in 2017 at the end of our research project around the “Organization of the future” – whose report is available and free to download and whose insights led us to create AEquacy, a hierarchy-free organizational design based on a radial network of self-organizing teams -, Stefano and Giovanna realized that if they really wanted to pioneer a new, purpose-enhancing, people-fulfilling and high-performing organizational design and stay ahead of the slow, bureaucratic, siloed hierarchical herd, we had to jump into the practice of letting go of the title-based (and shareholdership) power.

As we implemented AEquacy, any hierarchy was abandoned. We moved from titles to dynamic roles. Each role has:

• a purpose directly linked with the overarching company purpose,
• a scope which is the area of authority of the role or the perimeter inside which the role-holder can take any decision (unless it moves the company backward or damages another role), and
• a few accountabilities.

As a team, we decided that each role shall have a maximum of three accountabilities to maintain a strong focus on what is really important. This doesn’t mean that we don’t care about anything else, there are many tasks that we need to do anyway, but the focus on three accountabilities helps us a lot to avoid scattering our energy and time in too many projects.  When we were hierarchical we would craft a yearly strategy, then we would communicate… ooops… download some goals to the team, who should passively receive. Does this ring any bell to you? We would have a mid-term check-in in July only to realize that the goals should have changed according to changes in the business environment, but then it was too late.