Aaron Dignan

Atheist, Brainstormer, Business leader, Change agent, Educator/Teacher, Entrepreneur, Idea generator, Investor, Potential employer

Everywhere he looks, Aaron Dignan sees the same phenomenon. Our most trusted and important institutions – in business, healthcare, government, philanthropy, and beyond – are struggling. They’re confronted with the fact that the scale and bureaucracy that once made them strong are liabilities in an era of constant change. For the past ten years, he has been studying the most responsive and impactful companies of our time. What he’s found is that these pioneer organizations represent a major shift in operational values. He contends that teams everywhere need to upgrade their organizational operating system and adopt a new way of working that prioritizes adaptivity and autonomy over efficiency and control. In 2007, obsessed with the way exponential technologies were growing and shaping our daily lives, he co-founded the internationally recognized digital strategy firm Undercurrent. Based in New York City, the firm served the Fortune 500 for over 8 years. Clients included GE, American Express, PepsiCo, Ford Motor Company, Hyatt, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. While at Undercurrent, he co-founded Responsive.org, a community of practice dedicated to changing the way we work, which now boasts thousands of members and meetups in over 20 countries. His latest venture is The Ready, an organization design and coaching practice based in New York City. The firm focuses on helping companies large and small move away from command-and-control bureaucracy towards news forms of self-organization, dynamic teaming, and empowerment. Clients include GE, Kaplan, Lloyds Banking Group, Microsoft, Citibank, and charity: water. Dignan is an active angel investor and helps build partnerships between the startups and end-ups he advises. He sits/sat on advisory boards for GE, American Express, PepsiCo, and Cooper Hewitt, as well as the board of directors for Smashburger. He is the author of Game Frame: Using Games as a Strategy for Success (Free Press, 2011) and an upcoming book on organization design.

An ever better future.

Company Culture, Complex Adaptive Systems, Complexity, Future of Work, Organization Design, Self Management, Self Organization, Ways of Working

Making breakfast. You name it, I got it. From scratch.