Clay Parker Jones: author of "Hidden Patterns" on why your team isn't really a team

0:01Design needs to have a seat at this table because they're the ones who are obsessed with the customer journey, obsessed with the customer experience, obsessed with the interface. And that interface might not be the visual interface, the software interface, but the interface between the customer and the business that is so often expressed as UX. That can be deeper and more comprehensive if we let it be, if we start to get that stuff on paper. We all know that there's something fractured about the workplace that makes it inefficient and at times just straight up inhumane. If only someone was thinking deeply about these problems and how to address them.

0:38Well, that's what Clay Parker Jones is working on right now. Clay has spent close to two decades on this problem. First at the consultancy, Undercurrent, and today he is head of org design and development at Airbnb. be. He advocates for investment in creativity and humanity at work, something that you might think is obvious for any company, but sadly is eclipsed by short-term thinking. Clay's new book, Hidden

1:03Aarron Walter:Patterns, a playbook for more human workplaces, is one of the most cohesive philosophies of organizational structure that we've come across in a while. His diagnosis of what's broken is very simple. There aren't enough real teams. Most of us work in what he calls co-acting groups. We get together for a meeting and then we scatter back to the actual work. In this conversation, we get into why psychological safety stays a platitude until you make it structural, what rule of law looks like inside a company, and how to break a manager's job into atomic pieces and hand away the parts you're bad at.

1:37Aarron Walter:We also chat about why the org chart is a design problem that designers should be at the table for. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Eli Woolery. And I'm Aaron Walter. If you're hearing this, you're not currently on our premium subscriber feed. Design Better Premium subscribers enjoy weekly episodes. That's four episodes per month rather than just two. And all of them are ad-free. Plus, you'll get an invitation to our monthly AMAs with the smartest folks in design and tech. And if you subscribe at the annual level, you'll also get our toolkit, a collection of our favorite design and productivity tools like Perplexity, Miro, Read AI, and more.

2:20You'll hear a preview of this episode, but if you'd like to hear the full conversation, please consider becoming a premium subscriber at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. So if you can't afford a subscription, just shoot us an email at subscriptions at the curiositydepartment.com. will help you out.

2:52We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.

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3:32And now, back to the show.

3:39Clay Parker-Jones, welcome to Design Better. Thanks for having me. You've got a new book out that is super interesting, Investigating Organizational Design. And your perspectives in there are really interesting. Some of it I may have heard of before, but there's a lot that I haven't. And it's the first time I've seen a cohesive philosophy about what the structure of an organization should look like to be effective, efficient, humane, etc. Probably worth stating from the jump here that you are currently at Airbnb. They created a position for you to help with organizational design. We've had Brian Chesky and Hiroki Asai on the show in previous episodes.

4:26And Hiroki in particular had some views on organizational design. Of course, his background, he came from Apple. So I presume that you are working closely with both of these fellows and many other folks at Airbnb. But how did you find your way into that role? Because it's a rather unique role to be at such a cool company doing organizational design. Our head of people, Ian Roberts, is a former IDEO chief operating officer. And he's kind of an abnormal head of people. To have a designer, industrial designer in the seat, thinking about how the people function can change the organization for the better, was the predecessor to me coming on board.

5:08him being on board, him helping Brian rethink how the organization needed to be structured to move into its next generation led to Ian, I guess, finding me through the system, so to speak. We had known of each other in the past from IDEO and Undercurrent days. And I'd always looked up to his work. And I learned that he had always kind of looked up to the work that we were doing at Undercurrent. And there's not a lot of people who combine a focus on innovation and design and creativity and humanity at work with org design, you'd think those things would go together, but they don't go together as often as you'd think.

5:44Aarron Walter:From your perspective now, and you've been working on this topic for a while, and maybe you can even speak to it in sort of current terms, which are pretty turbulent in the tech world, at least, what do you feel is wrong with the workplace? Chief among the things that I find wrong with the workplace today is the lack of high quality teams. Most people, most of the time are working in an environment that doesn't allow them to put their whole self, their whole capability into the work alongside other people who care about the same things that they care about. And I find that most people that I speak to who have had a great experience at work, had it in the context of a team, people that they know people that they care about people that care about them, people that care about the work in the same way that they do.

6:32And that's just very rare, maybe not for your listeners, but certainly for most of the working environment. They don't work like design teams do. They work as co-acting groups of people who are coming together for a meeting and then splitting back up and going back to their actual team. And that's just a crummy way to work. It's not fun. We don't get as much done as we need to. We don't have an opportunity to grow and flex in the view and in community with others. So that's the problem. Not enough teams, not enough spending real time on real problems with people. Let's walk through some of the foundational principles in the book, because I think these are a good way to base the conversation here.

7:15One of the tenets is true purpose. Every action should be driven by an enduring why. This is something that I've always felt is job number one, is we need something. We need a beacon on the hill that brings us together and helps us move forward together. Can you talk to us a little bit about true purpose and how companies find that and articulate it and keep teams pointed towards it? It's one of those things that's really easy in a founder-led organization, for sure. They are the purpose in many ways or the best expression of it. I think one of the easiest ways to bring this up, design teams do a good job of this because they tend to be more obsessed with and driven around the user problem or the customer problem than the average team out there.

8:05But having some sort of object that you can point to that represents the purpose. And I think, as I was kind of describing, the founder can often be that. But having a document, having a phrase that we will use to encode the purpose into our day-to-day work, having something you can point to, that's number one. Number two is referencing it a lot and not being afraid of it feeling cringed to keep coming back to the purpose. and that kind of requires a purpose that doesn't feel false, doesn't feel like we're just trying to make ourselves feel good about the work that we're doing, but it's actually true to what the end outcome is, why we've come together.

8:43And that could be something that's very small for an individual team, not very small, it's like comparatively small, or that could be something that's comparatively gigantic, like we're doing XYZ thing in order to save the world via some sort of social change that we're trying to enact. And everything in between is respectable, is something that is worth glorifying and pointing all of our work toward. Not normal for most teams, much more normal for teams that are more craft oriented and functionally oriented in many ways. And figuring out how to like actually bring that to life for more people was kind of the point of the book.

9:18You can say true purpose all you want, but if you don't have a network of teams that's actually working against a network of purposes that help the top-level purpose come to life, it's going to be much harder.

9:29Aarron Walter:The second principle, rule of law, I think that's very interesting. And probably most of us think about that in the context of a country or society. If you've traveled in a country where rule of law isn't the norm, you've probably run into things like bribery and other things where it's like, wow, that's weird. That's an inconvenience for me as somebody who's traveling to the country. But if you think of a perspective of the citizen there who might be trying to like start a business or even to support their family. And that's something they're up against day after day where there is no rule of law.

9:58Aarron Walter:There's really nobody protecting their rights. I wouldn't say we take it for granted here as a citizen of the US or if we're in somewhere like Europe, but it's certainly something that allows us to do a lot of things that we can do, you know, start a company, start a small business. I'm curious how you think about applying that to a team. It's one of my favorite bits of the book is thinking about a way that we could apply rule of law to an organization and what that would look like. And you also very aptly described the experience that most people have, I think, in large organizations, where there is a fair amount of the kinds of experiences that you're describing.

10:35Like, it's hard to get things done. It's hard to get a project started. You might experience not exactly bribery, but certainly in large consulting organizations, you'll see something that looks similar to that, like the sales share. Like, oh, I'll give you a bit of my sales from this big contract that we just won, so that you will do something for me down the road. And that's effectively playing the game in those environments. You can draw a straight line from that kind of behavior back to, we don't have a set of rules that apply equally to everybody that we've all consented to. And then we all have some way, maybe it's still hard for us to do this, but we don't have some way for us to imagine changing those rules.

11:15Critical to that is that it may not be that every single rule applies to every single person equally, but at least we know for whom the rules don't apply, or if there are different rules at different levels of the organization or for different teams, those are at least things that we can observe and that we can act within or around or change. It's just about knowing what the rules of the road are and writing the things down that matter, rather than trying to write down only the things that would never really differentiate you, like your rules for expense reporting. These are not important rules in the grand scheme of things.

11:52They might be important for accounting purposes, but they're not important for when people are actually doing their work or the work that matters for the organization. So my push to people, to leaders, is to actually get the things out on paper that matter to the work that you're doing, that matter to your purpose, and try to hold yourself accountable to those rules until they no longer serve you, until there's something that needs to be reconsidered, redesigned, rethought. So think of it as like a temporary creed that we're going to hold to until we have new data, not something that is like, oh, we're just going to stick to this because we wrote it down.

12:30And that, I think, is that critical designerly intent to all of this, is making sure that we're actively considering all the things that we set up in our organization and whether or not they're serving us or whether or not they need to be reconsidered. You also advocate for psychological safety, and this is something that is a platitude that we hear a lot of design leaders or just leaders in general say, like, we need to have psychological safety and really have no clarity on how to create that. It is so core to a high-functioning team, high-functioning organization where we can challenge each other.

13:04We can air our grievances. We can have differences of opinion and we can communicate and feel like, okay, I'm still safe in communicating this. Beyond that though, you also say structural safety. Can you take us through one, how do we create psychological safety, the actual communication or environment that we create? And then what does it mean to have structural safety? I would jump into some of the direction or learning patterns of the book from there. So things that are more about how a team decides where it's going and makes decisions about what is right and what is on strategy and what is wrong and what is off strategy.

13:50And in so doing, you can provide an environment where it's safer to speak up because you're talking about things that are going to impact a business outcome, a creative outcome, something that is not about the interpersonal relationship between the people in the group, but is more about what we're trying to achieve, relates back up to the purpose idea. And if we get some rules of the road on paper, it makes it easier for us to point to something that we've all agreed to as the requirements for or the preconditions for membership within a group. Because the thing that we're worried about for all of these things, that we're not going to be allowed to be part of the group anymore.

14:30We're going to be kicked out. That's why we're afraid to speak up. So if we make those things structural, if we turn them into something that is arguable on a basis of fact rather than a basis of opinion or kind of a subjective review of events, but instead is something that we've written down, these are like the rules of the road, then we can negotiate those. We can talk about those things rather than talking about or being focused too much on the relationship between the individuals, which should be something that we're continuing to work on. So what to do with that is to try to turn it into something that isn't a platitude, but is actually something that is about the rules, that is about the measures, that is about how we set direction, that is about how the team is composed.

15:11And then it becomes something that is structural. You can only lose your membership privileges if you break something that we say is an inviolable rule. It's not something that's like, oh, you pissed me off because you didn't like what I created, or because you didn't like the way I showed up in that meeting. We actually know how we lose privileges, and we know how to stay inside of those rules, stay inside of those agreements. That to me is the ultimate thing, is to take it from being something that feels like it's interpersonal, between a leader and their direct report, or between two team members of equal hierarchical stature, and instead say, it's a structural thing.

15:46We know why we're doing this, and you know what's expected of you. That way, you're always part of the group as long as you stay within these guidelines. I want to play devil's advocate here just to try to tease this out a little bit. So I could see some sort of rule being codified that is no one will be terminated for expressing dissenting views. Like, okay, that seems like let's create psychological safety. And I've also worked with people who are nothing but negative. They are just like dragging a dead horse up a hill. They're just always bringing some negative perspective, which could fit into that category of a dissenting view.

16:27And I know what it's like when that person exits a team and the team blossoms, and you realize that they've been holding us back. How do you deal with a situation like that? If you've got someone who is always dissenting, never contributing, or the balance is a kilter. Yeah. Have you dealt with that? I'm curious. I mean, I have conversations with people and let them know, hey, this is the vibe that you're creating inside the team and it's becoming a problem. But ultimately, that person has to be deselected at a certain point where if they get the feedback and their behavior doesn't change. This is something else that I describe a little bit later in the book around conflict resolution.

17:15There has to be some escape valve for folks where it doesn't make sense for them to be on the team. They aren't serving our purpose. They aren't serving their highest purpose on this team. They could probably, in another context, be doing much, much better. Let's be sure that we give them a dignified chance to hear that feedback and to change their behavior. But that isn't really a psychological or structural safety thing. That's about having the ability to give people feedback, to actually push them on the things that matter. And at some point for the organization to decide what kinds of people attitudinally, in terms of experience, in terms of capability, are necessary for the work to be done.

17:59Those are the things that I think we should emphasize and drive toward and write down and be clear about so that everybody can know what they're signing up for. So it's not something that's ambiguous. And you're like, it's kind of okay for some people to voice feedback. I'm not sure if I'm doing it the right way. I get all these negative looks when I'm always the one who's like beating a dead horse on some feedback. That's not good for anybody involved. And if we figured out a way to actually get through that and have a method for dealing with conflict, which sounds like you had a good one, that's a pattern unto itself.

18:31That's a thing that more people can learn how to do. So we enter into that experience less frequently.

18:37Aarron Walter:There's some other key foundations in your books, like curiosity, wholeness, bring your full self to work. But one that I'm curious about is this idea of dissolvability. And the reason it stuck out to me is we had a conversation yesterday with Nir Eyal, who wrote these books, Hooked and Indistractable, and then this new one called Beyond Belief. And part of the conversation is around why it's so hard for us as humans to change, essentially. And there's an evolutionary reason for it, because essentially, if you've been doing things that have helped you survive till now, your entire mindset, evolutionarily, is going to say, don't change.

19:11Aarron Walter:Keep doing what you're doing. You're doing great. And so this idea of dissolvability, where it's like, okay, I'm going to come into this role, and then it might change after the work is done. And to me, that feels like, wow, that might go against people's sort of inherent resistance to things changing or their identity at work. So how do you address that if you want to make that one of your principles? I feel like at work, we tend to assume that everything that's permanent is like permanent, permanent. And when we're on a team, we expect to be there forever. And I know, I think we've all experienced and the world is telling us that that's not really that true.

19:45So anything that we think is permanent is in fact dissolvable. It is liable to change. 100 % certainty is a fantasy. We're all better off just on a human level accepting that. And I'll admit that's hard. Evolution has pointed us away from that idea because it doesn't feel good. It signals maybe that there might be loss on the horizon or near at hand. I think one of the things there is to try to build that into the system, let people know how long we expect them to be on a team or on a particular initiative. and that, again, their membership privileges aren't going to expire when their particular tour of duty on a project or a team or an initiative or whatever it might be comes to an end.

20:29Like they're still going to be on the team. I think design organizations do a pretty good job of this. You know that when the scope is up, unless you're a freelancer on that, that you're still going to work there and that your team lead or whoever you're working with is going to try to help you find your way onto another project. Consultancies do a really good job of this. You're on the team and you're on a project. And both of those things are considered to be separate in some way. So having a clear bit of separation, a clear set of guidelines, scopes of work, tours of duty, these are all things that help with that.

21:01So it's not like, oh, the thing is over, or we assume everything is intangible or dissolvable, but rather that we make the dissolvable more legible for people. I think that can help a lot. Let's take this in a different direction because there's one thing that you pointed out in the book that I was just nodding my head vigorously. You argue that we should organize around value creation like a customer journey rather than traditional silos. So engineering, design, HR, etc. Maybe you could explain the difference for listeners and why that works. Also like that you're at Airbnb and this is one of these principles because Airbnb famously has organized around customer journey.

21:45One of my closest collaborators is the guy who runs this team called Community Blueprints and their whole thing is about. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at designbetterpodcast.com slash subscribe. Once you do, you'll get access to every full length episode all ad free. monthly AMAs with inspiring people in design and tech, and recordings of all our past AMAs. The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. If you can't afford a subscription, just email us at subscriptions at the curiosity department.com and we'll help you out.

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