A Guide to New Ways of Working
Intro
The journey towards New Ways of Working (NWOW) is as much about discovery as it is about implementation. Imagine a workplace where creativity, collaboration, and adaptability are the norms rather than the exceptions. This vision is not achieved by following a one-size-fits-all solution but through continuous experimentation—doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
This guide is designed to help you to explore the patterns found in progressive organisations, offering actionable insights and practical steps to enhance your working dynamics.
Embarking on this path requires a significant shift in thinking and approach. Traditional hierarchical models, with their rigid structures and top-down decision-making, often fail to harness the full potential of a team. By embracing NWOW, organisations can cultivate environments that encourage innovation and collective intelligence. This guide introduces concepts like distributed decision-making, psychological safety, and brain-friendly feedback—core elements that can transform meetings, decision-making, feedback, roles, conflict, and more.
Consider how the ideas that follow can be adapted to fit your unique context. Start with small changes, observe their impact, and iteratively refine your approach. For instance, implementing participatory meeting structures can enhance trust and communication, while distributed decision-making processes can empower team members. This continuous improvement process will help you build a more dynamic, resilient, and high-performing team. Embracing NWOW is not just about finding better methods but about creating a culture where everyone can thrive and contribute their best.
So, are you ready to make your workplace more progressive?
The Patterns Found in Progressive Organisations
Progressive organisations share common patterns that set them apart from traditional hierarchical models. These patterns include participatory decision-making, clear working agreements, effective meetings, and a culture of experimentation. Leaders in these organisations intentionally move control to where the information is, ensure that everyone understands their roles, and cultivate an environment where high trust and participation are the norms. Recognising the complexity of their environment, these organisations embrace practices that support adaptability and collective intelligence.
Understanding these patterns is crucial for any organisation looking to evolve. Distributed decision-making taps into the collective intelligence of teams, leading to more informed and effective decisions. Psychological safety allows team members to express ideas and take risks, which is essential for innovation. Continuous feedback loops promote ongoing learning and improvement, keeping teams agile and responsive to needs. Additionally, a culture of experimentation encourages testing new ideas and approaches, learning from both successes and failures. By integrating these patterns, you can create a more engaged, resilient, and high-performing team.
Explore the free New Ways of Working Playbook to discover some of the most effective approaches found in progressive organisations.
Complexity & Organisations
Understanding the nature of organisations and teams as ‘complex adaptive systems’ is crucial for embracing New Ways of Working. Traditional linear thinking, with its flawed assumption that all events in our teams and organisations can be predicted and controlled, falls short in addressing the realities of modern the modern workplace. Complexity theory acknowledges that not everything operates in a linear, predictable manner. In complex systems, such as our teams and organisations, cause and effect aren't always directly linked, and surprising, emergent properties can arise unpredictably. Embracing this complexity means adopting ways of working that facilitate emergence, adaptation, and learning, rather than imposing rigid controls.
Shifting from linear to complex thinking is a game-changer. Life becomes much simpler when we acknowledge the nature of the systems we are working with. Given that our organisations and teams operate in a complex and unpredictable environment, we must treat them accordingly. They consist of interconnected and interdependent parts that continuously interact in unpredictable ways. This means traditional management approaches, which try to control and predict outcomes, often lead to frustration and inefficiency in these dynamic environments.
Recognising the inherent complexity of organisations allows leaders to be more flexible and adaptive. This involves creating conditions that enable the emergence of behaviours and outcomes, fostering innovation, and promoting resilience in the face of change. Instead of trying to micromanage every detail, leaders can set the stage for experimentation and learning.
For example, progressive companies like to implement distributed decision-making processes to harness the collective intelligence of their teams. By decentralising authority, they create an environment where rapid adaptation and innovation can occur naturally. Similarly, practices like Lean Coffee meetings and circle discussions support emergent, adaptive behaviours by encouraging diverse input and flexible agendas.
The patterns found in progressive organisations—such as distributed decision-making, psychological safety, continuous feedback, effective meetings, fluid roles, and a culture of experimentation—are all responses to the complexity inherent in modern organisations.
These patterns support adaptability and collective intelligence, helping teams to thrive amidst relentless uncertainty and change. By seeing organisations as ever-evolving ecosystems and embracing these progressive patterns, leaders can better equip their teams to navigate the challenges and opportunities of the modern organisational landscape.
Before we dig into each pattern, reflect on your own organisation: How can you shift from a linear to a complex thinking approach? What small experiments can you start to embrace the complexity of your team dynamics?
Try the free New Ways of Working Chatbot - your personal guide for exploring the patterns found in progressive organisations.
The Patterns: Meetings
Effective meetings are a cornerstone of progressive organisations. Imagine meetings where all voices are heard, nobody dominates, and interruptions are kept at bay. Circle meetings promote better listening, trust, and vulnerability among team members. Similarly, Lean Coffee meetings shake things up by letting participants set the agenda, ensuring discussions are always relevant and engaging. These structures create a more inclusive and dynamic environment, encouraging active participation and diverse perspectives.
Meetings are often seen as a necessary evil in many organisations, but they don't have to be. By adopting new meeting structures, teams can transform their meetings from tedious and unproductive to energising and effective. Circle meetings are particularly powerful for promoting equal participation and deeper connections. By taking turns to speak and actively listening to each other, team members build trust and empathy, leading to more open and honest communication. Lean Coffee meetings offer a fluid and responsive approach to agendas. Participants propose and vote on topics in real-time, ensuring that the most relevant and pressing issues are addressed, keeping the meeting focused and engaging.
Experimenting with these and other innovative meeting structures can revolutionise how your team collaborates. Incorporate check-ins at the beginning of each meeting to establish psychological safety, or use 1-2-4-All to quickly generate and refine ideas. By continually experimenting with and refining your meeting practices, you can foster a culture that supports collaboration, creativity, and continuous improvement. Be sure to bookmark Liberating Structures for more inspiration.
The Patterns: Decisions
Traditional top-down decision-making often leads to frustration and disengagement. Progressive organisations break away from this model by adopting distributed decision-making processes like the Advice Process and Consent Decision Making. These methods empower individuals to take initiative, seek input from those with expertise and those affected, and make decisions informed by collective wisdom. By bringing decision-making closer to the source of information, organisations can harness collective intelligence and significantly improve engagement and satisfaction.
The Advice Process is particularly powerful for nurturing a more inclusive decision-making culture. It involves key steps: taking initiative, gathering input, seeking advice on the proposed decision, making the decision, and informing those who provided input. This process ensures that decisions are well-informed and consider diverse perspectives. Additionally, it helps distribute power and responsibility more evenly across the organisation, reducing bottlenecks and increasing agility. By involving those with relevant expertise and those impacted by the decision, the Advice Process promotes a sense of ownership and accountability, leading to better, faster decisions and higher levels of engagement.
Consent Decision Making is another effective method where decisions are made if no one has a reasoned and paramount objection, promoting inclusivity and shared responsibility. By focusing on consent rather than consensus, you can make fast, safe decisions while increasing trust and ownership, learning lessons while others are still debating details. Considered ‘a Liberating Structure for decisions,’ this process requires facilitation, a proposer, and a team willing to make decisions that are “good enough for now, and safe enough to try.” The steps involve the team asking clarifying questions about and offering reactions to the proposal, the proposer making edits, and the team raising objections if the proposal is harmful or a backward step. If there are no objections, the decision is made.
Implementing these distributed decision-making processes can help organisations become more responsive, innovative, and resilient. By embracing these methods, you can transform your decision-making culture, making it more inclusive and effective. Start small, experiment with both approaches, and observe how these changes can lead to a more engaged and dynamic team. Here’s a handy decision proposal template that you can use.
The Patterns: Feedback
Regular feedback is vital for continuous improvement and collaboration. Brain-friendly feedback, which includes checking your intention, asking for permission, being specific, explaining the impact, and checking how it landed, helps create a positive feedback culture. This framework ensures that feedback is helpful and constructive, fostering an environment where individuals feel supported in their growth and development.
Creating a culture of feedback is essential for any organisation that wants to thrive. Feedback provides the information needed for individuals and teams to learn and improve continuously. However, giving and receiving feedback can be challenging, as many people fear criticism and avoid giving feedback to prevent conflict. Brain-friendly feedback can help overcome these barriers by starting with a clear intention to help, asking for permission, and being specific and factual. Explaining the impact of the behaviour and checking how the feedback was received further ensures that it is understood and taken to heart.
Making a habit of requesting feedback also helps to grow a feedback culture. It’s helpful to specify the type of feedback you are seeking (e.g., evaluative, coaching, appreciative) and to create Feedback profiles for teams. When more team members regularly ask for feedback, it normalizes the practice and encourages open communication. By practising these techniques and encouraging regular feedback, organisations can cultivate a culture of continuous learning and improvement, driving higher performance and greater job satisfaction.
The Patterns: Roles
In progressive organisations, roles are dynamic and evolving rather than fixed job descriptions. This flexibility allows individuals to take on multiple responsibilities that align with their skills and interests, adapting as the organisation’s needs change. Embracing dynamic roles supports a more responsive and adaptable organisational structure, enhancing understanding and collaboration within the team.
The traditional approach to roles can be limiting, often leading to silos and restricted information flow. In contrast, dynamic roles provide the necessary flexibility to respond to new challenges and opportunities. By allowing individuals to evolve their responsibilities over time, organisations can better utilise their talents and cultivate a more agile and innovative culture.
One practical tool for facilitating this approach is Peerdom. By visualising and documenting each team member’s roles, skills, and interests, Peerdom improves clarity, reduces misunderstandings, and enhances collaboration. It provides a clear reference for understanding each person's strengths, preferences, and working styles, enabling teams to work together more effectively. Embracing dynamic roles and using tools like Peerdom can help organisations become more adaptable, resilient, and high-performing.
Dynamic roles encourage employees to take on responsibilities that match their skills and interests, leading to higher engagement and job satisfaction. For example, someone passionate about both marketing and data analysis can contribute to projects in both areas, bringing a unique perspective and skill set to the team. This approach not only leverages individual strengths but also promotes continuous learning and development.
Moreover, dynamic roles support a fluid and responsive organisational structure. As needs change, roles can be adjusted without extensive restructuring. This adaptability is crucial in today’s business environment, where organisations must pivot quickly to stay competitive. By fostering an environment where roles evolve with organisational needs and team members’ interests, you can unlock new levels of productivity and creativity.
Start by exploring how visualising your team’s roles can transform your working dynamics. Embracing dynamic roles can lead to a more engaged, innovative, and resilient workforce, ready to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world. By developing a culture that values flexibility and continuous growth, organisations can thrive in even the most uncertain environments.
The Patterns: Conflict
Conflict is inevitable in any organisation, and how it’s dealt with makes all the difference. Progressive organisations develop clear processes for engaging with conflict, focusing on empathy, understanding, and resolution. Techniques like Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and conflict transformation emphasise addressing issues constructively and collaboratively. By planning for conflict and handling it with care, organisations can maintain healthy working relationships and improve overall team dynamics.
An effective conflict transformation process is crucial for maintaining a healthy and productive workplace. Ignoring or mishandling conflicts can lead to resentment, disengagement, and a toxic environment. However, conflict can also be an opportunity for growth and learning. Nonviolent communication, for instance, focuses on expressing needs and feelings without blame, fostering empathy and understanding. Conflict transformation processes address underlying causes and seek to transform relationships.
By developing clear processes for addressing conflict and handling it with care, organisations can turn potential disruptions into opportunities for deeper understanding and stronger collaboration. Effective conflict transformation helps to create a more inclusive and supportive workplace, where all voices are heard, and differences are valued.
The Patterns: Agreements
Team agreements, or working agreements, are essential for defining how a team operates. These agreements cover everything from meeting structures and decision-making processes to feedback and conflict resolution. By co-creating and regularly revisiting these agreements, teams can ensure their practices align with their needs, values, and goals. Clear agreements help to create a cohesive and supportive team environment.
Establishing and maintaining team agreements is crucial for enhancing alignment and collaboration. These agreements provide a shared understanding of how the team will work together, including expectations for communication, decision-making, feedback, and conflict. By considering everyone's perspectives and needs during the co-creation process, teams achieve greater buy-in and commitment. Regular updates ensure the agreements remain relevant as the team and its context evolve. They also serve as valuable reference points for resolving disputes and making decisions, maintaining consistency and fairness. Clear, mutually agreed-upon working practices foster a harmonious and productive environment where everyone knows what to expect and how to contribute effectively.
For example, a team might agree on limiting time spent in meetings. They could decide together that all meetings will have a purpose and a clear agenda, a time limit of no more than 50 minutes, and a maximum of 15 hours per week spent in meetings per team member. Regularly reviewing and refining this agreement helps ensure meetings are focused, efficient, and respectful of everyone's time, contributing to a more productive and positive team dynamic.
Here’s an example team agreement that you can use for inspiration or even duplicate and use as a template. The FD Works Handbook outlines their way of working and ‘how we do things around here’. We created this together and they have kindly agreed to allow it to be used as a template. Click the copy symbol in the top right to duplicate this template.
The Patterns: Mindset
"The psychological and physiological effect of anything in our lives can be and is influenced by our mindset," says Dr. Alia Crum, Associate Professor of Psychology at Stanford. Our thoughts and beliefs shape how our bodies react to things like food, stress, exercise, and even New Ways of Working. For example, our mindset about the nutritional content of our food changes how it impacts our brain and body, and the same is true for exercise, stress, medication, and work practices.
Dr. Crum defines mindsets as “settings of the mind”—core beliefs and assumptions about a domain or category of things. These beliefs shape our expectations, attitudes, and responses. Consider stress: Do you see it as enhancing, inevitable, natural, helpful, or debilitating? These mindsets significantly influence our responses, motivations, and even physiological reactions.
Mindsets act as portals between conscious and subconscious processes, operating as default settings of the mind. If your mindset is stress = bad or New Ways of Working = hard, this will shape your responses accordingly. To change mindsets, start by recognising that your beliefs are interpretations of reality filtered through expectations and assumptions. Reflect on the effects of your mindsets: Are they helpful or harmful? Seek to adopt more useful mindsets, focusing on how they serve you rather than being right or wrong.
A useful exercise is to ask: What is the effect of my mindset about experimenting with New Ways of Working in my team? Evaluate what serves you and what doesn’t, and find more adaptive and empowering mindsets to live by.
Adopting a growth mindset can transform the approach to work, recognising that abilities and intelligence can develop through effort and learning. Regular reflection and feedback foster this mindset, celebrating progress to reinforce the belief that effort leads to growth. Embracing a growth mindset helps create a resilient and adaptable organisation where continuous improvement and achieving full potential become the norms.
By understanding and actively shaping our mindsets, we can create more adaptive and empowering work environments. Mindsets are powerful tools we can access and change, altering the psychological and physiological effects that New Ways of Working have on us, our colleagues, teams, and organisations.
The Patterns: Psychological Safety
Psychological safety is a foundational element of effective teams. When team members feel safe to take risks, voice their opinions, and ask questions without fear of judgement, they are more likely to engage fully and contribute their best ideas. Building psychological safety helps to unlock the full potential of a team.
Creating an environment of psychological safety is essential for promoting innovation and collaboration. It refers to the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. This critical factor enables team members to take risks and share their thoughts without fear of negative consequences. Effective techniques for promoting psychological safety include starting meetings with a check-in, allowing team members to share how they are feeling and any concerns they may have, building trust and understanding. Circle discussions, where each person has a turn to speak without interruption, ensure that all voices are heard and valued. Additionally, creating an environment where mistakes are seen as opportunities for learning rather than failures further reinforces psychological safety.
When team members feel safe to be vulnerable and take risks, they are more likely to contribute their best ideas and collaborate effectively. Building psychological safety is key to unlocking the full potential of a team and achieving high performance. For example, a team that begins each meeting with a brief check-in might find that members become more open about their challenges and more willing to offer innovative solutions, knowing they are in a supportive environment. This practice not only enhances trust but also helps grow a culture of continuous improvement and collaboration.
The Patterns: Experiments
Experimentation is at the heart of continuous improvement. Progressive organisations encourage teams to run small, safe-to-fail experiments to test new ideas and approaches. This iterative process allows teams to learn quickly and adapt based on what works best. By encouraging a culture of experimentation, organisations can stay agile and responsive to changing conditions.
Running experiments is essential for fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement. In a rapidly changing world, organisations must adapt and evolve quickly. Experimentation allows teams to test new ideas and approaches in a controlled and manageable way. By starting with small, safe-to-fail experiments, teams can minimise risk while maximising learning. This iterative process involves testing hypotheses, gathering feedback, and making adjustments based on the results. Sharing the learnings from these experiments across the organisation helps to spread successful practices, drive innovation and avoid repeating mistakes.
For instance, a company might experiment with a new tool on a single team before rolling it out company-wide. By assessing the tool's impact on productivity and team satisfaction, the company can make an informed decision and fine-tune the implementation process based on real feedback. This method not only enhances agility but also ensures that changes are beneficial and well-received.
Practices You Can Try
Embarking on the journey towards New Ways of Working begins with small, actionable steps. Here are some practices to consider:
Circle Meetings: Ensure all voices are heard and build trust within the team. This structure promotes better listening and reduces interruptions, fostering a more inclusive environment.
Lean Coffee: Allow participants to set the agenda in real-time and engage in relevant discussions. This format keeps meetings focused on what matters most to the participants, enhancing engagement and productivity.
The Advice Process: Empower team members to make decisions by seeking advice from those with expertise and those affected by the decision. This encourages distributed decision-making, leading to more informed and inclusive outcomes.
Brain-Friendly Feedback: Practise giving and receiving feedback using the steps of intention, permission, specificity, impact, and checking how it landed. This approach helps create a positive feedback culture, enhancing learning and growth.
User Manuals for Teams: Create and share user manuals to enhance understanding of each team member’s working preferences. These manuals can improve communication and collaboration by making individual strengths and preferences clear.
Psychological Safety Hacks: Implement techniques like meeting check-ins and circle discussions to develop a safe and inclusive team environment. When team members feel safe to speak up and take risks, it enhances innovation and collaboration.
Starting with these practices can help you and your team begin the journey towards New Ways of Working. Remember, the key is to start small and experiment. Use the Playbook and Chatbot to try one or two practices and observe their impact on your team dynamics. Reflect on what works well and what could be improved, and use these insights to guide your next steps. By continuously experimenting and learning, you can create a more dynamic, resilient, and high-performing team.
To Wrap Up
Embracing New Ways of Working is an ongoing journey of learning, experimentation, and adaptation. By understanding and implementing the patterns found in progressive organisations, teams can create environments that foster collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement. Start small, experiment with different practices, and build on what works. Remember, the goal is to create a workplace where everyone can thrive and contribute their best.
This journey is not about finding a perfect solution but about embracing the process of continuous improvement. As you implement new practices, be open to feedback and willing to make adjustments. Encourage your team to share their experiences and learnings, and celebrate the progress you make together. For instance, try introducing circle meetings to enhance trust and communication or adopt the Advice Process to empower decision-making.
Expect some bumps in the road as you experiment with new approaches. These challenges are part of the process and offer valuable learning opportunities. By encouraging a culture of experimentation and learning, you can create an environment where everyone feels valued and empowered to contribute their best.
So take the first step, try something new, and observe the changes. Remember, every small step you take towards embracing New Ways of Working brings you closer to creating a more dynamic, resilient, and high-performing team. Embrace the journey, celebrate your successes, and continuously strive for improvement. Your workplace's evolution into a thriving, collaborative environment starts now!
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