---
id: "workshop:leading-change-rethinking-leadership-for-institutional-transformation"
type: "InnovateUS workshop"
title: "Reimagining Public Institutions: Rethinking Leadership for Organizational Transformation"
url: "https://innovate-us.org/leading-change-rethinking-leadership-for-institutional-transformation"
date: "2025-03-18"
duration: "90 minutes"
language: "English"
instructors: ["Christian Bason"]
recording: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry_bf4oeVBM"
transcript: "automatic, from the recording"
source: "InnovateUS (innovate-us.org)"
licence: "CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), as stated on innovate-us.org"
---

# Reimagining Public Institutions: Rethinking Leadership for Organizational Transformation

InnovateUS workshop · 18 March 2025 · 90 minutes

Join Christian Bason, Ph.D., Co-founder of Transition Collective, for a 90-minute virtual training on the evolving role of leadership in driving institutional change in the public sector. As governments face increasing complexity, leaders must move beyond traditional management models to foster adaptability, collaboration, and innovation.

This session will explore how public sector leaders can create conditions for meaningful change by shifting mindsets, rethinking structures, and enabling teams to navigate uncertainty. Drawing from real-world examples, Christian will offer insights into new leadership practices that empower organizations to be more responsive, human-centered, and impactful.

## Learning goals

- Lead institutional change with a future-oriented mindset
- Balance structure with flexibility in decision-making
- Foster a culture of trust, learning, and collaboration
- Navigate challenges in transforming bureaucratic systems

## Speakers

- **Christian Bason**, Co-founder, Transition Collective and former Chief Executive, Danish Design Center

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry_bf4oeVBM

## Transcript

Automatic transcript of the recording: names and terms can be misheard, and the times can be a few seconds off. Each time links to that moment of the video. The transcript alone: https://innovate-us.org/leading-change-rethinking-leadership-for-institutional-transformation.txt (plain text) and https://innovate-us.org/leading-change-rethinking-leadership-for-institutional-transformation.json (every segment with its start and end second).

**Christian Bason**

[0:00](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=0) Of my bio, so sorry for that. That was a little long, that text, but really it's a pleasure. And I should say that I love the idea of this organization and these opportunities for training that are designed both by public servants and for public servants. I was for eight years a public servant myself within government and then served government also for nine years as the CEO of the Danish Design Center and it really takes one to know one in the sense of, you know, having worked inside the public sector. I think it's quite critical that when we are conducting trainings and master classes and development that we're not only, you could say, bringing in, let's say, academia or private firms, but we also have material that is coming from the inside. And I'll really look forward to our conversation as well. I am going to, just as a disclaimer, going to ask for some comments in the chat in a moment as well on a particular question I have for you, but apart from that I guess I'll speak for a while and then we have time for, I hope, a quite rich conversation. I will with guarantee provoke you and I'm sure provoke some questions with the story I'm going to tell, but I will spend a bit of time framing the story before we get to that, so that's another cliffhanger. I'll share the screen and let's see if you can see it as well. Let's take a look, sharing the screen, but then we need to go here. All right, do you see the screen okay now? Yep, that's a yes from Jess. All right, so I'll speak about the redesign of organizations, how might we reimagine how we organize in the

[2:01](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=121) public sector and thereby also how we lead and manage at this time. This is actually a picture from my last large organization I was leading, which was the Danish Design Center, and the gentleman standing with a cup in his hand looking quite worried, that was my colleague and a chief operations officer who is now co-founded an advisory company with me, and what I wanted to illustrate with this image was just basically how organizations are all about people, and no matter what we're working with, whether it's digital or AI or it's climate change or it's health services, we have to remember that ultimately organizations are the social technology we have created to solve problems together and to create value together. As soon as more than one person is assembled and trying to achieve something, we have an organization, right? So the big question of course is how do we then design organizations or redesign them in ways that are the best fits for the challenges of our time and for the challenges that a particular organization faces, right? So I'd like to ask you, just to share in the chat, if I asked you what organization do you dream of or you dream of an organization where something is possible, what would that be? What would characterize your dream organization? It might be the one you're in already, that would be amazing, then we should run this the next time and have a talk about that, but what would be different and what would characterize it? So please in the chat, I'll just jump to so I can see it, but what would you say?

[3:56](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=236) Please go ahead.

**Audience**

[4:02](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=242) I'm glad to see your Danish slides, by the way.

**Christian Bason**

[4:07](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=247) Oh yeah, sorry.

**Audience**

[4:10](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=250) Just so you're aware.

**Christian Bason**

[4:11](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=251) No worries, no worries, nothing secret there.

**Audience**

[4:14](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=254) Kind organization. Value applied externally and internally.

**Christian Bason**

[4:24](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=264) Employees cherish and prioritize the experience of the folks they're trying to serve, right? That's very nice. Transparency. Meaningful purpose and mission. Engaged management workforce. Everybody in it for the collective goal. Peer learning and sharing. Collaborate across silos. Very little hierarchy. Hopefulness, innovation, collaboration. Wonderful. These are all really, really, really wonderful. Flexible. Human-centered. Help others to solve problems. Well, that's a lot of amazing dreams and wishes and desires, and I'm assuming that many of your organizations are probably living up to some of these elements, but probably also not all of them. And so, what I think we just have to remember sometimes is that if you'd ask anyone within your own organization to answer this question, you'd probably have a lot of similar words and statements. And in my mind, one of the big questions around the redesign of organizations is how do we create an environment where we can continuously work to become even better and to strive for some of those wonderful characteristics you just mentioned? Because the types of challenges we're facing are, of course, huge, and now this is just one illustration from a climate protest, but it could have been many other types of demonstrations, types of wishes and desires among our citizens. It could be other types of challenges, whether they're organizational or they're societal. But there are plenty to go around, and it feels like those changes are getting more radical, they are accelerating, they are becoming more complex. I also would say that we have a challenge of not just addressing symptoms of the challenges our societies are facing, but the root causes or the systemic underlying features that are leading to all types of problems and challenges. And systems change and systems innovation is clearly, in my mind, for sure

[6:27](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=387) something we need to work really hard at in many of our organizations. So the question, of course, is what does it take to work on complex issues? And one way of seeing complex challenges is the UN Global Goals. I'm sure you're aware of them. It turns out, by the way, that it's not going too well with the Global Goals, especially not the last five years or so since the pandemic. So the planet is basically backsliding on many of these targets we've set for ourselves as humanity to achieve by 2030. And you wonder, why are they backsliding? Or why is it going the wrong way? Or why is it perhaps backsliding in our own countries at a more local level? And I would say that there is one of these goals. It's almost like the Lord of the Rings. There's one of these goals which is kind of the goal to rule them all. And coming from where I'm coming, from my perspective, that goal is number 17. Partnerships for the goals. The ability to collaborate and work together in partnership of all kinds, at all levels, from international level to local level.

[7:39](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=459) But that's almost a secret goal, right? It's not one that many speak about. And actually, nobody really knows what's inside that goal. What is it about? I've actually taken a bit of time to dive into it and look at the metrics and which organizations are responsible for goal number 17 and so on. It turns out it's a bit of a mess. It's a bit of a mix of all kinds of organizations, some UN and some related agencies. And it's not very clear what it's really about. And then you wonder, why is it that we're not able to address all the other 16 if we can't even figure out a good way to reach, to collaborate? And I'm using this just as a little bit of a proxy to start the conversation on collaboration, but to say that there is somehow a challenge there. There's a challenge in having more institutional imagination. A challenge for us to take a step back and maybe be more critical of the organizations and in a wider sense, the institutions we've built to serve the public. And many of them were designed in the 20th century, if not the 19th century. And many of them were definitely not designed in the digital age, not designed in a quite globalized age or the age of the internet, weren't designed necessarily at an age of climate change or at an age where we were more than 8 billion people on the planet and so forth. So maybe we need to stimulate our imagination and creativity a little bit more when it comes to institutional and organizational designs. A couple of people who've actually taken a look at this are David Graeber and David Wengro in their quite amazing book, also a long book from 2021 called The Dawn of Everything. And by the way, that's a quite ambitious title, The Dawn of Everything, right? But it's a great read, written by an anthropologist and an archaeologist in partnership. And going through tens of thousands of history, of human history,

[9:41](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=581) they actually discover that our history as human beings is not like one long linear development from being hunter-gatherers to farmers, to city dwellers, to nation-state livers, to now a more or less global community. And by the way, where we've gone increasingly unequal along the way, they discover that humans have organized creatively in quite different ways along the way and have shifted between modes of organization as they wanted to. So, for example, you could have people living in cities six, seven thousand years ago who decide to part of the year live as hunter-gatherers instead, or people living on farmland but then, according to the season, shifting to hunting for part of the season. You could have people who simply choose to live in rural settings, even though everybody else is moving to the cities, and so on. So we are, as humanity, conscious political actors, and we are capable of embracing a wide range of social arrangements. There's no predetermined destination for us to arrive at, and that's a little bit refreshing when we live in a world where it's hard to see, perhaps, that things could be different. Throughout my career, I've also written quite a few books, all of which, some of them, as you can see, are in Danish, some are in English, but have been about, you know, innovation in the public sector and hope for governments to be more creative in how we both design policies and public services, how we digitize. And in my mind, there's never been a time, probably, than the present, in terms of the need to be innovative, not just when it comes to services and service provision, but when it comes to, you could say, the design of the public sector itself. And doing so to enable what I would call collective

[11:45](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=705) transition, or the transitioning towards a better society, is perhaps the most urgent challenge we have. So what does it mean to transition towards something that is better, not least at a time when things seem to, in many ways, to be moving the opposite direction? And when I say collective, it's because we need everybody on board, whether that's a question of all groups of our populations, whether it's public and private or civic, different levels of government, for that matter, how do we actually find pathways to transition our economies, our systems to better places together? One slightly provoking quote, another quote, is from James Plunkett, he's a political observer and analyst that works, amongst others, with Nesta in the UK. And he says that, or maybe he hopes, that whereas the 20th century policy paradigm was technocratic, efficient, cold, and optimising, and hierarchical, he guesses that in the 21st century, we would be able to describe our public sector arrangements as simple and flat and humble and warm, and even human. And actually, I share that hope. And I'm going to share a story with you today also about that hope. But I would also say that we are navigating times where the efficient, cold, and optimising hierarchical paradigm is also alive and kicking, right? So in a way, we have these two narratives living side by side. And in my experience, also, the first narrative being the most comfortable one, in the sense that it's the one we know best. And it's maybe our knee jerk reaction to move back to that paradigm when we are in being challenged, for example, to go back to the hierarchical and bureaucratic, so to speak, paradigm. And remember, there's nothing wrong, of course, with bureaucracy or hierarchy when it delivers what it needs to deliver in terms of accountability, or in terms of stability, and good governance. But there is something wrong with hierarchy and bureaucracy when it's,

[13:46](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=826) it becomes totally inflexible or inhuman and not able to deliver for citizens and society what it needs to deliver. So I'm not here to do just bureaucracy bashing, but I'm here to say there might be a different way to do organisations. So human government might help, or more human government might for sure help. It can be a dream we have. It was also something that many of you mentioned in the chat before. The question, of course, is what does it look like? And that's where I again think we need to challenge our imagination to have better pictures and also cases of what does more human organisations truly look like? What would be their design principles, what would characterise them? A couple of years ago, I wrote a book on the future of innovation and design. And one of the stories in that book, the book is called Expand, was that a journalist interviews an American designer called Charles Eames. And in this interview, the journalist gets confused because Charles Eames, this is back in the 1970s, he's telling a story about how design is the way we humans shape our world, including services and visuals and graphics and products.

[14:55](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=895) So design in a way is how we humans make our world concrete and tangible. build it? And so the journalist asked, but what are then the boundaries of design? Because it seems like this design thing is everything. And Charles Eames, the designer asks slightly provokingly with a new question, which is, what are the boundaries of problems? I might as well have said innovation instead of design here. But what I want to get at is that when the boundaries of problems change and shift, then the way we innovate needs to shift. The way we collaborate on challenges need to shift. The technologies we use, of course, need to shift. So we argue in this book called Expand that we need to get more thinking to design thinking. You also could say, we need to innovate the way we innovate. We need to shift the innovation paradigm from an industrial society one that is about designing, winning technologies and products, to a 21st century one that is about managing long term societal transitions on a planet that is in crisis and in societies that are in many ways in crisis. So in the book, we argue a number of expansions to stimulate our thinking about innovation. And I will not expand much more in the book today. But I will say that those expansions and the six chapters in the book, they address, for example, proximity, which means how are we closer to citizens? And how do we empathize more creatively with the people we serve? Sectors, which is about how we look at the world is networked rather than a siloed and how do we collaborate much more powerfully across sectors of value? How do we reimagine what is valuable? And how do we build organizations to create not just a financial economic return or value, but how do we build organizations for public and societal value? And so on. So this is just maybe a bit of a teaser on the book. But to say that it's an example of some of the ways in which we can start stimulating our thinking. Now, when it comes to redesigning the organization and unleash this

[16:57](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=1017) human potential for collaboration, let's dive a little bit more into that and what that might, what that might look like. So, as, as just kindly mentioned, I used to run the Danish government innovation team called mind lab, and it was a fully 100% publicly funded units that sat between multiple ministries. So cutting across the silos of central government in the government district in Denmark, working with the ministries of commerce or labor and workforce, ministries of revenue and taxation, ministries of education, and even other levels of government like city governments as well. And when we took this picture, which is taken from the lab, we had this think tank called the mind. And the mind is all whiteboard inside. So you can imagine how you can step into this, this part, and you can be creative by walking into this mind. And you can write on all the walls, and you can put posters on the walls, actually, they would fall down again, because the walls were curved, not great for posters, but, but it looked cool. And for the day of this photo session, we also had one of our interns run out and get a lot of flowers. So we could take this beautiful image of blossoming ideas, right? What I want to get at is that the notion of innovation teams and labs, and I know there are some leaders or colleagues from innovation teams in the call today, is that inherently, government or public sector organisations can't really be that creative. But if we inject a lab or team of creatives into it, it could help. And in a way that is right, that's by bringing in specialists with design thinking skills or anthropological skills or digital or data science skills and so on, then you create a particular resource that can stimulate and facilitate and support and steward innovation across existing organisations. And by the way, the same goes for many large businesses and corporates in the private

[18:58](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=1138) sector, they do the same. And often these labs and teams, they have more freedom, they have better furniture. We certainly did. And we also had a bigger budget per person than our colleagues within the ministries, we had a bigger space, we had better coffee, actually, we had such good coffee that our coffee, our French press coffee makers, they disappeared somehow in the building. And we found them, you know, they were sitting around in the other floors of the building, where civil servants were working on a day to day basis in their respective cubicles. And at one point, we have to buy a new one. So I purchased, you know, five or six, relatively expensive French presses, Danish design. And, and the head of finance of the Ministry of Business and Commerce comes down to me and says, Christian, why on earth did you buy all these new coffee makers? I thought you had plenty already. And I said, Well, apparently, the rest of the building has such bad coffee that they've stolen them. And now they're using them on the other floors. And the head of finance just kind of pulls his hair and goes back. And just struck me, why would we have that kind of double standard?

[20:08](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=1208) Why wouldn't we wait make every workplace in government, a thriving, creative, inspirational place with at least decent coffee. And, and having this kind of dichotomy is seems a bit strange. Also, because most of our work was not about us getting good ideas. It was about underpinning and enabling great civil servants to actually be able to get space and time and bandwidth to develop the ideas that already been thinking of or had late latently, ready to go when we then workshop them and so on. So it got me thinking, and it has gotten me thinking ever since, that could there be a bigger question, not that you create a small team of innovators to sometimes work with, but also sometimes being in a position to the wider system, how might we actually reimagine public institutions more, more widely. And also, because I found that the greatest barrier for innovative work that is run by labs or IT teams, is often the fundamental management culture and organisational structures of the wider organisations that are part of. So if you truly want innovative government, you might want to take a look at the fundamental management model of governance model, organisational structure and processes of the wider organisations. That's really the big game when it comes to creating organisations that can truly collaborate to address difficult problems. Now, what does then the newest thinking on organisations say about the, about where is, you could say, humanity going when it comes to organisational designs? Or when, what do we know about the kind of organisations that fully reflect the kind of challenges of our time? So what do I mean by that? Well, a time of complexity and turbulence, a time that calls for, yes, long term thinking, but also faster decision making, more agility, more sustainability, perhaps even more thriving, more belonging in organisations, attracting, retaining and

[22:10](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=1330) nurturing talent. Maybe a bottom line that really is organisations that unleash the full creative potential of people. And by this, I mean the full creative potential, no matter whether you're working on legislation, working on finances, whether you're working on in on in person service delivery, wherever you are, how can you be the best version of yourself at work? How can you bring the everything you've got as a human to work? And how can you collaborate with other humans in ways that are, that are meaningful, and that are sensible, and that are a good use of everybody's time. A couple of books that address this is Reinventing Organisations from Fredrik Lallue, or Humanocracy from Gary Hamlin-Zanini at Harvard Business School, or New Power, which is another book on shift in power and in organisations and there are many, many others. We did a study at the Danish Design Centre, in fact, on how large complex organisations innovate, this was actually around corporates. And maybe you can recognise what they said, but in this study among very large public or private sector organisations, they said these are the barriers to innovation, lack of collaboration, don't get enough insights about our customers or users, over over relying on technology rather than on on people. We aren't organised in a way that supports innovative thinking. We don't have time. And we don't have the right skills. I'm quite sure we could apply the same and maybe other characteristics and challenges and barriers to public sector organisations as well. So there are all these barriers that are hindering us somehow, from unleashing the potential. And at the same time, we have a lot of opportunity, we have a world of highly educated workforces, almost everywhere you look. We have people, and this is a claim, of course, that we are ready to take responsibility under the right conditions. As I mentioned in this slide, as well, COVID-19 for better and

[24:13](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=1453) for worse, showed us how much we can achieve and how much people are ready to step in, also in the public sector when it comes to providing all the time and resources and work that's necessary and all the creativity that's necessary, when things are really challenging. We have found and I'll get back to this with new ways of organising that are graining ground, that means that there are new models and new approaches out there that are maybe more fit for the 21st century. And of course, we shouldn't diminish that we do have technology, we have AI, we have a lot of tools at our fingertips that could give us opportunities to rethink work will very likely enable us to rethink work. And again, for better and for worse, but leveraging AI to create more value and to be more effective and to collaborate better and to be more creative is certainly where there's, I think, quite a potential. Then there's another side of the coin, almost back to this point about human government, right? Where we might even consider that the starting point for organisational design or reimagining how public organisations function could be to start with our view of human nature. Another great read, Humankind by Rutger Bregman, who's a Dutch historian, who basically is bold enough to argue that on balance, probably humans are more kind than evil. And if we, at a fundamental level, believe this, or choose to believe it, that deep down people are good, that has profound implications for how we would build our organisations. It has profound implications for what you might call human resource management, profound implications for leadership. And I'll, again, share a story about how to do that. This book I mentioned before, Reinventing Organisations, has a bit of a linear story of history, right?

[26:12](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=1572) So this is a thinking, and it's been quite influential, Reinventing Organisations, proposing TEAL as the epitome of organisational design, and proposing that command authority, division of labour, power via chaos, the red organisations in the bottom of this model, is where we all started. And fortunately, government came around and saved us with hierarchy, stability and control. Then we got large corporations with a number of, you know, characteristics around innovation, accountability, we even had meritocracy, which is also, of course, a trade off of bureaucracy. And then we had the value based organisation with focus on shared values, customer delight, stakeholder balance, organisational culture. And then so far, the next phase in organisational evolution, are, you know, TEAL organisations characterised by wholeness, self-management, evolutionary purpose, flat distributed decision making, and so on. And when I ventured into redesigning a concrete organisation, this book actually became a very powerful reference, in spite of also having some limitations, including the notion that this is just one historical, forward-moving, linear process, and we will get there someday. As David Graeber and David Wengro argue in their book, The Dawn of Everything, we humans can make a choice to go back to where we came from. We can also make choices to leapfrog towards something quite different if we want to. So we have that capability. So this model should probably be taken more as a set of heuristics or set of ways we could work, rather than necessarily a progression we can be sure of.

[28:07](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=1687) Old power versus new power, this kind of says everything, right? How do we organise and how do we distribute financial value? Some of the case examples that are prevalent when it comes to reimagining institutions, both in private and public sectors are some of these. I would say that apart from Bortsak, which is a Dutch organisation with about 15,000 nurses organised in self-managing teams, and the Job and Activity Centre at the top, which is a Danish social service organisation, actually not far from where I live, the other organisations are private. And so when you look at the case examples we have to look at globally, maybe also because of the literature's characteristic, most of the ones we hear about are from the private sector. I should have mentioned, of course, United States Special Operations Command, that's quite public as well, right? That's based on the Team of Teams book by Stanley McChrystal and the story around a team-based organisation of special operations amongst other military organisations. And again, these times, I suppose military is kind of back in vogue in different ways, unfortunately. But that's the case. And there are, of course, some learnings from military organisation as well, just like a lot of public sector organisations were originally inspired by how military was organised. Just look at the titles we have in most organisations, public and private. But there's limits to how much you can learn from these cases, I would say, but they're worth, of course, taking a look at and taking some inspiration from. I think a more interesting place to start really is this question about what do we believe about people?

[29:46](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=1786) What is the image we have of humankind? And what is the image we have of the capacity of people to be powers for good, especially when working together? Now, in our history, we've had quite a lot of stories around how people are not good when they are set free to work together. Some of you might recognize this image. This is from a very famous film based on an even more famous book, Lord of the Flies, by William Golding. This book, Lord of the Flies, won the Nobel. He won the Nobel, the author, for the book in, I think, 1950s. The film came out, and basically it's a story, for those of you who didn't read it in school, I don't know if it's still reading material. But in the Lord of the Flies, a group of young boys crash with an airplane on a remote island where nobody's there, so no adult supervision.

[30:48](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=1848) And when those boys self-organize on this remote island, ultimately they go savage, and very bad things happen. And the story by William Golding is basically the story of how we humans, when left to our own devices, stripped of civilization, stripped of control, stripped of management, stripped of somebody over us, we degenerate, and life becomes quite nasty, brutish, and short, right? The question, of course, is whether that is true, and whether that image of human nature is really true, and whether it is a good idea to base how we organize and create organizations around that is a good idea. Not least because there's actually a true story, now the other one was fiction, right? The Nobel was for fiction, Lord of the Flies is fiction. The true story of, one true story, of what happens when young people, boys, get stranded on a remote island is from these Tongan refugees, or castaways, which you have here, which is basically a story from the 1960s, where a group of young Tongan boys shipwrecked on a remote island in the Pacific, and ended up spending 15 months on their own, six boys.

[32:02](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=1922) Here are some of them. And actually, ultimately, they not only survived, and took care of each other, and one of them broke his leg, they fixed the leg, they actually came back with an even stronger bond than when they left. And the story about these Tongan castaways has been heavily documented also recently because it's a case study in the Bregman book on humankind. You don't have to necessarily take a full stance right now, but I am probably trying to give you these two images, right, of humans as ultimately bad and violent when we strip civilization away, and we strip top management away, and humans as capable, fully capable of self-organizing under the right conditions. And of course, the question becomes, how do we create the right conditions? So let me now get to the case example of how might you then redesign an organization in practice? What could be ways of going quite far?

[33:03](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=1983) And before I start, I would just say, this experiment was conducted under particular conditions. So I'm not recommending you do exactly the same, but I am hoping you will be inspired by the example. So at the Danish Design Center, which was based in this building, still is based in this building, I led it for nine years. After about five years of being the CEO in this institution, which has about 45, 50 employees, so quite small, and remember that we see examples globally of self-managing organizations at a much, much larger scale. We were at quite small scale, and we were also, I would say, relatively traditionally organized as a starting point. So we were organized in departments or divisions, we did project work, we had a hierarchy. I was CEO, we had a COO, we had a head of finance, and so on. So relatively traditional, and mostly publicly funded or funded by private philanthropy. So not really a market-based organization, but one that's publicly funded, and also an organization that's audited by the national auditors in Denmark.

[34:09](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=2049) So following, you could say, public sector rules and regulations as an institution. We were developing a new strategy, which were actually, it's called Design for Sustainable Growth. This is the Danish version, Design for Beerdigde Vægt, Design for Sustainable Growth. We wanted to work on big, complex challenges and show the innovation power of designers and design thinking and design capacities. And we said, in order to pursue a new strategy to really work on complex societal challenges, partnering with business, partnering with philanthropy, partnering with governments, can we realize that ambitious strategy to really work with the world, with the organization that we have? That was the question our team asked itself in the spring of 2020. And this was the team, right? Great people, skills in political science, skills in design, skills in management, in finance, in business, in technology, wonderful people.

[35:14](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=2114) But they were somehow not able to achieve what we wanted. One person came up to me and said, Christian, we have a hierarchy of six different titles in this small organization. It's as many titles as they have in the European Commission in Brussels. That's too much. We also found that people were working in their teams in silos, not sharing resources, sub-optimizing. One of our teams or divisions had created his own HR policy, including an inbox where he could suggest ideas for improvement, but only for that team, not for the rest of the organization. I can remember, I thought to myself, we've got to shake this up. We have to change things. We can't continue like this. It has to be different. So the answer to the question, can we implement our new strategy, was no. We cannot. We have to reimagine who we are as an organization. So we said the following, and this almost channels some of your dreams from earlier. We want the Danish Design Center to be a liberated organization, a free organization where colleagues have the support and the backing to realize our strategy together.

[36:20](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=2180) They have the framework conditions to be the best versions of themselves. We want to be a healthy organization where people thrive and they grow. And we want to be efficient and innovative, where there's space to work on what creates value and what makes sense. And again, remember that when I came from the Danish innovation team, MindLab, and I thought about why can't we create public institutions that are more like that, then part of my motivation for this experiment or for this organizational change was to say, let's see how far we can go and let's see if our colleagues will go along. And what we created was co-designed with our team. So this was not a top-down change, even though I would say that the specific design of the change ultimately became a management decision to get it started. So I've spoken a lot about human kindness. So what we said was, we asked our colleagues, we asked the entire team, 45, 50 people, what do we believe about people?

[37:23](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=2243) And this is the short version of what we adopted. We believe, you know, that people grow when they are recognized and respected, they grow when they have influence, they want to make a difference, they will take responsibility, they want to help each other, and they can lead and they can follow. And again, a premise here is that leadership is not something you're born with or that's innate, but leadership can be taught, it can be developed, it can be grown, it can be practiced, and is also a premise in this statement that followership, so the ability to work with others and to be led, is a choice we make as humans, and that followership is equally important as leadership. In fact, you can say that without any followers, you don't have any leaders, right? A leader who looks back and nobody follows that person is not a leader. You can be a manager or you can be an administrator for sure, but you cannot be a leader. So we said these assumptions about human nature, that will be our foundation, that will be what drives our strategic and organizational decisions.

[38:33](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=2313) And with that departure, we then said the following about our organization's design or redesign, right, because we were an existing organization. Everyone chooses their own personal leader, everyone, we did this after one year of experimentation, in the beginning it was only the most senior people, but ultimately we said everyone can offer their leadership to others. So in essence, people choose freely who they want as their personal closest leader. But it also means that a leader is not a decision maker over anyone else. It's someone who is your sparring partner, who is your coach, your mentor, your professional partner, somebody whose job is to help you achieve more. It is not somebody who makes decisions over you. We also said that everyone freely chooses their area of work. So basically, and we said in the beginning, you can do this every six months, but then we started to say, well, you can move pretty much freely to move to where it makes sense to contribute.

[39:40](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=2380) We also, of course, had to get rid of fixed departments and teams to build more flexible and more task and project-based teams. We stripped away most of procedure systems and policies and said we don't formulate anything until somebody wants that. And it's not legitimate to be at a central level and design policies or systems or manuals for other people. It has to be the other way around that is driven by the demand and the needs by those who are solving problems closest to our partners. We also said that tasks are defined not by your position, but by a role. And we can have multiple roles in an organization. And then, of course, follows from that, that decisions are not made in the hierarchy, in a power relationship of positioning, but decisions are made in a process of advisory or consultation. I know this sounds really strange, but ultimately we wanted an organization where the best argument wins, where the knowledge wins, where transdisciplinary collaboration wins, and where we can't make change by somebody saying, because I say so.

[40:53](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=2453) So we actually took away mostly, if not entirely, the ability for someone to decide over someone else. And it comes with a pretty wild premise, of course, which is that in any organization, it's full of adults who can make decisions and who are smart and informed and motivated, for sure can be motivated if we collaborate in the right way. So that's what we did. And we did that change in the fall of 2020. And we ran it for three years until my contract ended. And I stepped down about a year and a half ago. And let's take a look at what happened. Well, the first thing that happened was that we launched the new organization at a big seminar. And within a few minutes, everybody was enthusiastic and engaged and thought it was really amazing. And it was also a little bit scary. And then after about half an hour, the first question comes, which is, OK, Christian, if I choose my own leader now, then who do I then negotiate my salary with?

[42:03](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=2523) And we hadn't thought of that at all. I mean, it wasn't a consideration. So we didn't know. And the answer had to be, we don't know, but let's find out together. And that became probably the sentence we said the most the subsequent three years. I or we don't know, but let's find out together, because what we realized was we'd taken away a lot of what we think it means to be an organization. And we didn't put very much in place instead, which meant a lot of things had to be reinvented or rediscovered, which meant we had to become a learning organization and an experimenting organization. And we couldn't make decisions as we used to by a few managers going into a room, closing the door, having a conversation, making a choice, and then opening the door again and telling everybody else about it. There was no longer an option. In fact, within a couple of weeks after our first seminar, the weekly management meeting was canceled because the new leaders who had been chosen didn't think it made any sense to sit there in a closed room and talk about other people, especially since some people in that room were leading people also in the room.

[43:10](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=2590) So the management meeting was basically canceled. Some of the initiatives that came out of this were like a quite big burst of creativity and energy, including quite innovative new projects and partnerships, including a lot of new funding, some joint budget planning processes, so we build our budgets together. We had actually a seminar to build the budget together. Rethinking recruitment, we said we want to recruit humans, not CVs, and we started recruiting people by inviting them to work with us for half a day or a day rather than sit at a table and answering questions about their bio or CV. And we canceled. We decided to do a psychometric tests and various types of analytical testing. We took that away and just said, come and work with us and see what works. In-job interviews were also done at a cafe nearby or in a public space to see how people are like in public. We started working on a four-day work week with five-day salaries. So we tried to reimagine and experimenting our ways to increase productivity that way.

[44:15](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=2655) We decided to build transparent salaries for all so everybody could see each other's pay, including mine, which was something I had to think a little bit about, but I had to be one of the first to share my pay because everybody else did it as well. And we even made redundancies. We even did workforce reduction in a way where it was collaborative and where people volunteered in a shared and collaborative way how to do redundancies when we had to actually just have one person leave and ultimately more people left voluntarily in what ultimately was a really, really positive process. Some of the most difficult processes we have, of course, right, is to make redundancies. So a bit in summary here. Before I end, self-management, what we found was that problems were solved closer to the task. People would address issues with each other rather than accelerate them up through management, because there was no management to accelerate it through anymore. We had certainly higher productivity, not least in our project work. We had more innovative partnerships and ideas and solutions. We were quite resilient during COVID-19, which ran over for the next couple of years.

[45:26](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=2726) We had more collaboration across our divisions. We had an organization that could adapt to new types of challenges and adapt our strategy. And we certainly had more qualified and more legitimate decision-making because everybody was involved in decisions, and decisions were made decentralized by those closest to the problem. We also had quite a handful of challenges, including the issue on how do we set pay to who has my back when things get difficult, which is a classic, because we're used to having a manager above us to take over when we fail or when we can't get to work or when things get too difficult. And the psychological unsafety of not having that scaffolding in place was quite significant for the first many months. How do we make the most critical decisions? Well, ultimately, we found out they have to be made collaboratively as well. How do we make sure everyone thrives, also those that are not extrovert and not very visible in the organization? How do we have speed in very difficult decisions?

[46:27](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=2787) And that was a challenge to have speed sometimes because we wanted to include everyone and to be transparent. And then what are the new leadership roles, including what is my role as CEO when actually things get along, people go along just fine? I could certainly feel that I was becoming less and less important in the organization, which I think actually ultimately is a quite good thing for a CEO. But there were things that still made sense that I helped with now and then, at least until I stepped down. We've written quite a few articles, also some written by the colleagues about the experiments. They're online. I'll share them in the pack afterwards. Of course, you get all the slides afterwards. Some of the articles are more about dilemmas and challenges, some are about the positive side. The most beautiful quote from these different articles and stories is from some colleagues who published an article without me seeing it, by the way. It just came right into the press, into the media, where they said we are now more of an organism than an organization. And we fundamentally believe that this is the right way of organizing and we wouldn't have it any other way. This was about two years after we launched the experiment.

[47:37](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=2857) To me, that was a huge validation that we were doing something right. I might then take this first step towards more collaborative decision-making. Now, I won't spend much time on just ending up on this, but just to say that I don't think that very many organizations could do something as radical as we did. And I'm not advocating that necessarily. I'm advocating that we may learn from it as an experiment, but I'm also advocating that the fundamental learning was actually not the design of the organization itself. It was more the nature of the process of iterative experimentation and learning that we did together with this sentence, I don't know, but let's find out together, rather than top-down managing and saying, I'll find out and then I'll tell you about it. So, we wrote the book about this. This is a student of my colleague and now also co-founder. The book is in Danish, but the introductory chapter we've translated into English. We learned about how everything in organizations, they had to fit together. So, when you want to do a new strategy or make a difference in the world, then you have to think about your people, your structure, your skills, your processes, technology, and a guiding narrative. For us, the guiding narrative was that we believe humans are kind. We learned that getting started, just like you did 45 minutes ago, was to say, what is the organization we dream of? And then the action part of it is to say, what is the one thing we can change that will start us moving in a new direction?

[49:04](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=2944) So, that could be a very small thing, a very small change that demonstrates where we're heading, and then you work iteratively from that, rather than necessarily doing a big bang. We worked with this tool. Again, you get the tool, it's in the slide deck, but working on a change towards this preferred future where we build hypotheses, we do actions, we document, we learn, and then we basically have a bit of a learning machine going that helps us over time continue to work towards that preferred future. That certainly worked well for us. The kinds of questions we ask is like, we want to do this together, this is the barrier, we can make this difference, this is how we're going to test, we'll observe the change, we'll adjust, and then ultimately it will lead to new types of changes. Just by giving one example, we worked recently, my colleague Sune and I, with a hospital where the hospital team of doctors and nurses met every Monday morning for their conference, and they wanted to experiment with setting the organization free in a manageable way, because this is a hospital and things can go quite wrong if you make too many mistakes. But the one change they introduced was to say that the conversation in the morning conference, Monday morning for one hour, was always led by the doctor standing in the circle in the middle of the room, and the nurses not saying anything standing along the walls. So the big change they made was basically to move the nurses into the circle and have a conversation where both nurses and doctors would speak out, and where it turned out the nurses were the ones who had the most valuable information because they knew what was going on with the patients. And this super small change, it equalized the power dynamics between doctors and nurses and started out a series of new changes that in a sense distributed power differently and led to new types of roles and processes in the wider organization, but it started with just that one single hour every Monday morning. When I look back from a leadership and management perspective,

[51:06](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=3066) in order to redesign organizations, we have to be ready to first challenge our assumptions about what an organization is, and in a sense have the courage to start experimenting. We have to navigate the uncertainty and ambiguity, and there was a lot of that at the Danish Design Center when we navigated this change, and be comfortable even though it's uncomfortable, and be in the mess, and be in the questions. When people started asking me who has my back, and I had to say, well, you choose somebody, but it's your choice who has their back, it's not mine, there's no one over you, it's somebody you can talk to, that was kind of challenging. And then Rehearsing the Future is basically about this experimentation, that you as a leader, or as a manager, or as somebody in a role, is taking responsibility for experimentation rather than just talking about things, actually taking responsibility for the action. Because ultimately, and I'm sure you've seen this quote before, but I still very much like it, we cannot doubt that it's a small group of thoughtful committed citizens who change the world, whether that is public servants, or citizens, or anyone else. It's the only thing it ever has. Thank you for listening, I look forward to hearing any reflections, comments, questions about this story I've stopped sharing, and let's go back to here. All right. Awesome,

**Unknown speaker**

[52:26](https://youtu.be/ry_bf4oeVBM?t=3146) thank you so much, Christian. I'm going to stop the recording.

* * *

Original page: https://innovate-us.org/leading-change-rethinking-leadership-for-institutional-transformation · Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), as stated on innovate-us.org