So is the language we use to talk about it.
We believe a new language of work is emerging.
This language describes a new kind of organization and a new era of productivity.
As industrial-era management practices fail, ideas about the future of work abound. Start-up culture is redefining how to launch products and make markets. Gig-economy workers are abandoning traditional employment for the risks and rewards of project-by-project labor. The makers movement is reviving the value and meaning humans find in craft.
Underlying and connecting these practices is a new language of work. This emerging language describes a new kind of organization and a new era of productivity.
A coherent philosophy
Our twelve patterns of work span leadership, teams and individuals. Taken independently, none of these ideas are novel. We think their value lies in understanding how they fit together as a coherent philosophy of work.
These patterns are not intended to be exhaustive. Nor are they meant to be prescriptive. Just as languages sustain many dialects, different organizations will interpret and apply these patterns in different ways. Like learning a language, the goal should be greater fluency through practice. What that means will differ from individual to individual, from team to team and from venture to venture. That said, we hope these patterns provide a starting point for thinking about how a knowledge-economy organization should function.
We have also included workspace patterns. The workspace (whether physical, virtual or mental) is where knowledge is created. We can design it in ways that impede our ability to speak the new language of work. We can also design it in ways that encourage our language to thrive and spread.
Finding a human language of work
Our inspiration is A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Published in 1977 by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein, the book describes a series of architectural patterns for how to plan and build cities, neighborhoods, housing complexes, buildings and rooms. “The [architectural] languages which people have today,” they write, “are so brutal, and so fragmented, that most people no longer have any language to speak of at all – and what they do have is not based on human, or natural considerations.”
We would argue that the same is true today for how work is performed – and that we must search for the same remedy. It seems unthinkable to us that, with our wealth of technology and expertise, we cannot describe work – our primary past time – in ways that put humans and our needs at the center.
What remedies should we seek for organizations which cannot learn, adapt and create? Most leaders imagine it to be something they lack, and add chief officers, innovation labs and digital business units to their companies. The better strategy is to remove things that already exist—impediments to the behaviors that sustain innovation, growth and a culture of continuous improvement.
The seriousness of play
Team-based learning is an organic human activity. It arises spontaneously in early childhood as “play”—self-organized games whose negotiated rules are vehicles for different kinds of learning. Play is both intuitive to children and self-directed. Adult intervention is mostly counter-productive. Learning happens fastest in groups of mixed age and ability.
An organization has the potential for sustained learning and innovation when its fundamental building block is the autonomous team. Individuals commit their time and talents to the team. Servant leaders empower the team, identifying and removing impediments to its success.
Organizational antipatterns are behaviors which impede the proper functioning of self-directed teams. Executive-driven innovation undermines team autonomy through the direction of work from the top. Middle management is its agent, robbing individuals of control of their time, without which they cannot commit to their team. The wasteful by-product is busy work—email, meetings and status reports that flood the organization, drowning the value-added work. The servant leader must find the courage to appraise these antipatterns with honesty—and then work diligently every day to remove them.
Practice healthy habits, daily
Two more changes are required to build organizations that can learn, adapt and create. The first is the introduction of daily habits that encourage team collaboration and continuous improvement. Agile methods like Scrum and Kanban prescribe healthy daily rituals. Without a serious and long-term commitment to practicing good habits, bad habits will return.
The second is coaching. Although team-based learning is native to human behavior, most of us haven’t practiced it since early childhood. Our formal education system is itself a learning antipattern—although recent innovations in project-based learning offer hope of change. Adult teams need support and reassurance, much as injured players require rehabilitation and therapy before they can return to the field. Leaders must learn their proper role, which is underneath their teams and in support of them. Everyone must practice the prescribed rituals, and so contribute to a culture that sustains them.
Ben Edwards & Sol Sender