Boundaryless Conversations Podcast

#138 - Supply Chains as Complex Systems and their Organisational Implications - with Federico Marchesi

Federico Marchesi, supply chain strategist and author of the Hacking Supply Chains newsletter, joins us to explore how disruptions, variability, and global constraints are not anomalies, but structural conditions that organisations must design their supply chains for. Drawing on his experience across global companies like Haier, Federico reflects on a key shift in how we should understand supply networks today: “In reality, we don’t operate a chain, but a complex adaptive system.” In this conversation, we unpack why adaptability requires more than operational improvements: how modular product architectures can help, and how organisations can become capable of responding dynamically to uncertainty. From Demand-Driven MRP to the growing role of AI agents in forecasting and logistics, the discussion highlights how supply chains increasingly rely on distributed intelligence and continuous adaptation. For leaders, strategists, and organisational designers, Federico offers a valuable perspective on why supply chains can no longer be treated as a back-end function. Instead, they are becoming a central lever in building complex-aware, resilient organisations. He speaks on the ideas of supply chain strategic design and why the deliberate structuring of flows, buffers, and decision points is important so that systems can always remain functional. The conversation also explores the parallels between organisational design and supply chain design, and highlights how structuring companies into smaller entrepreneurial units with clear incentives and autonomy will make them: distributed, adaptive, and able to respond to uncertainty. This conversation is for anyone interested in organisational design, strategy, and production systems. Key Highlights 👉 Supply chains are often described as linear flows, but in reality, they function as complex adaptive systems shaped by feedback loops, multiple actors, and constant variability. 👉 Building resilient supply networks requires strategic supply chain design, not just efficient day-to-day operations. 👉 Modularity in product architecture allows companies to delay final configuration decisions, making it easier to adapt to changing customer demands and supply disruptions. 👉 Adaptive supply chains depend on adaptive organisations - teams must have autonomy and incentives to respond dynamically rather than follow rigid processes. 👉 AI is increasingly augmenting supply chain operations, from improving demand forecasting to automating transactional logistics tasks. 👉 As global disruptions increase, supply chains are shifting from a demand-driven world toward a more supply-constrained reality, where the key capability is delivering value despite constraints. 👉 Organizations must rethink the classic centralised vs. decentralized debate and instead focus on coordinated networks of decision-making. Topics /chapters (00:00) Supply Chains as Complex Systems and their Organisational Implications - INTRO (01:02) Introducing Federico Marchesi (03:30) Supply chains as complex systems (05:11) Key Elements Affecting Suplpy Chain Compleixty (09:55) Supply Chain Planning for Complexity (15:13) Organizational Design and Adaptive Supply Chain Designs (26:14) How do you visualize modularity and adaptive systems? (29:50) What can organizations learn from supply chains? (36:07) Preparing for the future of Supply Chains (42:03) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/Marchesi-Federico [https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/Marchesi-Federico] Episode recorded on Mar 03, 26 Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast [https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast] Get in touch with Boundaryless: * Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_ [https://twitter.com/boundaryless_] * Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts [https://boundaryless.io/contacts] * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo [https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo] Music Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music [https://blss.io/Podcast-Music]

#137 - Beyond Fear: Regaining the Passion of The Explorer in our Organizations - with John Hagel

A world-renowned strategist and author, one of the pioneers of platform thinking, John Hagel, joins us on this episode. He starts the episode by sharing something profound: “I was taught to believe strategy is everything for winning. Over the years, I’ve come to realise it’s less about strategy and more about psychology.” He also discusses how fear currently largely shapes decision-making, and why regaining the “passion of the explorer” is fundamental in this time of change, as new forms of value creation are needed. He talks about approaches such as the Zoom In/Zoom Out and scaling the edge, which can help organisations navigate uncertainty. If you feel the urge to go beyond fear and create sustainable and empowering creation spaces, tune in. John is the author of several influential books, including the seminal “The Power of Pull” and “The Journey Beyond Fear”. He has always reflected on how organisations can navigate an era defined by accelerating technological change. Throughout the conversation, we explore why the future of work depends less on tightly specified tasks and more on cultivating environments where curiosity, experimentation, and the “human” element of work thrive. Key Highlights 👉 Strategy alone is not enough to drive transformation; leaders must understand the psychological forces, especially fear of the future, that shape how people respond to change. 👉 In an era where machines increasingly handle routine tasks, human work should focus on creativity, curiosity, and responding to unexpected challenges. 👉 Cultivating the “passion of the explorer”, a desire to keep learning and make a greater impact in one’s field, is key to improving performance over time. 👉 The Zoom Out / Zoom In approach to strategy helps organisations align long-term ambition with focused short-term initiatives that create tangible progress. 👉 Instead of attempting large-scale transformation all at once, organisations can “scale the edge” by experimenting in small initiatives that can gradually grow into the new core of the business. 👉 The emerging “trusted advisor” model highlights the value of deeply understanding customer contexts and orchestrating networks of resources to help them succeed. 👉 While technologies like generative AI can significantly improve coordination and resource discovery, human curiosity, judgment, and the ability to challenge assumptions remain central to creating meaningful value. 👉 In a rapidly changing world, the most powerful form of learning is not simply sharing existing knowledge, but creating entirely new knowledge together. Topics /chapters (00:00) Beyond Fear: Regaining the Passion of The Explorer in our Organizations - INTRO (01:18) Introducing John Hagel (03:57) What Machines Can't Replace: Creativity, Curiosity, and Human Connection (08:39) Working with emotions for value creation (14:56) How can people create new value propositions? (22:23) How do you prevent fear from snowballing? (24:54) How do you create a passionate organization? (30:55) Patterns in discovering new forms of value (35:18) Generative AI as a coordination Technology (39:05) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/hagel-john [https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/hagel-john] Episode recorded on Feb 20, 26 Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/ [https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/] Get in touch with Boundaryless: * Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_ [https://twitter.com/boundaryless_] * Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts [https://boundaryless.io/contacts] * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo [https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo] Music Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music [https://blss.io/Podcast-Music]

#136 - Design As Participation - with Kevin Slavin

Kevin Slavin - designer and entrepreneur working across technology, biology, and culture joins us on this episode to reflect on what it means to design within living, interconnected systems, and how technology moves forward not just through invention, but through the social and cultural conditions that allow ideas to take root in the world. Known for his article ‘Design as Participation’, he explores how design changes when “the system is the subject, and you’re downstream of it,” shifting the designer’s role away from control and speed toward humility and participation in complex systems. He also reflects on the limits of regulation and policy, and shares how his company Fairfield Bio is building marketplace and platform models - using rules, access controls, contracts, and incentive design to build trust and enable fair access to non-human genomic data even when trust is low. This episode is a reminder that design always encodes the future we choose to optimise for and the role each of us plays in shaping it. In this episode, Kevin Slavin, whose work spans institutions like MIT Media Lab and New York University, reflects on his shift from working on digital systems to engaging directly with biological research environments and living systems. The conversation ranged across the realities of working with complex socio-technical and biological systems, the tensions between experimentation and responsibility, and the challenges of coordinating action across institutions, nations, and cultures. The episode explores what it means to build new infrastructures in a world shaped by power asymmetries, historical extraction, and uneven access to knowledge. Join us as we discuss how designers and entrepreneurs can navigate uncertainty through structured marketplaces. Key Highlights 👉 Technological progress isn’t driven by invention alone; it advances based on social norms, cultural adoption, and the institutions that shape how new tools actually enter the world. 👉 Regulation and policy struggle to govern complex systems at scale - so governance must be designed into platforms through incentives, access rules, and contracts. 👉 Global coordination fails when trust is low, so systems should be designed to align interests even between actors who don’t share values. 👉 Historical extraction has created deep mistrust around biological data. Benefit-sharing mechanisms must be embedded by design to tackle this. 👉 Platforms aren’t neutral, and therefore builders must take responsibility for what kinds of behaviour their systems reward or exclude. 👉 Designing metrics that prioritise long-term value creation over user volume ensures the focus is on building stable growth, rather than fragile products. 👉 Open access holds the risk of misuse and, therefore, access control, vetting, and membership design become core governance tools, not afterthoughts. 👉 Designing infrastructure is designing the future, making founders and designers explicitly choose the outcomes they want their systems to produce, rather than defaulting to speed and scale. Topics /chapters (00:00) Design As Participation - INTRO (01:32) Introducing Kevin Slavin (03:12) Introducing Design as Participation (09:47) Design is interconnected (15:01) How does Fairfield Bio Grapple with Social Nuances (26:42) The Risks and Benefits of Open-Access Biotechnology (38:41) Breadcrumbs Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/kevin-slavin [https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/kevin-slavin] Episode recorded on Dec 01, 25 Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/ [https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/] Get in touch with Boundaryless: * Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_ [https://twitter.com/boundaryless_] * Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts [https://boundaryless.io/contacts] * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo [https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo] Music Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music [https://blss.io/Podcast-Music]

#135 - Transforming Bureaucracy into Software Platforms - with Jos De Blok

The name behind one of the world’s largest and most cited self-managed organisations, Jos De Blok, joins us to deep dive into what it truly takes to build complexity-aware systems without bureaucracy. Founder and CEO of Buurtzorg, the Dutch neighbourhood nursing organisation, Jos has built a global reference point for community-based healthcare and self-managed organisations. In this conversation, we explore the philosophies that made Buurtzorg’s success possible - from transforming bureaucracy into software and replacing management layers with trust to the internal practices that enabled it to achieve remarkable KPIs, including a Net Promoter Score of 66% compared to a market average of 4%. Tune in, for this is a powerful exploration of self-management at scale. Is a leader’s job to steer? Jos argues that leadership is about protecting the autonomy that allows people to do their best work. For nearly 20 years, Buurtzorg has stood as a quiet anomaly in an industry defined by regulation, administrative overload, and hierarchical control, and succeeded. From these insights, we explore how steward ownership sustains long-term purpose and what it truly means to build an organisation that protects and grows professional wisdom. Join us as we explore how to prevent unnecessary bureaucracy and build platforms that enable genuine horizontal dialogue. Key Highlights 👉 Leadership is less about steering people and more about protecting the conditions that allow professionals to self-direct and exercise judgment. 👉 Bureaucracy doesn’t disappear by ignoring it - it can be redesigned and embedded into software, freeing people from mindless administrative work. 👉 Strategy doesn’t need to be a centralised offsite exercise; it can emerge through continuous, horizontal dialogue grounded in frontline experience. 👉 The true measure of support isn’t the size of the back office, but whether teams feel enabled to do meaningful work with minimal friction. 👉 Most people are already entrepreneurial in their daily lives - organisations simply need to create environments where that instinct can surface at work. 👉 Self-management works best when the focus shifts from controlling what might go wrong to expanding what professionals are capable of handling themselves. 👉 Steward ownership reframes capital as responsibility rather than control, aligning long-term purpose with financial sustainability. 👉 When trust is embedded in the system, resilience follows - from pandemic response to unexpected disruptions, autonomy accelerates adaptation. Topics /chapters (00:00) Transforming Bureaucracy into Software Platforms - INTRO (01:22) Introducing Jos de Blok (03:04) Introducing Buurtzorg: Transforming bureaucracy into software (15:47) Operationalizing Strategy as a Collective Decision (23:43) What cannot be self-managed in an organisation? (33:27) Exercising Creative Leadership, and saying “No” (37:24) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/jos-de-blok [https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/jos-de-blok] Episode recorded on Jan 12, 26 Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/ [https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/] Get in touch with Boundaryless: * Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_ [https://twitter.com/boundaryless_] * Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts [https://boundaryless.io/contacts] * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo [https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo] Music Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music [https://blss.io/Podcast-Music]

#134 - Agile in First Principles: Visualisation, Flow and Constraints - with Håkan Forss

What do we think about Agile beyond frameworks - and how organisations actually learn, adapt, and continuously improve? Håkan Forss, a lean and agile coach and speaker who has become legendary for his iconic Lego figures-based presentations, joins us to unpack the hidden purpose of Agile and why its true power lies not in methods but in how organisations design for flow and fast customer feedback. Speaking on concepts like lean thinking, Kanban, and theory of constraints, Håkan explores why visualising work is a radical act in knowledge organisations, how limiting work in process exposes real constraints, and why optimising for customer feedback - not busyness - is essential in complex systems. This episode offers a long-term perspective on Agile, beyond fads. Håkan takes us inside his long-standing practice of working with organisations as living systems, discussing how traditional, project-based organisations struggle to operate in flow, how autonomy and coherence are often imbalanced, and how to address this in modern organisations. As the conversation widens to autonomy, AI, and decentralised teams, we explore deeper questions: what does it mean to organise when individuals can act faster alone, yet outcomes still depend on collective coherence? Key Highlights 👉 The purpose of Lean and Agile is to achieve real business results for customers; methods and frameworks are only a means to that end. 👉 Knowledge work is mostly invisible - it lives in people’s heads and inside computers, which makes visualisation a critical enabler of understanding and improvement. 👉 Making work visible in a physical space helps people grasp the bigger context, react emotionally, and recognise how much work is actually happening in parallel. 👉 Once waiting time and bottlenecks are visible, it becomes difficult to ignore the need for change - “once you see it, you cannot unsee it.” 👉 Flow efficiency focuses on how much time customers' needs are actively being worked on versus how much time work is waiting. 👉 Most organisations are structured around projects, systems, or silos, while actual customer needs cut across those boundaries and create delays. 👉 Limiting work in process - not “work in progress” - exposes where work is standing still and forces problems to surface. 👉 Faster customer feedback is more valuable than maximising utilisation, especially when organisations do not yet know what customers really need. 👉 Increasing autonomy can improve flow, but without shared purpose and strategy, teams risk pulling in different directions and cancelling each other out. 👉 Radical transparency around goals and key metrics enables people to self-organise around what matters most. 👉 As power shifts to the edges with AI and decentralisation, the challenge for organisations moves from enabling flow to achieving coherence across signals. Topics /chapters (00:00) Agile in First Principles: Visualisation, Flow and Constraints - INTRO (01:25) Introducing Håkan Forss (03:24) The Hidden Purpose of Agile: Beyond Methods to Business Results (08:44) Visualising as a Radical Tool for Impact (13:26) How do traditional organisations operating in flow (16:12) Visualization beyond the tools (18:45) What’s the Value of Limiting Work in Progress (26:23) Theory of Constraints at a Portfolio Level (30:46) What’s the edge of collaborative work in the age of AI? (42:54) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/Forss-Hakan [https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/Forss-Hakan] Episode recorded on Jan 09, 26 Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/ [https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/] Get in touch with Boundaryless: * Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_ [https://twitter.com/boundaryless_] * Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts [https://boundaryless.io/contacts] * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo [https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo] Music Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music [https://blss.io/Podcast-Music]