Menschgeist

A few months ago, I was invited into a family‑owned manufacturer in the German‑speaking part of Switzerland. They produce highly customized mechanical components, around 250 employees, with customers across Europe. They had experienced several strong years. During this time, they expanded into new markets. They also added a layer of “project managers” to coordinate larger orders. On paper, this looked like professionalization. In practice, lead times were slipping, quality incidents were creeping up, and nobody could quite explain why.

When we mapped the journey of one “typical” strategic order, the pattern became visible. Sales closed a deal with a tight delivery promise, then handed it to a project manager. The project manager, sitting between departments, chased engineering for drawings, then production for slots, then purchasing for critical parts. Each department optimized its own queue; nobody owned the end‑to‑end flow. Escalations landed on the COO’s desk, who spent evenings manually re‑prioritizing orders to keep key customers happy.

From an AO perspective, the problem was not “lazy people” or “weak project managers”. The system was missing a real swarm around strategic orders. We brought together a small cross‑functional group. It included one person from sales, one engineer, one production planner, and one quality lead. We gave them explicit authority over a handful of critical orders for six weeks. They met daily for 15 minutes. They made decisions on the spot. They adjusted priorities based on what they saw, not on departmental queues.

The numbers were interesting, but the real shift was felt. Lead times for those orders dropped. More importantly, the COO’s escalations fell sharply. The team started spotting structural issues in planning. They also noticed supplier choices that had never surfaced before. At the end of the experiment, one of the production supervisors shared their thoughts. They said: “For the first time, I see the same picture as sales. I see the same picture as engineering. We can actually act on it together.” That sentence contains the AO question I invite you to sit with. Where in your organization would a small, empowered swarm around real work make more difference than one more coordination layer?

Try this AO move this week

You don’t need a reorg to start working with AO. The simplest entry point is to look honestly at how one important piece of work really flows across your organization. It is important to understand how it truly flows, not just how the process diagram says it flows.

1. Pick one meaningful case. Choose something that matters. Consider Onboarding a strategic client, delivering a key feature, resolving a major incident, or implementing a new regulation. The higher the stakes, the more clearly you’ll see your real system at work.
2. Map the real journey. On one page, list who actually touches this work from first signal (“we should do this”) to “truly done”. Record the actual steps in order. Include side chats. Add ad‑hoc spreadsheets. Also, consider unofficial approvals that never appear on a formal process map.
3. Mark the friction points. Circle 1–2 places where work waits, bounces, or gets escalated – handoffs between teams, unclear ownership, conflicting priorities, repeated rework. Add a word or two on what seems to be happening at each hotspot.
4. Ask the AO swarm question. For each hotspots, ask: “If we formed a small swarm around this work, who should be in the initial conversation?” Who should be involved from the start?” In a software company, this might include product, design, engineering, and operations. In a hospital, it might involve clinician, nurse, admin, and IT. The principle is the same. Bring key perspectives to the work together. Do this instead of pushing the work through them in sequence.
5. Run one small swarm experiment. For the next one or two instances, invite that swarm into a short joint planning session. Alternatively, hold a 15‑minute daily touchpoints. Allow them to make decisions for this narrow slice of work. Do this without creating a new permanent committee or governance layer.

If you do this, don’t just track throughput. Pay attention to what people start noticing and learning. They do this once they share a single, end‑to‑end picture of the work. That’s often where AO becomes a lived practice rather than a slide.