Tell me about your vision.
So my vision is to create organizations where the people in it are able to do
whatever they think is good for business and they're not held back by
outdated management practices, bureaucracy or other forms of red tape.
Okay, so where do you think that vision came from? Where did that originate?
What spark did that give you?
Oh yeah, it definitely came from my own experience when working in larger organizations.
I was trying to be innovative. I was trying to go faster.
I was trying to accelerate outcomes for the business, but I was stuck in meetings.
I was stuck in decision-making processes, stuck in archaic budgeting and planning processes,
and I just wasn't able to get done what I thought was good for the business.
And that's a tragedy because if you've hired capable people to do great stuff,
let them enable them to do what they need to do.
Don't make sure that everything that's blocking them is out of their way.
Understood. So you're a type of organizational coach for companies.
Let's go into depth about that. What exactly, is it the processes or is it the people that
you're organizing or how exactly, and I know every company is different, but across the board,
what are the things that you're kind of helping with the most?
Yeah, so I'm helping predominantly leaders and leadership teams to get their organization
unblocked. So every leader has some kind of outcome or some kind of goal in mind that they
want to achieve. And we also get calls from the leaders that are experiencing hurdles in their
organization and they're unable to get it done. And those hurdles can be in lots of different
domains. So maybe they are struggling with decision-making or maybe it's about people
not taking ownership or maybe it's the meeting culture of the organization or psychological
safety in teams. And for all of these different types of challenges, we have modern work practices
that are based on trust rather than control that foster self-organization and that frankly just
reduces the need for hands-on micromanagement, but still provides the boundaries within results can
emerge. Okay, so it's not so much you doing the organizing but teaching people how to organize
themselves. Yeah, we're teaching leaders new ways to approach all these aspects of work. I mean,
leaders, they grow up in either through organizations that they just learn how other
organizations do it or they get an MBA. But frankly, most of the work practices in larger
organizations are just based on old ideas. They're based on the periods where we were able to just
go slow and we didn't need these long-term. We didn't... Just let me rephrase that for a second.
A lot of the management practices in organizations were invented in a period where we
still had very simple problems and very repeatable processes. While these days, we require ways of
working that are based on complex decision-making on teams, on sensing and responding. And frankly,
a lot of the ways of working organizations are not fully compatible with that. So we're teaching
leaders how to deal with complex problems to get better outcomes. Your personal why for going into
this? What gets you out of bed every day to keep pushing? Yeah, so from a young age, I've been
fascinated by what human systems can do. So if you have a group of people and you figure out a good
way to organize them, to organize ourselves, they're able to achieve outcomes that aren't
possible alone. And I'm always fascinated by what are the principles and the guardrails that we need
to get amazing outcomes with a large group of people. And I'm really energized by the
possibilities there. And I mean it just by basically liberating people from the shackles
of traditional organizations where you see a thousand people working super hard to get
something done and just everything is just moving so slowly. And after having been able to turn that
around for some companies a couple of times, I'm like, okay, yeah, it's really possible to unlock
the next level of performance if you focus on how the organization is constructed. And I'm not
necessarily talking about structure, but I'm talking about roles, principles, behaviors, values,
ways of working that enable that.
you