About this publication

Autonomy Now exists because of one stubborn conviction: people do their best work when they are trusted to direct it. That sounds obvious written down. Most workplaces are still built as if the opposite were true.

So this is where I think it through in public. I write about workplace autonomy, self-managing teams, asynchronous work, and the slow, unglamorous job of building organizations that run on trust instead of supervision. Some pieces are essays. Some are shorter field notes from watching real teams succeed and fail at this.

The wider conversation about the future of work tends to lurch between breathless hype and easy cynicism. I try to stay in the more useful space between them. That means writing grounded in how teams actually operate, not how they look on a strategy slide, and being willing to say when a popular idea is mostly theater.

Topics I keep returning to include the psychology of self-direction, decentralized decision making, distributed and remote teams, the quiet cost of too many meetings, and the cultural conditions that make real autonomy possible or quietly impossible.

This project has lived at autonomynow.com since 2019, and the writing here is its latest chapter. New pieces land every few weeks. If you want them in your inbox, the email dispatch is the best way to follow along.

AutonomyNow.com is an independent editorial project covering workplace culture and organizational design. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any similarly named company or trade name. For editorial inquiries, use the subscribe form and reply to any dispatch.