The company that put the entire org chart in a circle
Frederic Laloux spent years cataloguing organizations that had dismantled the management pyramid. What he found was less chaos than anyone expected.
Conventional organizational charts flow downward: authority at the top, execution at the bottom, a hierarchy of permissions and approvals at every level in between. Frederic Laloux spent years visiting companies that had tried something structurally different -- organizations where nobody had a boss in the traditional sense and nobody needed to ask permission for most decisions.
In Reinventing Organizations, published in 2014, Laloux described structures he called Teal: companies where authority was distributed through self-managing teams, where roles were defined by what needed doing rather than job titles, and where conflicts were resolved through peer processes rather than managerial decree.
One case he studied closely was the Dutch nursing organization Buurtzorg, founded in 2006 by Jos de Blok. Buurtzorg's nurses work in small, fully self-managing teams of around twelve people, with no team manager. Each team handles its own scheduling, patient assignments, hiring, and finances. A small central office of fewer than fifty people supports nearly fifteen thousand nurses.
By 2011 -- five years after founding -- Buurtzorg had grown to become the largest home-care organization in the Netherlands, with patient satisfaction and employee satisfaction scores that topped the national health care sector.
The model doesn't work everywhere. Laloux was careful about that. But the existence of companies that run well without conventional hierarchy raises an uncomfortable question: are management layers a structural necessity, or mostly a historical habit that nobody has tested?