ORGANIZATION
Buurtzorg
The Dutch home-care organization founded by Jos de Blok in 2006 — fifteen thousand nurses organized into self-managing teams without managers — whose clinical and financial outperformance made it the most studied exemplar of Teal organizational design.
Buurtzorg is the Dutch home-care network that Jos de Blok founded in 2006 with four nurses and that grew to fifteen thousand within a decade, operating entirely without management hierarchy. Self-managing teams of ten to twelve nurses serve defined geographic areas, making their own decisions about hiring, scheduling, patient care, and strategy. A back office of fewer than fifty people supports the fifteen thousand clinicians — a ratio that would horrify Orange HR departments and that enables Buurtzorg to deliver care at roughly forty percent lower cost than traditional Dutch home-care providers while achieving the highest patient satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and clinical outcomes in the country.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Buurtzorg emerged from de Blok's frustration with the Netherlands' bureaucratic home-care system. He had worked as a community nurse and as a manager in traditional home-care organizations, and he had concluded that the management apparatus was producing worse outcomes at higher cost than nurses would achieve