This episode is hosted by Boundaryless Conversation Podcast host Simone Cicero with co-host, Stina Heikkilä.

The following is a semi-automatically generated transcript which has not been thoroughly revised by the podcast host or by the guest. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.

Simone Cicero:
Okay, so we are today the fourth of May. We are approaching our conversation with my co-host Stina.

Stina Heikkila:
Hello everyone.

Simone Cicero:
And today we are here with Joost, hopefully I pronounced it well, from Corporate Rebels. Joost, good morning!

Joost Minnaar:
Good morning, Simone. How are you?

Simone Cicero:
Well, very good. We are still into, as you know, enjoying our last lock-down days. So thankfully our morale is still keeping up, but hopefully in the coming weeks we’re going to be a bit more free. And our listeners know this very well — because they have been listening to our podcast with kids screaming in the background and you know works and something like that — because we are confined at home so we cannot find a good place to record, at least in Italy yet. So they will pardon us for that but let’s move more into the exciting part of this conversation, that is that we are really, really looking forward to having this conversation with you. We have been following the work that you and corporate rebels have been doing the last few years and we really really love the way that approach that you have: you can keep the simple and the complex, you can keep the serious and the fun, and we really think that this is a precious approach to discussing organising. And you know as a starting point — I’m sure we have a lot of ground to cover together but as a starting point — I think since this podcast is focused on essentially understanding what does it mean to organise at scale and in this world in continuous flow? Let’s start maybe from the basics of your understanding of what is organising at scale — or in general — what is organising?

Joost Minnaar:
Yeah, I think that’s a very good first point so we find kind of common ground on what we mean with organising. I think many people have a different understanding — or different like thinking — about what is organising and what do we mean with it? So, some years ago I started a part-time PhD programme here in Amsterdam on large-scale organising and then especially on understanding how large organisations with more than 10,000 people could organise without the need of middle management. But before I could frame that, I needed to first define what is organising. And after much reading and academic work, and much reading of — I think, many, many great scholars that went before us — I arrived at, I would say, three main problems of organising. So I frame it around problems, fundamental problems. So if we look at an organisation, I think it’s maybe interesting to start with like: what is an organisation? I regard — we regard with many other academics — organisations as just a group of people having a shared purpose or wanting to achieve a shared purpose. And so, like two or more individuals — or in academics they will talk about agents: two or more agents — working together, collaborating together to achieve a common purpose or outcome. So then you touch upon a few, like, I think problems that you have to solve to make that organisation, or organising that organisation properly. And I combined the work of some scholars — like Phanish Puranam, but also work of Lorsch and all kinds of other old scholars, I think, I will not mention the names, but people will know, like Birkinshaw — all that kind of management tinker’s. And I arrived at the three main problems of organising, and the first I would say, is the “direction”: so what is the direction of organising, the direction of the organisation? Many people will understand that, I think, more that’s the strategy. So what is the strategy of the organisation, where is the organisation going to? Then the second one — the other two actually — are more internal problems of organising. And I divided that into the problem of horizontally organising and a problem of vertical organising. And then if we look at the one vertically first, that is basically if you have a big strategy if you are going in a certain direction, then many organisations break down that bigger strategy into smaller tasks and those tasks need to be assigned. Or, they can be assigned or people can assign themselves to do those tasks. And that is what I call the vertical organising, which translates in academic work more into the what I call “division of labour”. So, how is the labour divided among different people in the organisation? And once you have individuals performing certain tasks, then there is the problem of coordinating and motivating these individuals among each other. And this I capture in the last fundamental problem of organising which I call the horizontally organising. And in academics you would refer to that particular topic — they will talk about “integration of effort”. So, you’ll end up with three three fundamental problems of organising, the first being strategy, the second being division of labour and the last being the integration of effort. Can you find you find yourself in that definition?

Simone Cicero:
Yes, yes, yes, of course. And my second question will be, as we explore essentially how this process is happening at large scale now — because as we shared before we started this conversation, the interesting thing that we also wanted to explore is that evolution between the organisation and the age of organising — and also we feel like we are transitioning into something that transcends the organisation as we know that and move into a more general scalable organising. So my question is: do you have already some thoughts on what happens when — and what you’re witnessing — when you start to look into how existing players, for example, have been playing with these three directions, these three problems let’s say? And also this idea of doing it at scale, for example, into a global organisation or something like that. I know that you have been talking a little bit about how some natural patterns are helping organisations in doing this. So, maybe you can touch a little bit about that?

Joost Minnaar:
Yeah, I think what is important then is to kind of… I think many of us will recognise that if we talk about strategy, division of labour, integration of effort, we tend to — in large organisations I think at this time — we tend to organise for many years, maybe decades or so in the same way. So, fundamentally I think many organisations still use managers, a hierarchy, dividing organisations in silos, in departments, assigning certain individuals within an organisation without authority to decide about tasks. So I think they order other individuals that are, let’s say, below them to do certain tasks, they motivate them by certain salaries that are set by people higher in the hierarchy with more authority to decide about orders, what is their salary for example. So, I think strategy is still mostly done with top management teams deciding both sides of the firm. The division of labour is very much sided by hierarchy and integration of effort is often guided by like a bureaucracy or by rules and protocols and all set by people with more authority than others in organisation. I think this must be a common vision to many of your listeners and to many of the people in the world nowadays. But this kind of machine metaphor obviously derives from the Industrial Revolution with the explosion of like hierarchical firms and maybe matrix firms and or matrix organisations and satellite organisations. I think many of us are familiar with that. And there’s a few organisations that actually depart from that. I think there’s a few large organisations in the world that try to move away from hierarchy and try to move away from bureaucracy. They acknowledged that those mechanisms might have been very successful, like hundred years ago, and they may still be very successful today in terms of organising, but they also realise that it doesn’t really motivate or engage the individuals that are part of the organisation. So might be good for the well-being of the shareholders of the organisation or the customers of the organisation, but they also realised that that is not very well optimised for the well being of the individuals of that organisations or like employees. And also not necessarily optimised for the communities in which these organisations are part of. So, with our adventure of Corporate Rebels, we have visited many organisations around the world, mostly we are interested in — or we are actually only interested in — visiting organisations that have highly engaged employees. And in these organisations we find that many of them are more I think more inspired by mechanisms stemming from nature, for example, in terms of organising. So they look at how does nature organise itself instead of how does a firm hundred years ago organised itself. And if you look at those organisations, if you look at organising in nature, and if you look into the complexity work of Geoffrey West and other people of the Santa Fe Institute, you will realise that there are there are still some parts of hierarchy and there are still rules, but there are completely different kind of mechanisms and the different different kind of hierarchical relationships between the elements of organising in nature compared to the ones we use in many traditional firms.

So, let me give you a few examples. If we look at the common work we do, for example, on this Chinese firm Haier, we see that they have been transformed very much away from the traditional hierarchy in the last like 15 years. And they have organised like 70,000 or 80,000 people into 4000 little teams — that teams are what they call “micro enterprises” — that have maybe in their teams still like a smaller hierarchy, like they’re still leaders in the team, and they’re still top management in the firm, but it’s completely broken up. So the big hierarchy is broken up into small parts, small building blocks. Just as your body is built up of cells of building blocks and how a plant is built up by building blocks. And we don’t only find Haier, but there was also the dirt characterization bird shark with his like organisational of 15,000 nurses, thousand teams of around 10 people. There is no middle-manager to be found in that organisation. And there’s some other interesting organisations that managed to scale or they managed to organise on a large scale without the need of traditional middle management without the need of traditional bureaucratic rules and procedures and like rules and protocols and that kind of things that many organisations are still using today. Many traditional organisations are still using today.

Stina Heikkila:
Thank you so much. I would love to follow up a bit on… I mean, you you have visited a lot of companies in your research and you had identified in your book, I think eight trends that you have seen resonate with these different.. and when you were talking, I was just thinking about this, you know, moving from a profit as the only purpose towards more sort of value-based and a purpose oriented organisation. So have you seen that these two go together somehow that, you know, is the hierarchical structure itself somehow making it more difficult to work purposefully, from your observations?

Joost Minnaar:
Yeah, like I can only speak about the experience from my own work before I started the Corporate Rebels with like, I would say my own experience with strong hierarchical organisation, because the organisations we visited were mostly not so hierarchical, or almost flat. But I would say I can very much agree with your point that: I think if you are organising very strongly, or with a strong hierarchy, the lower I think you are into, like the lower your position is in the hierarchy, it becomes harder, I think to connect yourself to the purpose of, the larger purpose of organisation, because it’s probably not, you cannot really influence that purpose or you’re not at all, I think, you have no authority to to talk about strategy or even to influence the direction of the firm. But I think it’s not always the case. Because if you look at organisations in healthcare or if you look at organisations in education, I think they have a very strong purpose. And what you see there is that people are actually working like teachers and nurses are working in those hierarchies, where they are getting very frustrated by the boundaries or the limitations these hierarchies bring and the bureaucracy it brings with them. So in Holland we have, for example, the highest burnout rates of all professions are in education and in healthcare. I think that is because the people are very connected to the purpose of their organisation, but they are very frustrated by the hierarchy and, or the limitations the hierarchy and the bureaucracy brings with them. And sadly, those bureaucratic exercises and this introduction of hierarchy has been actually very intense of the last 10 or 20 years. And I don’t think that this is just in Holland. I think this is happening all around, at least the Western world, where we see direction of the market, like, like we see a movement of having health care and education go to a more market regulated environment. And we see the introduction of middle managers to the kind of practices we are used to from large corporations. But I think it’s painfully showing that this doesn’t motivate at all the people that are on the frontline, and the people that are actually having to deliver at its value to the customers or to the patients or to the children that needs to get education. And I think Buurtzorg has a very brilliant example of how you can do a differently. I think Buurtzorg is — I’m pretty sure about that — Buurtzorg is founded based on that frustration with the limitations of hierarchy and bureaucracy in traditional healthcare organisations in Holland. So Buurtzorg’s founder Jos de Blok, was a nurse himself. He moved up the ranks of a traditional healthcare organisation but he experienced day by day the frustration that came with strong hierarchy, strong bureaucracies. So he — one day — he quit his job at a traditional healthcare organisation and he started his own healthcare organisation, with a purpose to bring the best possible care to the patients. And if you your purpose is to bring the best possible care to the patient, then they believe there is no need of hierarchy and there is no need of bureaucracy

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah, very well explained. I think it’s the — I mean I my background is I’ve worked in several different UN organisations — and it definitely resonates that it’s hard to see the purpose, even if from the beginning maybe you joined a certain organisation or a certain profession because your value-driven or purpose, and that’s where the link between the purpose and having a flatter organisation probably becomes very, very key.

Joost Minnaar:
Yeah, I agree on that point, but it’s a different way of organising and it’s not necessarily like an easier way of organising. But to give you a like kind of an example how that is different. So in a traditional healthcare organisation, a nurse in Holland typically would get like her planning would be made by somebody in the planning department and he or she will receive like a different like just the planning that is made by somebody else and on this planning it will say you have like five minutes to treat his patients here, you have 10 minutes or you have one hour to treat that patient there, somewhere else. And as a patient, you will then receive maybe every day a different nurse taking care of you. Because the planning is done by somebody in the planning department that is not at all familiar with the front line, most of the time. In Burrtzorg they say “we just make one team responsible for its own region” and in that region those 10 people only to be nurses and they will treat their clients, but they also need to make their own planning. They also need to recruit their own team members, they also have to fire their own team members, they have to find their own accommodation. They need to be profitable, they need to have a certain productivity rate. So they basically act as a select small and entrepreneurial team within their region. And if they need help, they can ask that from the headquarter. But in essence, they need to run their own little team in their region, which is a completely different way of organising than I think many traditional firms nowadays do. They want to have entrepreneurship in their organisation but they don’t give their people or their individuals, any mechanisms or any stimulation to be entrepreneurial. I think it’s the opposite. You just need to, you just get assigned tasks that you need to do. There will be somebody else telling you if you did that correctly or not.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah.

Simone Cicero:
So I have a fairly long reflection to share. I hope we will make sense No, because I think I want to offer a further step in the conversation we’re having. So when you speak about bureaucracies, I was thinking about Simon Wardley’s work, for example, in describing how organisations evolve and generally how human activities evolve over time. This lense that he offers to look into processes, like a progression between pioneer, settlers and town planners.. So you have a process of gradual bureaucratization in companies that is somehow mirroring a process of progressive industrialization of activities. So as activities become more industrialised and more standardised due to the law of competition, we really need to somehow bureaucratized them, you know, because they become more industrialised. So that’s one pattern for sure that we can somehow use to justify bureaucratization. So, somehow from what you said, I feel like there are some companies that are growing in in more natural ways and so maybe they succeed to avoid to express this pattern of domination that somehow is embedded in this idea of industrialising — to grow an organisation bigger and organise better so we can produce more, and therefore we can consume more for example of the environment. So my question is, for example, if I look into Buurtzorg, which is a fantastic example, and once Jos de Blok at the Drucker forum, I think he said basically “we took bureaucracy and we transformed bureaucracy into software”. So we use a technological artefact instead of an organisational artefact somehow. So my question is: in this transition of, say, towards this new type of organisation, are we missing the point? So, because if I think about Amazon — and Amazon is an excellent example of a company that has transformed bureaucracy into software — they actually arrive at describing the interface between teams as an API, something like that. So my question is: in your experience — where these organisations migrate and embrace different ways of scaling up, more naturally or more entrepreneurially driven — do they also change their cultural and epistemic frame towards the world? And the reason, their purpose let’s say, in the participation in social and economic activity?

Joost Minnaar:
Yes, I think they do. I think they are very much founded from a purpose that they want to bring added value to the customer but also to their own employees and to the community. So they want to be, they want to be to have the best of what is the best for the community. If you look at least on Buurtzorg or some other organisations that are following in their path. But I think I agree with you on the bureaucracy and on the the fact that there were still some kind of coordination needed to… if you remove like hierarchical levels, and if you remove like traditional bureaucratic rules and procedures, you need some something else in place to keep organising, at least in an efficient way. So you need to have something in place not to arrive in chaos. If I correctly understand what you want to talk about, like Jos de Blok saying we are, I would say defeating…

Simone Cicero:
Turning bureaucracy into a software.

Joost Minnaar:
Yeah, and I think that’s a very good point because we have seen.. I think that’s the, let’s say, let’s frame it this way: I think that’s the major enabler — technology, technology platforms — that these organisations can now scale to such sizes. So if we look if we take a step back, or we take a step more abstract, and we look at the work of Geoffrey West, I think he wrote like quite a brilliant book is called “Scale”. And in his book, but also in some academic papers, he shows that: if an organisation, or if an organism grows, it basically follows three fundamental rules. And those rules are, like the first one is that if you have a space, the organism that needs to to grow needs to fill that space completely to reach every part of the space with resources. So, that is the number one rule and I would stick to like a strategy like “what is the space you want to fill?” So that is the purpose like what is the space you want to fill your organisation with? Like what do you want to bring to the world? The second rule, the second rule then is like, if you fill the space, organisms fill the space and — I think you have already seen these pictures from the internet — this kind of a branching kind of fractal fractal structures. If you look at a tree, you see the trees like completely space filling. But if you look at organisms in detail, you see that the end part of all organisms are the same size. So the building blocks that need to fill the space, these building blocks that we touch the space or that are having, like interaction with the borders of the organisation with — what that’s interacting with something else — all those building blocks are the same size. And that’s exactly what you see in Buurtzorg, as well. Like all the teams, the thousand teams that are space-filling in Holland because they need to, they need to take care of patients all around Holland. And you see like all the teams being distributed really quite nicely within Holland and the oldest teams are not bigger than 12 persons, which is a clear rule from the organisation set by top management. So, this is a clear rule, you could argue this is part of bureaucracy. And then to the third rule of organisms, according to West, is basically based on the “principle of least action”. And the principle of least action you can find in almost every physical or chemical equation, or in chemical like principle, or physics principle. If you look at water, it will always try to find a way down the mountain that is the way of least resistance. So, if we look at these organisations — and if we look at Buurtzorg — they are creating IT solutions to coordinate and to let resources flow between the teams with the least amount of resources, or the least amount of resistance. So, resources should be able to arrive at the right place with the least amount of coordination effort, with the least amount of resistance. So, that’s why they introduced a very efficient IT system and they removed, I think, potential resistance elements like managers, bureaucratic rules, secrecy, all kinds of things that we are used to from traditional organisations. They have questions all the time and asked if those rules, or old way of organising or old way of management, if that is actually very beneficial for the teams and if those are beneficial for the customer. And if they are not, then they would rather not use those traditional management ideas and they created, most of the time they create their own ones.

And if we look beyond Buurtzorg or if we look at Haier, but also if we look at a very interesting company in India called Jaipur Rugs, or you look here more in Holland with some other healthcare organisations that have copied the Buurtzorg model, you always see that this IT part is very — this IT part of connecting the different elements, the connecting the different building blocks of the organisation — is crucial. I think it’s crucial, because I think this IT system enables teams to perform the tasks that are normally being, traditionally being performed by middle management, like think about things like coordination between different teams, think about doing performance management, doing things about hiring, firing, seeing how your prediction levels are, think about communicating with other teams, but also communicating with top management. This in Buurtzorg, happens all through the their own self-developed software.

Simone Cicero:
And so, let me highlight a couple of very interesting things that you said. So I was taking notes. But basically, you said that, very interestingly, there are these invariant units no, so somehow it looks like there is a certain inherent structure of a team, that is essentially shaping up the best way to collaborate. So if I think about the 12 people in boots, but I can also think about the famous — or infamous, I would say — two-pizza rule in Amazon. So this idea that you have a certain amount of people that need to be organised to to collaborate at best. So this is some insight that I think our listeners want to ponder, so maybe this is something you need to consider when you think about your organisation and how you think about how we organise, that there is some kind of size that it optimises for human interaction and human collaboration. On the other side, I think one particularly interesting aspect that you brought up is this one of technology and the action of least resistance patterns. So let me try to explain what I mean. So technology, you said the IT technology is crucial to enable teams to execute with the least resistance.

Joost Minnaar:
At scale, at scale, right. So it’s crucial if you want to scale, like to sizes like with Buurtzorg we talk about thousand self managing teams or autonomous teams. If we talk about Haier, we talk about 4000 autonomous teams. So like at the small scale, if we talk about maybe 10 teams or 100 teams, I believe you can do without technology. But at that scale, I think technology, yes, is crucial.

Simone Cicero:
And my reflection was that, for sure, it’s hard to say, you know, it’s a problem if Buurtzorg scales, because it’s recognised as a caring organisation that provides such an important service and so on. But many people have for example raised concerns on large technological providers like Amazon to scale so fast, to conquer so much of the world. You know there is this way of saying “you’re getting Amazoned” in the US, when Amazon somehow lands on a new market, it’s somehow conquers it. So this idea of reducing friction, it’s an idea that has been primary in our all our economic development and social development and social-technical development in the last decades. And also this idea of customer experience, for example, is somehow reflected into this idea of employee experience and entrepreneurial experiences, like Haier for example is promoting: this idea that you can create a new enterprising without frictions, because of all the systems that support this creative activity. But my question is, in your experience: is there any space for reflectivity and somehow to reflect on what the organisation is doing? And where are these spaces coming up? Are these spaces coming up in the periphery of the organisation? Are they coming up in the centre of the organisation? I think — just as a closure of this reflection — when I was at the Drucker Forum, Miriam Meckel did a very good internal reflection, she said: “you know, all this convenience is fine, but when do we put ourself into inconvenience, just because we need to reflect on what we are doing — if it’s the right thing to do for us as employees or as an organisation”.

Joost Minnaar:
I think what I like about our research is that we are looking into organisations where employees seem to be very engaged with the work they are doing. And I think this should be the prime reason why an organisation would organise differently because they want to create a stimulating engaging place for people to work. And what we see in companies like Buurtzorg, but also in Jaipur Rugs, or in Haier is that — or there’s some others like Ner group in Spain, Chobani and I think in in America is also an interesting example — is that that if you organise them this way, if you’re organised without middle management, then you will have teams that I think I’m way more connected with the local community. They’re way more connected with the work they are doing. They’re way more connected with not only the work they are doing it, the added value they bring to the customers, but I think also they’re way more responsible and they’re way more knowledgeable about what is their impact on the world. So now I think if you look into traditional hierarchies and bureaucracies, I think there’s people doing certain activities, well they’re not really aware of what those activities are, what is the impact of those activities to the larger community or to their even their local community? I think we are having a lot of people doing jobs that don’t really know what kind of impact their company has on the world, or where their company is paying tax, for example. I think if we start organising differently, and if we start organising around much more autonomous building blocks, where individuals that are part of those building blocks need to hire their own people, that need to fire their own people, that needs to take care of their local office, for example, that need to take care of their local clients, I think people will be very more connected with the work they’re doing and also, as a result, way more connected to the impact they’re making on their environment. And that impact obviously can be positive, but there’s some cases that are also negative. And I think in traditional organisations, we have lost that connection with the impact you’re making to the customer, or at least the impact you’re making to the customer of your organisation. Like in my previous job, I remember I was doing my work. And I was doing, like, I studied nanotechnology. So I was working for a big German firm and we were trying to, I was working in the R&D department trying to develop flexible displays. But basically, the only purpose of my job was to earn more money for the shareholders and everybody was like, aware of that. You worked for your paycheck, right? You worked for your salary. You didn’t, I didn’t realise what kind of impact that was making the world. Or at least I was not at all aware of what kind of impact I was making on my local community, or the other teams in organisation. We have completely lost that and I think this kind of organisations are more flat organisations, they’ll bring that responsibility back to the front line.

Simone Cicero:
So basically I get your point. I think you also made a very interesting example of this bank — was it a Swedish bank or a Swiss a bank? I don’t remember that.

Joost Minnaar:
Yes, Swedish: Handelsbanken.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah. Can you just quickly remind this to the listeners?

Joost Minnaar:
Yeah, so Handelsbanken I think is a rather interesting bank from, it originates from Sweden. It’s a pretty old bank and they have been in a corporate transformation already in the 70s or 80s. And they still have, I would say, three levels of hierarchy so it’s not comparable to the very flat organisations like Haier and Buurtzorg, which I think has only two levels of hierarchy, like being the teams and the top management. In Handelsbanken, they have like a corporate office in Stockholm, but they have different countries where they are active — mostly in Scandinavia and in the UK, in Holland nowadays — but they structured themselves around “local branches” they are called. So the local banks which are in like cities and towns and those local banks, they are very autonomous. So they’re very small, they are mostly I think 10 people working in the local bank and they have to take care of the local clients, they are very strongly rooted, they’ve strong connections with the local community. So before you open a bank account there, or if you are asking for a loan, you will have to go to the local bank, you’ll speak to your local banker and they will try to understand your local conditions. And in this sense, they are way more responsible, I think, and they are way more aware of who the clients are, and what they are bringing to their clients, or what they can offer to their clients. And in this regard, they are the most, they have been the most safe bank for years. They’re relatively conservative in their banking because they only want to give their local customers the right products. So after a lot of, I would say growth, and a lot of traditional like metrics like profit maximisation, they more want to bring the best experience and the best banking experience to their clients. So I think what is interesting is that — what you mentioned here — is that this kind of organising, with having local teams being very strongly connected to the local community and providing services, doesn’t only work in healthcare or in education, where I think we are mostly used to it. But it can also work indeed in banking. We have seen it in banking, we have seen it in manufacturing environments, we have seen it in Haier, for example, which is like a white goods manufacturing. So you can see it everywhere and it’s kind of a universal way of organising. It’s just completely, we just need a completely different mindset to introduce it.

Simone Cicero:
Yeah, yeah, I was chatting with Stina on a background basically, because it’s exciting to see, for example, — this example, I think is really, really poignant — meaning that normally banks also have these special these kind of banks, I think, have these really strong entanglement with their local communities. And also, it’s about giving money to local initiatives, or initiatives that may generate impacts locally. So that’s really, really interesting. And the question that we would like to explore with you as we enter in this, you know, probably a final part of the conversation more or less is: what are your feelings and your experience in, for example listening to these companies that innovating — so broadly if the fact that you embed again a part of your production process into the local context, so into essentially the community and the landscape — what does it mean in terms of driving new organisational models? Or new organisational artefacts that for example, may end up in generating incentives for local players that are not part of the transition, but I will say partners of transition? How their organisation serves these local constituents? So, in that case, how their organisational model is asked to transform and to change with new governance models, new communication patterns, and new organisational structures that can somehow collect all this potential that is, its existing locally? And putting it in service or in collaboration with organisational purpose. So that’s one important thing. And I think this is really, really important because if I think about, for example, the main difference between Buurtzorg and Amazon that we were debating before, is that Amazon is normally dealing with processes that are deliberately disconnected from the local dimension. So you basically take e-commerce. E-commerce is very fast to to be transformed because it’s very easy to unbundle. You can unbundle that from reality essentially, you can put all the logistics in a big box, where you put all the robots inside and just, you know, stuff gets shipped here and there. You can do everything online. So it’s really detached from the local, while when you speak about Buurtzorg, for example, or this bank, it’s very hard to imagine, you know, care to be disentangled by the local, the community and the landscape. It’s even impossible to imagine banking, you know — especially that kind of banking — to be completely disconnected from the local landscape and the community. So coming back to the question: do you see emerging experiments in creating new organisational models that can engage with these local constituents at a broader extent? Because the question we want to answer, I think, also with this research is to understand how the organisation form, and the corporate form is going to evolve to be re-embedded into a process of like, you know, there, but Deborah [Freize], I don’t remember the surname, but basically, you know, this idea of scaling across instead of scaling up, you know — scaling across through the landscape and through the community. How is this happening in your experience?

Joost Minnaar:
I think it’s still very, like infant, in the infant phase. So we see some experiments happening, I think, around the world. I think it’s growing, I think there are more and more people interested in it. And I think what we can, what we we saw during nowadays the covid crisis is that many people I think realised that maybe we have been a little bit too much reliable on global firms that produce on the other side of the world, for example, very necessary health care products like masks, disinfectant sprays and gels. And we realise now suddenly that we can have big problems if we don’t manage to organise them locally or produce and organise local skill anymore. So hopefully this crisis will bring that local initiative back on the agenda. Instead of having this kind of international mindset that everything needs to be outsourced to the cheapest place to manufacture, I think where I found a lot of inspiration is in the region of Bilbao in the north of Spain, where there was a group of companies called Ner Group. We describe this group also in our book, where there is like a group of around 20 companies working together locally. And if you’re a bit familiar with the situation in Spain, obviously it was a pretty bad financial situation in Spain for the last few years. Probably it’s going to be “not well” in the upcoming year as well. But in Bilbo, they have formed a group of 20 organisations — corporate organisations, manufacturing companies, lawyers, IT companies — that have grouped together and they try to, they have the purpose to keep employment and keep production in the region. And this group of organisations help each other, if like one organisation is in financial trouble the others will help by adopting some of its employees for a while. They have created like a fund — the group of organisations have created a fund for people that, for employees that are in financial needs. They have created their own bank to provide employees with loans, which are favourable, so they don’t need to rely on banks that charge ridiculous interest. So this kind of initiatives we see happening in Bilbao but you also see it in Holland happening more and more. There’s a lot of healthcare organisations following the steps of Buurtzorg here, the way of organising. And I think this is what we need. I think we need the few of those pioneers that show that such a revolution is possible and they show kind of the blueprint of how you can organise differently and that you can actually be very successful with that. And I think only if those pioneers show that there will be others that will follow.

But we are still in the pioneering phase I think, and I think it should be our job to highlight those stories to show this pioneers are there, to show to other people that it can be done — that it can be done very successfully, that it leads to better performance for not only your organisation but that it’s also very, very advantageous for the employees that are part of that organisation, that it’s good for the community, where the organisation is based, that it’s good for the clients of that organisation. And I think only by talking about these organisations and writing about these organisations and by trying to understand how these organisations will function and what kind of practices they have, then other organisations can follow them. But this will need leadership from traditional organisations to go into this direction and it needs maybe some encouragement from governmental institutions or other institutions to go this way. And I think as a local community and as a community we are part of a citizens, I think we should stimulate our governments and we should stimulate like our, not only governments but for example “we” as Europeans, I think should stimulate the European Union to invest in organisations that are good for our community and for the world. And we should not longer support too much the organisations that are only created for optimising the wealth of their shareholders.

Simone Cicero:
And if you peek into a bit of foresight before we move into, you know, a last point that we want to ask you. But if you could quickly peek into foresight — and especially situating yourself in the context we are living now — these rising disruptions and more frequent, let’s say, unpredictability to be factored in our economies. How do you see some of the patterns that you have been witnessing to play out more in the long term?

Joost Minnaar:
I think many organisations will go this way. I think the pioneers we’re speaking about, I think within 10 years many organisations will not anymore half of middle management. They will move into this direction of technology being the platform taking care of the middle management roles. The only question will be like what will be the reason companies are doing that? Will they do it because they believe that’s better for the employees and for the customer? Or will they do it because they believe it’s better for the financial return of the, of the organisation? Because if we compare Buurtzorg to Amazon, I think there is a very big difference in what is the purpose of the larger organisation. So I think only time will tell if this way, this new way of organising will improve also the life of its individuals and customer or that it will be just a new phase in creating a new organisational form that doesn’t need any more a certain group of individuals to manage, but that many people will self-manage themselves in existing authority structures.

Simone Cicero:
Hmm, got it, got it. So that’s probably the elephant in the room, the purpose question. Really, that’s important to consider together with the organisational evolution path. Stina I know that you wanted to close with a final reflection.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah, I just, it really resonated also with the previous conversation that we actually — well today’s is fourth of may and tomorrow we will publish it but when this goes live, we will already have published our episode with Stowe Boyd — and he was saying that, you know, that it’s very important as students of this transition to somehow help to push things in the right direction. So I just wanted also to acknowledge that even what all the work that you do, it’s very helpful I think to many readers, to visualise these kind of artefacts that’s also Simone was getting asked and it’s something that we share this mission, I think, to try to somehow illustrate what what we can observe. And the second thing that maybe is more like a final question is that: if you see in any way — apart from that role — if there are other things that you are doing with corporate rebels that kind of embody the change that you witnessed and that you might want to see accelerated in into the future? Is that clear, what I mean?

Joost Minnaar:
You mean if we practice what we preach?

Stina Heikkila:
I guess you can say that, yeah.

Joost Minnaar:
Yeah, yeah, look we are a relatively small company compared to the large companies we talked about, but in our organisation, yes, we try to take the best practices — or not necessarily the best practices because I don’t really like that word — but we take a lot of inspiration from the companies we have visited. So we all set our own salaries within the company, everybody for himself. We don’t really work with hierarchy. Well, obviously, there’s like a natural hierarchy, but nobody will be able to force somebody else to do something. There is total transparency about everything, about all financials or like performance, all kinds of metrics, there is no secrecy. We try to be supportive leaders. So there’s a lot of elements we take — and we draw inspiration from — and we also try to push so we help a selective group of clients that are really truly interested in this transformation. We try to push them in the right direction. But I think what Simone already mentioned before, it’s not easy to go in this direction — it needs to start small, I think, and it needs to have some stimulation to go in the right direction. So yes, we are, we are trying to practice what we preach. And I think we are doing a fairly good job. And we write about that. So if you’re interested, you can search on a few of our blogs where we share our reflections. That’s just to give you one example. Now obviously, there is this current crisis going on and people might have — people working with us might have — some kind of fear that they will lose their job. So last week, with one colleague of mine, she was working still with a temporary contract and we changed that directly to a fixed contract to make sure she feels safe for the upcoming months. And she doesn’t need to worry about her job. And she doesn’t need to worry about the circumstances of what covid might bring to us as a company.

Stina Heikkila:
Yeah, great.

Simone Cicero:
Just a final point Joost, so where, you know, where is your research going? And where people can find your latest research and connect with you? I think it’s always worth mentioning that.

Joost Minnaar:
Yeah, my research is going, it’s going out into the empirical very much. I was very much in a concept phase before and now much more than going into an empirical phase. So I have to do a lot of interviews and have to do a lot of data collection. So I will spend the coming year, two years gathering those data and then afterwards I will try to publish that on an academic level. But you might know that publishing on the academic level takes a long time. So I still have one piece of mine being in peer review already for a year, I guess. So it’s better if you’re really interested in my thinking, or if people are interested in my more, I would say, popular management thinking ID. Let’s say this way: I try to translate my academic work into shorter pieces for our blog, and everything I learn from my academic work I share on our corporate rebels blog. So now and then I will share our story. So it would be best if you, if the people that are interested in those thoughts, that they followed my work on the corporate rebels. And I will also publish there when I have something real academic journals convinced that my ideas are worth publishing.

Simone Cicero:
And that’s a good note to close the conversation now as to remind that bureaucracy is not just companies, but generally much more widespread in our society then then when we could think about. So Joost, you know, it was great, really. I think we captured a lot of very actionable insights and that we are going to comment in our podcast notes and in the blog post that we will share along with your interview. So really thankful for our conversation and thankful For the work that we are somehow doing together in the context of Haier and beyond. People would be able, for example, to look at the webinar that we ran together on the 29th of April, talking about this amazing company. So really, thanks very much. It was super, super interesting and insightful. And we’re looking forward to read the more of your work. So thanks very much.

Joost Minnaar:
Thanks for having me and thanks Stina and Simone, for this great work you’re doing.

Stina Heikkila:
Thank you very much.

Simone Cicero:
So, for the listeners, let’s catch up soon.