Here is our second cut of an Open Work Manifesto
The philosophy known as Agile is based on a famous “manifesto” which has at its heart four value statements of the format “we value A over B”. That is, we are not saying eliminate B, just that A is more important. Let’s get our priorities right.
It has a lot of content, but then there are many aspects to Open, it is a broad concept.
Here is an introductory booklet
Introducing the Open Work Manifesto
and a video
The transcript of that video:
Hi Teal Tribe, it’s Rob. Manifestos are a polarising tool, some people like them and some strongly dislike them. We feel it is a useful way to crystallise the key values of a movement such as Open. We like the format of realigning priorities to put a greater focus on some areas and greatly reduce the focus on others, without necessarily eliminating them entirely although that might be the outcome in some instances. We recently published the Open Manifesto, which got a lot of attention and feedback on LinkedIn and I felt the need to explain some of it which I think is necessary with any sort of simplification like that, that people will interpret it in their own ways and so it’s important for us to explain exactly what we mean.
So let’s look at the first draft of the Open Manifesto, a manifesto for our Open movement aimed at creating better work: better results, better lives, and better society; for organisations large and small, private and government.
One commenter suggested that Open Manifesto is too broad a title, (as the Agile Manifesto was when it was explicitly targeted only at software development), so perhaps we should call it the Open Work Manifesto. but to us, Open is a broad concept even wider than work. We help people both with families as well as work, and we’re published in Vietnam, widely read with our “Agile Family” thinking as much as we are with helping at work, so I think we’ll stick with just saying open because to us it’s a life and work thing. [Since we published this, we’ve already made that change to distinguish it from all the other Open X Manifestoes out there]
There are currently 8 value statements which might be too many, but Open is a very broad concept deliberately designed to embrace all aspects of better work, across all of “human systems adaptability” which is how we summarise it. We could have come up with more, but we held ourselves to as few as possible so as not to over clutter it, and try and stay focused on just the key values.
Let’s now consider each one.
Humanity over bureaucracy is directly inspired by the book Humanocracy from Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, which makes a cogent argument for how bureaucracy destroys organisations and humanocracy is the opposite. There is a place for bureaucracy in organisations but it is deliberately inhuman by seeking to be impartial and unemotional. As a result, workplaces have become oppressive and brutal, and productivity is destroyed. Restoring humanity means treating people as individual colleagues, accommodating their needs, maximising their contribution, and ensuring that they flourish at work. We open our hearts to allow people to thrive.
Liberation over command refers to a rejection of 20th Century command-and-control management thinking. You can’t make knowledge workers do anything, and an increasing majority of our workforce in this century are knowledge workers as we move into the service age and the information age. To maximise contribution it is essential to set knowledge workers free to work as best suits them, like masons of old. It is amazing the results we get when we treat all workers as intelligent people with their own contribution to make, if we respect their knowledge of how the work works. We open the workplace to allow people to be their best. We give people the authority to do their job. Naturally, giving people freedom requires providing clear policy to set the direction, the bounds, the rules, and the guidelines to that freedom, for the protection of both the organisation and the individual.
Transparency over opacity was a difficult one for us. As many commenters pointed out, the word opacity may not be the right one yet, but we needed a word that referred to all aspects of the opposite to transparency. We open up the flow of information so that decision making is seen to be fair, and distributed decisions are made with optimum contextual information. We make work, money, and capability visible. They can be invisible in a multitude of ways: they can be deliberately secret, they can be informally hidden, they can just be poorly radiated so they’re hard to find, they can be siloed and broken up and fragmented. There are many ways that information is not transparent, and opacity seem to be the only word we found so far that encompassed all those aspects.
Inclusion over hierarchy is one that many commenters did not understand. It is related to liberation over command but it is a different thing. Liberating staff lets them out. Inclusion brings them in. Inclusion covers invitational management, diversity, equity, collaboration, distributed authority, distributed decision making, networking outside the organisation, and other concepts. We open the organisation to all sources of contribution.
Flow over control can be summarised as get out of the way of the value work. Challenge excessive ceremony, minimise gatekeeping and authorisation, remove reporting from the value work, bring the governance to the work, automate as much as we can. We open up the value streams to get results to the customer.
The whole over the parts speaks to systems thinking and especially to our rising understanding of complexity – of the complex VUCA nature of reality – that we ignored in the 20th Century but we no longer can. Systems thinking leads us to change how we manage the system in order to develop the culture and productivity that we need. It also tells us to focus on improving the system not the components or the individuals, (avoid local optima), and equally blaming the system not the person. We open our perspective to the whole picture.
Experiment over planning goes deeper into complex systems thinking. All work is an experiment: everything we do, we don’t know the outcome until we do it. So planning should be the minimum necessary to advance to the next step and see what fresh information it yields. Sometimes a great deal of planning is necessary, especially logistics for large non-fungible projects, but that doesn’t change the necessity of shifting our priority to exploring our way forward. We may change the word experiment to explore to make this clearer. We open the organisation to embracing the unknown, the many possible futures.
Finally, adaptability over efficiency is another rejection of 20th Century thinking. As we understand the increasingly VUCA reality, we realise that adaptability is the primary attribute of an organisation for it to not only survive but to thrive opportunistically. Adaptability is made up of agility and resilience. Efficiency often reduces agility, and very much has to be a secondary optimisation. We open the organisation to everything that is happening.
We hope that this explanation of the manifesto helps make it clearer than the simple statements alone. Obviously there is a lot more to this as we have written four books so far on the subject with several more in the works. We also extensively documented on our website, sharing all that we have learned researching the global thinking and movements in better work.
We hope that you will feel inspired to join us in this movement, especially when you see the consistent and impressive success that we have with our many clients. This stuff works. Unlike some thought leaders, we have accumulated a great deal of tangible proof of the effectiveness of Open Work. Follow along by joining our mailing list and finding us on LinkedIn.
This video is produced by Teal Unicorn, created by Rob England and Dr Cherry Vu, [published] by Two Hills Limited, copyright Two Hills Limited 2024, Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3 Unported.