Plaintext
Organize for Innovation
Organize for Innovation
Rethinking how we work
Jim Whitehurst
Senior Advisor and former President, IBM, and former President
and CEO, Red Hat
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 Red Hat, Inc. All written content, as well
as the cover image, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu-
tion-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.1
"Culture matters for encouraging innovative behaviors" orig-
inally appeared at
https://opensource.com/open-organization/16/10/why-organiza-
tional-culture-matters.
"Understanding the limits of hierarchies" originally appeared
at https://opensource.com/open-organization/16/3/fastest-result-
isnt-always-best-result.
"Becoming a master of organizational jujutsu" originally ap-
peared at
https://opensource.com/open-organization/16/2/becoming-master-
organizational-jujutsu.
"Innovation requires new approaches to feedback and fail-
ure" originally appeared at https://opensource.com/open-
organization/16/12/building-culture-innovation-your-organization
"How to keep a meritocracy in check" originally appeared at
https://opensource.com/open-organization/16/8/how-make-meritoc-
racy-work.
"Try, learn, modify" originally appeared at https://open-
source.com/open-organization/18/3/try-learn-modify.
"What it means to be an open leader" originally appeared at
https://opensource.com/open-organization/16/3/what-it-means-be-
open-source-leader.
"What the community has taught me about open organiza-
tions" originally appeared at https://opensource.com/open-
organization/16/1/what-community-has-taught-me-about-open-or-
ganizations.
"Want to be a great leader? Assume positive intent" origi-
nally appeared at
1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
https://opensource.com/open-organization/17/2/assuming-positive-
intent.
"Why your people need to collide more, not less" originally
appeared at https://opensource.com/open-organization/18/4/man-
agement-coordination-collaboration.
"Why aren't we more invested in our work?" originally ap-
peared at https://opensource.com/open-organization/18/5/rethink-
motivation-engagement.
"Appreciating the full power of open" originally appeared at
https://opensource.com/open-organization/16/5/appreciating-full-
power-open.
"Peanuts, paper towels, and other important considerations
on community" originally appeared at https://opensource.com/
open-organization/19/9/peanuts-community-reciprocity.
"How I discovered Linux's true power" originally appeared at
https://opensource.com/life/15/9/jim-whitehurst-linux-story.
"What our families teach us about organizational life" origi-
nally appeared at
https://opensource.com/open-organization/15/11/what-our-families-
teach-us-about-organizational-life.
"Like open source software, a book is more than its content"
originally appeared at https://opensource.com/open-organization/
15/8/open-source-software-book-more-its-content.
"Open education is more than open content" originally ap-
peared at
https://opensource.com/open-organization/16/8/harnessing-power-
open-education.
"Engage more and dictate less" originally appeared at
https://opensource.com/open-organization/19/1/engage-more-dic-
tate-less.
"Combing to grips with an unknowable world" originally ap-
peared at https://opensource.com/open-organization/19/5/planning-
future-unknowable.
"The innovation delusion" originally appeared at https://
opensource.com/open-organization/19/6/innovation-delusion.
"Public sector innovation doesn't need technology—it needs
culture change" originally appeared at https://www.linkedin.com/
pulse/public-sector-innovation-doesnt-need-technologyit-needs-
whitehurst/.
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Contents
Introduction 14
Part 1: Open Organizations
Culture matters when encouraging innovative
behaviors 20
Understanding the limits of hierarchies 24
Becoming a master of organizational jujutsu 27
Innovation requires new approaches to feedback
and failure 30
How to keep a meritocracy in check 34
Try, learn, modify 38
Coming to grips with an unknowable world 41
The innovation delusion 45
Public sector innovation doesn't need technology—it
needs culture change 50
Part 2: Open Leadership
What it means to be an open leader 58
What the community has taught me about open
organizations 64
Want to be a great leader? Assume positive intent 67
Why your people need to collide more, not less 71
Why aren't we more invested in our work? 75
Engage more and dictate less 79
Part 3: Open Culture
Appreciating the full power of open 85
Peanuts, paper towels, and other important
considerations on community 90
How I discovered Linux's true power 93
What our families teach us about organizational life 96
Like open source software, a book is more than its
content 99
Open education is more than open content 102
Appendix
The Open Organization Definition 110
Learn More
About the author 119
Join the community 120
Introduction
Jim Whitehurst
I f there's a common thread I continue to hear over and over
again in my conversations with customers, partners, and lead-
ers all over the globe, it's this: disruption is everywhere.
Everyone's talking about it—because no one can avoid it—
and it's causing even the longest-running and most venerable busi-
nesses to radically rethink how they operate. Economic, cultural,
and technological conditions are changing so rapidly that entire in-
dustries are getting upended at an unprecedented rate. Faced with
that kind of change, organizations typically find themselves in one
of two positions: They're either disrupting their industries—chang-
ing the rules of the game, solving new problems, realizing new
sources of value—or they're being disrupted by nimbler, more inno-
vative, digitally native competitors.
Many people call the forces driving these trends "digital
transformation." We should remember that any kind of transforma-
tion ("digital" or otherwise) never involves technologies alone. It
also involves the people that use those technologies and the values
that infuse how they do it. In fact, the ability to stake out and main -
tain a robust strategic advantage today depends on much more
than technological superiority. An organization's culture—the prin-
ciples that inform what we do and why we do it, along with the
ways of working that stem from them—is a key source of competi-
tive advantage, and it's becoming more important every day.
Organizations hoping to manage disruption—to disrupt rather than
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Organize for Innovation
be disrupted—will need to make sure they're building new cultural
capabilities in addition to technical ones.
The challenge, however, is that most of our organizations are
still operating according to principles from a bygone era. Conven-
tional organizations born in industrial contexts tend to value ideals
like compliance, predictability, and efficiency. And their devotion to
those principles gets reflected everywhere—from the ways they set
their goals, to the ways they train their leaders, to the ways they
structure their organizational charts, to the ways they reward cer-
tain employee behaviors rather than others. They're organized for
those values.
Unfortunately, those values aren't central to driving success
today. Most of what those industrial-era organizations did or pro-
duced has been automated or commoditized, so the ability to make
the same things faster or cheaper isn't as important as it once was.
Today, what's far more important is what an organization and its
people can do with the resources they have—what they enable and
what they help others create or solve. That kind of capability re-
quires a different sort of work altogether. Really, it requires
rethinking the way we work—how we organize, what we value,
what kinds of behaviors we encourage or discourage. And to do
that, we need to fundamentally redesign our organizational struc-
tures and strategies. We need to organize for innovation.
In 2015, I wrote The Open Organization, a book about how
Red Hat, the company where I was president and CEO, does this.
We do it by leveraging the same principles that power the open
source software communities all over the world that are generat-
ing new innovations at lightning speed. We've imbued those
principles—such as transparency, meritocracy, community, collabo-
ration, and sharing—into our organizational culture. We've also
taken great care to foster them in our behaviors and decisions be-
cause we believe those principles are the foundation of an
organization optimized for innovation.
15
Organize for Innovation
The Open Organization was largely a descriptive book, not a
management text (I'm neither a professor nor a theorist!). But
since I've written the book, I've engaged in countless conversations
with the community that emerged around the ideas in it. Those
conversations have helped me see more clearly the technological,
social, and economic tectonic plates that are shifting all around us
—and changing the business landscape as a result.
And that's what this book is about. It collects some key
lessons I've learned—not only about open organizations and open
culture, but also about the ways we can lead more openly during
times of uncertainty and flux. As you read the pages that follow, I
hope you'll keep a few core questions in mind: What are the princi -
ples driving the way your organization operates? And are those
principles the ones best suited to helping you solve the problems
you're facing?
If not, then the first organization you'll need to disrupt may
be your own.
June 2018
16
Part 1: Open Organizations
Culture matters when encouraging
innovative behaviors
I regularly meet with customers and partners to discuss chal-
lenges they're facing, and I've noticed something recently:
When they ask for advice, they typically spend five minutes talking
to me about technology—and the remaining time asking me ques-
tions about organizational culture.
Many of these folks are realizing that a healthy and innova-
tive organizational culture isn't a "nice to have" feature of their
organizations; it's fundamental to success in our fast-moving
world. People are realizing that organizational culture doesn't just
boil down to the tools you use or the perks you offer. It's broader
and more complicated than that.
Your organizational culture is actually the relationship be-
tween the values your organization espouses and the behaviors of
the people who make it up. Understanding this relationship—and
adequately investing in, monitoring, and nurturing it—is perhaps
the single most important path to success today.
Defining culture
Organizational culture is the collection of values that give
your organization its identity. It colors and affects everything you
and your teams do. It's an unspoken and taken-for-granted set of
rules determining what people in your organization think is "nor-
mal" or "natural," what is "acceptable" or "unacceptable," what is
"good" and "bad"—and, by extension, what is "desirable" or "unde-
sirable." If organizations are groups of people who've joined
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Organize for Innovation
together to accomplish something, then organizational cultures are
the collective values that keep them bound together and moving in
the same direction as they do.
But organizational culture is largely invisible. It only be-
comes clear as a set of learned behaviors. You can glimpse it in the
words people use to describe themselves and their work while
they're together, in the stories about their history that they tell one
another over lunch, in the ways they set and manage priorities, in
the decisions they make when faced with difficult choices, and so
on. Without these behaviors, culture can't really perpetuate itself.
And only through these behaviors can culture really become some-
thing we can analyze.
So you can see how the relationship between values and be-
haviors is reciprocal: People don't act without some sense of
identity, purpose, or intent, and all of these are the product of or-
ganizational culture. But organizational culture is just vague and
abstract without the actions that make it visible to us—and those
actions are exactly what leaders need to watch if they're at all in-
terested in improving their organizational cultures.
That's because the alignment between value and action will
tell you if you're cultivating an organizational culture capable of
weathering our current environment of constant disruption.
A return to culture
Thinking this way really does require a cognitive shift. Tradi-
tional management theory views culture as a variable we "solve
for" when we're building our most productive environments. Hier-
archies, after all, work best when people aren't preoccupied with
issues like "mission" and "purpose." Hierarchies need workers that
perform rote tasks quickly, expediently, and without variation.
But today, as professor John Kotter suggests in his book Ac-
celerate, hierarchies don't move quickly enough to keep
organizations responsive to rapidly-changing environments. They
do several things well, but, as Kotter writes, innovation isn't one of
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Organize for Innovation
those things. Innovation isn't just another outcome of hierarchical
machination. In fact, by definition, innovation is something that
can't always be predicted or controlled—quite the opposite of what
hierarchies are designed to achieve! So leaders everywhere are be-
ginning to wonder how they can expect the best, most innovative
behaviors from their employees without having to prescribe every-
thing they do.
And the answer, they've found, is culture.
More specifically, they've discovered that workers today—
highly-skilled and adept at using multiple channels for collecting
data and analyzing problems independently—work best when they
have a keen understanding of an organization's mission, purpose,
and values, and then have the latitude to make what they deter-
mine are the best decisions in pursuit of success. Today's leaders
can't expect to be able to prescribe every single behavior and deci -
sion. They have to ensure they've created an organizational culture
in which people take action with the organization's values in mind,
and leaders are reinforcing an organization's culture through their
observable actions.
When action and values align, organizational culture works
as a positive force, propelling an organization to greater innova-
tions faster. When action and value are out of joint, the opposite
happens: organizations flounder.
Here's an example. I recently attended a meeting of a com-
pany whose primary core value was safety. Safety trumps
everything at this organization, and it forms the bedrock of just
about every decision the company makes. When the meeting offi-
cially began, someone came into the room and explained to us,
very matter-of-factly, the locations of all the emergency exits in our
vicinity. "In the case of an emergency," this person said, "we'll
evacuate along the following routes and we'll reconvene at this es-
tablished location" (in this case, a park across the street).
No one batted an eye. Everyone found this method of initiat-
ing the meeting perfectly normal, natural, and valuable. In fact, if
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Organize for Innovation
the meeting hadn't begun this way, I suspect people would have no-
ticed right away and said something immediately. This company
wanted safety—a core cultural value—everywhere. So it built
safety—a concrete set of observable and learned behaviors—every-
where.
Compare this to organizations I know everyone has seen at
least once, where leadership claims to value something but does
absolutely nothing to encourage or enhance it. Values only appear
in behaviors, and behaviors depend on values. When associates
join your organization, they'll immediately key into the values the
actions of those around them seem to express. And they'll pick
them up, live them, and perpetuate them.
That's why organizational culture is so important—not just
today, but always. When value and action align, great things hap-
pen. When they don't, you're in trouble.
23
Understanding the limits of hierarchies
S ometimes, the fastest route to solving a problem isn't neces-
sarily the best route. That's something I've learned while
leading an open organization.
Top-down organizations can certainly excel at achieving effi-
ciency—and if efficiency is your ultimate goal, then constructing a
hierarchy is a valid way to go. Quite often, a command-and-control-
style structure can produce the most accurate version of your vi-
sion, and quickly.
But don't expect anything a hierarchy does to pleasantly sur-
prise you. Don't expect it to respond well to forces or events
outside of your control. Don't expect it to flourish without your
meticulous oversight.
In short, don't expect it to be agile. That's because agility re-
quires an organizational capability to respond and react that top-
down, proscribed systems simply cannot achieve. It requires an or-
ganization in which every "box" has the latitude and responsibility
to react and adjust to a changing environment. That's not some-
thing central planning can accomplish. If that sounds messy and
chaotic to you, then you're right. But the long term results will sur-
prise you in many positive ways.
Think about a perennial garden in its early days. It looks sim-
ilarly messy and chaotic. To reach its potential, it will require a
good deal of nurturing. But the rewards of keeping a perennial gar-
den can be wonderful. Each year, new colors greet you. New
configurations, things you could never foresee or anticipate, sur-
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Organize for Innovation
prise you—all because you continued to invest in the activity
sprouting there.
Sure, you could plant an annual garden. Doing that would ac-
tually take you less time. You could place plants exactly where you
wanted them, arrange them in precise ways—control every aspect
of the project, from start to finish. The garden might flourish for a
bit, but its spectacle would only be temporary. You'd have to start
all over again the following year, and the work of replanting every-
thing would fall on you alone.
Leading an open organization—where hierarchy cedes much
of its control to dynamic, networked structures—feels much more
like maintaining a perennial garden. It involves working more on
conditions (turning soil, locating those spots in need of watering)
than it does on dictating direction. It means creating the context
for things (things you might not have considered or even imagined)
to occur.
And on top of that, tending to your networks is going to pro-
duce the best-performing results—every time. Because when
you've entrusted your associates to grow and evolve their work in
the ways they see fit, you're going to enjoy more robust and effec-
tive solutions. You'll also see speedier, more flexible ones. As I say
in The Open Organization, networked structures more easily facili-
tate what US Air Force colonel John Boyd calls the "OODA loop";
they allow for quicker reactions to immediate, pressing situations.
Hierarchies might let you make one-off decisions at a faster rate,
but, ultimately, they're just not as responsive in the long term.
Take what is probably the oldest participative, open system—
the United States' legal system—for example. Today, that system is
incredibly subtle and nuanced; it's highly adaptable and constantly
evolving. But building it required hundreds of years of painstaking
work: maintenance, upkeep, and tiny iterations in response to lo-
cal, contextual changes. The system is built on legal precedent
after legal precedent, opinion after opinion, and has emerged or-
ganically. You could dictate a legal system from above—"hatch" one
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Organize for Innovation
fully-formed in a shorter amount of time—but it wouldn't be nearly
as adept at addressing real-world complexity.
Or, to use another example (one much closer to Red Hat's
core business): take the Linux kernel. Today, it stands as the very
best solution to a growing number of technological problems, but it
didn't spring from a single person's head overnight. Decades of
work made it the flexible, superior solution it is today. Local im-
provements and impassioned debates between key stakeholders
continue to refine it.
Yes, sometimes you'll need to achieve an objective with maxi-
mum efficiency. We occasionally do at Red Hat. Rather than
activate the rich culture of our various networks to grow the best
solution, we opt for streamlining and expediting one. But we're al-
ways aware of the sacrifices we make by doing so.
Because most often, the fastest solution isn't the best one.
Bear that in mind the next time you start feeling frustrated by your
network's slower pace of execution. When you're ready to reap
what you've sewn, you'll be happy you did.
26
Becoming a master of organizational
jujutsu
O ne of the most difficult questions I get about open organiza-
tions comes from readers working at large companies with
deep, rich histories. "I understand how you grew your culture at
Red Hat," they tell me, "and I understand how open source commu-
nities can function the way you describe, but I work in a place with
an entirely different structure and culture. How do I begin to cat-
alyze the kinds of change you're describing?"
Recently I confronted the question yet again, when a senior
executive from a global industrial company met with me to talk
about ways she might open her organization. "We're really trying
to change our culture and become more agile," she told me, "but
we're trying to do this in the face of hundreds of years of en-
trenched tradition." She was looking for a way to fight against that
tradition.
And that's a common assumption: People think that mitigat-
ing the effects of hierarchy requires working against it. But that's
not the case.
Instead, you've got to learn to work with it.
Think about jujutsu, the martial art that specializes in turn-
ing opponents' strengths to your advantage. Jujutsu experts excel
at disarming opponents much stronger than they are because they
learn to channel others' energies in beneficial directions. (Full dis-
closure: I don't practice jujutsu, but my executive coach does—and
he's always more than happy to pass along its lessons to me.) Done
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Organize for Innovation
well, a timely jujutsu maneuver can flip a body's momentum
against itself.
Strongly rooted, hierarchical structures demonstrate a good
deal of momentum. They're difficult to counteract. But since writ-
ing The Open Organization, I've been thinking about ways leaders
might actually use that momentum to spark change.
Proponents of the open organizational model are quick to
note hierarchies' shortcomings: Hierarchies are resistant to
change. They're often brittle. They don't cope well with outside
forces. And they don't really foster collaboration, so they innovate
slowly.
But consider their strengths: They're extremely effective at
driving efficiency and, once in place, require relatively little up-
keep. They make sites of organizational power and influence
abundantly clear, and they offer obvious (if rather inflexible) routes
for information to travel along organizational lines.
So how might you perform a bit of jujutsu on a hierarchy in
order use those strengths to ultimately dismantle the hierarchy?
How do you channel a hierarchy's energies to actually cultivate the
conditions for openness?
I can think of two ways.
The first is something I attempted with my team at Delta Air
Lines. We wanted to increase engagement—to more tightly connect
associates to the organization's mission so they felt like they were
playing an active and important role in furthering it (a crucial com-
ponent of open organizations). So we initiated an ongoing survey of
everyone in the company. It asked people to respond to the follow-
ing statement: "I know the company's strategy, and I know what
my department can do to make it successful." And by tracking the
results by area, we made managers—and their managers' man-
agers—responsible for their teams' responses. Hierarchies excel at
driving specific metrics to further their own interests, so we lever-
aged Delta's hierarchy to point attention to the critical issue of
engagement, and we utilized our bureaucracy's strengths to really
28
Organize for Innovation
measure how effective everyone had become at generating that en-
gagement around the company's mission. While we didn't take it
quite this far at Delta, imagine what would happen if your response
to that prompt determined the size of your manager's bonus?
Here's a second idea: Use hierarchies' strict and clearly-de-
fined chains of command to increase your organization's overall
responsiveness. Imagine a company-wide meeting at which you tell
all associates: "We need and want your feedback, so you should
feel free to email your manager and you should expect to receive a
response, after a reasonable period of time, after doing so. And if
you don't get one, email me." You've just committed managers to
being more responsive to their employees; they'll know that if they
don't respond, then their associates' questions are going to move
straight up the hierarchy. I tried this once. As you'd expect, the vol-
ume of email I received on a daily basis initially increased—
dramatically. But almost as quickly as it spiked, the number of in-
coming messages dwindled. Apparently, people grew tired of my
stopping by their offices to ask them why they hadn't responded to
the notes they were receiving.
In both cases, my team tried to take the strengths of a rule-
following, order-taking, command-and-control system and use them
to actually further the interests of the open organization.
Just call it a bit of organizational jujutsu.
29
Innovation requires new approaches to
feedback and failure
"O rganizational culture" is something plenty of people are
puzzling over today, and with good reason. More and
more leaders are realizing that the culture permeating and guiding
their organizations will determine whether they succeed or fail.
The term "organizational culture" refers to an alignment be-
tween two forces inside an organization: values and behaviors.
Aligning those forces productively is one of the most difficult and
important tasks facing leaders today.
Customers and partners routinely tell me they want to create
a "culture of innovation" in their organizations. By this, they usu-
ally mean that they want to create contexts where certain actions—
those that generate new and unforeseen sources of value capable
of fueling growth—are not only expected but also commonplace.
I certainly understand why. Today, a culture of innovation is a
strong indicator of an organization's ability to weather the kinds of
constant disruption nearly every industry seems to be experienc-
ing. But creating one is easier said than done.
Here's how I'd recommend an organization approach that
challenge.
A new method
One method for creating a culture of innovation involves fo-
cusing on how your organization treats both feedback and failure.
30
Organize for Innovation
In innovative organizations, feedback is continual and frank
—in other words, it's open. Dialogue about ideas associates raise
must be ongoing, constructive, and, above all, honest.
To foster innovative environments, leaders must model the
kinds of feedback behaviors they want to see in their teammates
and associates. They need to be open to even the most difficult
conversations.
Innovation is one product of creativity. Despite the way we
tend to think about it on most days, creativity is very difficult; it's
the product of intense collaboration and sharing. Actually, Ed Cat-
mull and Amy Wallace discuss creativity this way in their book
Creativity, Inc. Innovative teams and organizations, they say, must
have some way to simply separate the wheat from the chaff—to
simply call a bad idea a bad idea—and move forward. Creating a
culture of respectful, frank disagreement is key to this. The oppo-
site of this kind of culture is one where feedback is a rarity—or,
worse, where it's only positive (as I wrote in The Open Organiza-
tion, it's possible for organizations to be "terminally nice").
One of the things people receive feedback about is their fail-
ures. But cultures of innovation take a specific approach to failure:
They celebrate it.
Without question, being innovative involves taking calculated
risks. People in innovative organizations must feel like they can try
something novel and unexpected without fear of intense, negative
blowback—otherwise, they'll never attempt anything new.
Traditionally, we've treated failure as a sign of personal fail-
ing: Someone faced with a tough choice didn't make the "right"
decisions, so we need to punish the behavior that led to a certain
outcome.
But in cultures of innovation, where everyone is expected to
experiment, how can anyone possibly know what the "right" and
"wrong" decisions will be if the problem is so new that few people
have any concrete experience with it?
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Organize for Innovation
Instead, I like to think about failure the way Jeff Bezos once
described it in a letter to Amazon shareholders.5 He said:
Most large organizations embrace the idea of inven-
tion, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed
experiments necessary to get there . . . Given a ten
percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take
that bet every time. But you're still going to be wrong
nine times out of ten. We all know that if you swing for
the fences, you're going to strike out a lot, but you're
also going to hit some home runs.
The trick to making this approach to failure an organization's
default approach is changing the way we think about evaluation.
Traditional management is management by objective. It ex-
amines outcomes to see if they've aligned with expectations
someone set out before undertaking a task. If these don't align,
then someone, somewhere, has failed—and that's a bad thing.
In innovative cultures, however, we need to balance that ap-
proach with one that actually rewards failure. Leaders must be
able to encourage certain motivations, which are a key source of
innovation. They're not as overt or quantifiable as outcomes, how-
ever, which is why traditional management theory struggles to
account for them.
How can leaders assess people who might have failed, but
who've demonstrated exciting new ideas and approaches along the
way? And how can they encourage others to actually emulate those
people?
If you can get there, you'll know you have a culture that re-
wards risk-taking.
5 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/
1018724/000119312516530910/d168744dex991.htm
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Organize for Innovation
A focus on structure
This approach to creating a culture of innovation isn't a fool-
proof and complete plan for changing the way your organization
functions today. I don't think such a comprehensive plan actually
exists (if it does, please let me know!).6
But I do believe that focusing on the organizational struc-
tures that govern approaches to feedback and failure is a
promising way to begin—much better, anyway, than simply telling
people to "be more innovative."
6 See "Culture matters when encouraging innovative behaviors" in this
volume.
33
How to keep a meritocracy in check
O f all the concepts we associate with open organizations to-
day, meritocracy might be the most complicated, complex,
and controversial.
I remember vividly a conversation that illustrated this for
me. Speaking with someone at a banking conference, I suggested
that, in organizations wishing to foster cultures of innovation, the
best ideas should always win—and that people with the longest his-
tory of concrete, successful contributions to an organization should
be the ones to decide which ideas are indeed "best."
That didn't suit my discussion partner.
"No way!" he said. "That's wrong! Why do people who have
been in the organization the longest—whose thinking might be
most stale and outdated—get the authority to judge which ideas
should be worth pursuing?"
It was a fair point. Creating an innovative culture in any or-
ganization means always having to balance the novelty of fresh
ideas with the valuable wisdom the organization's leaders have ac-
crued over time. That conversation really served to remind me that
meritocracy isn't a straightforward solution to any and every prob-
lem (something we can just "drop in" to an organizational context
and expect immediate, positive results). It's always a work in
progress, and keeping an organization's meritocracy in check—rou-
tinely scrutinizing it to make sure it's functioning to produce the
best results—is crucial.
But doing that is much more difficult when meritocracy re-
mains something nebulous and abstract—a set of principles with
34
Organize for Innovation
little focus on implementation. At Red Hat, we recognize this, and I
want to share what we've learned about meritocracy, as well as the
ways we're putting it into practice every day.
Not tenure
Meritocracy means many things to many people, but I tend
to describe it as a concept that unites three basic notions (which I
detail in Chapter 4 of The Open Organization):
THE BEST IDEAS SHOULD COME FROM ANYWHERE. Arbitrary
lines on a chart and artificial silos shouldn't dictate how innovative
ideas and solutions might (or might not) travel through an organi-
zation. Good ideas, no matter where they originate, should always
find generous and interested ears.
THE BEST IDEAS SHOULD ALWAYS WIN. Debate over potential
solutions, paths, or decisions should always be about ideas. This
means making concerns about the quality of the ideas we're devel-
oping the utmost priority, and working hard to ensure a diversity of
opinions and perspectives guides us while we develop them.
CONTRIBUTION MATTERS MORE THAN TITLE. As people in
open source communities often say: "Code talks." What people ac-
tually do (what they contribute, what they bring to the table)
matters more than what they say they can (or should) do, and it
matters far more than whatever title they hold. While it's true that
people with long histories of concrete, effective solutions tend to
garner more power and authority in meritocracies, this principle
always underscores the fact that power is something earned, and is
always shifting based on what people continually produce for the
good of the group. (As one Red Hatter, Tom Callaway, once put it to
me: "Meritocracy isn't tenure." Tom visited my office a few months
ago dressed as Linux mascot Tux the penguin, so he's clearly some-
one who has my attention.)7
7 https://twitter.com/JWhitehurst/status/694226943944822785
35
Organize for Innovation
Meritocracy in practice
At Red Hat, we've worked hard to cultivate meritocratic
thinking as part of our organizational culture. But, as former Red
Hat Chief People Officer DeLisa Alexander said, we've very deliber-
ately defined it as a leadership capability. 8 That means we don't
just pay the principles lip service and leave them be. Quite the op-
posite: We recognize that a meritocracy is only useful if the people
composing it are actively dedicated to making it work. So we're al-
ways asking ourselves whether our working definitions of
meritocracy are effective and productive—always actively refining
the concepts as we put them to work—then concretizing the con-
cepts into specific practices and behaviors we expect leaders at
Red Hat to exhibit.
One result of our years of meritocratic experimentation is
something we've made available to other organizations working to
create the most innovative cultures: the Open Decision Frame-
work.9 At its heart, the framework represents our ongoing effort to
reflect on meritocratic principles, translate them into concrete
practices, and analyze the outcomes we produce as a result. It out-
lines a multi-step process for collecting, researching, designing,
testing, and launching decisions and initiatives in a transparent,
collaborative, and customer-centric way. And it provides organiza-
tional leaders—whoever or wherever they are—a tool for gauging
whether a meritocratic structure is really working to produce the
best ideas.
In short, it's a step-by-step guide to being an effective open
leader. And we've made it available for remixing and reuse by any-
one.10 We're excited to see how others adapt, modify, and translate
8 https://opensource.com/open-organization/16/6/presenting-framework-
meritocracy
9 https://opensource.com/open-organization/16/6/introducing-open-
decision-framework
10 https://github.com/opensourceway/open-decision-framework
36
Organize for Innovation
the framework to their own organizational environments and cul-
tures.
I'm sure we'll learn even more about our own meritocracy
when they do.
37
Try, learn, modify
J ust about every day, new technological developments threaten
to destabilize even the most intricate and best-laid business
plans. Organizations often find themselves scrambling to adapt to
new conditions, and that's created a shift in how they plan for the
future.
According to a 2017 study by CompTIA, only 34% of compa-
nies are currently developing IT architecture plans that extend
beyond 12 months. One reason for that shift away from a longer-
term plan is that business contexts are changing so quickly that
planning any further into the future is nearly impossible. "If your
company is trying to set a plan that will last five to 10 years down
the road," CIO.com writes, "forget it."11
I've heard similar statements from countless customers and
partners around the world. Technological innovations are occur-
ring at an unprecedented pace.
The result is that long-term planning is dead. We need to be
thinking differently about the way we run our organizations if
we're going to succeed in this new world.
How planning died
As I wrote in The Open Organization, traditionally-run orga-
nizations are optimized for industrial economies. They embrace
hierarchical structures and rigidly prescribed processes as they
work to achieve positional competitive advantage. To be success-
11 https://www.cio.com/article/3246027/enterprise-architecture/the-death-
of-long-term-it-planning.html?upd=1515780110970
38
Organize for Innovation
ful, they have to define the strategic positions they want to
achieve. Then they have to formulate and dictate plans for getting
there, and execute on those plans in the most efficient ways possi-
ble—by coordinating activities and driving compliance.
Management's role is to optimize this process: plan, pre-
scribe, execute. It consists of saying: Let's think of a competitively
advantaged position; let's configure our organization to ultimately
get there; and then let's drive execution by making sure all aspects
of the organization comply. It's what I'll call "mechanical manage-
ment," and it's a brilliant solution for a different time.
In today's volatile and uncertain world, our ability to predict
and define strategic positions is diminishing—because the pace of
change, the rate of introduction of new variables, is accelerating.
Classic, long-term, strategic planning and execution isn't as effec-
tive as it used to be.
If long-term planning has become so difficult, then prescrib-
ing necessary behaviors is even more challenging. And measuring
compliance against a plan is next to impossible.
All this dramatically affects the way people work. Unlike
workers in the traditionally-run organizations of the past—who
prided themselves on being able to act repetitively, with little varia-
tion and comfortable certainty—today's workers operate in
contexts of abundant ambiguity. Their work requires greater cre-
ativity, intuition, and critical judgment—there is a greater demand
to deviate from yesterday's "normal" and adjust to today's new con-
ditions.
Working in this new way has become more critical to value
creation. Our management systems must focus on building struc-
tures, systems, and processes that help create engaged, motivated
workers—people who are enabled to innovate and act with speed
and agility.
We need to come up with a different solution for optimizing
organizations for a very different economic era, one that works
from the bottom up rather than the top down. We need to replace
39
Organize for Innovation
that old three-step formula for success—plan, prescribe, execute—
with one much better suited to today's tumultuous climate: try,
learn, modify.
Try, learn, modify
Because conditions can change so rapidly and with so little
warning—and because the steps we need to take next are no
longer planned in advance—we need to cultivate environments that
encourage creative trial and error, not unyielding allegiance to a
five-year schedule. Here are just a few implications of beginning to
work this way.
SHORTER PLANNING CYCLES (TRY). Rather than agonize over
long-term strategic directions, managers need to be thinking of
short-term experiments they can try quickly. They should be seek-
ing ways to help their teams take calculated risks and leverage the
data at their disposal to make best guesses about the most benefi-
cial paths forward. They can do this by lowering overhead and
giving teams the freedom to try new approaches quickly.
HIGHER TOLERANCE FOR FAILURE (LEARN). Greater frequency
of experimentation means greater opportunity for failure. Creative
and resilient organizations have a significantly higher tolerance for
failure than traditional organizations do. Managers should treat
failures as learning opportunities—moments to gather feedback on
the tests their teams are running.
MORE ADAPTABLE STRUCTURES (MODIFY). An ability to easily
modify organizational structures and strategic directions—and the
willingness to do it when conditions necessitate—is the key to en-
suring that organizations can evolve in line with rapidly changing
environmental conditions. Managers can't be wedded to any idea
any longer than that idea proves itself to be useful for accomplish-
ing a short-term goal.
If long-term planning is dead, then long live shorter-term ex-
perimentation. Try, learn, and modify—that's the best path forward
during uncertain times.
40
Coming to grips with an unknowable
world
F or the past two years at Red Hat Summit, I've argued that
traditional planning is dead. The increasing speed of techno-
logical innovation, as well as the shift to more open styles of
production and organization, are forcing everyone to rethink how
we go about setting, executing on, and measuring performance
against goals.
Those who've heard me talk about this have been sympa-
thetic—but also skeptical. "I see your point," executives tell me,
"but I still need to do something to prepare my organization for the
future. And isn't that planning?"
Understandably, these folks are doing what great leaders
should be doing: Not only helping their organizations respond to
what they see going on around them, but also helping them antici-
pate invisible and unforeseen forces too. After all, one of W.
Edwards Deming's "seven deadly diseases of management" is
"management by use only of visible figures, with little or no consid-
eration of figures that are unknown or unknowable." 12 Good
leaders account for what they might not see as much as what they
do see.
By suggesting that "planning is dead," I'm not saying that or-
ganizations shouldn't bother worrying about the future. What I am
saying, however, is that organizations hoping to avoid being dis-
rupted must change how they think about the future.
12 https://deming.org/explore/seven-deadly-diseases
41
Organize for Innovation
And that phrase from Deming contains a key to understand-
ing one way to do this.
Deming makes an important distinction between the "un-
known" and the "unknowable." These two words might seem the
same, but they aren't. The "unknown" is something in the future
that we don't yet know but that could eventually become known.
It's something that—if we did the research, gathered the data,
worked hard enough and put our minds to it—we could under-
stand, predict, account for, and eventually control. The
"unknowable," on the other hand, is something that by its very na-
ture cannot be known, regardless of how much energy we invest
into trying to predict it. Despite all our efforts, we'll never be able
to control for it.
Management theory in the 20th century considered the fu-
ture in terms of unknowns. 13 As a result, our techniques for
organizational planning reflected an assumption that the future,
while not yet known, was fairly predictable and unfolded much the
same way it had previously. So planning involved identifying the
targets we'd like to hit in, say, a year's time, outlining and assign-
ing the best methods for hitting those targets, and driving
behaviors necessary for achieving those goals (the formula was es-
sentially "plan, prescribe, execute").14
This method of planning doesn't really require the organiza-
tion itself to change—just work harder, smarter, and more
efficiently in its current configuration to meet the demands of an
unknown (yet eventually knowable) future. But this style of plan-
ning involves making lots of assumptions about the future that
could very well turn out to be wrong. It also tends to treat techno-
logical innovation as a linear and predictable process, which it
isn't. Today, conditions change so quickly that our conventional
methods—customer surveys, simulations, etc.—are less and less
13 https://hbr.org/1997/11/strategy-under-uncertainty
14 See "try, learn, modify" in this volume.
42
Organize for Innovation
helpful as we plan for the future. That's what I mean when I say
"planning is dead."
Those methods are losing their power because today we're
dealing more frequently with the unknowable—and no amount of
work on our part will make the unknowable knowable. So leaders
need to rethink how they help their organizations approach the fu-
ture. We need to focus on making our organizations more nimble,
responsive, and adaptable to uncertainties, rather than honing our
tired and obsolete techniques for predicting and controlling the un-
known.
Here's an example of what I mean. Think about how this
might work at an airline. If you're setting a budget for the coming
year, you'll need to make some assumptions about what the future
holds for you and your industry. Some aspects of that future are
unknown to you, but you can account and control for them using
traditional methods of prediction and calculation. GDP growth
might be one of these factors (it's a constant consideration for air-
lines). GDP fluctuates relatively little, so we can effectively outline
a range for those potential fluctuations and plan our budgets ac-
cordingly.
But other factors affecting the budgeting process are simply
unknowable. We can't outline a range of the probable impacts
they’ll have because we just can't know what those might be. Air-
lines might consider fuel prices to be one of these factors. Fuel
prices can vary widely from month to month (even week to week),
and their fluctuations depend on a complicated jumble of interre-
lated forces, including forces we don't even know exist yet like
breakthroughs in refinery technology or a sudden geopolitical
event. Predicting them with any useful accuracy is impossible.
So rather than waste precious time and energy trying to
make predictions about something that is simply unknowable, the
airline could instead focus on making itself ready for potential dis-
ruptions to fuel supplies, should they occur. It could focus on
making itself more flexible and responsive (for example, by upgrad-
43
Organize for Innovation
ing its ability to scale up or scale down quickly based on fuel costs,
or to pivot quickly in its aircraft leasing plans) so it's prepared for
a greater number of unknowable contingencies.
Most organizations are obsessively focused on turning the
unknown into the known when they should be focused on improv-
ing their ability to respond to the fundamentally unknowable.
This tendency makes sense. Evidence suggests that the hu-
man brain is so averse to uncertainty that it will do everything in
its power to explain it away. But the more we recognize the un-
knowable for what it truly is, the more we'll focus our planning and
development efforts on making ourselves change-ready—and the
better off we'll be.
44
The innovation delusion
I f traditional planning is dead, 15 then why do so many organiza-
tions still invest in planning techniques optimized for the
Industrial Revolution?
One reason might be that we trick ourselves into thinking in-
novation is the kind of thing we can accomplish with a structured,
linear process. When we do this, I think we're confusing our sto-
ries about innovation with the process of innovation itself—and the
two are very different.
The process of innovation is chaotic and unpredictable. It
doesn't operate according to clean, regimented timelines. It's filled
with iterative phases, sudden changes in direction, various starts
and stops, dead ends, (hopefully productive) failures, and unknow-
able variables. It's messy.
But the stories we tell ourselves about innovation, including
the books and articles we read about great inventions and the tales
we tell each other about our successes in the workplace, tidy that
process up. Think about how many social media posts you've seen
that feature nothing but the "high points."
That's the nature of good storytelling. It takes a naturally
scattered collection of moments and puts them neatly into a begin-
ning, middle, and end. It smoothes out all the rough patches and
makes a result seem inevitable from the start, despite whatever
moments of uncertainty, panic, even despair we experienced along
the way.
15 See "Coming to grips with an unknowable world" in this volume.
45
Organize for Innovation
We shouldn't confuse messy process with simplified story.
When we do, we might mistakenly assume we can approach inno-
vation challenges with the same practices we bring to neat and
linear processes. In other words, we apply a set of management
techniques appropriate for one set of activities (for more rote, me-
chanical, and prescriptive tasks) to a set of activities they aren't
really suited for (more creative, non-linear work requiring auton-
omy and experimentation).
An innovation story
Here's one of my favorite examples of how this idea in ac-
tion.
In the 1970s, the British motorcycle industry was desper-
ately trying to figure out why its U.S. market share was
plummeting while Honda's was skyrocketing. The company hired
my former employer, the Boston Consulting Group, to help them
figure out what was going wrong. BCG gathered some historical
data, reviewed a two-decade sequence of events, and developed a
neat, linear story explaining Honda's success.
Honda, BCG concluded, had executed an ingenious strategy:
enter the U.S market with smaller motorcycles it could sell at
lower cost, use the economies of scale it had developed in the
Japense market to set low prices and grow a market, then further
leverage those economies of scale to grow their share in the States
as demand grew.16 By all accounts, Honda had done it brilliantly,
playing to its strengths while thoroughly and accurately assessing
the new, target U.S. consumer. It had outsmarted, outflanked, and
outperformed competitors with a well-executed plan.
It sounded great. But the reality was much less straightfor-
ward.
16 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/
uploads/attachment_data/file/235319/0532.pdf
46
Organize for Innovation
Yes, Honda did want to enter the U.S. motorcycle market. It
initially attempted to copy its competitors there, building the
larger bikes Americans seemed to favor. But bikes like that weren't
one of Honda's strengths, and their versions had reliability issues. 17
To make matters worse, their models didn't look much different
than other offerings already in the market, so they weren't stand-
ing out. Suffice it to say, sales were not booming.
But in a happy coincidence, Honda's Japanese representa-
tives visiting the States had brought their own motorcycles with
them. Those bikes were different than the ones the company was
attempting to sell to the American market. They were smaller, zip-
pier, less bulky, more efficient, and generally less expensive. Sears
took notice, contacted the reps, and the companies struck a deal
that let Sears carry this new motorcycle—called the "Super Cub"—
in its American stores.
And the rest, as they say, is history. The Super Cub would go
on to become the best-selling motorized vehicle of all time,18 and
Honda continues to produce it today.
In hindsight, the events that brought the Super Cub to the
U.S. seem logical, almost boring. But Honda owed its success less
to an ingenious master plan and much more to serendipity and
happenstance than most people care to admit.
Open (and messy) innovation
Organizations (and especially leaders) like to think that suc-
cess is always planned—that they've become masters of chaos and
can almost predict the future. But they're often making those as-
sessments with the benefit of hindsight, telling the stories of their
haphazard journey in a way that organizes the chaos, essentially
17 http://www.howardyu.org/the-revolutionary-approach-honda-took-to-
rise-above-competition/
18 https://autoweek.com/article/motorcycles/first-ride-honda-super-cub-
c125-abs-all-new-and-still-super-cute
47
Organize for Innovation
reflecting on a period of uncertainty and saying "we meant to do
that."
But as I said, we shouldn't assume those stories are mirror
reflections of the innovation process itself and build future initia-
tives or experiments on that mistaken assumption.
Imagine another motorcycle manufacturer looking to repli-
cate Honda's success with the Super Cub by following BCG's
narrative to the letter. Because the story of Honda's success seems
so logical and linear, the new company might assume it could use
similar processes and get the same results: plan objectives, pre-
scribe behaviors, and execute against knowable outcomes. But we
know that Honda didn't really win its market with that kind of
"plan, prescribe, execute" mentality. It won through flexibility and
a bit of blind luck—something more like "try, learn, modify."19
When we're able to appreciate and accept that the innova-
tion process is messy, we allow ourselves to think differently about
approaching innovation in our organizations. We can begin build-
ing the kinds of open and agile organizations capable of
responding to innovation as it happens instead of over-investing re-
sources into pre-formed plans that try to force innovation into a
linear timeline.
I saw this kind of approach several years ago, when Red Hat
released a new version of a product that included a major technol-
ogy update. Version 5.4 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the first
to include full support for a technology called the Kernel-based Vir-
tual Machine (or "KVM").20 For us it was a significant innovation
that promised to deliver immense value not only to customers and
partners, but also to open source software communities.
The technology was evolving quickly. Luckily, because we're
an open organization, we were adaptable enough to respond to
19 See "Try, learn, modify" in this volume.
20 https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/
red_hat_enterprise_linux/5/html/5.4_release_notes/index
48
Organize for Innovation
that innovation as it was happening and help our customers and
partners take advantage of it. It was too important, and the com-
petitive landscape too volatile, to justify withholding just so we
could "save" it for a milestone moment like version 6.0.
When you go back and review the archived release notes for
Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you'll see that it doesn't "read" like a
typical software innovation tale.21 A game-changing development
pops up at an unpredicted and unremarkable moment (version
5.4), rather than a pre-planned blockbuster milestone (version 6.0).
In hindsight, we now know that KVM was the kind of "big bang"
advancement that could have warranted a milestone release name
like "6.0." But that's just not how the innovation process unfolded.
Don't get me wrong, organizations still need to maintain op-
erational excellence and perform execution-oriented tasks well.
But different kinds of challenges require different kinds of ap-
proaches, and we need to get better at building flexible
organizations just as capable of responding to the unforeseen or
unknowable.22
An organization great at planning (and executing against
that plan) will quite likely get the results it planned for. But when
success depends on things we don't or can't predict, is getting ex-
actly what you've planned for good enough?
21 https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/
red_hat_enterprise_linux/5/html/5.0_release_notes/index
22 See "Coming to grips with an unknowable world" in this volume.
49
Public sector innovation doesn't need
technology—it needs culture change
T he pace of technological change has never been faster. Call
this condition whatever you'd like—"digital disruption," the
"Fourth Industrial Revolution," or any of the other trendy monikers
coined in recent years. The truth is that the speed of innovation to-
day makes planning for the long term incredibly difficult.
It's true not only in the private sector but in the public sector
as well. Like everyone, government organizations are struggling to
chart paths forward in the face of a faster-moving and increasingly
ambiguous future. According to a 2018 report from the Congres-
sional Research Service, federal government IT budgets are
growing, but so are the costs of maintaining older systems. 23 That
leaves precious little budget available for new and innovative ini-
tiatives. When course-changing disruption becomes a persistent
possibility, organizations are left asking: Why spend millions of dol-
lars on long-term R&D initiatives for results that may be irrelevant
or obsolete before they're even finalized?
Part of the problem may be that technology alone won't ad-
dress the issues we're facing. The only way governmental
organizations—or any organizations, for that matter—will continue
to thrive amid continual, innovative disruptions will be to funda-
mentally rethink how they operate.
23 https://www.everycrsreport.com/files/
20180608_R44843_3bd5ab7590c0daa998a1ad0f341dfee7aaaf8bc7.pdf
50
Organize for Innovation
First and foremost, that means questioning the principles
that drive those organizations, which are still optimized for indus-
trial-era economies. These organizations tend to favor hierarchical
structures as a means of driving large-scale efficiencies. For them,
planning is a rather simple and straightforward matter of identify-
ing a strategic position in a market or a capability they need to
develop, formulating plans to achieve those things, dictating the
steps required to get there, and ensuring everyone in the organiza-
tion complies with those decisions.
Doing more of this—just somehow "better" and "faster"—isn't
the way forward. The hierarchies and bureaucracies so commonly
in use today were best suited for their context, and while they
were an elegant and effective solution for their time, today the con-
text has shifted. Traditional planning techniques only work in
situations where variables are clear and the future (at least some-
what) is predictable. That's just not the case in most industries
today, where work demands creativity, adaptability, and agility in
an environment overflowing with ambiguity.
Instead, we should be organizing for innovation. Now, let me
state up front: This doesn't necessarily mean overhauling every as-
pect of our organizations—gutting them and starting again (as if
that degree of change were so easy!). More often, it means starting
in a small defined way, perhaps on a project-level basis, question-
ing received wisdom and tradition.
What's most important is infusing our organizations with
some new guiding principles, ones that might seem alien at first.
The organizations best able to weather disruption are open organi-
zations, those that embrace principles like transparency,
collaboration, meritocracy, and sharing as foundational values.
These organizations are able to act with greater agility, to derive
knowledge from passionate global communities, to benefit from
more engaged employees and stakeholders, and to innovate more
frequently because they're built on values more conducive to
adapting to the future rather than controlling it.
51
Organize for Innovation
In short, they've focused not on refining outdated methods of
planning for futures that never come to pass, but on building orga-
nizational cultures that help them remain constantly change-ready.
Of course, the cultures of our government organizations
won't change until their leaders change. They'll need to recognize
that culture is an output of the behaviors they champion and
model, not an input they can simply decide to drive across an orga-
nizational chart. So they'll need to change how they act. They'll
need to get comfortable creating places where constructive con-
flict is the norm, where people question even the most long-
standing traditions, where bottom-up decisions carry real weight,
and where failure that produces useful knowledge is a cause for
praise, not punishment.
Most significantly, however, leaders will need to come to
grips with letting go. They'll need to leave behind their impressions
of the leader as an all-knowing coordinator who architects a bril-
liant plan and masterminds its execution. Instead, they'll need to
function as catalysts for constant change, agitators who bring the
right people together at the right moments to solve the right prob-
lems. In other words, they'll need to be open to changing
themselves before they work on changing their organizations.
Nevertheless, becoming more open certainly isn't easy, even
if it is necessary. But don't get me wrong: By suggesting that orga-
nizations adopt open principles and methods, I'm not saying they
need to begin sharing everything they have with anyone who's in-
terested. Red Hat, the company where I was president and CEO, is
an enterprise software company with an open source development
model. We share the source code for our software products be-
cause that's the best way to tap the wisdom of a diverse and
distributed developer community. It also helps us understand the
magnitude of oncoming innovations and enhance security. But not
every organization (certainly not every government agency) is in a
position to operate that way.
52
Organize for Innovation
What I'm talking about is taking an open approach to organi-
zational design and leadership—to letting open principles guide
how an organization does what it does, even if only internally. Ef-
forts to open up our organizations don’t need to be focused on the
product we ship (whether that be software or something else en-
tirely) but on changing how we deliver those products with greater
speed, responsiveness to constantly changing environments, and
care and attentiveness to the people who benefit from what we do.
An open approach to leadership and innovation can apply to
all types of organizations, including governmental ones. Public-sec-
tor organizations share many of the challenges and pressures that
private sector ones do—including maintaining the kind of agile, re-
sponsive, and digitally-enabled organizations people have come to
expect in their rapidly changing everyday lives. But they already
benefit from a mandate for transparency and an abundance of
civic-minded, community-focused enthusiasm, so they, too, could
open themselves to a more inclusive future. They also collaborate
frequently with external partners, like contractors. At the moment,
those collaborative relationships aren't as agile as they could be,
because the current system incentivizes large, complex, and highly
specialized tenders. If government leaders were to open them-
selves up, they might cause interesting ripple effects that would
impact contractors and their teams.
This is already happening at a grassroots level, where pas-
sionate advocates for a more open way of working are driving
changes across their departments. For example, the City of San
Rafael, located in Marin County, California, recently undertook
some major culture-renovation initiatives aimed at helping the city
government "learn how to make government work better by shar-
ing what we make, learn, and improve," as the city's director of
digital service and open government said in a recent presentation I
watched.24 The city has relaunched its intranet—something avail-
24 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSRXyCS7flA
53
Organize for Innovation
able only to internal employees—as a public-facing utility anyone
(employee or not) can access and review. This has not only in-
creased transparency and accountability but also aided
recruitment (a pressing issue for government agencies at all levels
today), as prospective employees can take an unobstructed look at
how the San Rafael team operates. These are just a few ways that
governments could (as the U.S. Digital Service puts it, and as we
like to say at Red Hat) "default to open."25
Incremental advancements toward openness go a long way
to fostering an environment where people aren't afraid to voice
their opinions and instead feel empowered to be creative and sug-
gest new ideas, which is an environment primed for innovation.
"Going open" isn't an all-or-nothing gambit, and it never works by
fiat or decree. It's about identifying the areas where open attitudes
and behaviors can make the most significant impacts in particular
agencies and empowering decision-makers to implement open poli-
cies where they see fit.
Operating openly is an option available to any organization.
But in a world where opening up seems to be the only way to avoid
disruption, it's a choice that's becoming harder not to make.
25 https://playbook.cio.gov/#play13
54
Part 2: Open Leadership
What it means to be an open leader
B eing an open leader means creating the context others need
to do their best work.
That's a relatively short sentence, but for anyone wishing to
lead a group in the 21st century, its implications are enormous.
And if you're hoping to be one of those people—if you're hoping to
have a career leading an open organization—then you must not
only understand what it means, but also recognize ways you can
put it into practice, so you can build a culture that creates a strate-
gic, competitive advantage for your organization.
Context shapes culture
Culture is something management gurus are increasingly
taking more seriously. "Culture eats strategy for breakfast," I've
heard people say.26 But I'm not sure that all of those folks truly un-
derstand why this is the case.
Despite depictions in popular media, a great company cul-
ture isn't simply the result of workplace perks and ping pong
tables. Culture is the result of sufficient context—a shared set of
values, a shared purpose, and shared meanings.
Being a leader in an open organization, then, means making
connections: It involves doing the work of linking people both to
each other and to some larger, shared picture. It's helping people
understand how they can contribute to a collective effort in mean-
ingful ways.
26 http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/12/culture-eats-strategy-for-breakfast/
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As a leader, you create context when you help everyone in
the organization understand its whole mission: the vision, the val-
ues—all the elements that define your very reason for existing. An
open leader also helps people recognize the vast sum of interac-
tions taking place that make an organization what it is—the aims,
goals, and passions that push individuals to work together.
So when we talk about "creating context," we're really talk-
ing about bringing these two facets of organizational life together
in exciting and productive ways. An open leader aligns passion
with purpose, action with vision. And that creates a culture where
people feel inspired, motivated, and empowered to do their very
best work.
Shaping that culture begins with an emphasis on sharing.
Learn to share
In conventional organizations, "knowledge is power." But in
open organizations, that well-worn adage can be a destructive and
downright disastrous guiding principle.
Some leaders believe that extending trust and operating
transparently will somehow diminish their power. In reality, how-
ever, leaders should be sharing as much as they can with their
organizations. Sharing information is how leaders begin to build
the context that people in an organization need to forge connec-
tions between their passions and the organization's mission. Open
leaders are honest about the problems they face, the worries they
carry, and the limits they possess—because, in the end, the prob-
lems leaders face are the problems everyone faces. Shared
knowledge is power.
The problems leaders hear about from customers—the things
that keep them up at night—that's the information we need to
share with our entire organization. Because when we provide that
context and share those problems, we inspire and empower people
to help us overcome them. In The Open Organization, for instance,
I describe how sharing my priority of making Red Hat more cus-
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Organize for Innovation
tomer-focused—and thereby inviting others to help me achieve it—
generated unique, creative, and valuable insights from people
across the organization.
I've met people who believe "sharing more" actually means
"delegating more." But that's not necessarily the case. In the tradi-
tional sense, "delegation" involves sharing responsibility for
implementing a solution the leader has already dreamed up and
settled on. What I'm talking about is different: sharing the work of
actually developing those solutions, so associates have genuine in-
fluence over both the course their work will take and the purpose it
will serve.
If this sounds hard, that's because it is. At Red Hat, we put a
lot of effort behind hiring for and developing these kinds of leader-
ship capabilities. We take the time to explain them to people, to
coach people on what it takes to connect, to be transparent, and to
extend trust.
We even talk about what overuse and underuse of these ca-
pabilities looks like. For example, we've found that it's important to
explain that transparency isn't an excuse for rude behavior, nor
does it mean you disclose confidential information about associates
or our business. Trust doesn't mean you give people assignments
without any direction or context, or that you fail to verify that work
they've completed.
Develop your EQ
In an open organization, leaders must be sensitive to nu-
ances—knowing how to share and how to invite collaboration in
ways that keep an organization from dissolving into chaos. A
leader's mandate to help people do their best work involves not
just an understanding of leadership capabilities like connection,
trust, and transparency, but also a certain familiarity with—and
sensitivity to—the feelings, emotions, and passions of the people
that leader is trying to help.
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Organize for Innovation
In The Open Organization, for example, I discuss the need
for leaders to share half-baked ideas with their organizations, to
bring plans or concepts to the table before they're fully developed,
in order to receive productive feedback sooner. The best leaders
can pinpoint precisely when to present a half-baked idea—not so
early as to distract people with an idea that may not play out, but
not so late as to preclude any opportunity for productive discus-
sion.
Spotting those opportune moments—really sensing them—
requires leaders to be in tune with their organizations' emotional
atmospheres.
Think about it this way: Great leaders give people enough
structure to know they're marching up the right hill, but those
leaders don't want to prescribe a single road north, because they
need the people making the journey to feel empowered to control
that journey. This way, they don't exhaust themselves trying to
climb over a massive rock in their way, and instead devise a
smarter method for getting around it.
The trick for leaders is providing enough clarity of purpose—
enough context—that people are able to help an organization ac-
complish its goals, but not so much that they're impeded from
exercising their creativity and initiative in the process.
Information overload doesn't create context. Distraction
doesn't create context. Strong emotional intelligence helps leaders
avoid both.
Be a catalyst, not a commander
Deciding to share (and determining how to share) drives
open leaders to an important conclusion: a group is always going
to produce a better solution than an individual.
Leaders of conventional organizations are commanders.
They dictate and prescribe both means and ends, then monitor
people to make sure they use the former to achieve the latter.
Leaders of open organizations are catalysts.
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Organize for Innovation
Chemistry tells us that a catalyst is an agent that, when
added to a mixture, sparks a productive change. This is precisely
the role leaders play in open organizations. They create context
that invites people into relationships with new (even surprising) re-
sults. And they do this because they believe, truly and deeply, that
the groups they help form will develop better solutions than the
leader could alone.
I won't deny it: Being a leader means constantly being
tempted to step in, to force decisions, to command. Commanders
generally consider collaborative dialogue a grueling waste of time
("I just need to tell people what to do," they say). Sure, they may
go so far as to hold meetings about, invite comments on, and ask
for feedback regarding their ideas. But in the end, those are empty
gestures, because they've already decided that they know what's
best.
Catalysts, on the other hand, believe that if they get the right
conversations going—if they spark the right kinds of collaboration
—then their organizations will realize better results. Leaders can
only become catalysts when they let go of the assumption that, cat-
egorically, they know best.
Without a doubt, being a catalyst is actually more difficult
than being a commander. Since open organizations tend to be mer-
itocracies, in which reputation and a long history of concrete
contributions trump job titles as markers of organizational power
and influence, leaders must be constantly balancing the skills, per-
sonalities, and cultural capital they see in their colleagues. Far
from dictating, they need to master the art of making appropriate
connections—producing the proper combinations—that ignite the
most influential innovations.
Yet being a catalyst is also more rewarding than being a
commander. Parents, consider this: Did you feel more proud when
you graduated from college, or when your kids graduated from col-
lege? If you're like me, the answer is: your kids. Catalysts
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Organize for Innovation
experience that same sense of pride parents do when they watch
those they've helped succeed.
A checklist
So here's a checklist for those hoping to make a career lead-
ing an open organization. Being an open leader requires:
• WILLINGNESS to extend trust and share information
• APPRECIATION for transparency and collaboration
whenever possible
• SENSITIVITY to the moods, emotions, and passions of
the people that make up an organization
• KNOWLEDGE of not only what to share, but how to
share it
• BELIEF that groups will consistently outperform indi-
viduals working in isolation
• TRUST in those groups to drive necessary change
Master all this, and you're well on your way to creating the
most important thing a leader can provide: the context for people
to do their best work.
63
What the community has taught me
about open organizations
W hen I was pitching The Open Organization, publishers al-
ways asked me the same question: "Is this a book about
management or leadership?"
And my answer was always the same: "The Open Organiza-
tion is a book about management." After all, it's about the ways
Red Hat, the open organization I lead, uses a networked organiza-
tional model (one we adopt from the open source world) to make
decisions and coordinate, and those are management issues.
But as the book took shape, its eventual publisher, Harvard
Business Review Press, insisted otherwise. "So much of this book is
about leadership," people at the press told me. "It talks about
things you're asking leaders to recognize and do to motivate asso-
ciates."
So I took a step back and really thought about what they
were suggesting. And that prompted me to reflect on the nature of
the question at the heart of the matter: "Is this book about man-
agement or about leadership?"
It's the "or" that struck me—the assumption that manage-
ment and leadership are in fact two isolated, separate domains. I
struggled to understand how their division had become so deeply
entrenched, because it seemed to me that open organizations in
particular don't embrace this distinction.
The key to the conundrum, I realized, is emotion. As I argue
in The Open Organization, classic management theories try to pre-
tend that emotions don't exist in organizational contexts. It's one of
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Organize for Innovation
the assumptions they make in order to justify their models of the
way the world works. In order to better understand management
as the "science" of distributing decision rights, developing control
functions, budgeting, capital planning, and other detached, disin-
terested activities like these, management theories "abstract away"
humanity. They presume people are entirely rational and that hier-
archies always function the way they're supposed to. (Incidentally,
they do this because they owe much of their thinking to work in
classical economics, which performs the same simplifying maneu-
ver: assume people are rational, that they have perfect
information, and that markets are in equilibrium—and only then
can you "make the math work"!)
We're beginning to learn that these assumptions are seri-
ously misguided. New research in behavioral economics is
constantly teaching us how patently false they are. They may have
been necessary at a certain point in time—for example, when man-
agement dealt mostly with uneducated workers performing
relatively rote tasks, when work environments were essentially
static, and when information was scarce rather than abundant—
but they no longer apply. Our age requires a new management par-
adigm, one that taps the passion and intelligence of a workforce
motivated by something other than a paycheck.
I believe the open organization is that model. But a manage-
ment model based on something other than the assumption that all
people are like Star Trek's Spock is practically unheard of today.
Talking about ways to tap and mobilize people's emotions, how to
get people to act in ways that transcend themselves, and how to
understand what motivates them to arrive at the decisions they do
—all that is the province of "leadership" studies, not "manage-
ment." We've always known these practices exist. We've just
cleaved them from management "science" and relegated them to
their own territory: the "hard" science of management over here,
and the "soft" skills of leadership over there. And there they've
stayed for decades.
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Organize for Innovation
But when you think about management and leadership, you
immediately realize that they're both essentially attempting to un-
derstand the same thing: How can we get people to work together,
in a coordinated fashion? They shouldn't be separate. Truthfully,
they aren't separate. They only seem separate because we've
thought about them this way for years.
So is the book about management or leadership? I'd argue
it's about both management and leadership: two arts of coordinat-
ing people's efforts, finally reunited.
Conversations with managers, leaders, and readers in the
open organization community have taught me this important les-
son. And those conversations almost inevitably raise the following
question: What's next? How can we begin putting open organiza-
tional practices in place? Where will open thinking eventually lead
us?
The truth is that I don't know. But I do know this: We can
look to open source communities to show us the way.
Open source communities demonstrate participatory organi-
zational principles in their purest form. Red Hat has been
incredibly lucky to work with so many of these communities—
which are essentially fertile and fascinating petri dishes of experi-
mentation with cutting-edge management and leadership ideas. We
learn from them every day.
And we'll continue looking to them for guidance on our jour-
ney, because they represent our greatest hope for making
workplaces more inclusive, more meritocratic, and more humane.
These communities are constantly innovating by questioning tradi-
tion, and that's precisely what any organization must do if it wants
to remain viable today. I've begun questioning the "traditional" dis-
tinction between management and leadership—but this entire
volume is evidence that people everywhere are overturning deeply-
held beliefs in search of fresh insights and new directions.
66
Want to be a great leader? Assume
positive intent
O pen source communities are some of the most passionate or-
ganizations I've ever seen. Their members care deeply about
the work they do (often voluntarily), and that passion drives incred-
ible innovations. That's no small feat, because open source
communities are often collaborating in the face of geographic, cul-
tural, and technological barriers that can lead to unfortunate
misunderstandings.
And yet open source communities are also extraordinarily re-
silient. Some of them have found clever ways to refocus their
energies and eliminate sources of conflict.
I really like one in particular: "Always assume positive in-
tent." It's something I occasionally hear community members say
to each other when passions are running high.
Here's what it means to me.
Motivation and action
Motivations are invisible. Actions, on the other hand, are
very visible. The way we connect the two is important.
When people collaborate—when they invest in a project to-
gether and all want it to succeed—they're constantly observing and
reacting to the actions they see from others. But they're making as-
sumptions about what they can't see: the reasoning behind those
actions, the motivations or intentions.
People that have worked together for long periods of time
have developed a deep understanding of one another's personali-
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Organize for Innovation
ties, habits, and approaches to challenges. They "get" one another.
That means they've learned to make positive connections between
what they observe co-workers doing (the visible) and what they as-
sume those co-workers are thinking when they're doing it (the
invisible).
In open organizations, where people are constantly reaching
across teams (even beyond organizational boundaries) to link with
folks they may be meeting for the first time, making productive
connections between action and motivation is critical. I've learned
that the best way to create those productive relationships is to as-
sume the best in what I can't see—that is, to assume people are
acting with positive intent.
This means assuming, from the start, that people are:
• trying to help you—not trying to undercut or deceive
you
• trying to make a project better for everyone—not to
bend it toward their own priorities or vision
• doing the best they can with the data, resources, and
perspective they have, to make the most sound
choices they can—not acting without consideration,
or even with malice
This strategy has worked well for me.
Shifting assumptions
For example, a few months ago I held a town hall meeting
with all Red Hat associates. We were on the cusp of a new calendar
year, we had plenty of ambitious goals in front of us, and I wanted
to get a sense for what people were thinking and feeling before the
holidays.
So I scheduled the meeting. Immediately, the emails poured
in.
"What's the big announcement?" people asked me. "Can you
brief me on the big news in advance?" said others. "How should I
prepare my teams for what you're going to say?" others wondered.
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Organize for Innovation
I quickly realized that these people were making some drastic as-
sumptions about my motivations for calling the meeting.
So I needed to follow my own advice and ask myself: Why
would people act this way? By assuming positive intent on their
part, I was able to realize that they were simply trying to do what
all good open leaders do: gather appropriate data ahead of big de-
cisions so they could set some context for their teammates before I
surprised them with something.
But I had no big announcement to share. When people real-
ized this, they were better able to make positive inferences about
my intentions too. (By the way, the town hall was great. Thousands
of associates attended and I was able to answer more than a dozen
of the pointed and thoughtful questions they asked. I learned a lot.)
Fostering positivity
Open leaders need to create environments where assuming
positive intent is a "default" mode of thinking for everyone. It leads
to more productive teamwork, a more open working environment,
and outcomes that are more satisfying to more associates. I'll be
the first to admit that it's not easy to do. But I do have a few tips
for leaders hoping to foster this kind of attitude.
CREATE A CULTURE IN WHICH COMMON GOALS ARE OBVIOUS
AND TRANSPARENT. Record them publicly, track them, and circle
back to them repeatedly. This way, everyone will know that their
teammates know the group's collective mission and are more likely
to assume they're working with the same intentions.
MODEL THE BEHAVIOR YOU WANT TO SEE. Assume positive in-
tent on behalf of your leadership teams and associates. At Red Hat,
our People team has developed some great strategies for making
this kind of thinking the norm.27
27 See both https://opensource.com/open-organization/17/1/force-for-
good-community and https://opensource.com/business/15/5/5-ways-
promote-inclusive-environment
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PRACTICE PATIENCE. Before jumping to conclusions about
people's intentions, stop and ask yourself about their frames of ref-
erence. Do they share the same context you do? And do you
understand everything they do? Sometimes, others simply don't
see what you see: Something that's a big deal to you might not be
to someone else. Take the time to initiate a conversation and align
your priorities.
I'm certainly not suggesting that everyone, everywhere, in
every organization always acts with positive intent. Sometimes
they don't! But I've found it's best to trust people. 28 Let them prove
their negative intentions to you, rather than assuming the worst.
28 See both https://opensource.com/open-organization/15/7/trust-
endgame-open-organizations and https://opensource.com/open-
organization/16/10/building-organizational-trust
70
Why your people need to collide more,
not less
A ny organization is fundamentally a pattern of interactions
between people. The nature of those interactions—their
quality, their frequency, their outcomes—is the most important
product an organization can create. Perhaps counter-intuitively,
recognizing this fact has never been more important than it is to-
day—a time when digital technologies are reshaping not only how
we work but also what we do when we come together.
And yet many organizational leaders treat those interactions
between people as obstacles or hindrances to avoid or eliminate,
rather than as the powerful sources of innovation they really are.
That's why we're observing that some of the most successful
organizations today are those capable of shifting the way they
think about the value of the interactions in the workplace. And to
do that, they've radically altered their approach to management
and leadership.
Moving beyond mechanical management
Simply put, traditionally managed organizations treat unan-
ticipated interactions between stakeholders as potentially
destructive forces—and therefore as costs to be mitigated.
This view has a long, storied history in the field of econom-
ics. But it's perhaps nowhere more clear than in the early writing
of Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase. In 1937, Coase
published "The Nature of the Firm," an essay about the reasons
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people organized into firms to work on large-scale projects 29—
rather than tackle those projects alone. Coase argued that when
the cost of coordinating workers together inside a firm is less than
that of similar market transactions outside, people will tend to or-
ganize so they can reap the benefits of lower operating costs.
But at some point, Coase's theory goes, the work of coordi-
nating interactions between so many people inside the firm
actually outweighs the benefits of having an organization in the
first place. The complexity of those interactions becomes too diffi-
cult to handle. Management, then, should serve the function of
decreasing this complexity. Its primary goal is coordination, elimi-
nating the costs associated with messy interpersonal interactions
that could slow the firm and reduce its efficiency. As one Fortune
100 CEO recently told me, "Failures happen most often around or-
ganizational handoffs."
This makes sense to people practicing what I've called "me-
chanical management," where managing people is the act of
keeping them focused on specific, repeatable, specialized tasks.
Here, management's key function is optimizing coordination costs
—ensuring that every specialized component of the finely-tuned or-
ganizational machine doesn't impinge on the others and slow them
down. Managers work to avoid failures by coordinating different
functions across the organization (accounts payable, research and
development, engineering, human resources, sales, and so on) to
get them to operate toward a common goal. And managers create
value by controlling information flows, intervening only when func-
tions become misaligned.
Today, when so many of these traditionally well-defined tasks
have become automated, value creation is much more a result of
novel innovation and problem solving—not finding new ways to
drive efficiency from repeatable processes. But numerous studies
29 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x/
full
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demonstrate that innovative, problem-solving activity occurs much
more regularly when people work in cross-functional teams—not as
isolated individuals or groups constrained by single-functional si-
los. This kind of activity can lead to what some call "accidental
integration": the serendipitous innovation that occurs when old ele-
ments combine in new and unforeseen ways.
That's why working collaboratively has now become a neces-
sity that managers need to foster, not eliminate.
From coordination to collaboration
Reframing the value of the firm—from something that coordi-
nated individual transactions to something that produces novel
innovations—means rethinking the value of the relations at the
core of our organizations. And that begins with reimagining the
task of management, which is no longer concerned primarily with
minimizing coordination costs but maximizing cooperation oppor-
tunities.
Too few of our tried-and-true management practices have
this goal. If they're seeking greater innovation, managers need to
encourage more interactions between people in different func-
tional areas, not fewer. A cross-functional team may not be as
efficient as one composed of people with the same skill sets. But a
cross-functional team is more likely to be the one connecting
points between elements in your organization that no one had ever
thought to connect (the one more likely, in other words, to achieve
accidental integration).
I have three suggestions for leaders interested in making
this shift:
First, define organizations around processes, not functions.
We've seen this strategy work in enterprise IT, for example, in the
case of DevOps, where teams emerge around end goals (like a mo-
bile application or a website), not singular functions (like
developing, testing, and production). In DevOps environments, the
same team that writes the code is responsible for maintaining it
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once it's in production. (We've found that when the same people
who write the code are the ones woken up when it fails at 3 a.m.,
we get better code.)
Second, define work around the optimal organization rather
than the organization around the work. Amazon is a good example
of this strategy. Teams usually stick to the "Two Pizza Rule" when
establishing optimal conditions for collaboration. In other words,
Amazon leaders have determined that the best-sized team for maxi-
mum innovation is about 10 people, or a group they can feed with
two pizzas. If the problem gets bigger than that two-pizza team can
handle, they split the problem into two simpler problems, dividing
the work between multiple teams rather than adding more people
to the single team.
And third, to foster creative behavior and really get people
cooperating with one another, do whatever you can to cultivate a
culture of honest and direct feedback. Be straightforward and, as I
wrote in The Open Organization, let the sparks fly; have frank con-
versations and let the best ideas win.
Let it go
I realize that asking managers to significantly shift the way
they think about their roles can lead to fear and skepticism. Some
managers define their performance (and their very identities) by
the control they exert over information and people. But the more
you dictate the specific ways your organization should do some-
thing, the more static and brittle that activity becomes. Agility
requires letting go—giving up a certain degree of control.
Front-line managers will see their roles morph from dictat-
ing and monitoring to enabling and supporting. Instead of setting
individual-oriented goals, they'll need to set group-oriented goals.
Instead of developing individual incentives, they'll need to consider
group-oriented incentives.
Because ultimately, their goal should be to create the context
in which their teams can do their best work.
74
Why aren't we more invested in our
work?
U nderstanding employee engagement is difficult—and so is
defining engagement in the first place. Many smart people
offer different definitions of "engagement,"30 but most seem to
agree that it refers to the emotional connection people feel to their
work.
And it's becoming one of the most frequently cited chal-
lenges for organizations around the world. Statistics about
employee engagement tell a sobering story. For example, a Gallup
study31 found that only 15% of employees globally feel engaged at
work (in the U.S. and Canada, that number is 31%—not much bet-
ter).
As the nature of work changes, the factors keeping people
invested in and motivated by that work are changing, too. What's
clear is that our conventional strategies for cultivating engagement
may no longer work. We need to rethink our approach.
New motivators
When traditional management systems (what I've called "me-
chanical management") were developed, most people's work could
be precisely specified. It was rote and routine. So management fo-
cused primarily on dictating actions—defining organizational
30 https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2018/02/21/if-
engagement-is-a-problem-why-cant-we-define-it/#5f919750416b
31 http://news.gallup.com/reports/220313/state-global-workplace-
2017.aspx
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functions and making sure all those functions fit together in a
seamless and efficient whole. In other words, it was managers' job
to ensure people were following prescribed behaviors.
Organizational reward systems reinforced this. The best em-
ployees—those that performed their prescribed tasks most
efficiently and with fewest deviations—received raises, bonuses, or
promotions aimed at getting them to keep doing what they were
doing (maybe even work a little harder at it). Rewards like those
compensated for the relatively unfulfilling nature of the work itself;
they seemed to acknowledge the fact that it wasn't much of a re-
ward on its own. They were extrinsic motivators.
But as the Gallup study underscores, much has changed. To-
day, many jobs require initiative, judgment, and creativity more
than efficiency and an ability to enact prescribed plans. That's
changing our understanding of productivity, too. With routine
work, the difference between an organization's most productive
worker and the rest of the workforce might be between 5% and
10%. But with work that emphasizes innovation over efficiency, the
most productive worker can be 10 times—even 100 times—more
valuable than the average employee.
Current research suggests that extrinsic rewards (like
bonuses or promotions) are great at motivating people to perform
routine tasks—but are actually counterproductive when we use
them to motivate creative problem-solving or innovation. That
means that the value of intrinsic motivation is rising, which is why
cultivating employee engagement is such an important topic right
now.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not suggesting that people no
longer want to be paid for their work. But a paycheck alone is no
longer enough to maintain engagement. As work becomes more
difficult to specify and observe, managers have to ensure excellent
performance via methods other than prescription, observation, and
inspection. Micromanaging complex work is impossible.
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Re-engaging
It's important to recognize that engagement is not the same
as morale. It's much deeper (and more complicated) than that. Yet
traditional management practices focus almost exclusively on
morale—which you could define as keeping people content with the
precisely prescribed work specified for them.
Engagement is an indicator of something that runs much
deeper: your organizational culture. 32 So to begin addressing en-
gagement issues, you'll need to focus on both the principles your
organization stresses and the routine practices you enact to rein-
force those principles. It starts with the much more demanding
problem of people's intrinsic motivations to remain invested in
their work. You might begin in one of the following ways.
CONNECT TO A MISSION AND PURPOSE. As I explained in The
Open Organization (and as Simon Sinek has also argued) innova-
tive, engaged organizations always foreground why they exist, why
they continue to do what they do. Even more importantly, they
make sure everyone in the organization understands that purpose
—and specifically how their work is connected to it. When people
understand the ways their work impacts not only the organization
but also the wider world beyond it, they're more likely to feel more
motivated by that work (because they can more easily see the dif-
ference they're making). Red Hat, for example, is a mission-driven
company; Red Hatters are passionate about the fact that working
on open source projects alongside open source communities im-
pacts the world in an extremely positive way. That intense passion
sets the foundation for powerful engagement.
RECONSIDER YOUR VIEW OF FAILURE. People are less likely to
engage deeply with their work when they feel like they can't take
be creative and attempt to innovate. So alter your approach to
feedback and failure to ensure people feel safe taking risks. One
32 https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2018/02/21/if-
engagement-is-a-problem-why-cant-we-define-it/#62c24a2a416b
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Organize for Innovation
problem with applying traditional performance management mea-
surements to creative tasks is that innovative behavior requires
some latitude for experimentation and uncertainty. And to be clear:
Most experiments will fail. But we learn from them—and that
learning, in itself, is a type of success—so help your teams develop
a finer-grained language for describing "success" and "failure."
People who aren't perpetually fearful of being disciplined if they
make a "bad call" will be more motivated to solve customer issues
in new, creative ways—and they'll feel more engaged as a result.
CULTIVATE A SENSE OF OWNERSHIP. Employees who feel like
they have a real, personal stake in the success or failure of a
project are going to funnel more energy into that project. We see
this kind of passionate commitment at work all the time in open
source communities, where collaborators work intensely on tech-
nologies not because of the monetary compensation they receive
for their work—quite often, there isn't any—but because they have
a personal investment in the destiny of something they helped cre-
ate. As more organizations adopt these open source technologies,
leaders are experiencing the power of this kind of engagement.
"I'm letting my developers contribute to open source," some have
told me, "not because I care at all about open source, and not be-
cause I think I necessarily want them to do it (as a matter of fact, I
had to argue with legal about it). But I can't hire talent if I don't let
them contribute." People want to work on—and feel personally re-
sponsible for—something bigger than themselves. Handing over
control of key projects can be scary for conventional managers, but
by doing so they'll begin building more engaged teams.
These three tips alone won't be enough to fix an organiza-
tion's culturally rooted engagement issues, but they're a way to
begin the difficult task of making people more satisfied, more in-
vested, and more motivated at work.
78
Engage more and dictate less
"S ays easy, does hard." That's a Southern expression I've re-
ally grown to appreciate. Change of any kind—either
personal or organizational—can be easy to conceptualize in the ab-
stract. But making that change, actually doing the work of
changing, is much more difficult.
I received an unexpected reminder of this recently during an
annual meet-up with a group of friends from business school. One
of the friends arrived looking dramatically more in shape than the
last time we'd played together, and everyone in our group was as-
tounded. "How did you do it?" we all asked him. "What's the
secret?"
Being a man of few words, my friend just shrugged and said:
"Eat less. Exercise more."
Eat less. Exercise more. What a brilliantly simple formula.
You'll likely read plenty of dieting advice, but, in the end, you can
reduce most of it just to those four words. As far as explanations
go, it's about as straightforward and uncomplicated as anything
could be. Says easy.
So why do so many people struggle to maintain their weight
loss efforts?
Because understanding what needs to change is only part of
the process of change. The next part, actually implementing and
sustaining change, often involves breaking deeply ingrained habits,
making difficult decisions, facing painful truths, and reflecting on
goals and commitments. Does hard.
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For every diet book on shelves right now, there's a book
about organizational innovation and leadership change sitting just
one aisle over. Those books promise to reveal hidden keys to orga-
nizational agility and associate engagement. In the end, however,
their messages are also reducible to a fairly predictable formula:
Engage more, dictate less.
Many forward-thinking pundits and management experts
seem to agree that innovation today requires leaders willing to
give up some control, push decision-making power to the people
working more closely on customer problems, and spark an intrinsic
sense of purpose to guide success (rather than attempt to drive
performance through edicts and top-down commands).
So why aren't more people doing that?
Understanding intellectually the principles of organizational
culture change and leadership transformation can be pretty easy.
But enacting them practically is an entirely different story.
I think that's true for two reasons.
First, any kind of change requires breaking habits, and
habits can get so ingrained that they become a kind of "default"
setting that blinds us to other ways of working. I'm thinking of the
CEOs who gather their direct reports in a room and unilaterally de-
mand they start thinking and acting more inclusively and
collaboratively, failing to realize that they need to start working
this way first. Issuing a command to "be more collaborative" is a
bit of an oxymoron, but this is the way most leaders have always
solved problems, so why should they think differently? (It's sort of
like browsing workout plans while sipping that extra large, sug-
ared coffee drink many of us buy every morning, which, let's be
honest, is more like a milkshake than anything else.) Habits can
lure us into a comfortable state of paralysis if we aren't careful.
Second, organizational culture change almost always neces-
sitates short-term discomfort in the service of long-term gain.
Much like dieting, it requires resisting the all-too-powerful tempta-
tion of instant gratification. Becoming a more open, inclusive, and
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meritocratic leader requires hard work that, let's face it, might not
always seem appealing. Listening to ideas from across the organi-
zation, hearing that our plans might not be as great as we once
thought, having our minds changed (and changed again)—it's all
difficult and tiring work. So we delay it. Faced with a list of ten pri-
orities we need to accomplish quickly, we convince ourselves that
we simply can't extend the effort to be more open right now. We
fall back on command-and-control leadership techniques to drive
change quickly (the managerial equivalent of flopping back on the
couch and having one more piece of cake "just this once"). We tell
ourselves we'll be more open next time. And then, when next time
comes, we do the same things.
I'm not suggesting that reading books on organizational in-
novation—like reading diet books—isn't helpful. Every day, we
learn more about the way organizations function, about what
works and what doesn't, and about how our once-incontrovertible
assumptions are actually incorrect. Intellectual developments in
fields like behavioral economics help us make better informed deci-
sions about how to construct and run organizations, just as new
research in human physiology helps us draft better diet and exer-
cise plans.
But then we need to appreciate the complexity those fields
offer us, avoid overly simplified explanations of what's ailing us,
and get started on the path to change with honesty and conviction.
So if you want to be healthier, eat less and exercise more. If
you want your organization to be more agile, dictate less and en-
gage more. But remember: Neither diet fads nor innovation fads
will be enough to help us become lighter.
81
Part 3: Open Culture
Appreciating the full power of open
I n 2015, open source had a blockbuster year. As Wired33 put it,
2015 was the year open source software "went nuclear." More
people than ever seem to realize the power of open—not just as a
programming methodology, but as a better way to accomplish just
about anything.
Of course, as the term "open" gains popularity, its meaning
shifts. Sometimes, it shifts so much that we risk overlooking pre-
cisely what's making it incredibly important today. If you want to
help your organization leverage the power of open, it may be help-
ful if everyone understands and appreciates what makes the open
source way so special.
In my mind, something is open when it emphasizes in equal
measure the qualities of sharing, collaboration, and transparency.
Share and share alike
Sharing something (like a line of software code, your favorite
recipe, or an idea) is a prerequisite for making it open. A group of
people working together will always produce a better result than
any one person working in isolation. To work together, groups must
share their ideas, insights, suggestions, and failures.
While this may sound obvious, it's also very difficult to do,
especially in an economic and cultural climate that tends to pro-
mote individual ownership and celebrate singular creators. 34
People tend to fear that sharing will somehow diminish their own
33 http://www.wired.com/2015/12/2015-the-year-that-open-source-
software-went-nuclear/
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power or authority. "Why should I share," they think, "when I could
benefit from controlling access to something valuable?"
Maybe they guard their recipes and only share finished
dishes. Maybe they license their software restrictively or keep its
source code secret. Whatever the means, people seem reluctant to
share, and they worry they'll lose something by doing so.
Open source communities have taught us that this just isn't
true. Sharing something often increases its value, because sharing
allows more and more smart, creative people to get their hands on
it. The value actually increases as you remove restrictions to shar-
ing—if you share as much as you can with as many people as you
can. That means sharing your instructions, your recipe, your
source code, and opening it up to everyone, not limiting access to
certain persons, groups, or "fields of endeavor," as the Open
Source Initiative puts it.35
But as important as sharing is, sharing alone is not enough
to make something open. I've watched some people claim they're
sharing simply by giving an already-finished product away for free.
You sometimes see this with various open education initiatives,
where content creators share courses by making them available for
public consumption online. While this certainly is a nice gesture,
these initiatives don't necessarily encourage or even allow others
to reuse, modify, or share the materials in turn.
That's why, when it comes to being open, sharing and collab-
oration go hand in hand.
Collaborate to innovate
Openness is a surefire path to better and faster innovation.
But innovation, by definition, involves change. Innovation occurs
only when people feel a certain freedom to manipulate, experi-
34 https://hbr.org/2016/04/its-time-to-bury-the-idea-of-the-lone-genius-
innovator
35 https://opensource.org/osd
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ment, and tinker. Something is open not only if it's shared or avail-
able, but also when it's collaborative or manipulable.
At its core, collaboration involves joint work. It's undertaking
something together with the understanding that working this way
will produce superior results. Collaboration also implies a certain
attitude toward failure—"openness" to it, you might say. When we
collaborate, we open not only our products to continual revision
and refinement, but also ourselves to feedback and critique. Open
source communities' ability to rapidly prototype, for example,
wouldn't be possible without this spirit of collaborative openness.
When you share without collaborating, you're missing some-
thing important. It's the intent and mindset behind an act of
sharing that fosters openness. Think about it this way: Are you
sharing something just because you want other people to accept,
embrace, or adopt it in its final form? Or are you sharing it because
you're inviting them to work on it with you? To remix it? To modify,
adapt, repurpose, or grow it? The content might be open in the
sense that it's freely shared or distributed. But we've all seen ex-
amples where a creator's attitude is clearly closed to the possibility
of others using that content as the basis for further innovation.
I call this an "attitude" specifically to point out that openness
is more than a licensing issue. It's a cultural issue, something that
can be rooted in an individual's mindset and an organization's
DNA. People can try to make something open by sharing it widely
—yet, at the same time, they can be reluctant to allow others to
modify, adapt, or build on what they're sharing. They aren't "open"
to that.
Yet even combining sharing and collaboration still doesn't
fully capture the power of open. Transparency is essential, too.
Transparent thinking
Something is transparent when anyone can view its inner
workings. In the software world, transparency is at work when
people publish the source code for their programs so others can
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see exactly how those programs operate, then learn from them and
scrutinize them for insecurities or inefficiencies. 36 But trans-
parency is obviously crucial outside the domain of software, too.
The open government movement, for example, emphasizes
transparency of decision-making practices, the idea that everyone
should be aware of the processes by which something important
gets implemented or altered.37 So something is open if it's trans-
parent (if everyone can see how it works, how it's put together, and
how it came to be the way it is).
For this reason especially, transparency is closely related to
accountability. When something is transparent, anyone can tell
who's responsible for it. At Red Hat, we care deeply about account-
ability. In fact, it's one of our core values. Quite simply,
transparency helps keep people honest. It ensures that people in
an organization own their decisions and actions. And it's integral to
openness, because without it people don't have the knowledge they
need to make the impact they're trying to make, or they're not able
to fully contribute to the best of their abilities.
It's important to realize, though, that transparency doesn't
guarantee much on its own. People can be utterly transparent
about decisions or ideas even while they're forcing them on others.
They can make their rationale clear without any inclination that
they're open to changing their minds about it.
Likewise, leaders can claim to value transparency—and even
act on those claims—without feeling any obligation to let it affect
them. In The Open Organization, I critique the "suggestion box"
approach to transparency, where leaders invite others to openly
(that is, transparently) submit their comments, questions, and sug-
gestions about ways an organization can improve. I understand
and appreciate the spirit of the gesture, but nothing about it guar-
36 https://opensource.com/resources/what-open-source
37 https://opensource.com/resources/open-government
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antees leaders will actually read, let alone act on, those sugges-
tions.
Necessary, but not sufficient
While each of these qualities is important, none in isolation
is adequate for completely encapsulating the power of open. You
must consider them all collectively, as a unit. Essentially, we might
say that all are necessary for openness, but none, by itself, is suffi-
cient to create openness.
When you promote transparency in the absence of collabora-
tion or sharing, you get a suggestion box. People are clear on what
you're doing, but they aren't invited to participate in shaping what
you're doing (so it's less valuable to everyone).
Sharing without transparency or collaboration is possible,
too. Think of a situation where people work on software projects in
secret, then "throw them over the wall" 38 to an unsuspecting com-
munity that's completely unprepared to receive them. Not much
value there, either.
And collaboration without sharing or transparency occurs
when leaders invite others to work on part of a project while with-
holding key information about that project (maybe even the
reasons they're working on the project in the first place).
I don't consider any of these situations to be truly open—and
I'm honestly not sure they create the most value for anyone in-
volved.
Open is more than a simple synonym for sharing, collabora-
tion, and transparency. Open encompasses the power of all three
forces working together in tandem.
Combined with our mindset and our actions, it yields extra-
ordinary results.
38 http://www.netlingo.com/word/throw-it-over-the-wall.php
89
Peanuts, paper towels, and other
important considerations on
community
T he most powerful aspects of an organization's culture live in
the smallest individual gestures—sometimes no bigger than a
peanut.
Not long ago, as I was sitting in the Dallas airport waiting for
a delayed flight, I watched another passenger munch on some
peanuts. Their shells fell all over the floor and, after a few minutes,
the passenger kicked them into the aisle, presumably for the air-
port cleaning staff to collect later.
I hadn't given those peanuts shells much thought until a re-
cent internal Red Hat event, when someone asked me about my pet
peeves. I started thinking about the way I notice paper towels on
the floors in Red Hat bathrooms. Whenever I see them, I pick them
up and put them in the trash.
I'll admit: it's a tiny gesture. But the longer I work at Red
Hat, the more I realize just how great an impact those seemingly
inconsequential moments can have on a community.
I've always done my best to put others before myself (my
mother was a nurse, and I think I inherited that attitude from her).
But working at Red Hat has made me care even more about the im-
portance of community. Community is critical not only to our
business but also to how we operate as an open organization. 39
39 https://www.redhat.com/en/about/development-model
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In a well-functioning open organization, you'll often see peo-
ple doing things simply because they benefit the organization itself
—even if those actions don't immediately benefit the individual.
People tend to prioritize the well-being of the group over the agen-
das of the few.
At the same time, you'll also encounter people working to
keep that spirit in place (I'm thinking of the Red Hatters who take
pictures of vehicles occupying more than one parking space in our
company lot and post them to the all-building mailing list). Maybe
they're extra conscientious about ending their meetings on time, so
others waiting for the room can get started right away. Maybe they
refill the printer paper even if they haven't used the last sheet.
Maybe they schedule an early-morning call so their colleagues
overseas don't need to stay up late. Regardless, in an open organi-
zation, you'll hear "let me help with that" much more than you'll
hear "that's not my responsibility."
For these folks, a paper towel is more than a paper towel. It's
a tangible representation of someone's investment in the organiza-
tion.
That sense of reciprocity at the heart of a community-fo-
cused organization—the idea that I might do something because it
strengthens the critical social bonds that keep our group from fall-
ing apart—is important. We can't underestimate the power of that
kind of social cohesion, not only in our organizations but in our so -
cieties more broadly.
In fact, writer and historian Paul Collier attributes the
United States' growth and success after World War II to it. "The es-
cape from the Depression by means of the Second World War had
been far more than an inadvertent stimulus package," he writes in
The Future of Capitalism. "Its legacy was to turn each nation into a
gigantic community, a society with a strong sense of shared iden-
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tity, obligation and reciprocity."40 Collier goes on to assess the cur-
rent state of that shared identity and sense of reciprocity in today's
seemingly fragmented political landscape.
He also explains how leadership practices also shifted during
this time, especially in organizations:
Gradually, many organizations learned that it was
more effective to soften hierarchy, creating interde-
pendent roles that had a clear sense of purpose, and
giving people the autonomy and responsibility to per-
form them. The change from hierarchy run through
power, to interdependence run through purpose, im-
plies a corresponding change in leadership. Instead of
being the commander-in-chief, the leader became the
communicator-in-chief. Carrots and sticks evolved into
narratives.
I love this passage, because it describes how my own think-
ing about leadership has changed since I joined Red Hat. Being a
"communicator-in-chief" is now the most important job a leader
can have. That means creating a sense of common purpose, shared
values, and what Collier calls "mutual obligation" among people
empowered with the context and resources they need to do their
best work.41
We tell stories through actions, not just words. Open leaders
should take opportunities to reinforce the kinds of communal, reci-
procity-generating behaviors they want to see in other people.
It's why I always pick up the paper towels.
40 https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062748652/the-future-of-
capitalism/
41 See "What it means to be an open leader" in this volume.
92
How I discovered Linux's true power
M y Linux story begins like that of so many others—with an
old computer and a desire to tinker.
It was the late 1990s when I read an article about a UNIX-
like operating system, "Linux," I could download and install for
free. When I was a computer science major in college, my class-
mates and I regularly used Solaris to learn computing with UNIX.
But we never had complete control over that technology. I remem-
ber we couldn't explore it the way we would have liked.
This thing called "Linux" promised something different, a
kind of openness and flexibility that seemed like the perfect pre-
scription for my ailing laptop at the time. So I took the plunge,
installed Slackware, and began using Linux.
That use and familiarity with Linux would prove incredibly
valuable when I was treasurer at Delta Air Lines. Beyond my role, I
was genuinely interested in how people flew, why they flew, why
they made the connections they made, why they chose nonstop
flights over other options, and how much they tended to pay for
nonstop flights as opposed to others. I decided to review a year's
worth of Delta's network data to gain some insight into passenger
psychology. (A quick aside: Many people aren't aware that airlines
must record data from every 10th ticket they sell—the U.S. Depart-
ment of Transportation makes this data available to the public as a
free download.)
But I encountered a problem: the data set I wanted to ana-
lyze was larger than 4GB, and back then Windows computers
couldn't handle files of that size. So, I moved all my data to a Linux
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machine where I could work with it the way I wanted. Linux en-
abled work that would have been impossible on other platforms. It
allowed me to glean insights I would never have been able to oth-
erwise. It helped me provide value to the company (and that saw
me promoted to chief operating officer).
Not only did Linux free my data, it also helped me advance
my career.
And yet even when I joined Red Hat in 2007, I continued to
underestimate Linux's true power. I still considered "software free-
dom" principally a matter of price; I thought, as others have put it,
that the "free" in "free software" meant "free as in beer" (in other
words, that the value of free software was its extremely low cost
for users). Eight years later, working at Red Hat has radically al-
tered my perspective on multiple ideas (including the most
effective way to run a company!), 42 and my views on software free-
dom are not least among these.
Only after spending time at Red Hat did I begin to truly un-
derstand the meaning of "free software"—that software should be
"free as in speech," that it should be something we share, some-
thing on which we openly collaborate as we make the world a
better place. At Red Hat, I quickly realized I was leading a com-
pany driven by something other than the profit motive. Like so
many people attracted to Linux, I came for the technology, but
stayed for the philosophy.
In my years at Red Hat, I've witnessed firsthand the kind of
excitement Linux can generate. At an event in Brazil, for example,
the Brazilian president wanted to meet with me to express his in-
terest in open source technologies and principles. The same thing
happened during a trip to Poland, when the Polish prime minister
learned of my visit and asked to meet with me to discuss Linux.
Something about the open source movement unites people across
all kinds of boundaries, including political and geographic ones.
42 https://opensource.com/resources/what-open-organization
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Organize for Innovation
In the technology world today, Linux has become the plat-
form around which innovative people are building the next
generation of computing. People are building the most exciting ap-
plications, languages, and frameworks to run on Linux. It's the
default platform for burgeoning technological ecosystems around
problems like big data, mobile, and analytics. Without Linux, all
this activity simply wouldn't exist.
As I sit and write this, I can glance around the room and spot
five notebook computers all running different Linux distributions.
And the computer I have in front of me is running Fedora 22.
They'll all come in handy as I pursue my next Linux-related goal:
acquiring my Red Hat Certified Systems Administrator certificate.
I guess you could say I'm still tinkering.
95
What our families teach us about
organizational life
I n October 2015 I appeared on the 100th episode of The Dave
and Gunnar Show,43 an independent podcast about open source
and open government issues hosted by two members of Red Hat's
public sector team. We spoke at length about The Open Organiza-
tion (one of my all-time favorite topics!), and the interview gave me
a chance to address an important question.
That question actually came from Paul Smith, Red Hat's VP
of Public Sector (you might recognize him as the guy who recently
photobombed me44 at a book signing), who asked:
How can you apply the open organization principles to
your family life?
This wasn't the first time someone had posed this question to
me. In fact, I'd been mulling it over for quite some time. The truth
is, people who succeed in leading open organizations embrace
open principles in multiple aspects of their lives—not just in the
workplace.
Emotions matter
When we're with our families, we recognize that emotions
matter—and we express them. We laugh. We cry. 45 We have impas-
43 https://dgshow.org/2015/10/100-a-president-and-ceo-we-like/
44 https://twitter.com/pjsmithii/status/614207083785883648
45 http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/09/pf/crying-at-work/
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sioned debates. We're frank with one another, because we recog-
nize that our deep relationships will outlast any single interaction
(even a turbulent one). And we recognize that the people in our
lives aren't entirely rational; they're motivated by more than their
left-brain impulses. But we tend to check our emotional selves at
the door when we enter the workplace.
Why?
Emotions are a sign that we're deeply invested in what we're
doing. Good leaders know how to read and gauge them (as I say in
The Open Organization, outstanding emotional intelligence is piv-
otal today). Emotions are indicators of employee passion,
something open organizations must harness if they're going to be
successful today. Family life forces us to confront, embrace, and
channel emotions. Life in an organization should do the same.
Engagement in the home
Trust me: I'm speaking from experience when I say that par-
ticipating in a family requires cultivating engagement. Families
tend to work best when everyone has sufficient context for under-
standing the group's goals (not to mention the resources the group
has for achieving those goals).
In fact, family goal setting should be a collaborative effort.
I'm not sure too many families sit down at the beginning of a new
year and have frank discussions about their goals for the coming
months. But more should. After all, families tend to recognize the
importance of having everyone on the same page, working in the
same direction. Questions like "What charities will we support this
year?" or "Where will we vacation this summer?" are too often
questions that individuals try to answer themselves when they
should be bringing these to the group for a more robust discussion.
Inclusive family decisions
When goal setting becomes collaborative, it immediately be-
comes inclusive: Family members suddenly have a stake in family
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decisions, and they feel tied to the outcomes of those decisions.
They embrace the group's objectives, and they work to help
achieve them.
Imagine the difference. You might come to a decision pri-
vately, then communicate that finalized decision to your family in
the hope that they'll accept it, understand it, and help enact it. But
have you ever taken this approach with your kids? It doesn't end
well (actually, it typically ends with confusion and hurt feelings).
But you might also consider involving family members in decisions
from the start, gathering feedback and adjusting your expectations
accordingly. In the end, family members will not only better under -
stand the implications of big decisions, they'll also feel more
invested in the process of carrying them out. My experience at Red
Hat has taught me this, because the company works with so many
passionate open source communities, and issuing orders to a group
is simply not as effective as drawing that group into a dialogue.
So in response to Paul, I'd say: You might be asking the
wrong question.
The real question is not about how principles of open organi-
zations can apply to life with a family. It's about what our family
relationships can teach us about creating more open, inclusive,
participatory, and humane workplaces.
98
Like open source software, a book is
more than its content
S ince launching the The Open Organization, I've received
questions about why we chose to distribute the book via a
traditional publisher. Some have wondered why we didn't release
the book with a Creative Commons license so people could remix,
redistribute, and even translate the book as they wanted. Others
wondered why we didn't crowdfund it so its audience could be
more tied to its success. Several have asked why we didn't simply
release the book online as a free download.
Instead, we chose to partner with Harvard Business Review
(HBR) Press. In many ways, HBR does for books what Red Hat
does for open source software; it collaborates with creators and
adds value to the products of these collaborations. Like any piece
of open source software (such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for ex-
ample), a book is far more than the content it contains. Like a
software application, a book is a project with multiple stakehold-
ers. It involves an agent that works to put the book on publishers'
radars. It involves an editorial team that reviews manuscripts and
suggests improvements. And it involves a marketing team that de-
cides how best to develop and target potential audiences.
HBR brought to this project an outstanding record of success
in selecting, editing, publishing, and promoting business books.
What's more, while we were writing The Open Organization, HBR
editors provided invaluable knowledge of our target audience, and
helped us organize and outline the book in ways business-savvy
readers would appreciate.
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HBR also provided something else: the trust of its readers,
who expect it to deliver something valuable (the same way our cus-
tomers expect Red Hat to deliver valuable, tested solutions). We
knew that by enlisting such a respected partner, we'd benefit not
only from HBR's resources and expertise, but also from the HBR's
strong reputation.
Like Red Hat, professional presses incur expenses when they
do their work. They therefore require a revenue model that will
make their businesses sustainable. In the case of HBR, this model
involves selling material licensed via traditional copyright terms.
HBR taught us that retail outlets are the primary drivers of de-
mand for business books like The Open Organization, and those
outlets (with their valuable consumer-facing shelf space) require a
physical book to sell. They typically don't want to invest in show-
casing a book that someone can download for free.
In the end, we decided that pursuing a traditional book pub-
lishing model would best help us achieve our objectives:
distributing The Open Organization as widely as possible, and
growing the community of leaders with whom we hope it res-
onates. Incidentally, growing that community also requires effort
and resources. HBR has invested heavily in the book's success by
promoting it at industry events and securing table space at major
retail outlets. We've matched those contributions with our own
community-building efforts, particularly the launch of a special sec-
tion of Opensource.com where conversations about the book's
ideas can take place.
In addition, it's important to recognize that Red Hat will not
profit from the book. While we'll use some of the book's revenue to
cover the costs we incurred writing it, once we cover those costs,
we'll be donating all remaining proceeds to the Electronic Frontier
Foundation—a nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in
the digital world.
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Running an organization means locating opportunities to
work with all kinds of partners on the road to success. Publishing a
book about an open organization is no different.
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Open education is more than open
content
T he famous playwright George Bernard Shaw once said: "If
you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange ap-
ples, then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have
an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each
of us will have two ideas."
I love that quote, and in May 2016 I shared it with a room
full of educators, administrators, and open source advocates at
New York University during the Open Summit, an open conversa-
tion about education.46 I believe it reveals something critical about
the future of education and the positive role openness can play in
the future, if we embrace it.
As I shared in The Open Organization, the nature of organi-
zations is changing, because the nature of how we organize to
create value is changing. Educational organizations are realizing
this more than most, because their stock-in-trade isn't something
primarily physical (like apples). It's ideas. And ideas are becoming
more plentiful, not less.
How we prepare people for life in these new organizations—
where an ability to innovate and produce the new is much more im-
portant than an ability to work efficiently and reproduce the same
—has to change just as significantly. We need to use the power of
open to rethink education.
46 https://opensource.org/node/832
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Unfortunately, much of what I read about "open" in educa-
tion applies to the sharing of educational content: the materials
educators use to teach students, from lesson plans to activities to
syllabi to entire curricula. While sharing content is certainly valu-
able, I think we can do more to make education more open.
To me, what makes openness such a compelling path forward
for education has less to do with specific licensing decisions and
more to do with the attitude we adopt toward educational practices
altogether. It's the way we both imagine and work to build value
around educational experiences (the "downstream" benefit of being
open, as open source developers might say). More specifically,
thinking openly changes how we create, interact in, and sustain ed-
ucational organizations.
Creation beyond control
By default, most traditional educational organizations aren't
inclined toward sharing. Just look at the ways many activities cen-
tral to them—like tenure, publication, and advancement—tend to
emphasize solo authors, thinkers, and inventors. In the context of
higher education, we like to imagine scholars and scientists toiling
away in isolation, dreaming up big ideas and releasing them to the
world in brilliant form.
But we tend to forget a critical piece of the scene: The ever-
present "Works Cited" or "References" pages that list every idea
and innovation a scholar builds on when creating something new.
Instead, educational organizations' cultural norms push against
open exchange and collaboration and reward individual careers
built on singular efforts—even though this isn't how innovation oc-
curs.
And that's more evident today than it ever has been. Take big
data, for example. In this exciting new field, every major innovation
has been open sourced and shared, and what's been possible has
been because of developers' desire for transparency and collabora-
tion.
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Thinking of ideas as possessions individual people create and
control is a relatively new historical development, of course. In the
context of the industrial era, people wanted informational goods to
function more like physical goods, so they invented things like
copyright and patent law to make ideas work more like apples. And
those inventions influence not only how we think about our cre-
ations and their value, but also how we build them.
When open education advocates focus too narrowly on con-
tent distribution, they can miss the act of content creation—and
then risk missing ways we might change the pace and quality of
the work we're doing together. Quite simply, co-creation allows bet-
ter, richer, more diverse solutions and insights. It also allows us to
succeed or fail faster, so we can accelerate the pace of innovation
necessary today. Reforming our criteria for valuable educational
contributions might help us begin rewarding an open approach to
creation rather than discouraging it.
Interaction beyond prescription
When openness does become a default attitude, people's in-
teractions change dramatically. Today we're enjoying the fruits of
some of the largest distributed groups we've ever seen: organiza-
tions of creators and innovators spread across the entire globe.
Each of them has something to teach us about the way we relate to
and communicate with one another.
This is no less true for educators. But educational organiza-
tions (like public schools, to name just one kind) are still rooted
strongly in certain values that emerged during an era of industrial-
ization—where the purpose of education was preparing people to
perform rote tasks repeatedly in closed organizations with little
contextual perspective.
And yet, as we're seeing, the organizations that graduates
join when they leave school (especially in the global West) are less
and less industrial—and even the ones that are industrial are rein-
venting themselves for largely post-industrial activities. These
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organizations demand new models of both cooperation and leader-
ship: new ways of working together, new standards for effective
interaction, and new rules for distributing authority.
In the meritocracies that so frequently form inside open or-
ganizations, formal titles mean less than reputation with regard to
power relationships. Leading an increasingly educated and savvy
workforce involves creating context for great work rather than pre-
scribing and specifying every detail in order to mitigate deviation.
Directing is less important than catalyzing. What might happen to
classrooms if we began teaching this way?
We need to think seriously about how we're educating tomor-
row's organizational participants and leaders, because—for now, at
least—we're emphasizing modes of interaction that are just out-
dated.
Sustainability beyond transmission
Thinking about educational organizations as catalysts raises
one other interesting point: What happens to these organizations
in an age of abundance?
This is a particularly hot topic among folks in higher educa-
tion, who are beginning to realize that imagining universities as
machines for the transmission of information is no longer working.
Under traditional models, schools market themselves as places
with the best educational "content" for students. But today—a time
when we're celebrating much easier access to information—these
organizations no longer have a monopoly on ideas. Many are even
putting their courses online and making them available at little or
no monetary cost to students. The "content" is losing its place as a
key value generator.
That's prompting educational organizations to face a kind of
existential crisis—one that raises difficult questions. When abun-
dance is the default, what happens to an organization that depends
on scarcity? How does its purpose change? And what happens to
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the revenue-generating mechanisms that allow it to persist, thrive,
and grow?
These aren't easy questions, by any stretch. But they're ex-
actly the ones that challenge us in the open source software
business, where our ongoing task is to create business models
around abundance.
Red Hat's product, for example, isn't software. The software
is open source, easily accessible to others, and licensed to promote
sharing. Development is community-oriented. The "content," in
other words, is free and abundant.
Red Hat adds value to the open source ecosystem by leverag-
ing abundance to create more and better abundance. We support
people using the software. We contribute to communities creating
new, more advanced versions of the software. We patch and secure
the software. We sift through the abundance, make sense of it, and
help other people leverage it effectively. That's our product (and
we're very good at making it!).
As they ponder their place, role, and function in an age of
relative abundance, educational organizations must find new ways
to generate value from that abundance. The longer we conceive of
education as an enterprise focused solely on "content," the longer
we're going to miss opportunities to help those integral organiza-
tions survive.
Reimagining education today might begin with a few simple
questions:
• What value do educational organizations provide?
• What is their product?
• What role can they play today?
Answers to these simple but difficult questions will differ for
everyone involved. But in an age of abundance, the educational or-
ganizations that survive will be those most focused on what they
can add, what they can catalyze—and how they can best harness
the power of openness to change the ways they create, interact,
and sustain themselves.
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Appendix
The Open Organization Definition
The Open Organization Ambassadors
Preamble
Openness is becoming increasingly central to the ways
groups and teams of all sizes are working together to achieve
shared goals. And today, the most forward-thinking organizations—
whatever their missions—are embracing openness as a necessary
orientation toward success. They've seen that openness can lead
to:
• GREATER AGILITY, as members are more capable of
working toward goals in unison and with shared vi-
sion;
• FASTER INNOVATION, as ideas from both inside and
outside the organization receive more equitable con-
sideration and rapid experimentation, and;
• INCREASED ENGAGEMENT, as members clearly see
connections between their particular activities and
an organization's overarching values, mission, and
spirit.
But openness is fluid. Openness is multifaceted. Openness is
contested.
While every organization is different—and therefore every
example of an open organization is unique—we believe these five
characteristics serve as the basic conditions for openness in most
contexts:
• Transparency
• Inclusivity
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• Adaptability
• Collaboration
• Community
Characteristics of an open organization
Open organizations take many shapes. Their sizes, composi-
tions, and missions vary. But the following five characteristics are
the hallmarks of any open organization.
In practice, every open organization likely exemplifies each
one of these characteristics differently, and to a greater or lesser
extent. Moreover, some organizations that don't consider them-
selves open organizations might nevertheless embrace a few of
them. But truly open organizations embody them all—and they con-
nect them in powerful and productive ways.
That fact makes explaining any one of the characteristics
difficult without reference to the others.
Transparency
In open organizations, transparency reigns. As much as pos-
sible (and advisable) under applicable laws, open organizations
work to make their data and other materials easily accessible to
both internal and external participants; they are open for any
member to review them when necessary (see also inclusivity). De-
cisions are transparent to the extent that everyone affected by
them understands the processes and arguments that led to them;
they are open to assessment (see also collaboration). Work is trans-
parent to the extent that anyone can monitor and assess a project's
progress throughout its development; it is open to observation and
potential revision if necessary (see also adaptability). In open orga-
nizations, transparency looks like:
• Everyone working on a project or initiative has ac-
cess to all pertinent materials by default.
• People willingly disclose their work, invite participa-
tion on projects before those projects are complete
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and/or "final," and respond positively to request for
additional details.
• People affected by decisions can access and review
the processes and arguments that lead to those deci-
sions, and they can comment on and respond to
them.
• Leaders encourage others to tell stories about both
their failures and their successes without fear of
repercussion; associates are forthcoming about both.
• People value both success and failures for the
lessons they provide.
• Goals are public and explicit, and people working on
projects clearly indicate roles and responsibilities to
enhance accountability.
Inclusivity
Open organizations are inclusive. They not only welcome di-
verse points of view but also implement specific mechanisms for
inviting multiple perspectives into dialog wherever and whenever
possible. Interested parties and newcomers can begin assisting the
organization without seeking express permission from each of its
stakeholders (see also collaboration). Rules and protocols for par-
ticipation are clear (see also transparency) and operate according
to vetted and common standards. In open organizations, inclusivity
looks like:
• Technical channels and social norms for encouraging
diverse points of view are well-established and obvi-
ous.
• Protocols and procedures for participation are clear,
widely available, and acknowledged, allowing for
constructive inclusion of diverse perspectives.
• The organization features multiple channels and/or
methods for receiving feedback in order to accommo-
date people's preferences.
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• Leaders regularly assess and respond to feedback
they receive, and cultivate a culture that encourages
frequent dialog regarding this feedback.
• Leaders are conscious of voices not present in dialog
and actively seek to include or incorporate them.
• People feel a duty to voice opinions on issues rele-
vant to their work or about which they are
passionate.
• People work transparently and share materials via
common standards and/or agreed-upon platforms
that do not prevent others from accessing or modify-
ing them.
Adaptability
Open organizations are flexible and resilient organizations.
Organizational policies and technical apparatuses ensure that both
positive and negative feedback loops have a genuine and material
effect on organizational operation; participants can control and po-
tentially alter the conditions under which they work. They report
frequently and thoroughly on the outcomes of their endeavors (see
also transparency) and suggest adjustments to collective action
based on assessments of these outcomes. In this way, open organi-
zations are fundamentally oriented toward continuous engagement
and learning. In open organizations, adaptability looks like:
• Feedback mechanisms are accessible both to mem-
bers of the organization and to outside members,
who can offer suggestions.
• Feedback mechanisms allow and encourage peers to
assist one another without managerial oversight, if
necessary.
• Leaders work to ensure that feedback loops gen-
uinely and materially impact the ways people in the
organization operate.
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• Processes for collective problem solving, collabora-
tive decision making, and continuous learning are in
place, and the organization rewards both personal
and team learning to reinforce a growth mindset.
• People tend to understand the context for the
changes they're making or experiencing.
• People are not afraid to make mistakes, yet projects
and teams are comfortable adapting their pre-exist-
ing work to project-specific contexts in order to avoid
repeated failures.
Collaboration
Work in an open organization involves multiple parties by de-
fault. Participants believe that joint work produces better (more
effective, more sustainable) outcomes, and specifically seek to in-
volve others in their efforts (see also inclusivity). Products of work
in open organizations afford additional enhancement and revision,
even by those not affiliated with the organization (see also adapt-
ability). In open organizations, collaboration looks like:
• People tend to believe that working together pro-
duces better results.
• People tend to begin work collaboratively, rather
than "add collaboration" after they've each com-
pleted individual components of work.
• People tend to engage partners outside their immedi-
ate teams when undertaking new projects.
• Work produced collaboratively is easily available in-
ternally for others to build upon.
• Work produced collaboratively is available externally
for creators outside the organization to use in poten-
tially unforeseen ways.
• People can discover, provide feedback on, and join
work in progress easily—and are welcomed to do so.
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Community
Open organizations are communal. Shared values and pur-
pose guide participation in open organizations, and these values—
more so than arbitrary geographical locations or hierarchical posi-
tions—help determine the organization's boundaries and conditions
of participation. Core values are clear, but also subject to continual
revision and critique, and are instrumental in defining conditions
for an organization's success or failure (see also adaptability). In
open organizations, community looks like:
• Shared values and principles that inform decision-
making and assessment processes are clear and obvi-
ous to members.
• People feel equipped and empowered to make mean-
ingful contributions to collaborative work.
• Leaders mentor others and demonstrate strong ac-
countability to the group by modeling shared values
and principles.
• People have a common language and work together
to ensure that ideas do not get "lost in translation,"
and they are comfortable sharing their knowledge
and stories to further the group's work.
Version 2.0
April 2017
github.com/open-organization/open-org-definition
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About the author
Jim Whitehurst is Senior Advisor at IBM. With a background
in business development, finance, and global operations, he has
proven expertise helping companies flourish—even in the most
challenging environments.
He was previously President of IBM, where he was responsi-
ble for the IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software organization, and
Corporate Strategy.
Prior to IBM, Whitehurst served as President and CEO of
Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source enterprise
software solutions.
In 2015, Whitehurst published a book with Harvard Business
Review Press entitled The Open Organization: Igniting Passion and
Performance, showing how open principles of management can
help organizations navigate and succeed in a fast-paced, connected
era.
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Join the community
Learn more about the ways open principles are changing
how we work, manage, and lead. Get started at:
theopenorganization.org
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