In 2013, Clay Parker Jones was in a meeting that changed how he thought about work. He was at Undercurrent, pitching a mobile-focused strategy to the CMO of a major hospitality company. Midway through the presentation, the CMO opened a thick binder full of decks from other consultants…and pointed to the exact same idea.

Clay was deflated at first, but then a different question started to form. If the idea was sound—multiple smart people kept arriving at the same conclusions—why wasn't it working? "It wasn't the ideas that were the interesting thing," he said. "It was actually the systems that were underpinning all of it that needed to change."

He started calling it "the invisible architecture of work."

That insight became the foundation of his book Hidden Patterns: A Playbook for More Human Workplaces (Simon & Schuster, March 2026)—a practical guide to building more agile organizations through intentional team design, clearer decision-making, and a more honest reckoning with where power actually lives. Clay is now Director of Organizational Design and Development at Airbnb, where he leads a team building the conditions for human creativity and organizational agility. In this episode of the Creative Confidence Podcast, he joins host Mina Seetharaman to explore the hidden patterns shaping how organizations work and how leaders at every level can begin to redesign them.

Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

Article Summary

Patterns (Not Prescriptions) For Organizational Agility

Make Power Explicit—Then Give More of It Away

Speed Up Decisions by Changing the Question You Ask

Treat Every Team and Structure as Temporary by Design

Organize Around Teams, Not Hierarchies

Adjust Your Strategy Weekly, Not Annually

Get Work Into the World Before It Feels Ready

Patterns (Not Prescriptions) For Organizational Agility

Hidden Patterns draws its organizing logic from an unlikely source: A Pattern Language, the 1977 architectural classic by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein. Alexander and his colleagues distilled decades of fieldwork into 253 remixable design principles for the built environment. Each pattern is numbered, described, and arranged so that anyone could apply them regardless of their level of expertise. 

Clay took the same approach to organizational design, building 75 patterns that describe specific workplace problems and practical responses, arranged so they can be mixed, matched, and adapted to any context.

"It felt more like I was writing software than writing a traditional business book," he said, "because it's not like a story that you read from beginning to end, but rather a bunch of things that could be composed into each other."

This episode focuses on six patterns that enable an organization to be more agile and adaptable as conditions change. 

Make Power Explicit—Then Give More of It Away

Most organizations still operate on an assumption inherited from the industrial era, what the business historian Alfred Chandler identified as the split between strategic and operational work. Strategic thinking belongs at the top, and execution happens below. Agile methods get layered on top of this structure, but the underlying power dynamic doesn't change. "Whenever a team is asked to apply Agile or Scrum," Clay said, "they come up against this idea that the power is somewhere else up in the rafters."

Clay calls this pattern Expanded Available Power. Real empowerment, he argues, isn't a declaration. It requires explicitly vesting authority in teams through charters, governance design, and documented decision rights so that the people closest to the work and the customer can actually act on what they know. Without that structural transfer, telling people they're empowered tends to land as: "okay, cool, sounds good, but I recognize that I don't have it."

"When we empower one group, we need to take power away from where it already exists, and give it to those people that need it." – Clay Parker Jones

A useful signal that this hasn't happened: repeated escalation to leadership. "That's an indicator to me that we have not done a good enough job of expanding our available power for more people to make more good decisions on behalf of the organization."

 

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Speed Up Decisions by Changing the Question You Ask

Most organizations default to consensus. Everyone needs to actively support a decision before it moves forward. 

"We have to operate like politicians," he said of how consensus mode shows up in practice. "You get the pre-meeting before the meeting so you can make the decision before the meeting. That eventual meeting becomes just kind of comfortable theater for everybody involved."

The alternative is a pattern Clay calls Consent and Consensus, rooted in sociocratic decision-making, a framework that has its roots in the governance methods used by organizations practicing holacracy and self-management. 

Consent-based decision-making asks a different question: not "do you support this?" but "do you have a reasoned objection?" That shift helps agile organizations move faster while still giving people a genuine voice. "You can get faster by focusing more on, 'I can live with this decision,' versus 'this decision has to be perfect.'"

One thing anyone can try without a formal rollout: write the decision down so everyone can actually see it together, then ask, "will this cause us harm?" Clay calls it a verbal trick that gets people thinking like scientists rather than politicians. It quietly shifts the energy of a meeting and surfaces real risks before they become real problems.

Treat Every Team and Structure as Temporary by Design

Everything in your organization should be thought of as having some kind of expiration date. Clay calls this Dissolvability, and it's as much a mindset as a practice. Organizations that embrace it treat teams, roles, and structures as temporary solutions to current problems, not permanent fixtures to be defended. When a team's mission is complete, it disbands. When a structure stops creating value, it gets reconfigured.

"This is something that's very normal for us in our lives, but very abnormal for us at work,” Clay says. 

Dissolvability also has structural implications for organizational agility. It requires building systems that are modular rather than tightly coupled. Temporary or “dissolvable” teams can be separated or shut down without pulling everything else down with them. That's a fundamentally different way of thinking about technology investment, team design, and the basic architecture of the org. It's also, Clay argues, the foundation that makes every other agility practice possible.

Organize Around Teams, Not Hierarchies

Clay says research suggests that few people ever experience a genuinely high-performing team during their working career. "I want that for more people," Clay says, "and it looks like actually designing our systems to support teams as the fundamental unit of work."

What Clay calls a Network of Teams replaces the traditional hierarchy with autonomous but interconnected units organized around actual value creation—customer journeys, products, or services—with explicit protocols for how they interact. 

Rather than information traveling up through layers and back down again, it flows laterally, directly to where it's needed. Entrepreneurship, in this model, is baked into the team itself. "Entrepreneurship and operations, together in one place, finally,” Clay laughed.

This isn't something you can declare without operational support. Making it real requires clarity on each team's purpose, membership, decision rights, and interfaces with the teams around it. 

"We've traded something that was ambiguous for something that's very, very tangible," Clay said. "It's a team with a charter, with people on it, with a mission, with a product and a service that it's delivering." The good news: the coordination burden that once made large networks of teams impractical is increasingly manageable with modern tooling, making this the right moment to take the pattern seriously.

Adjust Your Strategy Weekly, Not Annually

You wouldn't steer a ship annually. Yet most organizations make big bets once a year (or less) and then hope everything works out. Clay calls this pattern Active Steering, and it draws on several converging bodies of thought: Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework for navigating complexity, Eric Ries's lean startup methodology and its build-measure-learn loop, and Toyota's set-based concurrent engineering, which demonstrated how holding multiple options open longer leads to better final decisions. Roger Martin’s Playing to Win framework also reframes strategy from a once-a-year task to something you iterate regularly.

The core idea: make decisions more frequently, in shorter cycles, based on fresh data. Basically, you pay attention to signals and you adjust. Active steering isn't just a product practice. It has to be built into how the organization plans, budgets, and decides at every level.

Get Work Into the World Before It Feels Ready

The companion to active steering is what Clay calls Iterative Shipping: getting smaller, more frequent pieces of work into the world rather than waiting for something finished. The goal is to generate real feedback from stakeholders, customers, or the market on a regular cadence, so the organization can course-correct continuously rather than at the end of a long development cycle. It's the build-measure-learn loop applied not just to products, but to how teams communicate, decide, and plan.

For teams that worry starting small means thinking small, Clay offers a reframe. Start at the other end: write down the biggest possible change—something so large it would require the entire organization to transform. Then work backward. What would require half that change? What could you try tomorrow with no changes at all?

"Now you've created a path," he said. "You've created a thing you can go do right away and a thing that maps where you're ultimately headed.”

Key Takeaways 

• The systems underneath a strategy matter as much as the strategy itself. If good ideas keep failing, look at the invisible patterns shaping how decisions get made, how power flows, and how teams are structured.

• Empowerment must be structural, not just symbolic. Authority needs to be documented and deliberately transferred, not just declared. 

• Separate consent from consensus. Consent ("I can live with this") allows organizations to move faster while still surfacing real objections. Save full consensus for decisions that genuinely require it.

• Build in dissolvability. Treat teams, roles, and structures as temporary. Organizations that accept impermanence can reconfigure more quickly when conditions change.

• Make teams the fundamental unit of work. Organize around teams with clear purpose, decision rights, and interfaces, not around functions or management layers.

• Steer more often. Short, frequent decision cycles beat long planning horizons in fast-changing environments. Annual planning cycles create annual results.

• Start anywhere. You don't need org-wide authority. Pick one friction point, test one pattern, and build from there.

Keep Learning

IDEO U Course

Designing for Change — Learn how to lead change efforts that actually stick. Build the skills to move organizations forward, navigate resistance, and create momentum that lasts.

Clay’s Book & Website

Hidden Patterns: A Playbook for More Human Workplaces by Clay Parker Jones, available wherever books are sold. Explore Clay’s pattern library, goal index, and more at cpj.fyi 

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About the Speaker

Clay Parker Jones

Director of Organizational Design and Development at Airbnb & author of Hidden Patterns

LinkedIn

Clay has been writing online since flip phones were cool. First about ads, then the web, now the messy art of organizing people to do great work. That curiosity carried him from Undercurrent (guiding brands through the post-digital panic) to co-founding August, an employee-owned OD lab.

He later led transformation at R/GA and Black Glass (Fast Company Most Innovative 2023) before joining Airbnb to build and run its Organizational Design & Development team, where they’re helping understand and spread the best ways a creativity-first company learns, decides, and ships new ideas at scale. He is the author of Hidden Patterns: A Playbook for More Human Workplaces (Simon & Schuster, 2026). 

 

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