The Hidden Patterns Gift Guide
Gifts for the systems thinker/tinker-er in your life. Or for yourself, if you fit that description!
Clay Parker Jones
Essays and occasional newsletters about the future of organization design.
The Book
Hidden Patterns
Essays
Super Performance
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
Why Nothing Gets Done Around Here
Hundreds of thousands of hours are getting wasted on bad decision-rights. It’s got to stop. (Contains at least two good ways to fix this problem.)
Centralization (For Marketers)
Centralization isn't a good thing or a bad thing. It's a pendulum that swings back and forth, and the key is to centralize and decentralize with intention. And to learn from what you've done.
Five Things
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
Five OD Things Nº 11
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
Five Org Design Things N° 10
Pattern languages and org analysis; RTO is bad, even if offices are good; old maps made 3D; diverging values worldwide; exit interviews
Five Creativity Things
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
Five Org Design Things N° 9
Organizational health essential for firm performance; Avinsa; the heat death of Google; team performance research; platform teams @ PepsiCo
Radar
Daily observations on organization design.