Member-only story
Transparency doesn’t work
The following is more or less the speech I gave at the New Work Future Conference on the 15th of June 2017 — some of it is what I planned to say but didn’t. Some of what I did say but didn’t plan to, I have added where I can remember it.
In 2014 we restructured our organization into interdisciplinary, self-organizing teams and started an adventure that we didn’t expect. One of the effects was that we started getting noticed for this outside of our organization. About nine months after the introduction of our so-called “x-teams” an article about our experiences was soon to be published in brand eins [a renowned business magazine in Germany].
At one of our internal events, a member of the team spoke up and said that he thought we should not be going public with “all of this” — we were not finished.
I immediately responded (perhaps a bit dismissively) that we would never be finished. And we won’t be — it is a process that will continue as long as the organization exists. It is like the saying:
In the end, all will be good.
If all is not good, it is not the end yet.
But still, when I am asked to give a speech about our experiences, I find myself wanting to give you the answers. To tell you: this is how it works. To give you a recipe and provide you with all the ingredients…
