Five OD Things N° 12
Selling personal super-intelligence; trust & safety heading for the exits; raw compute vs. the junk drawer; Wall Street loves shrinking payrolls; the first targets are email jobs| Clay Parker Jones
Selling personal super-intelligence; trust & safety heading for the exits; raw compute vs. the junk drawer; Wall Street loves shrinking payrolls; the first targets are email jobs| Clay Parker Jones
Essays & newsletters on the future of Org Design. Author Hidden Patterns, out 2026.| Clay Parker Jones
Krugman on enshittification; a mission-driven reset at Microsoft; how Y2K wasn't a thing because of massive multiplayer cooperation; Medium's reboot story; Figma's S-1| Clay Parker Jones
TL;DR: We lack a shared, rigorous way to assess an entire organization – most tools either miss key drivers or apply only to specific domains. By meta-analyzing 102 criteria from 14 seminal sources, from Rams’ Design Principles to the Agile Manifesto to Jane Jacobs' Generators of Diversity, this post distills| Clay Parker Jones
RACI is vague, hard to use, and reinforces the "what the hell is happening here" status quo. DICE is specific, easy to use, and shines a bright light on dysfunction.| Clay Parker Jones
There's an old bug inside the system, and it'll never go away.| Clay Parker Jones
Because of course it does. That said, here's some research you can show your boss.| Clay Parker Jones
TLDR: Activist investors want lean SBUs, and they don't love that matrix| Clay Parker Jones
Hey there! I wrote a book. It's about fixing the about fixing the invisible stuff that makes work suck. I'd be honored if you gave it a read.| Clay Parker Jones
Pattern languages and org analysis; RTO is bad, even if offices are good; old maps made 3D; diverging values worldwide; exit interviews| Clay Parker Jones
Challenges facing creativity; owning ideas from beginning to end; opinionated palettes; are we doing zines again?; randomness that didn’t fit in the first four categories| Clay Parker Jones
4 ways to use Pace Layers in strategy and OD work: 🚀 As a career planning tool; 🎓 As a strategy tool; 🔬 As a diagnostic or sense-making tool; 🎨 As a design tool for value-adding layers.| Clay Parker Jones
Organizational health essential for firm performance; Avinsa; the heat death of Google; team performance research; platform teams @ PepsiCo| Clay Parker Jones
Most of the time when I ask teams how they make decisions, I get a lot of ... silence. And then either: a) "nobody's ever asked me that"; or b) "I don't think we ever know when we are making a decision"; or c) "we make too many decisions to have a 'way' to make decisions."| Clay Parker Jones
Prioritization isn't a tool problem. Or an individual performance problem. It's a strategy problem, and not one that you can fix with a better slide deck. It's about good diagnosis, a clear guiding policy, and truly connected actions... *made memorable* and *made practical.*| Clay Parker Jones
So you want to improve the performance of your team? Start with good team design. I started doing this method with clients and teams in 2013? 2014? and it’s still the undisputed champ.| Clay Parker Jones
Sometimes, it's hard to get teams and leaders to understand that *most teams* have a ton of performance upside. I think that stems from thinking that the average team has pretty middling performance: not great, but not terrible. The truth is that the average team is low-performing.| Clay Parker Jones
My ~sorta default setup for a workshop these days is to run these two sessions back-to-back: Future Backwards (from Dave Snowden/Cynefin), to sort out key topics that the team needs to address, then World Café, to actually work on those topics.| Clay Parker Jones
Don't use a RACI. If you must use something like it, use DICE (Decides, Informs, Consults, Executes). It's easier to understand, and shines a brighter spotlight on problems.| Clay Parker Jones
This development tool is designed to give change-agents inside organizations clarity into their path forward, help them define and deepen strengths, and maybe give us some shared language about what we do.| CPJ.FYI
A tool that helps managers and individual contributors design systems that get better performance out of dual-reporting roles.| Clay Parker Jones
Why Netflix's approach to complexity – going all the way back to 2001 – creates better results.| Clay Parker Jones
