 Okay. Let's start. Today's talk, the elaborate title, Teal, is the New Orange. I'm not sure how many people know Black is the New Orange TV series. There's a pun on that. But more importantly, this talk is about self-managing organizations. And to me, this is a really exciting opportunity to talk about this. It's also a lot of pressure, not only because I want to please the audience here, but I also feel a lot of pressure that I properly represent or we both properly represent all the leapers at home who really make up Leap and obviously have a big say in what Leap is. So without further ado, let's start. Briefly introducing myself. I'm Lukas. I've been with Leap since its second year. A partner since 2012. I'm still very much a developer at heart, so I'm actually still part of a development team as well. So I'm only part-time in management tasks and part-time developer. Mostly my management task is internal infrastructure as well as internal communications, and actually to some degree also communication to the outside, especially to the open source world. Yes, I hope this often on stage will go good during the presentation. I have a pretty similar history like Lukas regarding Leap. I joined some years ago. I'm also a partner. I also have an operational role. I'm a scrum product owner in one of our Drupal teams. My partner focus area is more regarding business conception than consulting. Alright, so what are we talking about today? Let's maybe set some baselines or some goals for this talk. One of the goals of this talk is to have you walk out of this room thinking that, yes, this is possible. Self-organization is possible. It's achievable. That you also go home with an idea of some of the pros and cons of going to self-organization. And to give you some real-world examples how an organization can morph itself step-by-step to self-organization. And the last but not least, it also that if you try self-organization, you realize that you're not alone. This is not just a single island out there. There are more companies that are doing this. There are people doing research on this. So this is not some esoteric, unreal utopia. What's not the goal of this talk is to make you think that there's a silver bullet to making your organization self-organized. And also, we don't want to give the idea that self-organization is the be all and all for all organizations. There's some really important characteristics about the industry that we are in but probably you are also in that make it possible to do self-organization. So why could this talk be of interest of you? So hopefully we get this right. So the first thing is that we have a sense that, especially within creative industries, there is a search for better organizational structures because people in these organizational structures today feel that their skills and their passions are not really leveraged to the fullest extent. That we also feel that we've already done this. We are going through this since many years, getting closer and closer to what we would define as self-organized. And then finally, we're not an exclusively Drupal company, but Drupal is a very significant part of our business. So most likely, since we have at least that in common, it seems, there's a good chance that we have that in common and therefore what we're going to talk about might be relevant to you. So before we deep dive into this topic, we just give you a short overview of what Leap is. There are many guys that never heard of us. We are nowadays a pretty standard full-service development company. We have our roots deep down in PHP development. That's why development still is a very big part of our revenues. We develop lots of stuff. We have mobile, nice websites, powerful business apps. You might know that. But some more hard facts. We are based in Switzerland. We are there in five locations. The company is owned by the leapers. So lots of leapers within the company have shares. Nobody outside the company has shares. Everybody that wants to leave the company needs to give them back. At the moment, we are 113 of us. There are some apprentice interns in addition to that. The management where we two guys are from, we are six persons. The whole company just has at the moment some sort of one level hierarchy. So it's us six and nobody else that has any managing role. The company exists in 2007. There was a merger between two small companies. Now to give you even more hard facts, that's kind of the history since the merger. So this company started with 17 persons. Looks like a pretty sustainable growth. You will see this table later on in the presentation. So what is our dedication? Since the root, since the very beginning, we are very dedicated to open source and open standards. That's maybe also a reason why we stand here today. You see pretty lots of our people in PHP and open source related conferences. We love agility. Since 2008, we perform 100% of our projects in Scrum. We are very people centric, not just meaning our own people or our we as leaper, but also clients. We give a lot in the relationships. And we really care for the environment socially and ecologically. So the guys that came down here to Barcelona, the guys that took the plane, they was not paid by leap. The guys that took the train, that was paid by leap. So the challenge of our business, you might know them very well since you might are in the same area. We have a super fast growing market. Lots of industries demand for web and mobile services more and more. And we have a super fast changing market. There are new technologies, new industries coming in, new competitors are rising. And for us, it's always a channel, at least in Switzerland, to find good, qualified and motivated lepers. It's also not easy to acquire clients that have a culture that is kind of working with our culture because our culture is a little bit special. And the basic things that's also a challenge is just balance the capacity, the capability and the projects. So, but now let's dive into the topic. So, you know, self-organization is the topic, so we should probably talk about what actually is self-organization. You know, this is, again, as I mentioned before, we are not an island. There's plenty of people that are doing research on this. There's a book by Daniel Pink called Drive. And a very nice video that talks about his main focus points, autonomy, mastery and purpose, Spotify. They've been very open about how they structure their teams, and they have some really nice videos explaining that. And then more importantly, and this is actually where the title comes from, there's a book, Reinventing Organizations from Fredrik Lalu, where he really goes in and researches lots of companies around the world that have already attained self-organization and tries to pinpoint a little bit what makes them tick and work. So, one of the key hypotheses of that book is that, you know, as humanity evolves and reaches new stages of consciousness, that humanity has always also found new, very much more productive organizational models. And he basically comes up with this color mapping of, you know, several stages. So, there's Impulsive Red, which is, you know, he compares to street mafia gangs or whatever. Conformist Amber, which is more like the military is organized that way. Achievement Orange, which is more like what the industrial age brought about. Pluralistic Green, which is what I think LEAP definitely covers right now, which is more modeled around a family. And then there's this evolutionary teal, which is, you know, sort of the ultimate goal at this point at least. So, let me briefly talk a little bit more detail about the last three. So, Achievement Orange, this is something that, you know, is still very much modern. Big multinational companies are organized like this. And one of the key things there is that innovation is one of the drivers for these companies. They have to innovate, but innovation is done in a pyramid structure. So, from top to bottom. And the top, you know, and actually a lot of innovation comes around how the top can better check what the lower levels are doing. So, they spend and invest a lot of time in middle management that just checks whatever people are doing below and making sure that they do. So, like, people are clocking in. People, you know, are most efficient. And if they're not efficient, they get their wrists slapped. So, really much also with the Achievement Orange age, people really started seeing sort of companies like machines. So, they talk about, like, we need to pull that lever or something like that. So, a lot of the analogies that people from the industrial age they created around companies are really much analogies around machines. And so, people in there are also considered machines that need to be told exactly what to do. So, the variables need to be removed. And Pluralistic Green, this is something that, you know, Lalu calls postmodern. We're still very much in a pyramid structure, but it's more like a family. So, in a sense that, you know, your boss is now kind of like a father or mother figure that, you know, wants you to grow up, that wants to empower you. But the relationship never changes. You're never at the same level. So, it's always like something nice that is given to you rather than something that you can just take because you know. And so, the next step is evolutionary teal where really the goal is to be self-managed so that, you know, nothing in terms of structure or hierarchy is stopping you from doing the things that you know are the right way to go about things. So, really, so rather than, you know, this parent-child relationship is really you're all at the same level and you might just have different points that you focus on and different skills and expertise, but you're really at the same height. Another key idea here is that, so evolutionary purpose is that you don't just talk about what is maybe strategically the right thing to do, but more what feels right for you as an organization, that there might be some business opportunity that you intentionally forego because it's not your character. You might be taking the company in a direction that just will not fit with the rest of the people there. So, and maybe, and I think that's actually very important to mention is that there are actually already plenty of organizations that work according to this model. So, you know, there's Birdshark in the Netherlands that actually revolutionized the home health care industry. So they went from being nobody to having 80% of the market within a few years. There are companies like Patagonia that you might know, the clothing company, and so on and so forth. So, again, this is not something that doesn't exist out there. There are really successful companies that are following this model. So, today I would say, and I mentioned this before, I would say that Leap is very much green. So it's not just our color, but I think we also sort of in that model from La Lou we would definitely be green. But actually, I think we're actually very close already to being teal and self-organized. So, maybe some, you know, shallow quick indicators why that could be true. So we have a lot of, internally we have a lot of things that actually were started by employees that just said this makes sense. So, for example, our user experience, you know, group of people, this was jump started by somebody that wasn't in management and they basically went to management and said I want to make it happen, empower me. And, you know, things like native mobile development, this was again something that, you know, an employee started. We're not teal in the sense that they still have to go to management and say I want to do this, empower me. But at least they already feel like they can, there's a good chance to make it happen when they go to management. We, as Tonya mentioned, we have no middle management. In fact, we don't have a CEO, which is sometimes an awkward moment when you go to a customer and they say like, are you serious? Where is your CEO? And we're like, yeah, we don't really have one. There's no head of X or Y. There's no team leads. So there's no structure within the teams. It's all sort of organic. And I think actually maybe one thing that's even more important, all the partners and especially the founders, they're willing to let go. So many of these things have weren't in place in day one. Maybe we thought that we were empowering people from day one. But we have slowly, one by one, have let go. And we found that every time we did this, it actually made us much more agile, much more productive. So, you know, that really has sort of also sort of hints that already shown us that this is the way to go. Yeah, and then just, you know, boring numbers. But, you know, we have a salary ratio of one to three. So the lowest salary that anybody earns at LEAP compared to somebody that is a partner is one to three ratio, which I don't know. It still feels kind of large, but shockingly, this is actually very low number. Yeah, and then effectively, we have 113 leapers plus interns. And as we mentioned, most of the people in management, first off, they don't work full-time. And number two, they're also working operational within teams. So effectively, we have the full-time equivalent of three people in management for 113 people without any minimal management. So you now might wonder, how does this work? And that's also the core of our presentation to give you a little bit insights and our secrets, how we make this happen. We identified, I think it's four or five core topics around that. And the first one evolved when we started it. We kind of learned strategy. It's kind of not our thing. So we have no centralized steering. We have no such thing like five years planning or how do we want to grow or to shrink or whatever. We have no business plans. We have, although, some rough animal budgeting. But if somebody wants to do anything, he has not the job to create a business plan and to prove by numbers that it works. We kind of learned that because earlier on we said, yeah, good management needs to have kind of plan and strategy and stuff. But we learned whenever we did a strategy, it was very hard to achieve the strategy. And it was also kind of the things that came out without the strategy by sight were pretty amazing. Just to give you an example, when we were small and like the 17 people, there was kind of great innovations evolving out of this group. Then we grew and the innovations didn't grow the same level. So we hired an external consultant that, okay, give us an innovation process. We need to have that. And then he made a pretty complex but democratic innovation process. We implemented it, but in fact, no single kind of innovation thing went through this process. Then we reduced that to a smaller process that was easier, but even then there were some innovation initiatives, mostly some bundles for open source frameworks, but also that was not what we called innovation. So then we got rid of it. But you see later how it came back. So, and why is this strategy working out with the strategy less being working out for us? First of all, we do not have to invest some money into some people who define strategies. We learned that it empowers people that are not meant to do strategy. So teams, every leper is completely free to say, I want to go there or I wanted to do this and I think this is the right moment. So we felt a lot of empowerment when we publicly said, okay, let's drop this strategy thing. We like to be agile and having no strategy is kind of super agile because you can adapt within hours, within days to any situation you want. You don't have to care that this is not our strategy. And we learned that it created the thing that it really uses all the skills of us, all the motivation and all the interests because nobody is kind of dedicated to some topic. He can't just live what he wants, what he's motivated to. And obviously you have the freedom to test things and adapt things. We have to admit there are some special conditions that makes this even possible. You remember when I described our business environment, it's very fast changing, very strong growing. So our competitors that may do strategic planning, they don't have a big advantage because you have to adapt your strategy so fast to the environment that we without strategy can live pretty good. And we are also in a business where no big investments are needed. So we don't have to invest in a huge machinery producing X. We just have invested in people, in locations, but these are kind of not comparable costs to some big machine. And what I also mentioned before, we practically have no shareholder. So there is not a big company or a big rich guy that says you have to make this 10%, otherwise whatever. So we really can kind of free-spend the money as we want to. And we also have to admit there are some guidelines. These guidelines are pretty obvious. So whatever a leaper does, he should see that it maximizes the leap for happiness like the happiness of all leapers, not just his own happiness, the happiness of our clients, and he should care about the financial health of his plans. And there is also a thing like the leap manifesto that was written by the founders some years ago. He describes that we are agile, that we care for the environment and for the people. And this hangs in every office, but I'm not sure that every leaper really knows what's in there. So, yeah, to be honest. So I was talking about this empowerment and this is another core of how we work. We learned that we have to empower the teams and we want to share with you how we did that over the past years. We have three things that our teams achieve today which we think is pretty the core of it. Our teams are fixed, they are cross-functional, and they are self-organized. To give you a little bit more meat to that, I tried to create some animation. So when we started our company, The Star, you can see as a project, people were grouped around the project, even some founder, that's the black one, or some management, and you worked on this project. But suddenly if you have success, you have a second project, so you have more people and you try to arrange them around the second project. And then you grow more and you see, okay, now we need something like management, like a management team who cares for that stuff. So we had the management team. And then it got to a point where we had the feeling, or it was obvious, that it's very hard for people to keep track of what's going to happen in the next project and you're on that, and then you're sitting in between having no project. You learn to collaborate with this guy, but in the next project you are not with this guy together. Then we tried a pretty crazy thing in our industry. We made fixed teams. Oh, that's the other management guy, yeah. We made fixed teams. So we put teams together. The teams will ever stay, or technically or theoretically, stay together and we try to find projects that match these teams. Obviously, that's a very hard thing to do because sometimes you have not the full capacity used of a team, so you need to do some minor projects, but we kind of managed to work in this model. But with the further growth, we had to introduce more special teams like an administration team or a business development team or an operations team, and later on, what Lukas already mentioned, the creation or user experience team. And that worked kind of out, but it kind of influenced the culture. So development teams saw what the hell did this business guy sell and the operations team were complaining, okay, those developers, that code base, we cannot handle that. So we came up with the idea of creating cross-functional teams. So in a cross-functional team, a team has every skill it needs to acquire a project, to concept a project, to develop a project, and to maintain a project. And even partners or managers were spread or are spread around these teams. And to assure that the knowledge within one skill is here, we introduced the guilds. There is, for example, the user experience guild that cares about the common knowledge around user experience, or we have the business development guild that cares about the income funnel in our company, and since everyone is in a team, they know which team could be interested in that. So with the skills and teams, we kind of had a pretty good organization which made people happy. There is some exception, though, that's an administration team that's still not in an operational team, but we will soon merge this, or like we will, the administration team had the idea, let's also go into an operational team. And if this is going to happen, basically every leper is in an operational team. Every leper feels what we do and sees what we do, so having this state, we set some years like two and a half years ago. Okay, now teams have everything they need to do business, so yeah, get self-organized, do it. So self-produce, maintain your projects, but also hire people, develop people, organize people. You can do what you want and you can take the responsibility for it. And that was a pretty rough moment. I mean, there were some lepers, they said, yay, we can do everything. And two months later, ooh, what are we going to do? And there were other people that said, oh my God, no, this shit, I can't handle it, so I just leave. So there were some guys that left the company. But you remember the table I showed you? We added our financial numbers as to revenue. I think if some competitors are in here, they are very happy to see such deep details of us. So you see two years ago, our revenue was kind of stagnating a little bit. We stick to eight millions. And we introduced this self-organized team concept in 2013, the beginning. And yeah, it took some time to take off. It was a shocking moment for us. But as you see in numbers, there might be other things that influenced that as well. But as you see in numbers, it had a huge impact for our company. Having everyone take responsibility for those things he does was just great. So talking more about people. Yeah, so as Tony mentioned, obviously in this industry, we don't need to invest in machines. But much more importantly, we're all about people. And sort of that is, you know, the capital if you want to label it that way. Of any, you know, web company for the most part is that, you know, what it comprised of is all these people and what the skills that they have, the motivations and how they work. So briefly talking about, you know, what makes a leaper a leaper or how do you get to become a leaper. So one of the key things that we look at during the hiring process and so on is the willingness to experiment, to see things change. And sometimes I even say that almost like staying the same way is for most leapers sort of an uneasy situation. They much prefer experimenting and seeing something else, like trying it out and if it doesn't work going back. But this is really some characteristic that we really look to. And the second thing that we really look to is if they are able and interested in trusting people. So that, you know, when, you know, innovation happens everywhere, you know, you need to be able to trust that other people are doing it in the interest of the company and that they're not just driving their own egos. And this is actually sort of a scale to some degree. You know, having the ability to trust people. We also, we, you know, of course we have, you know, job offers and, you know, we might say, you know, we're looking for a product owner or we're looking for an AngularJS developer. But, you know, in fact, we're not looking for fixed roles like that. So if a developer notices issues with the user stories that are being created by the product owner, then they should get involved. Like, they shouldn't just sit there and wait until the product owner gets things right. So really everybody is absolutely encouraged to do whatever it takes as a team to get things done. And, you know, and it can just be like, you know, being the substitute when somebody goes on vacation and things like that. And generally, and again, this is sort of the empowerment, this is sort of the theme of the talk, you know, this is really key. That's what people get. And it's amazing what happens when people get empowered. Like, they just start being so much more productive. Not necessarily because all the ideas that they come up with are amazing, but just because they do everything with much more passion, right? And, you know, it just starts with, you know, not slacking off like, you know, we don't check if people are checking their YouTube videos or whatever at work because we know they're going to do whatever they have to do, right? So if they look at YouTube videos during the day, we don't care because, you know, they might be doing some extra time at home and we don't need to double-check their hours that they enter because we can have this trust in them because we know that they hear to do things in the best interest of lead. And another thing that is very important is that we also sort of let them partake in the success of the company. And this is something that is actually quite a little bit irritating for me. So if I looked at the Reinventing Organization book and several of the stories that I heard about it, many of the organizations work based on individual bonus systems. So, you know, the more efficient you become, the more bonus you get. And this can be sometimes monetary, it can sometimes be time. So there's, I think also in Belgium, there's a ministry where basically you work down, you can go on early. So this is, you know, nice and so on, but I don't know, to us it didn't feel like the right approach. So because it basically means that you're still sort of feeding ego and you're still basically enabling or you're basically promoting the idea of like making yourself look better, right? So you're like gaming the system to some degree. So for us what we did, we basically we pay additional salaries. So it's custom in Switzerland many companies to pay 13 salaries so in December you get a 13th salary so we do that as well. But actually we do our yearly, you know, our rough annual budgeting. We do with the goal of paying 14 salaries. And so this is something that is really key. I think either everybody gets a 14th salary or nobody, right? So, you know, just, you know, making yourself look better at you another salary, right? It's not your personal bonus. It is the company bonus. So I think that's a very key philosophy that we have. Another thing that leapers can count on is that we really work hard to keep the salaries fair. So we have a point system that we use to double check if the salaries are fair across skill set, across offices, across ethnicity and diversity and so on and so forth. And we review that yearly. But it's still unfortunately something that is done by management. So this is definitely not teal in that sense. I mentioned this 14th salary. So here's another column. So in the eight years that we've paid yearly salaries, only in two years we didn't manage to pay a 14th salary. There were actually some years where we paid a 15th salary. And actually I think it's kind of interesting, like in 2014 we actually retroactively paid a salary. So this star next to the 15th there is that we basically paid half of a 14th salary to everybody that was already with the company in 2012 and to everybody that was in the company in 2013. Because there were some sort of money that came in later than it was originally sort of earned. So we wanted to correct that a little bit. And for this year it's already very likely that we'll pay a 14th. In fact we've already paid half of the 14th early because things were going so well. So one of the things obviously that I mentioned is that we really pick leapers very much to some of the soft skills that they bring into the company. Not so much the technical skills only. Because mostly technical skills are much more easily taught. Because we have a very good knowledge exchange culture. But it's very hard to change people their base character how they approach things. So this hiring process is very much driven by the teams as well as the guilds to some degree. So basically teams decide what profile is missing and they basically go to the administrative team and say please publish the job ad on the website. And that process is mostly because we decided that we want to have some common structure between the job ads and that's why it goes to the admin team. Then CVs start pouring in teams and then sometimes also guilds check those CVs. Then the guilds and teams decide who they want to interview and they basically get invited for a first round. In the first round it's still somewhat custom that there's one person from management and one person from a team. Usually the scrum master in a team. It's not really hard coded. It seems like still the teams to some degree ask for this. And it's sort of also a result of the fact that management is still responsible to German salary. So it's very important for somebody from management to actually at least having met a person once before they get hired. So after the first round the two people that were in the first round asked us a lot about culture like how we work and then try to figure out if that person can relate to how we work. We ask a lot about how they think that their past experience applies to how we're doing things and how that might have made things better or worse. We talk a little bit about the technology skills but not really in depth. After that maybe go back to the team and then a decision is made to invite people to the second round. And the second round then is basically trying to meet as many people as possible from the team that will most likely hire that person. And we basically have two to three hours of 20 minutes with one or two people going in and talking to the candidate and we have mostly no processes at all so some people might focus again on cultural aspects other people might focus on tech skills or any mixture. There is one guild that decided that they wanted to establish a test so that's the user experience guild so they also make the candidates take a test but other than that we don't have any standard testing and basically it was an invention by that guild as part of their vetting process. And then after the second round everybody gets to give some feedback and it's usually so basically you give some written feedback you say how the tech skills or the skills that we're looking for if that is a good match we also look at everybody gets to say if they think it's a cultural match and then they basically get to say thumb up, yeah hire I'll go with the majority or no, don't hire basically if a single person says don't hire we don't hire sometimes we might go back, the team might discuss it because they might say that person voted for don't hire based on some wrong assumptions about what the person will be doing or some misunderstandings but really there's no way to overpower a no so basically this is a discussion that can happen to the team it doesn't have to happen but we don't overrule it so basically the teams in the end decide who they hire it's not management management is not involved in that decision where they do get involved again is determining a salary and that's again one of the reasons why they need to meet the candidates to sort of get a feel how to put people in the salary system then the administrative team creates the contract for another administrative task for the management team they sign the contract but as you can see the emphasis is on teams and guilds in the entire hiring process another thing that is really key is exchange and with that we mean really exchanging ideas, culture and things like that so if you look at any company and regardless if they're self-organized or whatever they're organized company culture is very important but it's obviously much easier to at least define what company culture is supposed to be if you have centralized authority the reality might be that people don't really live it but you can at least define it very easily but I don't think that many people really flock to that idea of having some centralized authority telling them how they should be spending their day what their processes should be when their daily is what their definition of done is what industry they should focus on things like that so company or cultural exchange is very important in this slide I'm not sure if everybody can even read these lines here but it's not really a purpose the purpose of the slide is just to all you with all these different areas of exchange that we have so for example and I think that's actually a fun anecdote there's this one week newsletter on there this was like an internal weekly newsletter they came to management like okay we want to get budget for this management was like we don't think that this makes sense at all they said no we're really sure it makes sense and we're like okay whatever so let's we gave them like a budget so they can do it for three months and then we said okay we assume they were going to realize it was a waste of time and then we can get over it rather than arguing about it forever turns out it was a huge success we really love it and it's actually kind of I've noticed this often times that candidates mentioned like when they joined LEAP that this is one of the greatest ways for them to get into the company another thing that we do is Team Roadshow so we have months and months one of the teams goes to all the different offices and presents what they're currently working on some of the challenges they're dealing with and how they're dealing with them we're also using Slack which is sort of a chat system extensively we started I think in 2014 early 2014 with it we now have about three times as many channels as employees and it's working really great it's really fostering the exchange much better than Skype that we were using previously which was really hard because it was creating these discussion silos because you need to invite people into channels and with Slack they can just jump into what they want to talk in another thing that is actually still very much part of our culture is that nowadays we have quite a few alumnus that have left LEAP for various reasons and we still very much invite them to come to our barbecues, come to our parties give LEAP talks that we do once a week and I think to a lot of you that maybe might also be an indicator to showing that people actually really like LEAP and working with LEAP that they keep coming back even after they've left the company for whatever reasons another thing that is very important to us is transparency and I want to show this a little bit so every team has a financial dashboard which shows them on a weekly monthly quarterly and yearly basis aggregate values of how they're contributing to the financial health of the company and we introduced this I think in 2013 the first version and then last year the second version of that and the idea really is that you see this lower number this 156 this bar there this is sort of the key bar if that is green it means that they're contributing to paying the 14th salary if it's orange they're just barely there still contributing to a 14th salary if it's red it basically means that they're not helping to get it to a 14th salary and they need the other teams to help them out essentially this number is basically based on sort of experience we've kind of figured out that we have some number that we need to earn per hour in order to be profitable so it's very much not some theory but just looking at empirics we've widened it out because I don't know we felt that it was a little bit maybe confusing to have that number there because it's really specific to us and we're not saying that this is the number that you should go for the bar above this is sort of an indicator if you're red for example this could help you find out why you are red so there's different numbers there if you mouse over them in the tool you see what they're about so they are basically like the chargeable hours is 70% here 20% I think here I don't remember there's one for business development efforts and the thing that is currently red here is the 8% this is internal stuff so this is stuff that was not possible to be written down on the project so if this team would be red they might look at this above chart and say ah so we're doing a little bit more than what most teams do with internal stuff so let's look at what time we're writing down could be more efficient are we writing down the time for our employees on internal stuff rather than the client and things like that so really this the bar is more of like a helper to figure out where you're at or why you're where you're at one thing I should also note is that if a team is red it doesn't mean that they're fired it basically means that they need to maybe think about if their current approach to doing things is working out yeah so basically you know it's just something that should alert them that maybe they need to rethink some of the things rather than just keep going what they're doing but if they have a good reason so for example my team we were investing into a new partnership earlier this year with the swiss post and it basically meant that we were doing lots of non-chargeable hours and you know we had a good reason why we were temporarily in red the other thing that I want to mention here with transparency is that you have to spend a lot of time and we do this explaining why things are the way they are so I just want to briefly start the presentation of how we introduced the updated version of the dashboards and this is going to run through here in the background it would take the entire hour here to explain all of what's going on there but you know we really take a lot of time explaining why the things are the way they are and really convince people why it makes sense to do it this way rather than just telling them by authority this is how things should be done so I think this to me wraps up transparency now the big question what is actually missing to reach Teal for us let's just summarize fastly what we achieved so as you learned we have very little classical manage capacity strategies are driven by the team yes some still ask management for allowing things but some also just do things and the hiring is also within the teams so what's left over it's actually the nasty stuff so the whole salary topic huge headache then conflict management not just between leapers there are happily not too many conflicts but also clients there are some clients who want to see the boss so that's going to be difficult without bosses then for the bigger budget decisions we would like to have a process where leaper can decide by themselves if they want to change the education budget per head or not we have some legal limitations that we have to deal with within Switzerland so every company needs to have a management for example and nobody knows how it's going to react during crisis not interesting stuff how are we planning to get to or to master that basically there are two different ways to approach that we could do it by ourselves or we could take something from the shelf self means to give an example we just proceed like we did the past years so somebody has an idea somebody makes it better an example is the salary work group I said that's one of the nasty things so people that was recently like two weeks ago gathered themselves and said okay we want to have a solution for the salary topic so not management needs to define the salary for everyone so people from guilds, teams and different locations build the work group and discuss about that and the goal is to make a proposal and then some undefined process might let it happen or not that's how it usually works at LEAP the example for shelf is holacracy that's a framework that you can implement in your company organization to have a teal status sounds amazing but to see if this is really the thing it says and not just some share point thingy LEAPers from different teams guilds and locations they go to trainings and plan to make proposals things like holacracy would definitely give us some benefit so we could have documentations it's tested there are other companies doing it there are availability of trainings and it got open sourced recently so we can also just take it and fork it but there are also concerns to such an approach example holacracy that thing is pretty role based so you basically the organization defines exact roles which roles has which responsibility and just that fact will be difficult for us because we don't like roles we like skills there is also the risk that we the holacracy could undo some things we achieved unlike scrum where we integrated scrum which is also something from the shelf we basically had no project management so it was great to have something but here we are in a different state we reached some point implementing that it's going to be difficult so the question self or shelf we will see we don't know yet but it will definitely happen within the next month so let's talk a little bit about opportunities and this is more again also maybe what your opportunities could be if you are applying this so fast adapting I think this is a huge opportunity that to some degree we've already realized what we've done but we're still not there yet as I mentioned right now if an employee or a leaper has a great idea they still need to go to management to get a bigger budget so we're still a bottleneck and so removing that bottleneck would make us even faster at adapting and I think there's a pretty cool example and again this came through management but it was essentially driven by a team so last year we were working with a customer we were body leasing to them we didn't like working in their office so we asked them couldn't we just have our own office next to yours in a different city and from the idea to actually doing it in less than 30 days we had a new office and it was basically people within the old office that said actually I live pretty close to that city so it doesn't matter for me which city I work with and actually I think it was kind of awesome to work there so basically they decided yeah I want to make it happen and they were really a key driver in making this possible so we are already able to do really quickly adapt but I think we could be even faster self-responsibility again this is something that to many degree we already attained but I think for example right now still with conflict management it's still maybe that management then goes in and sort of saves the day or not and so I think this is something that we will have to invest also in training and just making people willing and capable of dealing with conflicts and at that point I think we will remove one of the big stumbling blocks I have to admit right now I'm in a phase and Tony as well we both are actually kind of stuck in a phase where we are very much overwork this just happened we will get back to a normal level but right now we feel like sometimes when there are conflicts people are turning to us and we are not as efficient as they are used to and again we are a bottleneck to solving problems and that shouldn't be the case and then happy people this is a huge opportunity like I mentioned every time that the management has given up things and handing it to people there were some people that didn't like it in the left but the majority of people really enjoyed it and it really drives them and it just makes them more happy and you know that in and of itself I think is an opportunity again because we don't have to make some shareholders happy right if we can make ourselves happy then we've already succeeded but there are also challenges to this self-realization approach the thing is you cannot command and control anymore but even today we do not do that even if we could you have to convince and to convince you have to really know what you are talking about you have to find the right reasons to tell your story and you have to be a good communicator not everybody is a good communicator so in a self-organization it's not too easy for them other difficult topic is career titles or hierarchies or models it takes a little while until people see okay I mean it's awesome I can do what I want I can reach what I want I can create new offices I can go abroad I can introduce new technologies but because there is no titles it's very hard what did I make a career yes or no we are open to write any title they want we have to get it to realize what is my career here and same as we encountered with Scrum lots of years ago we will also be here a problem so clients are used to have some responsible person and if we say we can talk to anyone in this company everybody has the same responsibility that's going to be hard and obviously nobody knows what's going to happen if bad times come so that's also a threat but finally we try to summarize our key elements out of this presentation whether you should think of or think not going into the same adventure as we do so what seems important to us is that you have a business that can also work without a long-term strategy that you are working on an organizational structure where people can be empowered our management tasks are actually drastically reduced that's a good start to get into this topic you will need full transparency about everything so people every single person knows what is the impact of my work or of this for the whole company and what is always valuable is a strong culture of exchange because people have to talk together and to organize themselves to find yourself here we just can recommend give you the try and welcome to the community so thank you very much for listening and thank you Drupal Con for having this opportunity there we were asked to make some advertisement for the sprint on Friday and to evaluate our talk and now we are very open for questions I guess there's a microphone over there I'm not sure if it's working just sit down and we will repeat the question sorry if I make you get it so the question was about the salary system how transparent it is so there's one thing that has always been the case we have defined salary levels and they are in the wiki so everybody can see the salary level so everybody can see my salary at least and they can see wherever they are on the scale themselves but they don't know the salary of the person that they are working with the other thing I mentioned there's a point system so it's public knowledge what criteria we have so it's basically education, work experience are sort of hard facts and then there are some soft facts like how much of a team motivator that person is, how self driven they are how good of a communicator they are and then we have sort of like the Joker topic which is basically everything that doesn't fit in that system we can still give some points and then we compute a total point value but the total point value is also not public knowledge so they don't really know where we put them but sometimes when I'm talking to an employee doing the individual employee meetings they might ask me okay so where am I low in the points and then I will say for example we feel that there's potential in communication that's the area where we feel that you are lacking most something like that so we're not entirely transparent about it and this is the big question how to get there yes that's totally transparent and it also leads to the fact that when a team is very green so they could spend their money to do some innovation and they see okay there are other teams in red they usually don't spend their money because they know the community bonus will just be paid if the average then is green not until now but I definitely can see potentially so we had one team and there was actually a new office in Lausanne they had a client that was basically throwing work at them and this was actually in this 2012-2013 phase and we had two big projects in Fribour and Zurich that weren't going well and at the end they were like why aren't we getting a 14th we feel like we're doing a lot and then something interesting happened the next year is that this big client stopped giving them work so suddenly for three months they were basically more or less out of work so they did some innovation things so they kept themselves busy in a sensible way and they actually got on the Django bandwagon but I think now we have a good example of why it makes sense to share the success rather than just getting upset yes that's my topic it works pretty much like we tell the market what we do and the market requests services from us it's kind of one of the big factors how we grow or not grow so we do not do actively sales we wait on requests and then we sometimes pitch sometimes don't have to yes you have such a free form self-organizing system do you find that it's easier if people work full time because I know you have full time equivalent if you have people coming in for one or two days a week what kind of flexibility do you give people about their working hours because if people are not around on Tuesdays or Wednesdays or Thursdays and you have a project do you have any restrictions around when people are able to work to get people together to communicate the question was if it's challenging if people don't work full time in this organization yes it is but we do just make recommendations so we recommend that people do not work less than 60% if they're in an operational role like developers the most difficult is for product owners which are a lot in the client if they just work 40% it's hard but basically we let the team deal with it we can feel sometimes some team pressure to this person not to reduce to 50% but we learned as long as the critical mass like lots of people in a team that work 50% it works actually maybe to add something to that I think it actually makes us stronger because not everybody is there all the time people go on vacation they get sick sometimes there's an old project haunting them so they have to do support so basically for us this is a normal state you can't expect everybody to be there all the time so we learn how to deal with it it's kind of like what people say deployment, if deployment is hard do it more often because then you get routine so for us we dealt with it, there's Wiki there's Slack people are preparing themselves handing over properly anyway we'd love to answer more questions unfortunately we have to go we'll be around at least until Thursday we'd love to talk to more people that have maybe experiences of their own trying this out so thank you very much for listening have a great conference