How to flatten your organization without creating chaos

Okay. Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. Um actually, perhaps it's afternoon or evening where you are. Um but yeah, we I'll to be honest, we're quite overwhelmed uh with the response that we've had from this webinar. Um it was a very satisfying number before we uh were meeting, and we were at 1,111 people who signed up to join. Um so, thank you so much for that. Um and we've got the next hour together, and we are going to be exploring exactly this question that you can see in front of you, which is how to flatten your organization without creating chaos. Um my name's Emma. I'm going to be hosting this next hour. Um and in a minute, you'll also get to meet co-founders of Corporate Rebels, Joost Minnaar and Pim de Morree. Pim, are you there? Yes, I'm here, too. — Um Pim, we have a little poll to kind of kick things off for this session today. Um can you get that launched for everyone? Yes, here we go. Cool. Um so, one question we were kind of curious to just start things off is have you tried going flat? Um one thing I'll mention here while we're kind of getting these results coming in is that we're not actually married to the term flat. Um even self-management, bossless, radically decentralized organizations. I think all of these words are being thrown around at the moment, but we still actually ourselves haven't even really landed on the term that we're, I don't know, most comfortable with. Each has its kind of pros and cons. So, maybe we'll interchange between these words throughout. Um but yeah, flat, self-managed, autonomous, uh whatever feels right for you there. So, if you just take a moment to answer that. And Pim, Joost, um as I mentioned, both the co-founders here today, uh they are going to be mainly [clears throat] sharing the content of this session. Joost, how's it going? It's fair. It's going very well, Emma. How are you? I'm doing good, thank you. Um do you want to do a little short introduction of yourself? The Yeah, sure. So, uh what you just said, I I'm one of the co-founders of Corporate Rebels together with Pim. So, we started around 10 years ago. Um within the Corporate Rebels, I'm spending most of my time in uh researching and writing most of our content. And of course, I'm part of uh our masterclass later this month or next month. Nice. Thanks, Joost. Um Pim, over to you. Yes. Hi, everyone. My name is Pim de Morree, the other co-founder of Corporate Rebels, and spending my time um also a lot of researching progressive organizations. Um some of the stuff that we'll be talking about today comes out of that research. And I also spend uh quite a bit of my time helping to scale our buy and transform business, which I'll talk about a little bit later. Cool. Thanks. Um so, for some of you here today, maybe you've been joining us and following the journey for a long time. Um it's been 10 years. This is actually the 10th year of Corporate Rebels. Um or maybe you've just seen us through some provocative um social media posts on our LinkedIn. Uh but we are real, we are human. Um and yeah, Pim, maybe for those who don't know Corporate Rebels so much, just a little bit of a quick intro just so people can get to know a little bit about us. Sounds good, but before we do that, let's look at some of the poll results first. Um let me share them. Gives us a bit of an idea of who are in the large audience today. So, answers to the questions, have you tried going flat? Um I guess you can all see the results now as well. So, um quite a few have uh so, 47% um haven't tried. Um yes, said 34%. So, 1/3 of the people here. And 20% saying right in the middle of it now. So, especially for that group, um interesting to explore some of the content of today. But also for those that might have tried it and where it failed or where they haven't tried it yet or but are keen to explore the topic. Um so, um that's what we'll be focusing on today. Um but indeed, first, let me talk a little bit about Corporate Rebels for those of you who are not that familiar with what we do. Not going to go into too much detail. Um most importantly, Corporate Rebels was started uh 10 years ago now because Joost and I were completely frustrated with how our workplaces were organized. Um we were after we graduated working in jobs

where we experienced the trouble and the challenge and the frustration of traditional management. Having a manager telling you what to do, no freedom whatsoever, no entrepreneurship because you just had to follow the rules. So, any creative ideas or innovations were kind of uh pushed aside and said uh they said to us, "Just do your job. Just do the job that you were hired to do. " So, not a lot of fun for us. So, we set out to visit organizations where work is done quite a bit differently. That's how the journey started 10 years ago. Uh but for now, I want to zoom in a little bit, not so much on the past, but more what is our mission and how do we see ourselves, Corporate Rebels, and the bigger movement transforming workplaces for the better. So, to quickly show you what our kind of master plan is behind Corporate Rebels, um here's where you see it. So, the first phase that started in 2016 that I just talked about and that is still currently ongoing was a lot about learning. So, learning how organizations can work in a completely different way. We were trained uh engineers. We hadn't studied for how do you organize um a company or an organization in a proper way. So, we had to learn it from the best. That's why we uh set out to travel to visit all the pioneering workplaces across the globe to try and understand what they do different, codify it as much as possible, and share it with the world to show that there is an alternative to how work is currently organized in 99. 9% of the companies. Um that is still ongoing as we continue to publish newsletters, uh books, um and everything to teach people that there are better ways to organize work. Then, with research and sharing those insights, you're not going to change the world of work. That's why in 2023, we teamed up with a couple of excellent transformation people, founded a company called Kessels, and it's where we now put into practice what we preach at Corporate Rebels. So, we buy, this is the prove it part, we buy traditional companies and then transform them to self-managed or flat or whatever you want to call them organizations to show that it's not just better for people to work like that, but it's also better for businesses, and they actually outperform um in this new setup compared to the traditional management model. So, then we learn what works, we put it into practice in these organizations that we buy and transform. And then the third phase in our plan is to scale that to the world. So, to teach more people how to reinvent work, to make sure that organizations apply it, and to build more transformation capacity in the world. Because more and more organizations, and I'm probably also the people here in this webinar today, are keen to find a better way to work. That's why you're here. But unfortunately, not many people know or have the skill and capability to actually transform organizations into this new paradigm. So, that's our bigger plan, learn from the best, uh prove what works, and then scale it to the world so that the way of working that is still an outlier at the moment becomes the new norm in organizations. So, that's a little bit on uh why we do what we do and why we exist. Um now, let's look at some of the pain points, some of the mistakes that people make when implementing uh self-management or flat organizations. And currently, it's a big hype, right? So, a lot of companies, especially now with the the rapid changes with AI, are thinking about flattening their organizations. Unfortunately, 99. 9% of them are doing this completely wrong. Um and let's talk about some of the things they do wrong before we start talking about some of the solutions that we've seen at these pioneering companies that actually do this very successfully. So, the overarching mistake that organizations make is a very clear misunderstanding and misconception of what self-management actually is. Many people think that if you get rid of your hier- traditional hierarchy, your traditional management model, and you just remove everything that doesn't work, you will create a self-managing organization, and people will just figure out themselves how to organize work. Sounds nice in theory, but it is not that simple. If it would be that simple, many more organizations would be successfully self-managing already. So, the biggest mistake that's being made is that um the goal is removing structure. It's not. The goal of this is to replace the structures that don't work with alternative structures that do work really well for both people and the organizations they are part of. So, don't make this mistake, too. Don't get rid of managers and call yourself a

flat organization. Don't just get rid of top-down decision-making and think that people will start making the right decisions themselves. You need to replace these things that don't work with something that works really well. So, um what are some of the common pitfalls when it comes to this mistake? Well, what we're seeing now a lot is that organizations jump on the bandwagon of removing managers, and but they don't really redistribute the work that managers are usually doing. So, while we, as you've probably seen in our socials, we love to do some manager bashing, uh we don't think the role is needed in many organizations, but that doesn't mean that the work that managers are doing doesn't need to happen in organization. So, yes, you can get rid of managers, but you cannot get rid of the manager role. The coordination that needs to happen, the conflict resolution that normally managers pick up in an organization, the coaching element that managers are expected to pick up in traditional organizations, those are key elements for any organization, and you want to make sure that those elements are in your organization available for people, but instead of just So, instead of just removing um those jobs and thinking that things will just naturally unfold in the right way, you have to replace it with something else to make sure that those roles that managers usually pick up are redistributed within the organization towards the people who can pick it up best or have the best skill or talent for it. Um later on, we'll talk a little bit about how organizations can do this. Then, a second pitfall what that we're seeing in many self-managing organizations is that accountability becomes a vacuum. So, you get rid of the top-down decision-making, managers, you get rid of the functional hierarchy, the departments in your organization, but then, if you don't replace it with proper structure, then what you will often see is that teams, individuals, and even sometimes in the entire organization, people are unaware of who's responsible for what, who takes accountability for which topics, who makes which decisions, and how are those decisions made. And if you just leave it up for people to figure out, if you create this complete uh lack of structure, then people will feel lost, and as a result, you will often see chaos, or you will see informal hierarchy arise. An informal hierarchy mostly with the people who are loudest or have the most experience or who have been the longest around who or who can play political games really nice. All the things you don't want to see in an organization. So, you have to replace it with something. If you don't do that, often you see this huge accountability vacuum in an organization where people just simply don't know who's responsible for what. Probably a feeling that you've all experienced as well, either in a self-management experiment or even in traditional organizations. Um it's vitally important to have this so people don't feel lost. Then, third pitfall that we see all the time, even if you find um the replacement structures for traditional hierarchy and traditional management, there's still a lot more to be done than just replacing the structures. Because in this new system, people are expected to pick up very different kinds of skills and roles. If a manager doesn't solve your conflicts anymore, then you have to do it yourself. If the manager is not responsible anymore for providing feedback to the team, you have to give direct feedback to your colleagues. Um decision-making, taking initiative, all these things that in traditional hierarchies are often placed at certain positions, in self-managing organizations, people are expected to pick them up themselves. So, you need to learn very different skill set than in a traditional hierarchy. Um however, many organizations are skipping this step. They think if we just put in the right structures in place, people will thrive, but that's not the case. We see this also when we buy and transform a company. You can put a different structure in place, but you also need to spend dedicated time um on developing people, giving them the right training on feedback, conflict resolution, initiative taking, decision-making, making sure that people can actually thrive in this new system that you have created. Uh for ourselves, what we see is that we spend around 40 to 80 hours per person over a period of 2 years to train them and help them get accustomed to this new system so they can actually thrive in it. So, summarizing the biggest mistake that many organizations make when trying to go flat or self-managed is removing the traditional management structures, but not replacing them with other structures, and therefore ending

up in a vacuum of accountability and responsibility, people not being aware of who's responsible for what, um managers' roles not being distributed, and also people just not focusing enough time on developing themselves and helping others to develop themselves to be able to thrive in a system like this. So, the answer to traditional management or the antidote to traditional management isn't just less of that structure, it's actually a different type of structure. So, if there's one thing you want to take from this webinar, that's the key thing. Don't just get rid of the traditional hierarchy, replace it with something that works. Later on, we'll look at what are some of the key elements that you need to get right to be able to successfully self-manage as an organization. But for now, Emma, back over to you. Great. Thank you, Pim. Um and we will also have a chance at the end of this session as well to go through some of the questions that are coming up as well in the Q& A. Um there was a mention of an echo. Pim, I'm not sure if we're able to do something with that, but we have seen those comments, so hopefully we can do something. — Um okay, so Joost, are you there? — Yes, I'm here. Nice. So, to maybe just break this up a little bit, I think maybe something that people say very often is it seems very easy, maybe almost quite like utopian this flat self-managed way of working together. Uh what's your experience of this? Is this the case? Um first of all, I think you're right. There is this kind of idea that if you remove, I think what Pim was just talked about, right? If you remove structure, if you remove the things that don't work or that people are frustrated with, that automatically it will work or that automatically people will love it and will love the freedom. Um this idea that there is no boss anymore in the organization. But in practice, from visiting all these places, so we have visited more than 200 uh self-managing companies around the world, I think most of them they say it's not that we don't have a boss, but it's that everybody needs to become a boss. So, right? So, it's actually a more I would argue more different way of working. It requires more from you as a person. You have to take more initiative. You have to honor your commitments. So, you have to put more initiative yourself, but you also have to peer control uh your peers. Uh and this requires quite some not only like technical skills, so you have to learn how to make decisions by consent, for example, or how to deal with conflicts among yourself, but it also needs a degree of unlearning. So, everything that you have learned in the how you're conditioned in hierarchical setting, you will need to unlearn, and that requires quite some personal development uh steps. Like Pim said before, like 40 to 80 hours we train people to unlearn old habits and to relearn new habits. Maybe just to pick up then on something you said, and I think again this can sometimes become a bit of a talking topic. Is it therefore for everyone? Like maybe some people just want to like rock up to work and be told what to do, um and not have to be responsible, and they can kind of brush their hands up at the end off at the end of the day and go home. So, I mean, is this for everyone then? Yeah, it's a very good question. I don't think it is for everyone. I In fact, we when we buy the acquire the companies and transform them, we see quite like maybe 5 to 10% of the people leave. Uh they leave by themselves after a while, so we don't fire them. So, it's also not that we fire middle management. We just our middle managers, right? The person, we just kind of fire the role, but not the people. Um and in reality, the people that are used or that cannot that don't want to invest in that personal development, so the they don't like it, and they and they will leave. But if you would ask, I think um I think the best idea is to ask the organization, like the people, how do you want to like how do you like to work? Would you like to work with a hierarchy or more like self-managing way or flat way? Uh I would argue that most of the people would like to work with more autonomy, with more purpose, with more mastery. So, if you you I would say most people that are autonomous in their private life would also probably thrive in their um in their uh professional life on that

autonomy. I really like what you said there on fire the role and not the people because I think that is perhaps maybe like the misconception we have when maybe even people come across on LinkedIn uh these posts where it's saying like remove managers um but indeed it doesn't mean that we're just going around and firing everyone, right? No, not at all. No, not at all and I think most of the people actually like not to be or most people maybe don't even like to be the manager, right? So, most people also want to add value but we are creating this high hierarchical places where the only career development is basically going up the the manager level. So, we remove that completely and we we give people other means and other career paths to develop themselves and I think that's what people probably want most of them. They want to have that development and the capability to develop themselves, not necessarily having authority over other people. Cool. And we've kind of spoken about it then maybe on like an individual level but what about like I don't know on an industry level um again I think something that we can get and we can see also coming through our social media posts is like yeah, okay, it can work for you but it could never work where we are and in our industry. Um what's your experience with that? I think that's fair enough. It's probably the first reaction of most people that will not work in our industry, it culture in our country. Um that's one of the reasons why we started Corporate Rebels back in the days is to show that it actually can happen everywhere. So, we at that time we made this kind of fair I think it became quite uh maybe famous in this future of work space that we wanted to have a bucket list where we wanted to visit companies. So, we didn't go only to let's say startup uh tech firms in Silicon Valley because most people would probably assume that it would work there or some kind of knowledge firms. What we are what we wanted to know is like how would this work that at scale in a manufacturing company in for example China? Or [snorts] how would it work in uh in health care or in all kind of highly regulated places, right? So, um we have seen that it can work everywhere. Um or most of the places we have seen uh and most of the time I think it's just an excuse for people not to do it but that excuse is probably coming from not knowing how to do it, right? So, if you cannot picture how it could work in your organization but that's easier to come up with an excuse why it would not work. Uh and we went to all these places and I think the most people that run those places they have this idea that okay, maybe we don't know how it works, we have kind of an idea how it can work and let's just try it and let's let's uh break the status quo, go beyond it and see how that would work in our industry. Great. Thank you, Joost. Um Pim, are you back? Yes. Great. Thank you. Um all right, so Pim, we're going to be handing it back over to you. Cool. Yeah, so I saw some people are actually hearing the echo, others not so much. Uh let me try just so our the headset microphone broke down before we started the webinar as you will always see. Um but I will just keep this one a little bit closer um that might solve the issue for some people. So, um I'm going to talk about the things that organizations that we have been visiting for the past 10 years and researching in depth what they're actually putting into place, um what are some of the key elements that they organize well to make sure that this self-management can work for them. An important reminder is that there's not one single solution. Um a huge tech company might require something very different than a small manufacturing plant. Um and what happen what works in uh China in a rural area might not work in uh Stockholm in Sweden for example. So, there is differences and nuances in each of these approaches. But we do very clearly see that these organizations have key elements put in place that they need to replace that traditional management structure that they wanted to get away from. So, let's go through them one by one. I'll simplify them and um to make sure that you really understand okay, what are these key elements and how do they also interact with each other? So, um let's start with the first one um a more obvious one um and it's being named often but we cannot um just stress the importance of this enough. Um — [snorts] — so, the first one is what is very important in all of these organizations

is to have a very clear purpose and guiding principles. So, the pur it's seen as the compass, right? So, if you break up this organization into all these smaller parts and you give them the power and distribute the authority and responsibility to them. It is important that they all move into the right direction and that right direction they can assess themselves based on a very clear purpose and a clear set of principles. If you don't have this in place as an organization, you will struggle anyway whether you're a traditional progressive company but the problem will be bigger for more self-managed or distributed companies because then everybody has the power to make their own decisions and they just start moving into different directions. That's what we often see if there's not a clear purpose and guiding principles, people go off into all different directions and the organization can very quickly get lost um and they it loses its sense of direction and purpose and feeling of why do we exist in the first place and how do we want to achieve our goals and get closer to our purpose. So, a vitally important one to get right. It doesn't always need to be this noble or lofty purpose that you see for example in organizations like Patagonia. But it is very important for people to understand it and also understand how their personal job and their team contributes to the bigger picture and the purpose of the organization. And that they can actually use it in their day-to-day decision-making. So, um don't just make it so you can put it on nice um wallpaper in your meeting rooms but actually use it so people can use or make it in their day-to-day work. Then, the second one is to break up that familiar um hierarchical pyramid that people are well aware of with CEO on top, lots of management layers often divided into functional silos where you have marketing and service and finance and HR and everybody's focused on their part of the bigger picture. Um these organizations break away from that so they get rid of those traditional structures. But it is important to very clearly define what the responsibility for teams is. So, it's important to ask yourself as an organization what makes sense for us in terms of how we split up our teams. So, if you get rid of those bigger structures and you want to create this network of self-managing teams, it's important to figure out how to separate those teams. Are you separating them on um a specific industry? So, one team focuses on a specific industry or feature of your product part of your production line or one team focuses on a specific customer. There's different decisions to be made for different types of organizations or sometimes even within bigger companies different decisions within different um business units. But it's important to think this through properly. The most important thing is that you um design it in such a way that a team in many organizations they stick to this rule of thumb that a team should be about eight to 12 people roughly and that within that team they have a very clear end-to-end responsibility for a certain part of the business. So, one customer that they are fully responsible for and they have all the skills in their team to make the right decisions when it comes to uh servicing that customer. Or when they are making one specific product, make sure that all the people involved um have the skills and the capabilities to bring that product to market. So, that's an important thing to create so that every team in that network is fully responsible for their specific part of the business. And this creates the level of entrepreneurship that you want. So, keep the team small so eight to 12 people but big enough to have um a variety of roles and responsibilities within them. So, these teams can act as mini companies within the larger organization. So, one example of a company where you see this very clearly is Haier. Um it's a Chinese manufacturing company, they make washing machines and refrigerators etc. And they are very well known for splitting up their 80,000 employee organization into more than 4,000 what they call micro-enterprises. So, small companies that are fully responsible for their own part of the business with their own profit and loss account, um their own profit sharing if they are successful. Um so, they really feel that level of entrepreneurship in their smaller team but are also part of a bigger system that they collaborate with to provide products and services to their customers. So, breaking up that familiar pyramid into a network of team structure with very clear responsibility and accountability for each of the teams. Then, the third one, if you zoom into those teams, it is important that people are very

well aware of their responsibilities. Um as we talked about in the first part, one of the pitfalls is that you have this vacuum of accountability and responsibility. You don't want to have that because people will just feel lost and it won't be good for the engagement or the productivity. So, make sure that every team is very much aware of roles and responsibilities. And how do many of the pi- these pioneering companies do that? Is that they get rid of fixed uh job descriptions where one person is hired for one job description and that's all they're responsible for. Um these organizations work with a distributed roles. So, they split all the work that a team needs to do up into multiple roles. Often many more roles than the amount of people in their team. And then people can pick up multiple roles that fit their specific talents. Um so, people can pick up a much wider variety than they would in a traditional job. And therefore, we often use the metaphor of hats, not chairs. So, in a traditional hierarchy, your job is a chair. That's what you're in and that's what you do. But in a self-managed team or self-managed organization, people wear multiple hats, sometimes four or five hats. You put on another hat and people can very clearly see what hat you're wearing and why you have this specific responsibility over a certain role. So, um it's important for organizations to very clearly have this in their teams uh um written down and clarified so that everybody know knows who's aware of what and also they know what their own personal responsibility is to the bigger picture of their team and their organization. Then, um the fourth one, the fourth building block that all of these self-managing organizations need to get right is information sharing. So, how do you make sure that the lights are turned on for everyone? Where in a traditional hierarchy, people are often in the dark. They don't know, for example, the finances of the company. They don't know how their team is performing on certain key metrics. It just gets lost in the complexity. For these organizations, it's vitally important that people are well aware and that they can actually see the results of them as a team and the organization as a whole. So, where in a traditional company only a manager would have a light switch, so they will be able to see what's happening, um the rest of the people will be in the dark. In uh these progressive companies, it's vitally important that everybody can see and that everything is translated to team level so that everybody is well aware. So, to give you some practical examples, these organizations share the profit and loss account with everybody in the organization. They go through the balance sheet together. They teach people how to understand both of those financial documents to make sure that people can start influencing them as well. And then teams can spot uh here we are not performing well. We're making a lot of cost in this area. Is there something we can do to lower that cost um so we can be more successful as a team. So, vitally important to give this to people. Um what we're seeing, for example, in Buurtzorg, one of the more well-known self-managing organizations here in the Netherlands, is an organization of 15,000 people. They have a network of a thousand self-managing teams. The teams are fully responsible for everything themselves, from hiring to firing to onboarding to planning and executing the work. Um and therefore, it's also vitally important that the teams understand how they are doing, whether they are successful or not on a couple of key metrics. So, every team in the organization has a very simple dashboard that shows them how they are performing in terms of their budgets, um patient satisfaction, how their planning is work, so how much of their hours is spent actually uh caring for patients. And it's all compared to those other 999 teams in the network. So, this visibility is vitally important for teams to successfully self-manage because if you don't know the score, it's really hard to play the game. Then, the fifth one is um another key building block is to make sure that the reward distribution is organized properly. So, make sure that the incentives in the organizations are aligned. And this is something that's not happening in many traditional organizations, but is key for self-management to work, um that you have not just transparent financials as I talked about in the previous point, but also that the incentives are clearly aligned. For example, if we buy a company and transform it, one of the key things we do is that we have a 25% profit share for everybody in the organization. Why? Because it aligns incentives. If you give people access to the profit and loss statement and if you show people where costs are being made or where

opportunities are for growing revenue, then they will actually start working towards that, self-organizing towards those goals. And it will also benefit them individually because if the company does well, they do well financially, too. So, it's an important thing to get in line so people are actually all working into the same direction and also benefit from the work that they do. So, if they are doing a great job, people who are actually comprising the entire organization also should be rewarded um in turn for that. Um another thing to get um uh organized well is to figure out how much level of, for example, competition do you want to have? How much individuality do you want in an organization or do you want to focus more on collectivity? So, do you have a collective profit-sharing scheme or do you want to have more innovation and competition, like, for example, at Haier where each team has its own profit share. So, there's different decisions to be made depending on the type of behavior that you want to see in your organization, but the key thing here is to make sure that these um this reward distribution is designed properly so it's actually in line with all the other building blocks in your organization and the type of behavior that you want to see in your company. So, these five things are key to get right in an organization. They're all linked and it's important to make sure that they are also aligned and that if you design one, you also start designing the other um to at least be in line with it. Doesn't mean you all have to start at the same time, but it's key to make sure that all of these things are thought of before you move from a traditional management hierarchy into a self-managing organization. So, um one more thing that is I think very interesting to mention when it comes to these building blocks, um is the transformation approach that we use in the organizations that we buy, has proven itself time and time again. So, it's applied in more than 100 transformations in organizations going through the exact same transformation program and designing these five building blocks very clearly, is that you see very powerful results when these transformations are completed. So, these are the results after 2 years of transformation in more than 100 of these transformations. So, you see the revenue go up on average with 80% profit goes up 200% on average, productivity 40%. And you see the same time the accidents going down tremendously with 86% and absenteeism, so the people calling in sick is also going down dramatically with 32%. So, the benefits of a successful implementation of self-management are huge um when it comes to business numbers, also when it comes to engagement and motivation in the workplace. If you get it right, people will feel more motivated, more passionate. They take more initiative, start showing more entrepreneurship. And people will thrive if you are able to successfully set up an organization like this. Um the flip side is if you don't do it right and if you don't take these five building blocks into account properly, then there's a big chance of your self-management experiment failing. So, keep these five building blocks into account when you start thinking about the replacement structure for the traditional hierarchy. So, um back over to you, Emma. Um just with this quick summary, self-management isn't the absence of structure, it's a better structure based on these five building blocks that I just talked about. — [snorts] — Great. Thank you, Pim. Um Joost. Uh Pim was talking there about these building blocks and all of them being linked. But just to kind of like poke a little bit, um do you have an opinion maybe on which of those you believe is perhaps like the most powerful one? Good question. Maybe most powerful one is the purpose and principles, of course, because that decides kind of how you design all the others, but what gets mostly wrong, to flip a little bit the question, uh is I think the roles and responsibility part, so the part of um designing who's responsible for what, where account- like who's picking up which roles, um how to do that, like how to do this kind of job crafting, right, at scale. That's often going um or if something goes wrong, that might be go wrong quite often and it leads then to this kind of uh vacuum or that leadership vacuum that Pim was talking about before of or people not taking initiative because they don't know exactly who's accountable, who can make decisions about what. Forcing people into consensus thinking so not really wanting

to make a decision and then we just decide or we try to distribute our authority by speaking to other people so we can kind of also distribute our accountabilities. So that's I think one of the powerful powerful building block and also one that from the most recent interviews we did many companies actually frame as really powerful change where when that roles and responsibility part is introduced well that it even works quite well in organizations that are still partly hierarchical. Right? So they really keep that part and they really view that as a as an impactful transformation part. Nice. And okay, we have emphasis then on purpose and principles and roles and responsibilities but then in your opinion are all five of those needed? Yes, it's a system. I've been just said it before. I think it's it's something you need all of them but you don't of course in a very extreme way directly. Right? So you might start with autonomous teams roles and distribution and only change radically the for example the reward structures afterwards. I can imagine and we also do it ourselves opening up salaries having people self define or peers peer define salaries. That's something I think you don't want to start with. So you want to maybe do that in the end of the transformation when people are already used to take on more authority and more responsibility. So it is definitely a system. I think you cannot really pick out one and then hope for the best but it's also not needed to have all this five building blocks directly in a radical shape. Nice. Thank you. And I saw like some of the questions maybe coming in on where to start Yost. Like does this have to be done talking to the top of an organization first? Can this be done bottom up? Like what's your opinion on this? Like where to start in that case? A very annoying answer maybe but that depends. Depends on your situation. Like if you are a small to medium sized company that's for example family owned that's completely different situation than being a large corporate with let's say 100,000 people. So there's multiple starting points. Right? So you can start from the owner and all this like I think there's multiple starting points and all these starting points have their benefits and their difficulties or their challenges. Right? We can start from the owner of course you have a lot of authority and you can push it through but it might lose the rest of the organization. You have you can go in with consultants. You can change that you can change with internal change agents. You can start with a pilot. There's multiple um multiple transformation approaches but of course I believe mostly the one we do ourselves with our business and that's quite a comprehensive but uh that's a little bit too short I think this Q& A session to dive into that but we cover that in our masterclass quite in depth. So if you want to learn that then there's much more to learn. Pim um I don't know what your opinion is on that as well like going into that. How do companies then actually implement this? It's nice that we can sit here and talk about it all today but I think that's like the golden question. Right? Yes. And not an easy one to answer in a couple of minutes but I think so the key thing for now is to show people this framework. Right? So there is this system in place that these organizations use to self manage. However, if you want to actually dive into this and how companies apply it because I mentioned already it's not the same in every type of organization and some questions I picked up from the Q& A section. So for example Sandra asking about how to design a compensation system that works in such an organization. Aline and Vanessa asked about what the career paths and personal development actually look like if you get rid of that traditional hierarchy and usually people just look for career paths and make a promotion up the hierarchy. So very valid questions. Peter asked where to start a transformation in a large organization. So way too much to dive into today but that is why a couple years ago we decided to launch a masterclass to dive very deeply into these topics. Not from a theoretical concept. Yes, we

talk about this framework and we look at what is needed in an organization like this. But much more importantly, we actually look at how companies apply it because as I already mentioned it's done very different in different types of organizations. So when it's in this masterclass let me briefly talk a little bit about it before we dive into a Q& A. In this masterclass we set out to look at the most pioneering companies we could find. So from that 10 years of research we selected a couple of them that represent very different types of organizations in different industry, different sizes and with very different applications of self management. And we went deep into their organizations, created content together with them. So in the 6-week masterclass every week you will zoom into one specific case study of an organization to explore these organizations in depth and we will use the lens of those five building blocks we talked about today to look at each of these organizations and see how they're actually putting these things into practice. So we look at for example how Buurtzorg is using this roles and responsibilities building block in their teams to make sure this self management in the nursing teams works well. We look at for example the reward distribution at higher. So how in a 80,000 employee organization do you actually set up a profit sharing and salary system that fits with the kind of behavior the entrepreneurial behavior that you want to see. So we do it through deep dive case studies. I think one of the most powerful things in the masterclass is that we actually have a live Q& A section every single week with a leader from one of these companies. So either a founder or a person who's worked very lengthy in these organizations on their way of working and all of the questions that people have in this cohort they can ask directly to these people. So it's a really unleveled opportunity to talk directly to these pioneering organizations. And we also zoom into proven transformation playbook that we briefly touched upon so the playbook that we also use when we buy and transform a company. We look at the details of all of the steps in that process and we very clearly lay them out with the challenges, the do's, the don'ts so people can actually understand how to apply this in their small, medium sized or large organization. So going back to that question that Peter asked where do you start? That's being touched upon in the transformation section of the masterclass. So we have something unique for cohort. Emma can pop the link in the chat. We will also share it in a follow-up email right after this webinar. We will also share the recording. We'll also pop in the link there to the masterclass page where you can enroll. And if you enroll now for the next cohort you get some interesting bonuses that are definitely worth exploring. So first of all you get lifetime access to our membership platform. So as part of Corporate Rebels for all the alumni of our masterclass and all the progressive organizations that are part of our network they come together on an online platform where they can raise their challenges ask help, share their successes, their fuck-ups so that others in the network can learn together. So if you enroll in the masterclass now you will get lifetime access to that platform as well. Then secondly, we have a full course library on that platform and a growing amount of case studies. We're now about 20 to 25 case studies and we're publishing new ones on a monthly basis. Deep dives of new pioneering organizations that we visit and meet and learn from. So you get access to that as well and quite excited to announce that here today. As part of the next masterclass we have a specific week going into the topic of AI and self management. So probably all of you get a little bit nauseous of the amount of times they see AI popping up on their LinkedIn timelines. We promise you this is going to be different. We're not just going to talk about any um AI application for work. Other people can do that perfectly well. We're zooming in with uh experts in the field on how to combine AI and self-management. So, where is the opportunity? Where is the challenge? And how can you actually make self-management more powerful with the support of AI? So, there's a lot of changes going to happen in uh the world of work um in how

companies are organized, how they are structured. You can do it poorly by just replacing humans with AI and then figuring out later on that it was a stupid idea to do and then rehiring those people as we're seeing quite a lot in organizations. Um there's also a much more human way of actually making sure that the good things that people can do, so the the human skills are elevated by taking out, for example, the routine tasks with AI. So, we have a completely new week in the 6-week masterclass zooming into that specific topic. And again, with an expert who will do a live Q& A session where you can ask all of your questions, whether you're a beginner or whether you're more experienced, to really dive into this topic and better understand the potential implications of AI and the ways of working of companies. So, those three bonuses are included if you sign up to the masterclass before the next cohort starts. Um and as I mentioned already, it starts on May 26th. 40 spots are available as always. Uh a number of those are already sold, but we go into a cohort of 40 people through this program. If you want to be on there, make sure you sign up. Go to corporaterebels. com/masterclass or wait for that link that will pop up in the follow-up email that you get after this webinar. So, that was a bit of a promotion block. Um now, Emma, going back to you. Yep, as mentioned, uh let's try and get through a couple of the questions. Um there was one coming in from Christina. We've brought in some big examples today um of companies with thousands of employees, um but how do you think it could be applied to uh smaller companies, maybe say like 100 to 200? Like uh is it still possible? It's actually a whole lot easier, um if I can take this question. So, actually the companies that we acquire are not thousands of people. Uh they are anywhere between 40 to 150 people. And for a quick implementation of self-management, it's actually more the kind of uh um easier size. Larger organizations are much more complex to transform and take a longer period of time. Um so, no, in the um we are seeing in our research that it can work in any type of organization and it's actually a lot easier in smaller ones than it is in larger organizations where many more things are linked together and there's just simply much more complexity because of the size of these organizations. So, no, definitely you can do it on a small scale and it's actually easier. Nice, which ties maybe into Bryony's question. Um does it have to be a drastic shift or can this be something a bit more gentle transitioning, kind of maybe maintaining some kind of management structure and over time uh transitioning to entirely flat? What are your thoughts on that? Yes, of course, again and even you can transform only part of the business. There's some businesses that are relatively small, like maybe 1,000 people, and they only have like half of the workforce being um self in a self-managed uh setup. And yes, you can also transform at your own uh at your own pace. So, I I think that doesn't really matter. I think cuz as long as you have your mindset ready for to transform and you have a clear idea of where you want to go, then I think it's all up to you. Um but maybe more important up to the organization to decide how far they want to go and how fast they want to go. So, it's not only leaders, it's I think co-creating with the whole organization the the next new organization, which I think I will warn you that it will never end, right? And like going on this kind of journeys will it doesn't have an end. You will keep uh transforming and you will keep trying to improve uh the organization till like an end state you'll probably never reach. Thanks, Joost. Um which then maybe goes nice into Ria's uh question. Like, what would be leading or lagging indicators that a change towards a flat organization is going in the right direction? So, how would you suggest to measure it based on conversations, but perhaps also like on the work with Inderro um as well? Yeah, the it depends, of course, what's the reason for your specific transformation. Like depends, some organizations do it because they want to be more innovative and entrepreneurial, like higher. Uh other organizations want to create more equality. They just want to distribute power um and believe that it's um in healthier and better if people have a more distributed power in an organization. So, it depends, of course, and just measure what you want to uh achieve. For us, when we buy a company and then transform it, we do it for two reasons. One is to create a better way of working in

terms So, we want to see more motivation, more engagement, uh more equality um in terms of financial equality, but also equality in terms of opportunity between genders, uh but also uh for anybody in the organization that based on their ambition and skill, they can pick up opportunities and not because of for whatever other reason. Um so, that's thing those are things that we very clearly measure to see if we are making progress on a continuous basis on those. But also, the second thing is the uh the business side. So, we also want to see more profitability. We want to see higher revenue. We want to see um more innovation, people coming up with new products and services to develop. So, we're measuring those things as well and keeping a dashboard for the organization and making that fully transparent again is key to making that work and also being honest if it doesn't work out yet and you have to come up with better uh or more changes to make the organization better. That's also perfectly fine, right? You won't get it right the first time. As long as you are open, transparent, and keep developing yourselves, um then you have a good chance of succeeding. Thanks. And like, a really practical question here from Isabel. Like, what is the role of a CEO in a self-managed organization? Very important. I think this is also one of the misconceptions that it's these companies are not completely flat. There is still like uh a top management team and then it's mostly two layers, right? We have a top management team and then uh a layer of autonomous teams or autonomous units that work together. But that top layer has still very um a very important uh function, mostly on guiding the organization, right? On establishing this purpose, these principles to create basically the playing field for the rest of the organization to play into. So, the it's not that this all these teams or the people that work in these teams have all the freedom. They It's not a free-for-all freedom. Uh we can do whatever we want. It's actually freedom within a clear box. And the the role, I would argue, of that top management team is to create that box and to enforce the box um um when things go wrong, right? So, when teams cannot solve it anymore between themselves, problems or whatever, then it's up to Sometimes it's up to the top management team to make that kind of decisions. Thanks, Joost. I'm going to try and squeeze in one more from Nick. Um he enjoyed listening to experiences um and how self-managing organizations respond to external pressures and changes which threaten the business. And how well do they adapt? Um are they are challenging decisions easier or harder, would you say? I think it depends on who you ask. So, um before those decisions relied on just a couple of people, so they might struggle in a traditional hierarchy making such decisions. Um but um now in a more self-managed organization, that responsibility is distributed, so um it it also really depends on the appetite of people of how much responsibility and accountability they feel comfortable taking. So, it doesn't mean that because you share responsibility, everybody has to take up an equal amount. That's not uh realistic either. So, some people take a lot of responsibility for a certain area of the business or a certain role and others might be more in supporting kind of roles where uh they rely very much on other people to take that responsibility. So, um I think on average per person, there's more responsibility, um but if you look at the entire system, um some people take way more than others might take. Um so, I think that's the realistic story of this. Great. Thank you. Um I think that's all we've got time for today. Uh quick question. Pim, will there be access to the recording after? Yes, included in the follow-up email um where we share the link to the masterclass and how to enroll, we'll also include the recording. So, please share it with as many as people as possible who are struggling with the same challenges as well. Great. And also, we had a question from someone who was asking if we can also get access to the slides. Yes, no problem. We'll include those as well. Great. All right. Uh that brings us to the end. I'm quite proud of us, actually, uh for ending exactly on the hour. Um thank you, everyone, for joining us. I hope you enjoyed it. And yes, as Pim mentioned, if you know someone who is also wrestling with these similar challenges, please feel free to share this with them afterwards. That's it. Thank you very much everyone and we hope to see you soon. Thanks. Bye-bye. Bye.