50. The Ways of Working Movement Failed. Now What?

Summary

Podcast Summary: At Work with The Ready

Episode 50: The Ways of Working Movement Failed. Now What?
Hosts: Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin
Release Date: June 15, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this thought-provoking milestone episode, Rodney Evans and Sam Spurlin reflect honestly on why the much-hyped “ways of working” movement hasn’t become the workplace default, despite years of optimism and effort. Drawing from recent experiences at Agile practitioner events, consulting engagements, and shifts in the business climate, they candidly assess the movement’s limitations and share evolved thinking on what it takes to truly modernize work. With humor and insight, Rodney and Sam analyze both systemic obstacles and their own role as practitioners, landing on practical, forward-looking advice for anyone passionate about transforming the world of work.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The “Ways of Working” Movement: What Failed and Why?

• Movement stalled, not the methods: Despite a decade-plus of momentum, truly adaptive, participatory, complexity-conscious organizations remain the exception, not the rule. Names like Morningstar, Haier, and Buurtzorg are still the main reference points—there's been no mainstreaming of these models ([08:44]).
• Cyclicality & Macro Forces: Economic conditions (e.g., low interest rates, abundant cash in the late 2010s) fostered openness, experimentation, and people-first approaches. The return of chaos and scarcity, post-pandemic and amid AI disruption, has shifted power back to centralized, control-oriented management ([12:06], [13:26]).
• Optimism for the Long Arc: Both hosts express faith that cycles will return and that tightly controlled, extractive systems inevitably fail in the long run—even if the transformation is slower and less linear than hoped ([14:09], [14:56]).

2. Practitioners’ Role—And Where They Got it Wrong

• Mismatch Between Selling & Doing: Organizations buy simple, productized “Sunshine Zone” solutions (playbooks, artifacts), but real transformation lives in the “Twilight Zone”—messy, unscalable, unpredictable work ([17:59]).
  • Senior execs want measurable outcomes quickly; teams may experience gains, but results take time and aren’t always visible at the C-suite level ([19:53]).
• Superficiality and “Bottoms-Up” Trap: Early efforts often focused on surface-level practices—facilitation, standups, meetings—without going deeper into power dynamics, structural change, or system-level shifts ([20:07], [21:30]).
• Over-indexing on Emergence: Some earlier consultants (including The Ready) were “puritanical” about empowerment and emergence, eschewing roadmaps or outcomes, which didn’t mesh with quarterly business cycles and executive expectations ([22:33]).
• No “Rip and Replace”: Transformations almost always layer new systems atop old ones; hardly any organizations genuinely discard command-and-control—even those that try (Agile, Holacracy, squads, etc.) ([23:40]).

3. Market & Client Psychology: Why Context Matters

• Impact of Economic Climate: Openness to experimentation and risk recedes in times of scarcity or heightened uncertainty ([13:26], [14:09]).
• Clients Want Done-For-You, Not Capability Building: Especially in stressful times, most organizations don’t prioritize learning or true capability-building—they just want solutions, fast ([25:20]).
• “Golf, Not Tennis” Metaphor: The consulting posture has shifted from being a tennis partner (reactive, co-creating in real time) to a caddy in golf (prescriptive, offering guidance and leveraging pattern-recognition and expertise to optimize client outcomes) ([29:10]-[33:40]).
  • “In tennis, every time you react, you’re putting the work back on them… In golf, I am kind of responsible for moving them toward an outcome.” – Rodney ([30:00])

4. Value of Localized Impact

• Small, Local Wins Still Matter: Even if transforming the whole company is unrealistic, creating “pockets of excellence” and building strong subcultures within large organizations is valuable ([35:18]).
• Fragility of Change: However, these pockets often revert if a championing leader departs; real cultural change remains tenuous ([37:00]).
• Ripple Effect: People who experience better ways of working can bring those practices elsewhere, potentially fostering broader shifts over time ([38:13]).

5. Notable Metaphor and Practitioner Takeaways

Tennis vs. Golf Consulting Metaphor ([29:10] onward)

• Tennis: Reactive, letting the client lead each move; less defensible as a profession (“You can be very well approximated by a brick wall” – Sam, [31:22]).
• Golf/Caddy: Expertise, course knowledge, seeing the big picture, guiding proactively. “It is a different mindset… It is much more, may I say, complexity conscious.” – Sam ([32:03])

Soundbites & Memorable Quotes

• “The idea for this episode was about the failure of the movement, not the failure of the moves.” – Rodney ([38:51])
• “Systems do fight back... a system designed to produce quarterly results is not a system that can tolerate, ‘Put it in the teams’ hands, good things will happen… hang in there, guy.’” – Rodney ([22:33])
• “I have become more okay with the idea that making things better locally in a huge organization is nothing to sneeze at… That is worthwhile work.” – Sam ([35:18])
• “There is no part of me that thinks you don’t need an operating rhythm to get shit done in a company.” – Rodney ([38:53])

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Recommendations & “Now What?” Advice

For Practitioners ([40:52] onward):

• Go Deeper with Practices: Don’t settle for surface-level moves. “The surface level moves are the least interesting parts… The actual, more interesting thing is how do you help a team start to navigate their realizations around power?” – Sam ([41:22])
• Orient to Outcomes: Sell and deliver based on tangible results, not on the change methodology or philosophy. “The ways of working, to me, the work design of it all is basically secret sauce. It’s not the product.” – Rodney ([44:27])
• Use Roadmaps with Branching Scenarios: Help clients see future trade-offs, not just a single plan ([44:56]).
• Pursue Organizations Built for Change: Lead clients to view change as their core differentiator in a world of AI and commodified tools ([46:14]).
• Respect Cycles and Context: Accept that the movement’s arc is long and non-linear. “Maybe the arc of transformation… is longer than we want to admit.” – Sam ([14:09])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [05:38] Rodney describes Agile transformation teams being eliminated at large firms
• [08:44] Discussion of why progressive organizations remain rare
• [13:26] Pendulum swings: worker-led to control-led as economic tides shift
• [17:59] The mismatch between “Sunshine Zone” selling and “Twilight Zone” work
• [20:07] Surface-level adoption vs. true systemic change
• [22:33] “Put it in the teams’ hands” doesn’t work with public firms, executives, quarterly demands
• [23:40] “Stacking” new methods atop old, not replacing
• [29:10] Golf vs. tennis consulting metaphor
• [35:18] The impact and limits of localized success in large organizations
• [38:51] Distinction: failure of the “movement” vs. the “moves”
• [40:52] What practitioners can do next

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Summary Table: Practitioner Guidance

| What to Keep Doing | What to Do Differently | What to Let Go Of | |-------------------------------|-------------------------------|------------------------| | Go deep on team-level change | Sell outcomes, not methods | Hope for an overnight movement| | Focus on user/employee value | Be a “caddy,” pattern-aware | Making transformation everyone’s new default| | Support subculture creation | Use scenario-based roadmaps | Over-indexing on “start anywhere”|

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Tone and Style

Rodney and Sam’s hallmark blend of wit, humility, and realism runs throughout. They are candid—self-deprecating and unafraid to critique their own past approaches—yet ultimately optimistic about adaptation, localized change, and the long game of organizational evolution.

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For Listeners New & Old

If you missed the episode, this one encapsulates cutting-edge reflection on the state of workplace transformation, why things look stalled, and how practitioners and leaders must evolve. While the “ways of working” movement may not have “won,” the right moves continue to matter—and new approaches tailored to the era of AI, market turbulence, and long-term cycles are in the making.

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For more topics or to submit questions, contact [e-mail].

Transcript

[A]

It can be helpful to remember that a lot of the ideas that we're talking about, it's not like we didn't come up with that in the 2000 and tens, like from the 50s and the 60s, like Ray Parker Follett. Like, these ideas have been in the ether for a long time and there's been lots of cycles, and there will continue to be lots of cycles into the future.

[B]

Hey, everybody. This is Outwork with Ready, a podcast about work design and how organizations can make change work in their favor. I'm Rodney Evans and I'm here with my co host, Sam Sperlin.

[A]

Companies are facing more change than they were built for. The problem is organizations are still running on management ideas from a completely different era. Rodney and I work with leaders and teams who are redesigning how work actually gets done so change becomes fuel in the tank instead of sand in the gears.

[B]

On this show, we share patterns that we're seeing inside of organizations. What's working, what's getting in their way. Today we're taking a slight detour from the usual and we are talking about the failure in many ways of the ways of working movement and what we are seeing around that and digging into why that has happened. But first, we will check in, because how you do something matters just as much as what you do.

[A]

Well, this new way of working we are sticking with, which is the check in question.

[B]

I'm still long on the check in round.

[A]

Yeah, me too. Me too. What was your first music purchase with your own money?

[B]

So, Sam, I am an only child, and if there is one skill that I developed early in my life, it was hustling my parents for things that I wanted. I was spoiled as shit. So I was being rewarded for something I had done, probably grade or cello related. I was like six or seven. I was given the money to buy a tape because I am that many years old.

[A]

Just real quick, a peek behind the curtain. My first draft of this checking question. What was the first CD you ever bought? And then I was like, wait a second, wait a second.

[B]

You're like, she's too old for that.

[A]

Might not work.

[B]

Yeah, that's fair. You were right. My mom took me to Bradley's, which was like the target of my day. Okay, RIP Bradley's. And I only had enough money for one tape. And I couldn't decide between Michael Jackson's Bad and Madonna's. I'm going to say it was. What was Madonna's first record? Was it called Material Girl?

[A]

You're asking the wrong guy.

[B]

Okay, someone out there is screaming the answer into the air right now.

[A]

Might be. Might be the one screaming into the air right now.

[B]

Ah, fair. Anyway, with my newly formed skills of manipulation, I convinced my mom to give me enough money for both of the tapes because I pretended that I couldn't decide and therefore was so paralyzed that I could have neither. And she finally gave in. And so I got two tapes with my own quote, unquote money right out of my mom's wallet at the Bradleys. And that is what I bought. And man, bangers both.

[A]

Yeah. All right, nice.

[B]

I'm looking at album because we need to know.

[A]

Yeah, of course. We can't have that lingering. Just unknown in the world.

[B]

It was just called Madonna. Okay.

[A]

Oh, all right.

[B]

Yeah, that's right. Anyway, that was it. What about you?

[A]

For me, I'm pretty sure it was 1997, which would have made me 10. Uh, and the. The memory that I have is. It must have been, like, birthday money or something, because I had enough money to buy my first CD player, like, personal CD player, and I got three CDs to go along with it. This CD player was bright yellow, and it was a piece of shit because.

[B]

Was it Sony?

[A]

If you looked at it the wrong way, yes, it was.

[B]

Yeah, obviously.

[A]

Uh, and the three CDs that I got, one was just some, like, generic instrumental piano CD that I wanted to, like, be able to listen to when I was doing homework or something. Cause that's so good. That's who I. And then the other two. One was Alanis Morissette, Jagged Little Pill Sick, and Hanson Bop. I don't really know why or how those were the ones that I wanted. I don't remember if I went into the store being like, this. This is what I'm gonna buy.

[B]

Or, ma', am, I would like browsing.

[A]

If I was just browsing, I was like, yes, this is what I want. Because my other musical memory. And I didn't buy these. These were gifts. But I had tapes. I had a James Taylor tape. Again, I don't really know why, but I was pretty into James Taylor as a small child. And then I had a Dire Straits tape as well. And of these four, Dire Straits.

[B]

Perfect still. Hold on.

[A]

I mean, it was fine. Of these four musical artists that I have mentioned, I don't know that they would crack my top 100 anymore. But for whatever reason, they were my initial musical thoughts.

[B]

I love this checking question also, how funny is it that, like, several generations grew up being like, james Taylor's my guy?

[A]

Yeah, just that that Smooth guitar dude.

[B]

He's smooth. He's like the Mr. Rogers of folk music.

[A]

That's very accurate.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

All right, Rodney, why the heck are we talking about the quote unquote failure of new ways of working? And again, one other like small P behind the curtain? This has kind of been on the list for like a long time. But something about this week when we were looking at topic ideas, you were like, yep, we're doing this. I got a thing like, all right, you're coming in, you're coming in hot.

[B]

I am coming in hot. So really the reason is I was speaking at something very recently that was attended primarily by practitioners and had really grown out of the agile space. So it was a lot of very well known agilists. Do you call them that? Agilists?

[A]

I think so, yeah.

[B]

Yeah, Like, I think one of the people who wrote the manifesto was there, maybe all of them, I don't know, whatever. And I was in several conversations with people who had been in the Agile Office or the Agile Transformation team inside of large organizations that have since been eliminated. And so throughout, not the people, but

[A]

the whole, the whole agile, like office.

[B]

The whole thing, including the people. Yeah. And so throughout the day I just was having conversation after conversation with people who are like, I was an internal coach, I was an internal scrum master, I was an internal transformation person and it all got shut down. And I was like, this is really interesting to me because on the one hand we are seeing the rise of a clear need and a recognition frankly of the need for good organizational and good work design because of AI. And this is right on the tail of sort of the extinction of that kind of work in a lot of organizations. And because of both that and some internal conversations at the ready recently, you know, I've just been less and less convinced of ways of working as the thing on their own. Now we are like Twilight Zone OGs. You are never gonna catch me saying that the ways of working that we have taught all of you about on this show are not evergreen and valuable and impactful. And I am now of the mind that they are necessary but insufficient to actually do anything really important anywhere. And that's why I wanted to talk to you about it.

[A]

Okay. Okay, cool. Yeah, that, I mean that certainly tracks from, from my experience as well. Maybe, maybe the way we can dive into this, being the consultants that we are, I want to challenge the premise of the question or maybe just clarify the question, which is just what, like, what do we actually mean by failure? I don't, I'm not arguing that there has been like kind of a overall failure of new ways of working to like, change the world. And is that, is that what we mean by, by failure at this point? I guess when you think about kind of the failure of this. Why that word?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, we never thought that there was like an end state to creating an evolutionary organization. And so, so, so few companies are actually built to benefit from changes. And if you look at, like, we are looking at the same case studies of the truly adaptive organizations that we were looking at ten years ago.

[A]

Morningstar.

[B]

Higher. Higher. Yeah. I mean, Bear is coming under bill, which is great, but like, they're just there. It just still feels like more participatory, more like complexity conscious, more like progressive. Like, more progressive organizations, especially US based, are still very much the exception, not the rule. And given where things were, you know, even five years ago, but it's, I mean, five years ago during the pandemic, like, there was a real, there was some real momentum around new ways of working. But, you know, I would say 15 years ago to five years ago, there was like a real decade in there that was like, command and control is not the way bureaucratic systems are crumbling. There is a better way to do this. We should all be trying it. And I think there was a groundswell that I would say, on balance, failed to get a footing and certainly failed to become the default. Like, yeah, yeah, Bert's or, or, or Higher or Roach. Those companies did not become the default for how organizations operate.

[A]

Yeah, not even close. And also, there's not a general awareness of those companies that they should be anything but what they are. Because the other way of looking at what you just said is like, oh, my gosh, like we, we have more work than we could ever do in a lifetime because all these companies are like, oh, we're not the way we want to be. Like, come help us, you know, fix ourselves. And like, no, I mean, like, you know, the, the right is doing work. I'm doing work, people are doing work. But it's not like, I know for a fact we're not just like trying to like, bat people away from, from trying to work with us because there's, they just don't know how to do it. Like, there's not even an awareness that, like, there are alternatives to what they're doing.

[B]

That's right. That's right.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So that's what I mean by failure. Like, I think I held an assumption in 2012 or 2013 when I was relatively new to this work that eventually the world would have an awakening and the future of work would be progressive, adaptive organizations. And that future has not arrived in 20, 26, 15 years later.

[A]

Yeah, I wonder. Not to go to sociology on this, but I'm wondering if the kind of like zero interest rate phenomenon of the late teens, 20 teens was connected to this optimism that we had around. Oh, there are different ways to work and different ways to organize. And now that we're well past this zerp moment, if like y it's even coming back around even harder than maybe we expected.

[B]

Say more about that.

[A]

Just that I think things were more free and easy in the 20 teens, late 20 teens, pre Covid. And I think there was more openness and awareness and money, frankly, floating around to do this sort of things. And then Covid was its own beast that had its own very acute moment that needed to be navigated, that was actually very much in the wheelhouse of kind of like new ways of working. But nobody was doing that by choice. It was pure survival.

[B]

They had to. Yeah.

[A]

And then coming out the back of that money's not, you know, interest rates are up, money's not free. Organizations maybe made some questionable decisions during COVID around how they grew. And it's a, a big swing back toward kind of autocratic leadership in organizations and the world. And I think it just runs counter to a lot of the stuff that the ready and were kind of proselytizing 10 years ago.

[B]

I think that's right. And you know, obviously the markets are all over the place right now and just like irrational in many ways. And I think that in external environments that feel chaotic and I would argue that that is the environment we are living in right now. Like we have tipped from complexity into chaos because there's like, things don't actually feel dispositional, they feel random. At this point, it's not that surprising that the power has shifted back to centralization and to the companies. So to your point, in more abundant times where more people were experiencing more growth and more opportunity, there was more power in the hands of employees. It was much more of like a worker led market. And so companies were responding in many ways to that by saying, if we want to be a great place to work, if we want to get the best talent, if we want to keep the best people, if we want to have the brightest innovation, we have to be a place that creates human thriving. And now in chaos, there is much more of a return to traditional ways of thinking and managing, which is, we gotta lock this shit down. These people are Lucky to be here. Everybody's gonna be out, automated, out of a job in 10 minutes. We can do whatever we want with them. The market is flooded with smart people looking for stability, et cetera, et cetera. So, like, I think you're right, Sam. I think the pendulum has swung. And I don't think that the philosophical sh shift is unrelated to the macroeconomic shift that has happened in the last 10 years.

[A]

Yeah. And I think the optimistic take for me on that is just the reminder that things are quite cyclical and, you know, we'll swing back the other way hopefully at some point. And that doesn't mean that when you're in this moment that you abandon kind of the, the larger project of what we're trying to do, but just kind of keep it in perspective that maybe the arc of transformation that we're talking about is longer than we want to admit. I mean, and I think it's, it can be helpful to remember that a lot of the ideas that we're talking about, it's like we didn't come up with them in the 2000 teens, like from the 50s and the 60s. Mary Parker Follett like, like these ideas have been in the ether for a long time and there's been lots of cycles and there will continue to be lots of cycles into the future.

[B]

I think that that's very true. And I am also, like, optimistic in the long term because I do feel like, both philosophically and from a data perspective, we know that just like extraction and overly managed systems that are too tightly controlled don't thrive. And I do think that companies are rational in general over the long term, and when that fails, there will be some kind of return. But one of the things that I really wanted us to talk about today is like kind of all of our part in this as practitioners, because on the one hand, like talking to some of these Agile folks, it's very easy to do the game of, like, they just don't. They, like, the man just doesn't get it. And I'm like, that's true. And, and that's true. And there is a part of what we have said and practiced and done also that has not helped. And I also want to talk about that because everything that you and I are saying right now about the broader environment is fair. And what we also know is that if shit works super, super well in an organization, it tends to stick around.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And so, like, I am curious, like, if you take the market out of it, what do you think the ways of working movement Just got wrong.

[A]

Well, I think, I think quite a few things. The first thing that comes to mind for me is just something around this tension between truly complexity conscious organizational change and all of the gnarliness that entails, and the very real challenge of packaging and selling things that companies will buy. And I mean that encompasses lots of different things. It was a evergreen topic of conversation at the ready. I'm sure it still is something I'm thinking about all the time. Because when you're truly like truly in that space of talking about what complexity consciousness looks like and you start talking about how that shows up in organizations, like you can lose folks instantly, folks with responsibility to spend money and make things happen in an organization. You can get pretty squirrely pretty quickly with them if you go hard into that. So rationally there's a packaging of the ideas that need to happen that is understandable and more bite size and something that you can really sell and talk about and go do and point to as a thing that has been done. And I think there are ways to do that more or less complexity consciously, but in having to do that at all inherently is a kind of a, just a requirement that doesn't necessarily help the work, but needs to be done. And that's just a difficult place to be in.

[B]

I think, I think that's right. I mean, I think this happened absolutely with the Agile movement, but I think it happened in ways of working stuff as well, which is basically like you have to sell a Sunshine Zone product, like you have to sell a playbook or an artifact or some shit, because that's what, like, that's what companies can buy. Like they want to buy a widget. And first of all, selling that is then does not set you up well to do the work that's required because like then clients are unpleasantly surprised that that's like the beginning of the conversation, not the end of the conversation. And it's just like there's, I think in the ways of working movement there's all these mismatches. So there's that mismatch which is the sale is for, in many cases for the buyer. They want the Sunshine Zone thing, but the work is the Twilight Zone work and that's a mismatch. And then there's the mismatch between like what the buyer wants and what the users get. And in many ways like the buyer who's often a senior person because they have the money and they're an executive, like they want outcomes, like they want systemic, measurable outcomes and they think of a Better employee experience through partnering with us as like sprinkles, but they don't particularly care. And so there's a mismatch also there because a lot of times the people that we're interacting and engaging with inside of clients are like, this has like changed my team's ability to like communicate and execute and make decisions and create value and blah, blah, blah. But like, the COO is like within one month. I haven't seen the numbers move yet. And like there's a mismatch in timescales and a mismatch in altitudes. And so it's like there's all of these mismatches between how the work gets bought, how the work gets delivered, and how the work gets measured that I don't think most of us did an amazing job of closing.

[A]

Yeah, I think, I think that's right. I don't even know how closeable that even is. Like, it might just be like inherent to like the nature of this system. Because I think, you know, if I had to simplify kind of the approach that I have seen, you know, early days of the Ready Take and other organizations, other folks, other practitioners doing new ways of working there was this kind of bottoms up to a fault kind of ad hoc practice adoption that the complexity conscious view of it was something like start anywhere, start with anything and follow that energy and follow the deeper tensions that you uncover and build this muscle. Experimentation, which I'm not even saying is necessarily wrong. I think one failure mode that I saw was very few situations did I see where the starting with something and then continuing to go and do the next thing like that didn't do too many cycles before it had kind of just fallen apart. And if you're kind of just picking a random thing and maybe only doing a couple iterations on it, you never really get into the meat of what we're trying to do. And of course no kind of systemic change happened because you ran a different meeting like three times and that. And it didn't solve everything.

[B]

Right. You're not gonna get an outcome from that.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I think that like, especially, I mean, I don't think this has been true at the ready in a few years. But like, I, I feel like early days, even projects that I was a part of, because I came from more traditional consulting, I would be surprised by people I was working with from the ready who would like, straight up refuse to like, write down outcomes or like create a roadmap with the client or like, and we're just so sort of puritanical. About like empowerment and emergence and letting the teams figure it out and blah blah, blah. And it's like obviously a lot of things have changed in the world have changed, but I look back that like 10 years ago and I'm like, I wouldn't have let those people into the. Ready to do that now. Yeah, like that was why. That was like wild. And obviously everybody was like a bit drunk on like the new ways of working Kool Aid, including a lot of buyers and a lot of really good work happened. I'm not discounting that. But I'm also aware that like, you know, systems do fight back and a system that is designed especially like when you're dealing with executives who have a publicly traded company, a system that is designed to produce quarterly results is not a system that can tolerate like put it in the hands of the teams, good things will happen on some timeline. Just hang in there guy.

[A]

Yeah. Oh totally. Well, and I, I contrast that with something like Holacracy or sociocracy, which is a entire bundle of logic that right in that you can theoretically install kind of soup to nuts to encompass everything. And that also has not been the answer. We're not in a world where every other organization is a holacracracy or a sociocracy. So it's not, it's not as simple to say, well like, you know, if you got to come in with like a complete theory of how everything works and then work to install that, I would definitely not advocate for that either.

[B]

Well, I think you're hitting on something that like I really wanted to talk about, which is when people think about transformation, particularly like ways of working transformation as it was called for a long time, there's an assumption that we're like replacing an old way of doing things with a new way of doing things. And I haven't been close enough to a Holacracy transformation to actually know if that's how it goes. But mostly my experience is like you're actually adding a new system onto an old system more than you're ripping out an old system. And that's like, you know, if you're an agilist, it's like you're still dealing with like the sort of executive level desire for waterfall type reporting and planning or if you're like, you know, into the self management school of this stuff, like you're still working in a company that has like a performance management system and individual compensation and I guess this is like a flavor of agile. But if you look at things that became popular For a minute. Like the spot model. It's like, you know, you and I can put people in squads, but like there's still a org chart shaped like a pyramid that exists. Like things are not being blown up and then cleared away and then rebuilt in these large organizations. And so I think that like on the one hand, there's always an opportunity to do things better. And that assumes that those are things that you have to do anyway. And that assumes that there's some capacity to actually learn how to do something better. Like there was a time, and I think this was related to what you were saying before about there just being more abundance in general. There was also a time where I think there was more attention and interest in learning. Like there was a real moment there where we were like growth mindset, learning organizations. That's the shit. People do not want to do that now. Like my clients do not have the capacity to do hard shit, period. They want the answer from me, they want me to do it for them and then they want it to be done without having to learn one thing about it. And I'm kind of like, that's your right. And like if you, if you want to pay just to have this go well without learning anything about how that shit happens, I think that's fair enough.

[A]

Yeah. And you probably will pick up some residual learning just by having it go well and be around through osmosis, et cetera. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

But I think that like I'm sort of talking about two shifts in one which is very long winded and now I'm gonna lose my voice so I'm gonna have to stop talking. But like there's the one shift which is like, this was predicated on a stupid idea which is that the old system wasn't there and we weren't putting something on top of it. And then there' also the secondary thing where it's like nowadays even if you wanted to do that, there's no internal capacity to do it. And clients are not asking for capability building around this stuff. Mostly some still are, some still are. And those clients tend to be the ones that are like experiencing abundance for whatever reason. But most companies now are just like, do the hard thing for me, I don't care how it gets done.

[A]

Yeah, no, that, that tracks. I wonder if there's something about really just leaning in much harder to the pure like org, debt removal, getting rid of shit that doesn't make sense. Simplification without actually necessarily doing it much of anything in new ways of working. Let's just Strip out the shitty old ways of working that can be removed without. Because they're not load bearing in any way, even though you think they are. And I think bringing in somebody to help you see things that are not actually load bearing and can be removed and just freeing up some of that time and attention and hopefully money to redeploy elsewhere, I think still remains an interesting line of work and service to provide to organizations, particularly in this moment.

[B]

Well, yeah, and I think that, you know, like, that a lot of what you're saying now is like, what the AI transformations that we're part of are about. It's about, like, removing unnecessary process and then automating what remains, which is really interesting. I also just think that, like, you know, I. I wrote sort of like a very long, like, thought piece internally, which maybe I'll ship to the world sometimes. And the metaphor that I used, because, you know, I love a metaphor, Sam, is like, the ready? And companies like it were born on sort of the motion of playing tennis, which was like, being a great tennis coach or practice partner means being on the court with the client and just like anything they serve to you, smashing it back to them. And what that looks like is like hopefully upskilling a little bit as we go. We're all like, they're learning to play tennis better, but basically you're responding to what they serve up. So they're like, I'm not happy with how this team is communicating. Or these people are, you know, really laggy in their ability to ship. Or this group is really slow in doing anything cross functionally or whatever. And you're like, okay, serve it to me. And I will give you an answer that you can go and try. And to be fair, that is what clients wanted five years ago. Like, I could not show up to a boardroom in maybe longer. No. Like, I couldn't show up to a boardroom in 2020 and be like, listen up. This is what we're gonna do. Like, executives would be like, who are you? Get out of here. Now, the posture that my clients want, it looks much more like golf than, like, tennis. And the role that I consider myself to be in is much more like a caddy. Like, I know where we are going, even if they don't. I am coaching them. They're still taking the shot. But I'm like, use this club. This is what the wind is doing. This is what this course is like.

[A]

You can't see it, but there's a sand trap over there.

[B]

You can't see it, but I Know what's next. Also, you don't have to know this whole course, because I know this whole course and I can see where we're gonna. What 18 looks like and how we're gonna end up there. And the reason that the metaphor works, and I love it, is a fewfold. One, because tennis courts are basically tennis courts. No matter what.

[A]

They're all the same.

[B]

They're all the same. And it doesn't really matter as a tennis coach if you know a particular tennis court, like, right. The geometry stands. And two is because in tennis, essentially every time you react, you are putting the work back on them. You are saying, back to you boss, until you get it back to me over the net. And in this golf metaphor, the idea is that I am kind of responsible for moving them toward an outcome that I see for them and that I know is going to work for them. And it's not so, so important that they become better golfers. I just want them to win. And it's not so important that they, like, buy in to the strategy for getting there. And it's not so important that they, like, learn all of the moves. Like, I just want them to make great shots and get to the end as quickly as possible. And it is a different mindset.

[A]

Well, I love that. And I think the thing that I love even more about this metaphor is that in the tennis one, you can be very well approximated by a brick wall.

[B]

Sure.

[A]

Like, that can do 90% of kind of what you were doing in that situation. So, like, how much. How much defensible kind of moat is there for you as a professional or as a business? Whereas a caddy, like, that's a very. Expertise required, experience required. You got to know the course. There's some, like, real human stuff around, calming your golfer down when they're just losing their. Because they made three bad shots in a row. Like, there's. There's a lot of. It's much more, may I say, complexity conscious.

[B]

It is. It is. I think golf is a more complex game. And I think that, like, one of the reasons that people at the ready, like, you know, in olden days were more hesitant to play golf is because we really relied on the idea that, like, we're not experts in your business. We're experts in how work gets done. And we're the containers and you're the contents. The reality is, though, we are in and around a million companies, and we see these patterns again and again and again, and we do have opinions on how it should go, and we do Know when we hear a bogus strategy and we do know when they're futzing around with something that's not going to work. And we do know when they are doing a bad job making a decision. Because we've been in 25 other leadership teams and seen how this goes and what the long term results are. And so I think that like some of this is remaining like humble to the idea that like, I'm not a subject matter expert in the logistics business that like my client is in. However, I have been in more companies in his space than he has and I have been in more executive teams than he has. And I've, I have the benefit of seeing a million patterns play out over time that no executive that has any tenure in their company is ever going to have. And like, there is value in that. My clients appreciate that and there's not really a reason not to bring that expertise to bear if it's helpful to them.

[A]

Yeah, I definitely kind of remember the shift that we made internally at the ready from like the dawning realization that we could be a little bit more prescriptive than Zero Prescription. Nobody's done that made the work, I think a lot better and made it more fun. It felt like we made progress in ways like, all right, I've done enough projects where I know we start with these three things. I'm not going to let you like spend a month figuring that out on your own. I'm just going to tell you, like, we should probably start here and let's get a move on and we can save the more kind of co creative stuff for the things that truly need to be co created.

[B]

Yeah. And these days, like, even when it's co created, I generally am like, I'm bringing a draft by co created. I'm like, here's the starting point. It's 80 done.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Because like, again, people aren't dumber than they were five years ago, but they are more taxed. Like, nobody I know has more space in their day. Nobody I know feels like a head in their role anything. And so giving people answers to respond to, not to necessarily like prescribe, like it has to be this way, but giving them answers, giving them options and saying like, look, I know you're full up. I know your brain is full up and your day is full up and you don't have a lot of time to sit here with me with a blank mural board and come up with shit. Here are the three things that we could do to get to the next hole. I'd suggest this one, it's just like, it's better for everybody.

[A]

Yeah, no, yeah, I completely agree with that. Let me throw one other thing that's kind of bouncing around in my head right now, and you can tell me if I'm just. If it's a cope or there's something actually there too. I've become more okay with the idea that making things better locally in a huge organization is nothing to sneeze at. Some of these organizations are so huge. Like, we're talking, you know, hundred thousand people, tens of thousands of people. And the idea that this thing is going to become a completely new type of thing because of working with us is a borderline farcical. But the idea of a group, a function, a product team, a set of teams, a team of teams crafting their own subculture within the constraints that they have in this organization. I have seen people light up. I have seen work get better, even if it is just part of a larger beast. And I've chosen to become more okay with the idea that that is worthwhile work. Work to do.

[B]

Yeah. I'm not gonna argue that doing that work, no matter what, and people having a year of a better working experience and seeing a better way of working and probably doing better work and getting better results is not worth doing. Like, you're already more beneficial and productive than 80% of consultants in the world just by having that impact.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I think the thing that I am no longer convicted about is whether the subculture of that pocket can hang on if that leader doesn't stay.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, I'm with you on.

[B]

So that's the only part that, for me, has become a hinge. I'm like, I have had too many projects of my own where the believer and I have done some, like, awesome shit and their organization has outperformed their peer organizations, et cetera, et cetera. And the second they leave, it gets snapped back to the way the rest of the company works.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, I'm right there. Right there with you. And the other part of that that I choose to think has an impact, I don't know if it actually does, is that the people who experience that, who now are kind of forced to snap back, you know, to the extent that they stick around, maybe they're a voice of. Of potentially, you know, bringing some of these ideas wherever they are. If they're leaving, which I think is a very common pattern. You know, a group really gets deep with the ready, or someone like the ready, things are really good. And then it snaps back when everything leaves. They're like, oh, I don't actually have to accept this, I can go somewhere else.

[B]

They're like, I don't want to do something.

[A]

There's hopefully kind of the start of a, of a chain reaction where those folks can go off and, and bring some of those ideas to other organizations. And I've certainly heard from enough former clients over the last 10 years who are no longer at the organizations they were at when we worked together, who still talk to me, who are still doing things that there's at least some evidence of that that I cling on to, like a life raft when things get a little bit grim.

[B]

100% well. And I would say that, like the idea for this episode is, was about the failure of the movement, not the failure of the moves.

[A]

Ooh, good point, good distinction.

[B]

I still, like, there is no part of me that thinks you don't need an operating rhythm to get shit done in a company, or that you don't need feedback from multiple sources to become a better teammate, or you don't need a strategy stack to steer your business quarter on quarter and month on month. Like, I, I am still like fully allegiant to the ways of working. I am more curious about the ways in which the systems have fought back and those things have not become defaults, in part because they feel like such, like no shit solutions to me. And because when I'm in an organization for whatever reason that doesn't have them, it's like actually the lived experience of nails on a chalkboard where I'm just like, oh my God, how do you guys function like this? It's fucking chaos and I cannot do anything meaningful here. This is insane to me. So it's like I'm more curious about why a new way of working and a new way of organizing didn't become the way. But yeah, I agree with you. And also it's like, you know, there are clients that I have worked with who have left their organizations who are like, I am a changed person because of our experience together. And I'm like, that's not, not worth something to me. Like, that's still, like, I'm still proud of that work and I still would go do it again, even if their departure meant that that company undid a lot of what they had done.

[A]

Yeah, for sure.

[B]

Okay, Sam, now that we have explored the death of Agile and ways of working as being, you know, the possible accepted future, at least in the short term, let's talk about ideas for what to do. Because there's still so so much to do that's really worth doing. Why don't you kick us up?

[A]

All right, My, my first thought, and this is really kind of speaking to the practitioners out there, external, internal, it doesn't really matter. But if you find yourself kind of advocating for new ways of working, here's my challenge to you. Make sure you can go deeper with any of these practices. I think there are a lot of folks out there who are kind of in this world who can, you know, talk about or introduce an action meeting or a strategy stack or an operhythm, all of these things, like the surface level moves. But the surface level moves are the least interesting parts of these things. So the example that I always kind of go to is like, we don't do an action meeting, like for fun or just for like some of the surface level things that you get from it. I mean, we do, but the actual more interesting thing is how do you help a team start to navigate the realizations they're having around power on this team? Or how do you help them navigate when they start asking for the first time, well, what is our shared work? Or what should our shared work be like? That is where you start to make the move beyond this very surface level, easy to understand sort of practice into the actual, actual kind of fascia of the organization, like the actual deep parts where you can start to make some of these system level changes. And I don't know that all practitioners have the experience or the deep understanding of how to get to that. So if you're hearing yourself in that, I would challenge you to go deeper in these practices so that you can get beyond the easy stuff and start doing the more interesting things.

[B]

Yeah, and, and like, don't be confused about the two, because I, you know, I still have conversations with people that are like, it's facilitation. And I'm like, that's what you see. That's part of what you see. That's like not 90% of it. That's the tip of the iceberg.

[A]

All right, what do you got?

[B]

Like, slightly opposite end of the spectrum, but this is just something that like I've been really leaning into for the last year, which is just orient to the outcome. So like, if what the client wants is growth in a new product line or to reduce opex, or to see a cross functional initiative come to light, I don't really bore them with the details of how that's happening. I'm like, I'm going to do all the things that I know how to do, because I know that that's how you get great outcomes. But I'm not really going to bother being like, first, first we're going to get clear on leading and lagging indicators, then we're going to do roll work, then we're going to deal with decisions that I'm like, I just like, do not concern them with it. I'm just like, what is it that we are aiming for? Got it. And then the ways of working, to me, the work design of it all is basically like secret sauce. It's not the product. Like what they are buying is the outcome. Maybe that's like AI adoption or workflow automation or something else very specific. But like, I basically do not try to enroll them in the philosophy or in giving one single shit about how we get there unless they're curious. And to your point, it often rubs off on people and people do often say, why are we doing it this way? And then I am very happy to tell them, but I don't spend nearly as much time trying to get people interested in this shit as I used to.

[A]

Yeah, I, I think that as much as that breaks my heart because, you know, I'm a super nerd about this and I want to, I want to tell you all about why it's really cool that complicated and complexity are like different things and like why it'll unlock a lot for us. And yeah, if you spend more than about 30 seconds on that, it's probably a waste of time.

[B]

Yeah, totally. I think that's right.

[A]

I'm realizing.

[B]

What else you got?

[A]

My other idea is actually the same thing that I already said, so I'm going to come up with something a little bit on the fly here.

[B]

Fun.

[A]

I have become much more open to the idea of creating roadmaps around what it is that we're doing and how things are going to fit together, but leaning into kind of like the scenario planning version of that. So it's not like here's the one roadmap, but here is the branching roadmap and the decisions that we will have to face going forward. And we will like prune this roadmap down to our reality as we move through the work, as opposed to me just kind of like recreating a roadmap over and over as the context changes around us. So I think it has been useful for thinking about how do these things actually fit together? Like, what are we likely to learn from this first batch of work? Which then means we're going to either do this or we're going to do this or we're going to do this. And like, here's how we'll kind of make the decision when we get to that point. That has been. I think it's easier to tell the story of the larger thing that we are trying to accomplish and how things fit together when you are willing to kind of play into that space. And in my very early days of doing this work, the idea of me trying to predict the future, it was like, oh, you can't do. You can't do that. Like, well, no, I've seen enough of this. How this goes. I can tell you what our kind of paths that we will get to choose down the road. Do you have one more, Rodney?

[B]

Yeah, I have one more. And it's kind of a macro idea, but I think it's really important and it's very related to my tennis versus golf metaphor. So ways of working and tennis were always somewhat reactive in nature. It was always fundamentally about how to, like, sort of cope as things changed or things happened, whatever those things were. And it was like, how do you kind of like meet the moment that is happening and make it through? And I'm actually seeing a lot of similar language around AI it's like, how do we. How do we survive as these things happen to us, as this new technology is happening to us? And that's fair. Like, I, you know, I get that. That's why the response is what it is. But I think that the golf posture is about creating organizations that benefit from change, that are built for change. And if you don't start from that perspective, if you don't start from the perspective that the promise of work design is an organization in which change itself is the asset, and your ability to use change as fuel is the only differentiation you have. That is a very different case for designing work differently than how do you cope with whatever the environment throws at you without becoming completely overwhelmed or paralyzed or sunk? And I think that even though that's a little bit, like, softer than some of the other things that we've talked about, I would like to see, I think, especially for leadership teams, if they can start to even inquire about what would it look like for this company to be built to benefit from change, to believe that that benefit is our only differentiation now that everybody has access to the same competitive analysis, to the same technology, to the same tool, now that AI is going to democratize. And so many things that were strategic advantage before, what if this is the one that's left over? And what if we pursued it? Doggedly I think, like, that shift is actually the unlock to everything else that we're talking about.

[A]

Yeah, I, I, I really like that. And I'm thinking about the golf metaphor, and I'm wondering if it's something like, like the best golf players don't just walk up to the ball and hit it as hard as they can every time. Like, that's not actually how you play golf. Like, you have to know when to use the various clubs in your bag, know your tendencies with each club. You know, I always hit my 7 iron this far. For whatever reason, I hit my 5 iron, like 10 yards further than people think I should. That type of flexibility is, I think, kind of the thing that you're, you're talking about.

[B]

Yeah. Rather than it being like, oh, man, they mowed this morning. Oh, I'm expecting that. Be the kind of player that's, like, they mowed this morning. That's going to fuck somebody else's game. Up.

[A]

Up. Yeah.

[B]

But for me, I'm good. That's gonna be, that's gonna make me better.

[A]

Yeah. That's cool. All right.

[B]

All right.

[A]

I feel rejuvenated in my chosen career. Thanks, Rodney.

[B]

Good. That's what we're here to do, rejuvenate you.

[A]

That's right. All right. We're always looking for new topics for the show, so if you have an organizational pattern that you're having trouble changing, shoot us a [e-mail] this show is

[B]

edited and mixed by Taylor Mervin at COOP Studios and produced by Jack Van Amberg at work. The Ready is created by the ready, where we help organizations around the world change the way they work. Thank you for listening.