The Covid-19 pandemic altered every aspect of daily life (remember bathing jars of tomato sauce in Clorox?), including how teams worked together. Facing head-spinning uncertainty, organizations suddenly had the will to adopt new practices.

Remote work went from impossible to mandatory. Decisions that would have taken quarters got made in days. In a back-against-the-wall moment, organizations proved they could do hard things at speed to survive.

We've had a front-row seat to the surge… and the snapback. Leaders were eager for new ways of working to cut through bureaucratic noise—to make trade-offs clearer and communication sharper, so teams could do their best work without the organization getting in the way. There was excitement! Progress! Then abandonment. Not entirely and not all at once, but enough to give us pause.

Six years later, evolutionary organizations are the exception, not the rule. We experienced the upside of distributed authority and faster decision-making, but new ways of working failed to become the default for how most places operate.

The practices we've made nearly 230 podcast episodes about are still worth doing. You need a dynamic strategy stack to steer the business month over month. You need an operating rhythm to execute. The moves aren't up for debate. But we're seeing the pendulum swing back toward command-and-control ways of leading and operating.

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You'll never catch me saying the ways of working we've taught you are not evergreen, valuable, and impactful. And: I'm now of the mind that they're necessary but insufficient to do anything really important.

— RODNEY EVANS, AT WORK WITH THE READY

We believe your organization's most durable advantage is its ability to investigate, decide, and move together, and work design is the practice that builds that capability. But systems resist, especially amidst chaos. Feelings of anxiety have replaced feelings of abundance, and people's capacity to slow down and think clearly has evaporated. AI is revealing the urgent need for foundational work design while agile coaches and transformation teams go extinct.

How did things break down? And what role did we play in this missed opportunity?

That's what Rodney and Sam dig into in this week's podcast episode. They don't just point outward.

Part of their diagnosis stings, because of self-inflicted wounds. Work got packaged into something companies could buy, but the packaging didn’t always match what the work actually required. Engagements stayed shallow when they needed to go deep. New ways of working got layered on top of old structures instead of replacing them, so when organizations wanted to fight back, they could win.

None of this means the work doesn't matter. The failure belongs to the movement, not the moves.

Now, we’re circling around a version of this work—laser-focused on outcomes, honest about what organizations can absorb, and oriented toward building companies that treat change as fuel rather than threat—that's worth doing more than ever.

Hit play to find out where we've got to go from here.