like how am I going to win by looking backward? It's all rearview mirror. And even what you'll notice in the meeting, I'm sure you've seen this and probably busted me for it, is even though we're looking back, we'll start looking forward, what should we do? What should we do? What should we do?
Rodney Evans:
Ali Randel is the retrospective hall monitor at The Ready-
Aaron Dignan:
Hi, Ali.
Rodney Evans:
... who's like, "I hear us moving into solutions. I'd just like to bring us back. This is a retrospective." And we're all like, "Okay, all right, I know."
Aaron Dignan:
Oh, Ali.
Rodney Evans:
So we have to do retros where we look back so that we can make sense of what happened. And we did an episode on retrospectives a long time ago with Jordan Husney. You can go listen to that to hear a lot of detail, but there are a bunch of things about it that are important. One is just a moment to marinate in the data and the patterns and whatever is happening.
Two is to really notice divergence. So I feel like retros are the meeting where you and I could have been in the same exact situation and come away with wildly different takes. And it's really important that we can have that conversation. If we're doing a retro on a growth conversation and I come out being like, "Nailed that, that sale's happening." And you come out and you're like, "That was really weird energy and I'm not sure if we should work with those people." That's a very useful conversation to have.
Aaron Dignan:
Totally.
Rodney Evans:
So retrospectives, the other thing retros do is they give us a bunch of material that goes into the other meeting types. So when we force ourselves to stay really in backward looking, but we hold a little time at the end for what we're going to do with it, those projects can feed into our action meeting list or they can become proposals that we later process in a governance meeting, which is the next meeting in the rhythm.
We have talked extensively about participatory governance on this show. Go listen to the episode on consent-based decision-making. Listen to the episode with Ted Rau. This is the place where we use an integrative decision-making process to make decisions together either live or in a really awesome tool called Murmur.
Aaron Dignan:
Shameless plug. It is interesting you brought that up though because as we were looking through this, I was thinking to myself, these are meetings and these are meetings that are well-hewn from the stone that we have practiced ourselves and implemented in so many places. And also in this remote first, super distributed, super global world, I have seen certain teams choose to make one or more of these an asynchronous activity.
Rodney Evans:
Sure.
Aaron Dignan:
And so it's like that's the varsity version. If you are heavily remote and heavily distributed, it may be that you're doing governance in Murmur asynchronously or that even you're using something like Parabol to do an asynchronous retro. Obviously you get high fidelity when you have those conversations if you need high fidelity.
But it is interesting to notice this and think about which of these would I prefer to do live, which of these would I be open to doing asynchronously with the right setup and structure? But I think to learn and master these live is a great way to understand how they fit together.
Rodney Evans:
And I don't think it has to be one or the other.
Aaron Dignan:
Right.
Rodney Evans:
Parabol or using a Mural board or whatever you want to use is a really great way to make the conversation time a little more efficient.
Aaron Dignan:
Right.
Rodney Evans:
So it's like, go do the thing in Parabol and upvote it and decide which topics you're going to discuss. Do all of that stuff asynchronously and then the 30 or 60 minutes you spend can just be digging into the thing.
Aaron Dignan:
Pure fire.
Rodney Evans:
And I think same with Murmur. It's like, one of the emojis in Murmur that I find useful is we need to talk about this. And so it's like, start with proposing the agreement in Murmur and see if you can get that bad boy to consent.
Aaron Dignan:
Right.
Rodney Evans:
And maybe you won't be able to and maybe there will be a moment where as the proposer you're like, "Oh, there are a lot of ... Let's talk about this emoji. I better slow down here and discuss." So I think it doesn't have to be one or the other.
Aaron Dignan:
Or even if it does pass, then a conversation might be convened about how the hell do we implement this governance?
Rodney Evans:
Yes.
Aaron Dignan:
It's all connecting.
Rodney Evans:
Exactly. So that, and then the last one is strategy meetings.
Aaron Dignan:
My fave.
Rodney Evans:
I rarely do strategy meetings initially with groups because what I realize, and I'm curious if you've noticed this too, is when you get a team who hasn't worked in a lot of new ways into an action, retro, governance cadence, they realize themselves that they're missing a strategy conversation.
Aaron Dignan:
Right.
Rodney Evans:
And that is the best time to do strategy is because now they're dialed and they know which shelves each box goes on and then all of a sudden they go like, "Yeah, but what is the closet that these shelves are in?" And you're like, "Yes, now we get to do a strategy meeting." Maybe quarterly, maybe monthly, maybe annually depending on your business and your team and how often you need this, but pairing of retro and strategy is always a great thing to do.
So from a cadence perspective, I'm just going to say my default, action meeting weekly, retrospective monthly. You do three of them and then the fourth one is retro with strategy meeting right on the back of it. Governance probably monthly to six weekly.
Aaron Dignan:
Yeah, that makes sense.
Rodney Evans:
That's my starter pack
Aaron Dignan:
And I like that you talked about how they fit together because to use the bicycle metaphor from sociocracy, action and retro and governance are learning how to ride and steer the bike and you're just riding around, you can ride, you can steer. And then it becomes, where are we biking to? And that's when strategy keeps moving the focal point, and then you have the skill to ride the bike to get there.
If you did one without the other, you'd be in trouble. If you have strategy but you don't have any of these other, keeping the bike moving and steering mechanisms, then you're just running on a treadmill. And if you are able to really keep things moving but you have no sense of directionality, then of course you're accomplishing a bunch of stuff, but to what end?
Rodney Evans:
Totally, totally. I just thought of a fun example. I might fuck this up, but I'm going to try to tie these things together. Also, I've been on a lot of other people's podcasts lately and I've been really trying not to curse. And so now the word fuck is just like it's stored up in me-
Aaron Dignan:
It's exotic and you have to-
Rodney Evans:
... that I have to say all of them on our podcast because-
Aaron Dignan:
Oh, I see. You're holding extras that you're bringing with you.
Rodney Evans:
I've been holding them in and apparently they don't just go away. I'm just like a PEZ dispenser now of the F word.
Aaron Dignan:
There's a lesson about feelings in there somewhere.
Rodney Evans:
So apologies. I don't know what you're talking about.
Anyway. Okay, so we have a growth circle at The Ready that is responsible for growing the company and in an action meeting, something we continually were bumping up against last year, the end of last year was projects coming in and us not having a project steward ready to grab them. And we talk about stewards, it's not a traditional engagement manager, it's just someone who has enough reps to architect and staff and deal with the project sponsors. Anyway.
And the way we do growth is as soon as we have a project steward, the growth team is trying to get that steward connected to the client to make sure that that works and they're contracting effectively, and so that you don't fall into the old, the person who sells it and the person who delivers it are different people and it gets all jacked up.
Aaron Dignan:
Right.
Rodney Evans:
Anyway, my point is few action meetings go by where we're looking at the pipeline and going, "Uh-oh, we have humans who could come and do some of this work, but these humans are saying to us we would want a steward for this and we don't have those stewards. So that's cool." And then in a retro of that same group, what we realized is that the thing that was a bit of a handbrake on our growth was capable stewards. And that also came up at a Ready-wide retro is that we are missing this thing.
And so what that turned into was a couple of things. One is from a strategy perspective, a whole bunch of work shook out about how we might get people ready to steward. And more importantly and interesting for this conversation is the realization that we weren't super, super crisp on exactly what a project steward is meant to be doing and a bunch of other interesting work to be done around hiring and around training and around a chapter and around all of this stuff.
And what that resulted in is I currently have on my list a training to design with the training circle, a project steward role to govern in the transformation circle, and a bunch of other people have other shit to do too. So it was, we noticed this in an action meeting, we sense-made around it in a retrospective, it kicked off a bunch of governance and project work that lived in other action meetings. And then all of that became part of a strategic outcome for the trimester. And that my friends, is how an operating rhythm is supposed to work.
Aaron Dignan:
I mean, that felt right on the money. I don't know why you were worried going into that.
Rodney Evans:
I just felt like it was a bit of a journey that wasn't clear before I started it.
Aaron Dignan:
It was a canoe ride, but I liked it. I think what was cool about it is it illustrates something that I think is so critical about the interplay between the structure of operating rhythm and the structure of good governance in a self-managing system. And the self-managing part, which is I think a lot of people who look at self-management, self-organization, decentralization, DAOs, whatever, are like, "Oh, if you don't have a person to take a problem like that and just run it to ground then it'll never get solved."
And the reality is, well, if you build the structural relationship between these moments, the structure of the meeting rhythm is doing the shuttling for you. Here's an insight, here's a pain point, here's a thing, and then it becomes a set of ideas and then those now have a place to go. And it's almost like lighting a firecracker or when they used to light the gunpowder that leads to the TNT keg. It's like this is going to happen because we've set the system up where the Plinko puck is going to go downhill.
And so as long as the stuff emerges in one of those four places that you just talked about, chances are really good that it's going to naturally unfold. And it's not because one particular person was the whole cloth owner of making sure that happened from a single insight.
What happens when your operating rhythm breaks
Rodney Evans:
Yes, and what do we do when it doesn't happen?
Aaron Dignan:
I mean, I'm not saying it's perfect, right? I think that there's a relationship between the individual agency and action of the participants and that structure and its natural momentum. And so my advice to any team including ours, would be watch what happens naturally. That's great. And of course naturally doesn't mean people aren't involved. It means they're picking up and moving stuff around.
But if there's something going on that isn't making it to the next step or is popping up but not being recognized or launched into the pattern you just described, then of course it's incumbent on the members that sense that that's important to give it the extra nudge or even ask the team why. I've seen you many times before be like, "Hey, guys. We've talked about our capacity issue for three retros now and nothing has happened. Anyone want to talk about why?"
And then we can diagnose rather than pointing fingers at it's someone's fault we didn't do something about it, we're asking ourselves the question of what is happening in the richness of this complex team and situation where that thing keeps popping up, but we're not doing something about it. Are we hiding from something? Are we missing something important?
And then that conversation often leads to, "Oh, the problem is X." And then we have the actual thing we need to cascade and that does happen. It's like hiring ahead of the work for us was an example of that where it was like, "Why isn't this happening? Why isn't this happening?" And then suddenly I think it was you was like, "Our pattern is when we hire ahead of the work we grow, not the other way around." It was like, "Oh." And then boom, that puck went downhill and we just started to have a shorthand for what needed to happen.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, exactly. And the only thing I would add that I thought you were going to say but you didn't, so I'll sound smart-
Aaron Dignan:
Sorry.
Rodney Evans:
... is sometimes also the thing that we identify in a retro and then also in the strategy meeting and then also in an action meeting that doesn't move is because we don't care about it anymore.
Aaron Dignan:
That's right.
Rodney Evans:
And that's okay. When companies talk about emergence and evolution, it's like, you know what? Not everything lives in evolution. Sometimes things die and sometimes things don't make it and it's because they weren't meant to for the environment.
Aaron Dignan:
That's right.
Rodney Evans:
And sometimes we do a retrospective and we got really hot to trot, an idea. This just happened on a project that I was on and two months later we did a retro, it was a team of teams level retro. We realized that there was a particular asset that we could create that would serve all of the projects inside of this one client. There was a strategic outcome made that was about creating that asset. Nobody fucking did anything, including myself.
And two months later, Alastair, to his credit, was like, "Do we care about this? Have we just been distracted from this and that's why it hasn't happened?" And everybody was like, "No, we just don't actually think it's going to do the thing that we thought it would because all of us have tested many versions of it and it hasn't really landed, and so we're just not going to." And it's like, "Great, kill that."
Aaron Dignan:
To me, this is the equivalent of the great idea you write down when you wake up from a dream, and then you look at it in the morning. And in the dream you're like, "Oh my God, I've solved the fucking world equation." And then you wake up and it's coffee cups that are taller. And you're just like, "That's rough." So to me, the same thing can happen with the hive mind in the moment where you're just like, "We have to hire someone with brown hair." And then like you said, a week later, everybody's like, "Do we though?"
Rodney Evans:
And in traditional companies, to your point, normally what we do is we don't examine why that is. We blame a person or we blame a lack of accountability or some other such nonsense. And then we go, "You know what? You know how we're going to make this happen? We're going to fucking give it to Paul and we're going to put a deadline on it and we're just going to march through this thing until we have this asset that apparently neither the team nor the client actually gives a shit about." It's like, "We'll have that taller coffee cup come hell or high water because Paul's going to make it happen." And it's like, just fucking stop doing that.
How to experiment with a team-of-teams operating rhythm
Okay, we've started to scratch at this, but one of the things that I've been really curious about lately, because The Ready has changed its structure and because in two different companies, my work has been exclusively lately at the team of teams level. I haven't really been working with an intact team that shares work. I've been working with a team of teams where there are leaders from a bunch of different places that come together around a topic or a thing, but otherwise don't really interact. And so I've been really fiddling with what a TOT's rhythm could look like and I'd be curious to just start by asking you what you have seen work because I'm not sure I really have this dialed yet. I'm still playing with stuff.
Aaron Dignan:
I think this is a cool area of exploration because I believe that the party line from a lot of our source material is like it's turtles all the way down, like everything is just nested and everything's the same. And there's some merit to that. I don't think that you are totally wasting your time to try to do a similar rhythm at every level. But it does feel to me that in decentralized systems, because they're decentralized in particular often, there are these places where different parts of the system interconnect and there needs to be some governance or some sense-making or some strategy done, and they don't really have a ton of shared work because the work is so spread out.
And so it really is more like a representational government. It is a set of reps coming together to do some collective work. And I don't know that what we just described is exactly the right fit. So I am very curious to hear what you've been trying because I think in the past, I've mostly shoehorned the norms into there and then occasionally just designed super custom stuff on top of it or around it where if we have a need, then we'll just add some novel thing on top of the mix rather than actually thinking about its composition.
How to get executives doing shared work together
Rodney Evans:
So I'll tell you what I've been trying and maybe you have ideas. The first thing, and this to me is more about disrupting typical patterns for groups like that than it is about literally anything else is I'm just making them do work together in a meeting.
So I feel like when you get a group of execs together, they're like, "I'm the CFO and I'm the CTO." You know what those people fucking hate doing is writing words down together in a document.
Aaron Dignan:
Yes.
Rodney Evans:
It's such a struggle, but they feel so great when they do it. So something that I've been defaulting to is starting with tension-sorting from The Ready tensions deck or a retrospective or something like that. And then when we have some needs identified for the group that could inform what the projects are in an action meeting, instead of going right to that, I've been like, "Let's just do some jam sessions."
We need a new workflow around procurement, this is a real thing. We need a new workflow with procurement because it's the procurement people who are holding us up from being able to achieve these goals that are very important. This group next week is going to, in a mural board, use sticky notes to map out what the current procurement process is because all of these people from different functions actually have a different view on what the process is.
Aaron Dignan:
Totally, yes.
Rodney Evans:
And then we're going to identify where the blockages are in the process. And then in this meeting, we are going to decide who we're going to go talk to or make requests of or politic or whatever and what we're going to say. Then we're going to draft the email together that goes to the chief legal officer and the chief procurement officer that's like, "Hey, from your friends in this group, these are our requests. Can you meet them?"
And what I find is it breaks down a lot of the naturally territorial nature of having people who are representing different domains to just be like, "We do have a shared pain point and we could all just do work in the next 45 minutes to solve it." That helps. And then it also just creates a level of vulnerability. Writing something together or making a board together is just a different kind of togetherness than the discussing and debating points of view.
Aaron Dignan:
Absolutely, yeah. And I think it does two things that are really powerful. One is it helps differentiate between the representative part of team of teams governance and presence, which is like, yes, on the one hand, if you show up as the VP of finance, you are representing the perspective of finance. But on the other hand, you are Jim. And it's often I think, we lose complete sight of Jim's skills, ideas, cognition, identity, history, et cetera and instead it's just rep finance only. And when you're representing something, you're not actually doing work, you're just doing governance.
Rodney Evans:
Yes.
Aaron Dignan:
And so I think the idea of being like, okay, we can govern stuff, but also as individuals with presence in the system and un-normal amounts of influence, et cetera, we can also just work on a problem together. And the second thing that does, which is really fun, is it brings back the sense of autonomy and mastery and purpose and nostalgia of production that people have in their career. And it's just a nice burst of energy like, "Oh yeah, I can actually make stuff in the world. I don't just point." Because if all you do is point, eventually you really do feel like an apparatus.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I love the point, I love all of that, especially the part about Jim, because it is weird. It is weird how when you're dealing with a representative group or a cross-functional group, people do fall into that thing of like, "Well, I'm just here as the P&L guy to tell you about the money." I'm coaching a group right now that is very much about figuring out ways of working stuff that can scale.
And a guy the other day who I don't even know what his job is, I think he might be the head of security, was like, "I really feel like what this group could do that would be beneficial is create some material or some assets or some training around how to make good decisions in a constantly changing environment."
And I was like, "See, this is what I'm looking for." I want the corporate security guy to go, "We have to stop trying to issue guidelines because shit changes too quickly and instead teach people what having good judgment and using authority means to us."
Aaron Dignan:
Looks like, yeah.
Rodney Evans:
I was like, "Dope, yes, let's do that thing." But it took a month where we were all playing from role before that guy was just like, "Oh, I see how this game is played. It's just an ideas game."
Aaron Dignan:
And to me that is the distinction about The Ready way of working that I'm always very excited about, which is we play from role, but we play from roles. And one of your roles might be finance guy and one of your roles might be musician and one of your roles might be brother, and they're all present in your head.
So the idea that we're only going to listen to one of them in the context of doing the work to me is completely ludicrous. And I think it's very funny that in our personal life, no one at home is like you are only wife. That is so weird and no one plays from wife. But then when we get to work, it's like you are head of security.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Aaron Dignan:
All right, what are the other moves?
How to recognize patterns in your OS
Rodney Evans:
Doing work together, recognition, whether that is through a retro. I really like to have cross-functional groups having an OS Canvas in front of them and figuring out what the fuck is going on in the system because it's like, they can use the data that they have from their own function to inform that.
But if a cross-functional group has formed with representatives to accomplish a certain mission, I want that group to be looking at, okay, how are things being resourced? How is the tooling going? Are we missing a strategy here? Just keeping them really grounded in your first job is systems thinking, everything else is coming second to that.
And we do this on one of the TOTs meetings that I'm on for a project at The Ready, our meeting is completely anchored in what's up in the OS? And we all are playing from different project teams, but what we are noticing is patterns in the OS. And unsurprisingly, there's a lot of consistency.
Aaron Dignan:
No kidding.
Rodney Evans:
Because we're all doing different stuff, but we're in the same system, so we're experiencing similar things.
Aaron Dignan:
To me, that one is almost just like a special, special flavor of retro in a way.
Rodney Evans:
Totally.
Aaron Dignan:
Right?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah.
Aaron Dignan:
It's a retro with a focus and a space or surface area that's much wider. Whereas I feel like the previous move was taking something that's already happening naturally in an intact team, which is doing the work together every day and artificially recreating it in a place where it's mostly just a convergence of representatives. This feels like it's a modulation on the retro theme, which I like a lot.
It's really just table-setting. At every level, what I do think is turtles all the way down is that you are doing OS work at every level, and the question is just, where do we sit in the OS together and how do we perceive it? And then what are our abilities to act on it? And what level of the fractal are we acting on?
So if I'm in a team retro doing team governance, et cetera, I'm in our OS as a team. But if I'm in a team of teams context doing a retro or doing governance, I'm looking at what are the agreements and structures that apply across or between teams, and it's just another layer up, same activity, different scope.
How to run cross-functional experiments
Rodney Evans:
Totally, which leads me to the last thing I like TOTs to do together, which is experimentation.
Aaron Dignan:
Yes, try shit.
Rodney Evans:
We've all been in the situation where we have a really neato idea for an experiment, and then it's like, "Yeah, but IT won't let us use the tool that we want to experiment with," or, "There's no budget for that." And even though we know there's money that could be moved, that would require finance to make us a new cost center, whatever. You guys know, you have jobs, most of you probably, I don't know.
Anyway, I really like getting cross-functional groups into designing experiments because with, well, not even the right group, with a cross-functional group, you know very quickly what you're missing in terms of authority to do shit. You can just invite that person in because it's not like, "Oh, we're this intact team and it would be really weird if someone from design came up." It's like, "We're already all just a federation of people, so it doesn't really matter if we invite another nation in." And then you can just try really cool shit together because you tend to have representation from a bunch of different places.
So it's like, "Oh, okay, the strategy guy is here and the procurement person is here and the supply chain person is here, and the finance person is here and the HR person is here. And so now we can try a thing because there's nobody really to stop us." And that's super, super fun because those groups often don't really orient that way, and it creates real collaboration because they are together signing up to do something rather than again, just representing a function or silo.
Aaron Dignan:
And you owe it to the team to do that work at that level because it can't happen any other way. As someone that has done some remodeling recently, let me just say, if the tile people are doing tile things and the brick people are doing brick things, eventually you just end up with innovation in those pockets. Someone has to be the person that's like, "Let's pop the top off this thing and let's do a gazebo." And you have to have those kinds of ideas if you really want to change things in a way where your purpose and your goals can be expansive and you can start to shed your skin quite literally.
Rodney Evans:
It's also really funny because I'm building a gazebo right now.
Aaron Dignan:
No shit, really?
Rodney Evans:
Did you know that?
Aaron Dignan:
No.
Rodney Evans:
That's so weird.
Aaron Dignan:
I'm going to play ukulele in your gazebo.
How to sense what your team needs and adjust
Rodney Evans:
Okay, that'll be a really nice afternoon. All right, so we've talked about the basic, the 101 OG op rhythm for intact teams. We've talked about the stuff we're trying with team of team's rhythms and what we think that could look like. But nothing here is a prescription. This isn't a framework. We're not McKinsey. So what else would you throw in this stew? What are the missing carrots maybe?
Aaron Dignan:
I think it is up to each team to decide what they need. And in some ways, these core pieces of the rhythm will probably reveal that to you. But it may be that in a retro, it's like we don't have enough fun, and so maybe you need a recurring game night or maybe you need some other activity that you do as a team. Or we want to understand better what's happening in other parts of the organization, and so maybe we need an AMA on the monthly or something like that.
I just think listen to what's missing and figure out if indeed the right way to solve that is with a meeting. The only caveat or caution around that I would offer is it's already a lot. And if you haven't moved any of these to an async model, then just tune into ... Don't let the total time spent in your operating rhythm start to really affect your ability to have energy to do the work and the rest of what needs to happen.
So I would say tune in, how efficient and effective is it? How is it feeling? Where's the energy at and what's missing? And then it's totally okay to slot things in. The Ready has definitely tried different meeting types on every Friday, for example, at the team of teams level. And some of those have gone great, and some of those have been like, "We probably don't need to do that anymore."
So let the fifth slot effectively be the rotating circus of what might we need, how long might we need it? And of course, none of this prevents you from having an ad hoc meeting, which is always the best place to start.
Rodney Evans:
Sure. Of course.
Aaron Dignan:
Don't for the love of God, start with a 45-month pattern if you can just try it once and see, did it add value? What did we get out of it? Is that the right way to do it?
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, I totally agree. Also, a lot of times when we get into a really dialed op rhythm, the things that you just mentioned do come up, people are like, "When do we get to have fun? And when do we just get to hang out? When do we appreciate each other?" And so there's two things that I want to say about that.
One is I always say to teams, "The rhythm that I am asking you to participate in is five hours a month. You have the rest of your fucking lives to go to the bar together, go forth. This is not meant to prevent you from doing other things. It's just for these moments, we are going to do these things in certain ways and then the rest of the time, live your lives."
And there are sometimes ways to bake those requests into the designed meetings that we have. I'll use a Ready meeting as an example, because it's easy. I think you in a closing round, maybe last cycle of our All Ready meeting, which I facilitate, were like, "I would like more appreciation to be baked into this meeting." And what I know is that when we have in the past had meetings that are about appreciation, everyone hates them.
So rather than doing that or being like, "Today, we're going to put a Slack message where we all say something-"
Aaron Dignan:
Forced family fun.
Rodney Evans:
I just made the check-in question be, "What is a woot that you have for someone in this meeting or yourself? Go."
Aaron Dignan:
And it was really fun.
Rodney Evans:
And that was the check-in question. And we got appreciation baked in without forced family fun or adding a meeting that's about a circle where we all just look into each other's eyes. So look at the patterns that you do have and see if you can get the needs met there.
Aaron Dignan:
Find a spot.
Rodney Evans:
And then the other thing is design for the thing that you're designing for. So what did you say about fun that we should do, play a game?
Aaron Dignan:
Yeah, have a game night.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. I really get mad and irritated when teams are like, "This meeting wasn't fun." And I'm like, "Yeah, I know. This was a meeting for making decisions." Now it can still be light. I'm not saying we need to be super serious about these things, but we don't have to make the action meeting fun. We can have an action meeting where we get all our work done and then we could play a game together because games are designed for fun. That's the whole point of them. So try to do the thing that's meant for the thing, right club for the right shot kind of thing.
Aaron Dignan:
Yes. I love that.
Rodney Evans:
Okay, great. Play games together. That's always fun.
What a good operating rhythm actually changes
Rodney Evans:
So to wrap this bad boy up, let's just talk about some of the effects of this, what we hear when we get teams into a really good routine around operating rhythm. Because some of the impacts I think are very straightforward and obvious, and some of them that have underlying principles are less obvious. So you go first. What do you see as the upside here?
Aaron Dignan:
I'll be captain obvious.
Rodney Evans:
Okay.
Aaron Dignan:
So the things I hear from teams right away that are obvious are, "Wow, that was effective and efficient. We're getting more done because the structure is optimized for the purpose of what we're trying to do. There's much more clarity and accountability and responsibility about who's doing what, who's facilitating, who's taking an action item, who's making a request."
The forced clarity of the way these meetings are structured means that there's a lot less wondering what did she mean? And what are we really talking about here and where is this going? And more like, what do you need? How do we get it for you? Let's move on. So I do think that there's a little bit more just increased clarity.
And I think the last thing, and I'm not sure if this falls into the obvious camp, it probably starts to wade into the non-obvious, is that people start to realize very quickly that things have a place to go. And so if, someone has a tension, they have an idea, they have a request, they have a need, it's pretty quick that you're like, "Oh yeah, that goes there and this goes there." And the closet is organized for the first time in a decade.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah, which reduces so much cognitive load.
Aaron Dignan:
Yes.
Rodney Evans:
How many times in a week do you have a thought about, "Oh, I need this from Ali," or, "I need to tell Aaron this," or, "I need to whatever"? And sometimes you can just take care of it with a Slack message. That happens a lot, but a lot of times I just go to the board for that meeting and put the triage item in and then I can just release it from my brain because I know I'm going to see you on Thursday afternoon in studio circle, and there's already a triage item in the board about my vacation and making an extra podcast episode so that it's covered.
Aaron Dignan:
And you often save your colleagues from a round of gossip or a discussion that was unnecessary. So like-
Rodney Evans:
Or just distraction, right?
Aaron Dignan:
Right. Like, "I think we should change the way we do retreat, so I'm going to go talk to Rodney and bitch to Rodney, and then I'm going to go talk to Aaron and bitch to Aaron, and then I'm going to go do a white-boarding session with Sam." And all of that is basically not knowing where to put itself and trying to politic my way to a solution when it's just like, "Hey, guess what? There's a governance meeting for that. You could just propose that idea."
Rodney Evans:
Yes, just propose it.
Aaron Dignan:
"Let's do that instead." And so I do think that it eliminates a lot of the interpersonal waste that can happen if you just don't know how to get things done or how to get things changed.
Rodney Evans:
Yes, totally. And the other thing that you said quickly was about accountability. But I want to just dig into that a little bit more because a lot of times when teams start to move toward more self-management, folks who have been in traditional management roles are like, "How do we hold them accountable though?" And I sort of jokingly, but also not always say, "Well, transparency, which leads to shame and social pressure is a pretty great mechanism for accountability." And I do joke about it, but the operating rhythm generally takes care of this because there's nowhere to hide.
So I know that when I go to the All Ready meeting, there is a item in circle updates for Source, and I'm the Source steward who will have to give an update in front of our whole company in that meeting. You know what I do, is make sure that we've done some work that I can talk about and then also spend a little bit of time thinking, because one of the things I'm supposed to have is insights to share.
It takes care of itself because I don't have to give the company the thing I'm going to talk about. The container is present, and so it forces me to do the thing that I should be doing anyway. And it doesn't require a person, it doesn't require a manager or a project manager to be like, "On Friday you should have a deck." It's like the calendar invitation and that container is the thing. It's the mechanism.
Aaron Dignan:
Yeah, and at a very real level that's what this stuff is all about. Half the stuff we talk about on this show is replace the person doing the managing with the system doing the managing, and then everybody is accountable to everyone else in a partnership of adults.
Rodney Evans:
Exactly, exactly. The other thing that I really liked about what you said with knowing where to put things is I really recommend that once you found a rhythm that works pretty well for you, scheduling it at least six months out. And the reason for that is because it saves a lot of the like, "Well, I was going to take a vacation in April and Aaron was going to take a vacation in August."
And now it's like retreat is on the calendar, the strategy meeting is on the calendar. These moments are on the calendar, and now I don't have to talk to anybody about it, I just make my plans based on those moments. And if the moment moves, no one is going to expect me to necessarily be there.
It's a very virtuous cycle when you start to have these organizational habits that just cuts down on a lot of friction and a lot of sludge and a lot of noise. Because if somebody is like, "We should move this strategy meeting," what they likely know, and interestingly in our business is like, "I want to move this strategy meeting because of a client need," the rest of that circle is going to be like, "Go fuck yourself." And that's good, that's healthy because we should be practicing these kinds of routines and methods and not letting the tail wag the dog.
Aaron Dignan:
Totally.
Rodney Evans:
So the predictability of that, scheduling that out ahead once you have something that's working for you, I think is really important.
How healthy operating rhythms increase participation
And then the last thing that I thought we could just talk about a little bit was participation. So one of the things I hear a lot from groups that I've been working with for three months or less is they are surprised by the shared air time in every kind of meeting that we facilitate when they compare it to their typical or traditional meetings.
Aaron Dignan:
Yeah, again, it comes back to structure. If you just have an agenda and a name for the meeting, whatever power dynamics and conversational dynamics are already there are just going to continue. When you have a structure to the conversation, including sometimes who speaks when, who's facilitating, that there's conversational turn-taking happening, it's a complete blow up of that, which of course is the hard part about the first few rounds. And that's where you have to work with someone who is helping and facilitating and coaching. But once you break the pattern and the habit and you get used to the new one, it's like, "Oh, wow." Again, built in.
And that's why my favorite thing to talk about when people start pulling out their DEI agenda or something is like, "Yes, you can do anti-bias training for a day, and that will maybe affect some people, but it won't really change the system as much as just saying, 'We take turns talking.' That actually makes a systemic change." And so just bringing back your attention to whatever we want to be true about the way we participate, is that in the structure? Is that in the rhythm itself?
Rodney Evans:
Yes. Yes, and there's been a lot of, I think because it was just International Women's Day, there's been a lot of static about the word empowerment lately, which I am here for all day with popcorn because honestly, fuck that noise. And it's the exact point you're making, which is if we're designing correctly, someone does not need to empower the team, the interns, the women, the whoever, we have a structure.
And in all of the meetings we talked about today, there is a way for every single person to participate. And in some of those meetings, there is a requirement for every person to participate in some way. And so it doesn't require empowerment from, the structure itself empowers equally, where you and I have the same ability to propose something. You and I have the same ability to put a meeting item into an action meeting to get our own need met. And that changes the game completely in terms of how people show up and just how the game unfolds.
Aaron Dignan:
And not only do you have all those rights and moments of participation, but also when it comes to roles that do have power in these meetings, like facilitators, we elect them. So even the person who has more power was put there by those of us who don't.
Rodney Evans:
Right.
Aaron Dignan:
And we can pull it back at any time.
Rodney Evans:
Yeah. We'll give it and we'll take it away. I'm just kidding. So yeah, I feel pretty good about this topic. The last thing that I want to say is just a lot of times, I think, you tell me if this is your experience, but I feel like people listen to you give a speech or they listen to a podcast or they read the book and they have very lofty ideas about ways of working and how they're going to have this people positive and complexity conscious organization and it's all going to just feel like, I don't know, pixie dust all day every day.
But when we talk about the how of work, this is the shit we're talking about. It's not just mindsets and connections and building relationships, and whatever. It is habits that we adhere to and that we evolve to serve the work that we have to do together. Really being in the how of work is shit like this, which is, do we have a system of interaction that progresses the most important work that we're committed to doing? If we don't, it does not matter what you believe in because it will all fall apart. All your groovy purpose and ideas and missions and strategies and whatever the fuck else you're about will all fall apart without any kind of organizational rhythm to bring it to life.
Aaron Dignan:
I think that's a bit of a mic dropper, so I'm going to use that as an excuse to draw things to a close. If you like what you're hearing, we would love your review and even more than that, we would really love you to share the show. Share one specific episode that you know aligns with someone's challenge that they're faced with or something they're working on right now, and have them reach out to us, podcast [at] theready [dot] com, to find out what's resonating and how we can help.
Rodney Evans:
I love that. And as always, a quick tip of our hats to Taylor Marvin for making us sound good. Brave New Work is produced by The Ready, where we help organizations around the world change the way they work, including operating rhythm work generally. As for all of you out there, thank you so much for listening. Now go change something.