Bags: How to Support What’s Working For Your Teams
In my previous newsletter, I said something that hit a nerve with some readers:
“We only know how to manage mandatory best practices.”
I stand by that.
In most companies, anything that isn’t enforced tends to be ignored. Non-mandatory practices don’t get tracked or get shared. They’re invisible to the system. And that’s a huge problem, not just for efficiency, but also for culture, for two reasons:
More and more practices become mandatory even when they shouldn’t
It’s a lost opportunity to foster a strong collaborative culture
This newsletter will explore a solution to this problem, which I call “bags”. The light, flexible, team-owned ways of working that don’t need to be standardized to be useful. I’ll show you how, when managed well, they can take your company’s culture to the next level.
Prescribed Work vs. Actual Work
Imagine you just joined a new company.
Your first few weeks are full of onboarding materials: slide decks, wiki pages, Notion docs. You study them and invest a lot of energy mastering everything because you know how important it is.
After a while, you’re ready to join the battleground and start the actual work.
Suddenly, nothing looks quite like the playbook said it would.
Teams have adapted guidelines and bent rules. There are many small adaptations here and there (for very good reasons, most times!). You realize you will have to re-learn how to do your job. And no one wrote that part down. You’ll pick it up from Slack threads, side comments, or watching someone’s screen over lunch.
French psychoanalyst researcher Christophe Dejours calls this difference the gap between prescribed work (the tasks and procedures officially defined by an organization) and actual work (what people really do to get the job done).
And the truth is that most of the value lives in that gap. Prescribed work gives us structure. But actual work is where adaptation, improvisation, and human judgment live.
This gap shows the importance of subjectivity, ingenuity, and cooperation in the workplace, revealing that successful work depends not just on rules, but on how people navigate and interpret them.
The Bags & Boxes framework helps you navigate this.
Boxes capture the practices that must be shared and enforced. Bags capture everything else, such as the practices that help teams work better without having to follow standard rules. Bags also allow several good practices to coexist and teams to experiment more freely.
Let’s explore bags in more detail.
What is a Bag?
So what exactly is a bag?
Think of it as a container for any good practice that’s too useful to lose, but too local to turn into a rule, mainly because the way it is done can’t negatively impact other teams. Templates, rituals, workflows, tools… all of them can live in a bag. But a bag is not a 10-page document. It’s a lightweight structure meant to raise awareness, not control behavior.
To be efficient, a bag must contain:
A Name : Unique, for obvious reasons.
One or More “Needs” : Needs are short descriptions that explain when a bag can be useful. I like to start needs by “We use this bag when…”
A Short Description : Keep it brief, only a paragraph - that way, teams actually write them and read them. The goal isn’t to explain the whole process, but to let people know it exists and decide if they want to learn more.
A List of Teams Using the Bag : This is the most important part. If a team wants to try the bag, they need to know who’s already using it, so they contact them easily. Talking to those teams is 10x more valuable than reading documentation. Oral explanations are more concrete and create real synergy between teams, keeping the info up to date. Documentation is prescribed work, whereas demos and conversations are actual work.
Optional Extras : Got a link to a dashboard? A PDF? A few workshop photos? Add them here, but only if it takes 30 seconds to do it. This shouldn’t require extra work. Ever.
Where Do the Bags Live?
All these brilliant little ideas and good practices your teams come up with?
If you don’t store them somewhere, they vanish. That’s what the bagshelf is for.
A good bagshelf isn’t a library. It’s a backstage pass to how teams actually work. Here, teams can discover new ways of working without leadership having to validate or approve them. And when a bagshelf is used correctly, it becomes something more than documentation - it becomes your company culture catalyzer.
For centuries, craft workers passed on their knowledge orally. Even in manufacturers, most of the know-how wasn’t in manuals, it was in how the workers actually did the job.
For a moment, we thought this would become the case in factories too, and some companies still believe this. But research shows that this is not true.
Unless a company is built on extreme division of labor, there’s always a layer of real Actual Work sitting on top of the Prescribed one. Local adaptations allowing people to do their job more efficiently. Smart workarounds. Tiny hacks that save hours.
I believe this is where real company culture lives - in spontaneous, formal and informal discussions between teams about their way of working.
Not in onboarding decks or company all-hands, but in Slack threads, retro formats, workarounds, and rituals. In what spreads, what sticks, and what teams quietly pass on to each other.
And that’s what bags are: culture made visible.
Bags don’t force harmonization, they enable curiosity. They let different teams solve the same problem in different ways, then learn from each other (if you make that discovery possible).
That’s what the Bagshelf is for. Not to enforce, but to expose.
And that’s what leadership should be supporting. Because culture doesn’t live in the values painted on your office walks, but on how people actually get things done.
Ok, but if bags aren’t mandatory, why bother?
Because practices don’t need to be mandatory to be meaningful. And just because a practice isn’t enforced, it doesn’t mean it can’t be improved.
If you want to allow space to develop real company culture, you need to take care of your bags. That means:
Giving teams permission to share their bags
Making them proud to do so
Rewarding experimentation, not just compliance
Celebrating improvement, even when it’s local
Managing non-mandatory practices should be just as much of a leadership effort as managing the mandatory ones. Because companies that manage Actual Work move faster, spot better ideas, and build real trust between teams.
That’s the ROI of taking your “optional” practices seriously.
Play with bags. Show them off. Tweak them (or don’t).
Do whatever makes them useful, as long as you respect the only real rule:
A bag must never contradict a box.
But I will tell you more about that in my next newsletter.