Narrator: Imagine a declassified field manual from 1944, written by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. Its purpose? To teach ordinary citizens in enemy territories how to subtly sabotage their own workplaces. The instructions are simple: insist on going through channels, make long-winded speeches, refer all matters to committees, and haggle over the precise wording of communications. Now, pause and consider your own workplace. Does any of that sound familiar? This shocking parallel is the explosive starting point for An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey. The book argues that modern work isn't just frustrating; in many cases, it has become indistinguishable from sabotage, a system perfectly designed to stifle progress, drain energy, and crush human potential.

Narrator: The authors begin by exposing a deeply uncomfortable truth: the daily frustrations of corporate life are not random bugs in the system; they are features. They recount the story of the OSS "Simple Sabotage Field Manual," which outlined the very behaviors that have become standard operating procedure in many companies. When leaders are asked to list their biggest frustrations—endless meetings, risk aversion, information hoarding, bureaucratic red tape—their lists are nearly identical to the sabotage tactics prescribed by the OSS during World War II.

This revelation is not just a clever anecdote; it's a profound diagnosis. It suggests that organizations have, over time, built systems that actively undermine their own success. The book tells the story of a leadership team lamenting a monthly strategy meeting. When prompted to calculate its true cost—including salaries, preparation time, and materials—they were horrified to discover it was a three-million-dollar meeting. Their immediate reaction was, "We are spending $3 million to have this shitty meeting?!" This moment of clarity reveals how deeply embedded and unexamined these wasteful, sabotage-like practices have become. The system is broken not because of bad people, but because the rules of the game are fundamentally flawed.

Narrator: To understand how work became so broken, the authors trace its origins back to one man: Frederick Winslow Taylor. At the turn of the 20th century, Taylor introduced "Scientific Management," a revolutionary idea that treated work as a series of tasks to be optimized for maximum efficiency. He famously conducted experiments to find the "one best way" to do a job, separating the "thinking" (done by managers) from the "doing" (done by workers). This created the hierarchical org chart we know today, where information flows up and decisions flow down.

While this model drove unprecedented productivity for a time, it came with a Faustian bargain. In exchange for higher pay, workers gave up their autonomy and judgment. This legacy created what the book calls "organizational debt"—the accumulation of outdated policies, processes, and structures that no longer serve the organization. The result is a system that treats people like cogs in a machine, leading to widespread disengagement and a staggering cost. The authors cite research estimating that bureaucracy costs the U.S. economy over three trillion dollars annually in wasted time and potential. This "Legacy OS" is designed for compliance and control, not for the complexity and creativity required in the modern world.

Narrator: As a counterpoint to the Legacy Organization, the book introduces "Evolutionary Organizations." These are companies that operate on a fundamentally different set of assumptions about people and work. They are built on two core mindsets: being "People Positive" and "Complexity Conscious."

Being People Positive means trusting that people are inherently capable, motivated, and want to do good work. It rejects the old view that employees must be controlled and coerced. A powerful example is FAVI, a French brass foundry. In 1983, its new CEO, Jean-François Zobrist, eliminated time clocks and quotas. He trusted his employees, giving them the autonomy to manage their own work in small, independent "minifactories." The result? FAVI became a market leader, exporting to China and never shipping a late order in over twenty-five years.

Being Complexity Conscious means accepting that organizations are not predictable machines but living systems. They can't be controlled, only guided. Buurtzorg, a Dutch home healthcare organization, embodies this. Founder Jos de Blok created a network of over a thousand self-managed nursing teams with almost no central staff. These teams have the autonomy to provide care as they see fit, leading to dramatically better patient outcomes and massive cost savings for the Dutch healthcare system. These organizations prove that trading the illusion of control for freedom and responsibility is not just possible, but profoundly effective.

Narrator: Kegan and Lahey argue that transforming an organization requires a systemic approach, not piecemeal fixes. To guide this, they introduce the "Operating System (OS) Canvas," a framework that breaks down an organization into twelve critical domains. These include Purpose, Authority, Structure, Strategy, Information, and Compensation. Evolutionary Organizations don't just tweak one or two of these; they reinvent them all.

For instance, in the domain of Authority, Legacy Organizations centralize power, creating bottlenecks. Evolutionary Organizations distribute it. At the gaming company Valve, there are no bosses. Employees "vote with their feet," choosing which projects to work on, making Valve one of the most profitable companies per employee in the world.

In the domain of Structure, Legacy Organizations rely on rigid hierarchies. Evolutionary Organizations favor dynamic networks. The Chinese appliance giant Haier broke its 60,000 employees into 2,000 self-managing micro-enterprises, each with its own P&L responsibility. This made the company incredibly adaptive and responsive, turning it into the world's largest home appliance company. The OS Canvas provides a map for leaders to see their organization as an interconnected system and to intentionally redesign it for adaptivity and human flourishing.

Narrator: Perhaps the book's most critical insight is that the process of change must itself be evolutionary. Traditional change management—with its top-down mandates, grand rollouts, and linear plans—is a product of the same broken thinking it's trying to fix. It treats the organization like a machine to be re-engineered.

Instead, the authors advocate for "continuous participatory change." This approach is emergent, not dictated. It starts small, with safe-to-try experiments that address real tensions felt by teams. It is guided by principles, not plans. One such principle is "Through Them, Not to Them," meaning change should be done with people, not to them. A powerful example comes from Pixar. Facing rising costs and a faltering culture, the leadership didn't issue a new set of rules. Instead, they held a "Notes Day," shutting down the entire studio to allow all 1,000+ employees to brainstorm solutions. This participatory process generated dozens of valuable, team-led initiatives and revitalized the studio's collaborative spirit. The leader's role in this new model is not to be a visionary architect, but a "space maker"—one who creates the psychological safety and boundaries for the organization to transform itself.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from An Everyone Culture is a radical call to action: stop trying to change people or manage culture. Instead, change the system. Culture is not a lever to be pulled; it is a shadow cast by the organization's structure, processes, and power dynamics. By redesigning this underlying operating system to be more trusting, transparent, and adaptive, a healthier culture will emerge as a natural consequence.

The book leaves us with a profound challenge. It's not about finding a perfect, one-size-fits-all model, but about having the courage to begin a journey of continuous evolution. The ultimate question it poses is whether we are willing to build organizations that are not just the best in the world, but the best for the world, creating environments where both the business and its people can truly thrive.