Frederic Laloux

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The org chart on my wall stopped making sense on a Tuesday.

Not gradually. Not through some slow erosion of relevance. One week it described reality — who reported to whom, which team owned which domain, where authority lived. The next week, my backend engineer was building user interfaces, my designer was shipping features end-to-end, and the clean boxes and dotted lines might as well have been a map of Narnia.

I did what any builder does when the blueprint no longer matches the building. I tried to redraw it. Flatter hierarchy. Broader role definitions. Cross-functional pods. All the moves in the playbook. None of them worked, because the problem was not the shape of the chart. The problem was the assumption underneath it — that