Brave New Work

Have you ever looked around your workplace and thought, “This can’t be the best way to work”? If so, you’re not alone. In Brave New Work, Aaron Dignan argues that modern organizations are drowning in bureaucracy, paralyzed by control, and unfit for the complexity of the twenty-first century. He contends that while technology, markets, and societies have evolved, the way we manage work remains stuck in the industrial-age mindset of control, predictability, and hierarchy. The central question he raises is simple but revolutionary: What if organizations could run themselves?

Dignan believes that organizations everywhere are constrained by what he calls the Legacy Operating System—a set of outdated assumptions, roles, and structures inherited from the early days of Scientific Management (the world of Frederick Taylor and his stopwatch). These assumptions—like the belief that people can’t be trusted, that the world can be predicted, and that control equals success—are embedded deep in how we set budgets, hold meetings, make decisions, structure authority, and measure performance. But in a world filled with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (known as VUCA), those assumptions no longer serve us. The result? Leaders are exhausted, employees are disengaged, and organizations are failing to adapt. His proposed alternative is to replace the mechanistic paradigm of command and control with an Evolutionary Operating System (OS) built for continuous learning, experimentation, and adaptivity.

The Broken System of Work

Dignan opens with a relatable story: a $3 million meeting that no one wanted to attend. After challenging executives to cancel it, he reveals how deeply embedded waste has become in corporate life. This anecdote symbolizes what he calls our addiction to bureaucracy—the endless meetings, overplanning, and risk-avoidance that keep organizations spinning their wheels. To emphasize how absurd modern work is, he cites the Simple Sabotage Field Manual—a World War II document used by the CIA to teach citizens how to disrupt enemy institutions. Its sabotage techniques (like referring all matters to committees and reopening settled decisions) eerily resemble today’s office culture. The sobering realization is that our workplaces have unintentionally institutionalized sabotage as standard procedure.

Much of this dysfunction stems from outdated management models. Dignan illustrates this with the century-old org chart of the Union Pacific Railroad—a pyramid that perfectly mirrors the hierarchies still in use today. Despite tech revolutions from the internet to space rockets, management hasn’t evolved. The reason? We’re trapped in assumptions that prioritize compliance over creativity and obedience over autonomy. Our organizations are designed as signal-controlled intersections (managed through bureaucratic lights and rules) rather than roundabouts (driven by trust, simple guidelines, and shared judgment). The result: control and stagnation instead of flow and autonomy.

The Evolutionary Alternative

The solution, Dignan suggests, is to redesign our organizational “operating system.” Just as computers have code running under the surface, our teams run on unwritten rules about authority, meetings, strategy, and resources. He identifies twelve domains on his OS Canvas—including purpose, authority, structure, strategy, resources, meetings, membership, and compensation—that can be intentionally reinvented to create freedom, transparency, and adaptive capacity. This reframing enables organizations to see work as a living system rather than a machine.

Dignan’s concept of Evolutionary Organizations captures those companies already thriving in this new paradigm—examples like Buurtzorg, a Dutch nursing agency with no managers and tiny self-governing teams; Morning Star, where employees design their own roles and salaries; and Handelsbanken, which abandoned traditional budgeting decades ago yet consistently outperforms peers. These firms embody two foundational mindsets: they are People Positive (trusting that humans are resourceful, motivated, and capable of self-management) and Complexity Conscious (recognizing that uncertainty and emergence are normal, requiring adaptability rather than control). These mindsets empower teams to continuously revise how they work, giving rise to self-organizing, resilient, and high-performing cultures.

Why This Matters

The book’s moral is both hopeful and demanding: our organizational paralysis is not inevitable—it’s designed. We can redesign it. Work isn’t broken because people are lazy or unmotivated; it’s broken because we’ve built it on false assumptions. In Dignan’s view, becoming brave enough to reinvent work requires leaders and teams to shift from managing people to designing systems that let people manage themselves. He challenges readers not only to critique bureaucracy but to start experimenting locally with new ways of working—small, “safe-to-try” changes that compound into transformation. This approach rejects the grand, top-down redesigns of traditional change management and replaces them with continuous participatory evolution.

Ultimately, Dignan invites you to imagine organizations as living organisms rather than machines—capable of sensing tensions, learning through feedback, and growing through iteration. His rallying cry is for courage and curiosity: “Before we’re done, you’ll wonder why anyone would want to keep working in captivity.” Brave New Work is not simply a call for efficiency; it’s a manifesto for humanizing work itself. In an era where adaptability is survival, Dignan’s framework offers a map—drawn not for control, but for evolution.

Most organizations today are still operating under an industrial-age model of control and compliance. Aaron Dignan insists that bureaucracy—once a strength for scale and efficiency—has mutated into organizational debt that cripples innovation. He calls this the Legacy Operating System, a complex web of roles, processes, and approvals that were designed for predictability, not learning. In his words, “We’re being asked to invent the future but to do so inside a culture of work that is deeply broken.”

The Roots of Bureaucracy

To understand why we’re stuck, Dignan traces modern management back to Frederick Winslow Taylor, the early twentieth-century engineer behind Scientific Management. Taylor’s central insight was that work could be broken down into small tasks and optimized—the famous “one best way.” That logic created amazing productivity but came at a cost: thinking was separated from doing, and workers became cogs. Each subsequent theorist—Henri Fayol, Henry Gantt, Max Weber, and even James McKinsey—reinforced hierarchical control as the engine of performance. Over time, budgets became religion, and efficiency displaced purpose. The result is an institutional addiction to planning and control—a self-reinforcing cycle of bureaucracy that resists adaptation.

As Gary Hamel (author of Humanocracy) notes, half of America’s 23.8 million management roles may be unnecessary, wasting trillions annually in compliance activity. Dignan builds on this data to quantify the cost of what he calls “organizational debt”—structures or policies that no longer serve their purpose but remain in place. Each time something goes wrong, we add a new rule or approval layer, creating complexity that spirals until no one can move. These layers protect the very dysfunction they created. The irony is that bureaucracy, meant to safeguard performance, now ensures mediocrity.

Rethinking Scale and Efficiency

Despite the economic success of bureaucratic capitalism, Dignan shows that its underlying system is degrading. Corporate lifespans are shrinking dramatically: the average S&P 500 company, once lasting sixty-one years, now survives only about twelve. Labor productivity has stalled; return on assets has plummeted; and wages stagnate even as CEOs earn hundreds of times more than employees. He calls this “graceful degradation”—a system still functioning but internally failing. Although the planet and its people have prospered materially, Dignan argues that human vitality and organizational learning have been sacrificed on the altar of efficiency.

Emergence of Evolutionary Organizations

To counter bureaucratic collapse, he introduces the concept of Evolutionary Organizations: companies that continuously upgrade their operating system based on learning. They reject centralized control and build cultures where teams decide locally how to pursue purpose. Buurtzorg’s nurses, for instance, organize themselves into neighborhood teams, cutting costs by 20–30% while delivering superior patient care. FAVI’s workers self-manage “minifactories” that serve specific customers, never missing a shipment. Morning Star’s employees craft their own agreements and set their own pay. As diverse as they are, these organizations share two traits that Dignan claims define evolution: People Positive and Complexity Conscious. They trust humans’ intrinsic motivation and accept uncertainty as the natural state of reality.

In short, Dignan reframes progress as distributed experimentation, not centralized perfection. His argument resonates with thinkers like Margaret Wheatley (Leadership and the New Science) and Peter Senge (The Fifth Discipline): to thrive in complexity, we must treat organizations as living systems capable of self-healing. Evolutionary design does not promise control—it promises growth through iteration. It’s a hard pivot from bureaucracy to biology—one that replaces dead rules with living principles.

At the heart of Aaron Dignan’s philosophy lies the conviction that people are not the problem—systems are. Becoming People Positive means rewriting the assumptions that drive management culture. Traditional organizations built on “Theory X” (from Douglas McGregor’s The Human Side of Enterprise) assume that workers dislike work, avoid responsibility, and need coercion. Evolutionary Organizations instead follow “Theory Y,” believing that people are naturally motivated, learn through autonomy, and seek purpose and mastery.

Evidence from Radical Trust

Dignan illustrates People Positive thinking through companies like FAVI, where workers operate without bosses, organize into “minifactories,” and treat customers as their employers. The CEO, Jean-François Zobrist, removed time clocks, let employees buy equipment freely, and trusted them to self-regulate. Far from chaos, productivity rose and morale soared. During economic downturns, employees even volunteered to take temporary pay cuts rather than lay off colleagues. This case shows how trust generates accountability—not the other way around.

Psychological research backs this up: Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s self-determination theory reveals that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are core human needs driving motivation. When employees can direct their own work, motivation thrives; when control increases, motivation erodes. Dignan’s “People Positive” approach translates psychological truth into organizational design: give people freedom, and they bring creativity and commitment; restrict them, and they withdraw.

Changing Assumptions, Changing Behavior

Dignan challenges leaders to notice how their everyday language exposes underlying beliefs. Words like “incentivize,” “manage,” or “enforce” signal distrust, whereas phrases like “co-create” or “own the work” reflect respect for autonomy. The paradox is that leaders often see themselves as empowering even while reinforcing control. “We are capable,” Dignan tells them, “but we treat others as incapable.” To become People Positive is to assume everyone has good intent, worthy of transparency and challenge.

When organizations shift this mindset, performance follows. Cornell research on autonomy-oriented firms shows they grow four times faster and have one-third the turnover of control-based ones. Authentic trust scales better than surveillance. Dignan’s message echoes Simon Sinek’s: “A team is not a group that works together—it’s a group that trusts each other.” A People Positive culture creates the psychological safety required for innovation, vulnerability, and growth. Leaders who practice it must learn to let go—to stop fixing and start facilitating. In doing so, they rediscover what it means to lead humans, not systems.

If People Positive is about trust, Complexity Conscious is about awareness. Dignan argues that organizations must evolve from seeking control to embracing uncertainty. We often conflate “complicated” (things that can be engineered) with “complex” (systems that adapt and surprise). Cars are complicated; traffic is complex. The former can be fixed, the latter must be managed through relationships and learning.

From Control to Coherence

Most leadership models treat organizations like machines—when something breaks, we install more control. Dignan turns that logic upside down. Complex systems thrive on enabling constraints (simple rules that permit judgment) instead of governing constraints (strict policies forcing compliance). A roundabout works better than a stoplight because drivers adapt continuously through social coordination. Similarly, teams perform better when empowered to interpret principles rather than follow rigid commands.

He illustrates this through decisions about travel budgets: a bureaucratic firm solves overspending by adding approvals and audits, whereas a Complexity Conscious firm shares transparent data and lets employees self-regulate. One cultivates fear, the other responsibility. In this sense, complexity consciousness means designing systems for learning, not control. “We can make informed guesses about what is likely to happen,” Dignan writes, “but we can’t be sure. We can’t solve complexity—we can only manage it.”

Working with Emergence

Being Complexity Conscious has major implications for leadership. Instead of commanding direction, leaders create space for emergence—the spontaneous alignment that arises when conditions allow freedom and purpose. This principle, drawn from systems theorists like Dave Snowden (creator of the Cynefin framework), means shifting the leader’s role from architect to gardener. The focus is no longer predicting outcomes but nurturing conditions where learning and adaptation flourish.

Organizations that practice this (like Haier or Spotify) act more like ecosystems than hierarchies. They use small, loosely coupled teams that share information and learn fast while maintaining coherence through shared purpose and reputation. Complexity Conscious leaders trust that self-organization will yield better decisions than centralized command. By working with—not against—the unpredictable, they transform volatility into vitality.

To help organizations change systematically, Aaron Dignan introduces the Operating System Canvas (OS Canvas)—a diagnostic and design tool that reveals how an organization’s invisible code shapes behavior. Just as a computer has an operating system, Dignan argues, every organization runs on hidden principles governing twelve domains: purpose, authority, structure, strategy, resources, innovation, workflow, meetings, information, membership, mastery, and compensation.

A Tool for Seeing the System

The canvas helps teams map their current state and then design “safe-to-try” experiments to evolve each domain. For example, in authority, a team might replace approval hierarchies with an advice process (seeking input before acting) or adopt consent-based decision-making from Sociocracy, where proposals move forward unless someone raises a reasoned objection. In meetings, teams might test a moratorium, canceling all recurring sessions for two weeks to see what actually matters. In resources, firms might trial participatory budgeting, letting employees allocate discretionary spending collectively. Each experiment reveals assumptions—about control, trust, and structure—that limit agility.

Learning Across Twelve Domains

Across the twelve domains, Dignan guides readers through stories and practices from companies that have redesigned one or more dimensions:

• Purpose: Whole Foods’ eudaemonic mission to “Nourish People and the Planet” contrasts with Kroger’s sterile corporate goal of “distribution and merchandising.” When purpose inspires, profit becomes fuel, not the destination.
• Structure: Haier’s decentralized “microenterprises” show how breaking hierarchy into self-managed units restores speed and innovation.
• Information: Buffer’s radical transparency demonstrates how sharing salaries and performance openly builds trust and alignment.
• Workflow: Spotify’s “squads and tribes” design small, autonomous teams that deliver continuously, focusing on being “loosely coupled but tightly aligned.”

The Canvas thus becomes both mirror and map: it helps teams see where control lives and where freedom can grow. Applying it, Dignan says, doesn’t mean following a formula but learning to think in principles. “There’s no one-size-fits-all playbook,” he writes—because complexity demands context, not standardization. The OS Canvas turns the abstract idea of organizational adaptation into tangible practice.

Most change initiatives fail because they’re top-down and static. Dignan offers a replacement: Continuous Participatory Change—a living process in which transformation happens through local experimentation. Instead of designing giant change programs, leaders create conditions where teams can sense tensions, propose ideas, and run safe-to-try experiments. Change, he says, should be like adding milk to coffee—gradual and everywhere, not episodic and imposed.

The Looping Process

Continuous change lives through “looping”—cycles of learning that contain three steps: sensing tensions (noticing what’s holding us back), proposing practices (co-creating solutions), and conducting experiments (testing safely to learn). Dignan’s clients use this approach to evolve culture organically. One team might remove a meeting and observe what breaks; another may decentralize a budget; another tests transparent salary sharing. Over time, these micro-changes compound into systemic transformation. Instead of change managed to people, it happens through them.

Safe-to-Try Experiments

Borrowing lessons from systems theory and Agile, Dignan treats change as continuous experimentation. Every proposal must be “safe to try”—meaning it won’t cause irreversible harm even if it fails. This principle transforms fear into curiosity. At Pixar, for instance, “Notes Day” invited all 1059 employees to spend a day reimagining how the studio could improve. Dozens of ideas were implemented without hierarchy. Similarly, in Control Inc. (a composite case study), teams who waited for permission stagnated, while “Emergent Inc.” thrived by experimenting collectively. The message: progress requires psychological safety, not perfect plans.

Leadership as Space-Making

Leaders in evolutionary systems no longer command change—they create and hold space for it. Drawing from generals like Stanley McChrystal and psychologists like Amy Edmondson, Dignan urges leaders to cultivate psychological safety, transparency, and trust. Their role is to safeguard experimentation by defending against organizational antibodies—the forces of “how we’ve always done it.” In this model, change isn’t a destination but a discipline. It’s how organizations remain alive, learning, and responsive to complexity.

By the book’s end, Dignan zooms out from organizational redesign to societal transformation. He argues that capitalism itself must evolve from endless growth to meaningful contribution. Quoting economists like Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics), he imagines a People Positive and Complexity Conscious economy driven by purpose, participation, and sustainability. Milton Friedman’s dictum that “the business of business is business” has led to profit obsession and ecological crisis. The new paradigm must treat profit as fuel, not purpose.

Reclaiming Purpose

Purpose is central to both organizations and economies. Dignan distinguishes between instrumental goals (shareholder value) and eudaemonic purpose (human flourishing). Purpose, when fractal—visible at every level—connects teams, individuals, and societies to collective meaning. It becomes the organizing principle of a living system, enabling coherence without control. Patagonia’s guiding purpose (“We’re in business to save our home planet”) illustrates how moral clarity and business success can coexist.

Long-Term Thinking and New Metrics

Building on this purpose-driven foundation, Dignan envisions a world where companies measure impact over decades, not quarters. He highlights Eric Ries’s Long-Term Stock Exchange and B Lab’s Public Benefit Corporations as emerging frameworks that align legal structures with moral missions. “Growth with impact,” not just scale, becomes the benchmark. Strategies shift from domination to regeneration—what Raj Sisodia calls “Firms of Endearment.”

The future of work, in Dignan’s grand vision, is inseparable from the future of society. If organizations become evolutionary—transparent, participatory, sustainable—our economies can, too. This is not utopian idealism but systemic realism. As he reminds us, “This isn’t business as usual. This is brave new work.”