At Work with The Ready

This is the eighth episode in a crossover mini-series between Brave New Work cohosts Rodney Evans and Aaron Dignan and Chase Chapman, builder of DAOs and host of the On the Other Side podcast. Each episode dives into a specific topic related to organizational design for Web3. Today, they talk about the different reputational flavors and expressions that show up in Web3 (and all ecosystems for that...

This is the seventh episode in a crossover mini-series between Brave New Work cohosts Rodney Evans and Aaron Dignan and Chase Chapman, builder of DAOs and host of the On the Other Side podcast. Each episode dives into a specific topic related to organizational design for Web3. Today, they talk about centralization’s downsides (it can create hurdles and sludge), its upsides (it can let people at th...

[This episode originally aired in June 2021.] With his organization Sociocracy for All, Ted Rau is helping organizations empower their members, and put a spotlight on equity. In this episode of Brave New Work, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans talk to Ted about his book, Many Voices One Song, consent-based decision-making, and the challenges of getting the ball rolling with large orgs. Check out Ted's...

Have a young business or about to launch something new? This episode’s got your name on it. In today's episode of Brave New Work, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans unpack some of the first moves worth making (and some they wish they’d made) when you’re standing at your org’s starting line to help you get clear on what’s truly fundamental and cut down on any wandering and waste. Defining purpose, estab...

This is the sixth episode in a crossover mini-series between Brave New Work cohosts Rodney Evans and Aaron Dignan and Chase Chapman, builder of DAOs and host of the On the Other Side podcast. Each episode dives into a specific topic related to organizational design for Web3. Today, they talk about instantiating marketplaces as one way to enable greater resource-allocation, decision-making, collabo...

This is the fifth episode in a crossover mini-series between Brave New Work cohosts Rodney Evans and Aaron Dignan and Chase Chapman, builder of DAOs and host of the On the Other Side podcast. Each episode dives into a specific topic related to organizational design for Web3. Today, they talk about different mental models, choices, and mechanisms to consider when designing a compensation OS and why...

This is the fourth episode in a crossover mini-series between Brave New Work cohosts Rodney Evans and Aaron Dignan and Chase Chapman, builder of DAOs and host of the On the Other Side podcast. Each episode dives into a specific topic related to organizational design for Web3. Today, they talk about why anchoring to KPIs can run afoul of how value is actually created in complex systems and how data...

Ready for a wake-up call? Today’s episode of Brave New Work is all about conscious leadership—a way of showing up that asks us to be responsive rather than reactive, present rather than lodged in the past or the future, feeling-full rather than feeling-empty, and radically responsible rather than carelessly unaccountable. Sound hard? Exhausting? Wildly uncomfortable? It is. That’s why Aaron Dignan...

This is the third episode in a crossover mini-series between Brave New Work cohosts Rodney Evans and Aaron Dignan and Chase Chapman, builder of DAOs and host of the On the Other Side podcast. Each episode dives into a specific topic related to organizational design for Web3. Today, they talk about the governance structures currently used in most DAOs and why transitioning away from a voting-based...

This is the second episode in a crossover mini-series between Brave New Work cohosts Rodney Evans and Aaron Dignan and Chase Chapman, builder of DAOs and host of the On the Other Side podcast. Each episode dives into a specific topic related to organizational design for Web3. Today, they talk about some of the blurriness between DAO customers and contributors, and how to design and define roles in...

This is the first episode in a crossover mini-series between Brave New Work cohosts Rodney Evans and Aaron Dignan and Chase Chapman, builder of DAOs and host of the On the Other Side podcast. Each episode dives into a specific topic related to organizational design for Web3. Today, they talk about different proposal types, the best ways to structure them, and the critical info that should go into...

Dear awesome listeners: You’ve been asking us great questions, so it’s high time we take a stab at answering them. That’s why we’re going back to the mailbag to address some of the big stuff on your mind, from impostor syndrome to AI’s place in the future of work to the risk of doing something versus the risk of doing nothing. In this episode of Brave New Work, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans get in...

If you won’t say it, we will: Making working agreements is dope. Doing so can give teams an equal opportunity to contribute; provide clarity where clarity is missing and causing friction; introduce new employees to an organization’s source of truth. We could go on. And because it’s not uncommon for us to hear, “But agreements can lead to inadvertent bureaucracy,” we did. In this episode of Brave N...

If you’re like us, you’ve binged all of Netflix’s docuseries about Formula 1 racing. And if you’re like Ready member Jurriaan Kamer, you’re not only steeped in the popular sport, but also often thinking about its overlap with self-management and org design. Turns out that when you peer under Formula 1’s hood, you find provocative organizational lessons about requiring room for reflection, distribu...

Doing the accountability dance in the world of self-management, where everyone’s balancing a different portfolio of projects and priorities, can be tricky. When an initiative needs nudging, when a product needs launching, or when a gap in the system needs filling, who owns that work? Who should own it? And how does an organization create space for vision and ownership to emerge? Rather than force...

You’ve probably heard this advice before: “Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” But missing from that laughably quaint maxim is the promise of a job ever loving you back. The “labor of love” myth sits at the heart of some of our most core beliefs about work. But the expectation that the place cutting our paychecks should be the same place giving our lives meaning isn’t an...

Think you’ve been working from home during the pandemic? Writers Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel have news for you: You haven’t. Rather, you’ve been sending more Slacks and going to more meetings in order to beat back stress and white-knuckle your way through this mess before we get back to the way things were... right? Legit flexible work requires intentionality, mindfulness, nuance—a.k.a....

Believe it or not, a new year is just five days away. As we approach 2022, we’re taking a minute to reflect on all we experienced, experimented with, and noticed in 2021. And guess what? We learned some stuff! We learned that getting folks into their zones of genius can help an organization scale with abundance and ease; that (spoiler alert) it takes heaps of time and patience to become truly grea...

Don’t be alarmed by the title of Ginny Hogan’s book: Toxic Femininity in the Workplace is the comedian and writer’s satirical collection of whip-smart pieces poking fun at the flavors of male bravado and egotism that show up in the office. (A pitch-perfect example from the book: “Appropriate Thank-Yous for the Man Who Generously Informed You That You Need to Negotiate Your Salary.“) If you’ve ever...

Maybe you’re already deep into crypto, NFTs (or non-fungible tokens), and DAOs (or decentralized autonomous organizations). And maybe you only know what web3 is because your cousin can’t stop talking about it. Whichever end of the spectrum you fall on, there’s much more for all of us to learn about this novel digital landscape being built before our eyes. But here’s something we do know: web3 and...

You know pyramid thinking; it’s the pervasive mindset that compels us to ask, “Who’s up? Who’s down? Who’s in? Who’s out? Who wins? Who loses?” But thinking about power and its flow between people in those terms means missing out on other skills. Pyramid thinking says, “If you’re not spinning around the winning-or-losing hamster wheel, then you’re doing nothing”—when in reality, blowing up that bi...

Wait, haven’t we already covered retreats? Yes. But if the first one explored key dos and don’ts, this one imagines the retreat as a blank sheet of paper and invites you to ask: With unlimited options, what would you do? How would you take an off-site from good to great to transcendent? What’s the space where strategy meets luxury and how can you plan a rewarding experience that includes real work...

What is sludge? Friction. Paperwork requirements. Waiting time. Online forms filled with confusing jargon. Reduced operating hours. The tedious, arcane, and (in some cases) disenfranchising hurdle preventing someone from accessing a service they’re entitled to? Yep, that’s sludge. And the sludgier a process, the more likely ordinary citizens—especially those already marginalized—will give up and w...

The workforce is changing. Millennials are turning into elder millennials and Zoomers are turning into employed adults, thus shifting the makeup of the modern working population—and its values. Long gone are any romantic or bootstrappy notions of “paying your dues,” which, in many work environments, is just shorthand for dealing with toxicity and subpar pay; there are fewer people receiving chintz...

We dedicate this episode to our favorite…excuses. That’s right, we’re cracking open the archive of reasons people frequently cite for avoiding or stalling new ways of working. Odds are you also know (or have yourself played) the top hits by heart—hits like “We just need buy-in from every stakeholder first” and “Let’s wait for the new COO to start,” and the classic of all classics, “If only we hadn...