WLP156 - Playful Growth at Atlassian

Pilar talks to Dom Price from Atlassian about how to maintain a playful, collaborative mindset in a growing organisation.

visit www.virtualnotdistant.com

Introduction Pilar mentions these other podcast episodes that might be of interest:

https://www.virtualnotdistant.com/podcasts/trello-and-coffee (with Brian Cervino from Trello)

https://www.collaborationsuperpowers.com/evolve-rituals-include-remote-colleagues-2/ (with Dom Price, today’s guest)

The Conversation The role of Work Futurist. His job involves looking at macro-level trends in the workplace to understand the complexity of the future world of work. (Although much of it is guess work...)

How Dom takes the "less hippo, more elephant" approach into his interactions with other companies/organisations.

What Atlassian does and where its employees are based.

From 500 to +2,000 people and the change that this brings.

How Dom’s role emerged and how Atlassian developed its own way of staying agile.

They have now opened up their internal ways of working:

https://www.atlassian.com/team-playbook

“We don’t want to be famous for how big we are, but for how awesome we are.”

How and why the playbook was created and opened up.

“As we scale, we want to feel smaller, not bigger. More creative, not slower.”

As the company has grown, it has become more distributed in many ways. A shared language and way of working has become essential.

Building the awareness in companies of the need to remain adaptable and the dangers of “transformations”.

Preventing hierarchies from emerging as your company grows and how the fear of failure could be driving this.

How you operate has nothing to do with size, it’s all to do with attitude and mindset.

If we have to add something in, what other things can we stop doing?

“Collaboration is about being willing to be wrong.”

“Organisational structure can give you a comfort blanket that’s not real.”

How remote working is evolving at Atlassian and how so many assumptions were challenged after acquiring Trello.

Dom’s article on remote working: https://www.inc.com/dom-price/why-ending-remote-work-in-name-of-collaboration-is-bs.html

@DomPrice on Twitter