How should you structure your organization in the age of AI? How can you help your company develop faster? What kind of culture allows people to do their best work?
Leaders have no shortage of questions right now, and the answers are harder to come by.
Nordic Business Forum 2026 focused on the Human Edge, and many of our speakers shared sharp insights into exactly these questions. We collected ten of the most practical organizational development ideas from their talks and grouped them under three themes: designing for productivity and trust, using AI with intention, and growing your people and culture. After each point, you’ll find a few concrete steps to help you take the idea from the conference hall into your own organization.
Part 1: Design Your Organization for Speed and Trust
1. Organize Your Company as a Heterarchy
“It’s not the product. It’s not the service that you compete with. It’s the organization in itself that will be the competitive advantage now,” underlined Kjell A Nordström.
Companies need flexible organizations for faster decision-making, more agile development and easier experimentation, and the list goes on. Kjell suggested that organizing your company as a heterarchy might be the answer. A heterarchy is an organizational structure built on flexible, cooperating networks, where authority and decision-making are distributed instead of concentrated at the top.
According to Kjell, heterarchies work when two conditions are in place: high levels of social trust and widespread technology adoption.
→ What to do next?
- Map where decisions in your organization are actually made. How many approval layers does a typical decision go through, and which of them truly add value?
- Choose one area, such as a product team or a market unit, and give it full decision-making authority for a set period.
- Review the results together afterwards.
- Take an honest look at Kjell’s two conditions. How much trust is there between your teams and leadership? How widely do your people use technology in their daily work?
2. Replace Control with Responsibility
One of the most talked-about lines of NBF 2026 was Patty McCord’s: “Hire adults”. Out of context it might sound funny, but she had a very fair point. It also connects directly to Kjell’s idea, because a heterarchy only works when people are trusted to act like adults.
Company policies are often designed to keep an eye on a few bad actors. In reality, approvals, tracking and extra layers slow down the entire company, even though most organizations could do perfectly well without them.
Patty’s solution was to hire adults, tell them clearly what is expected of them, and trust them with the responsibility. When you remove heavy procedures and safety nets, people are encouraged to take personal ownership of the outcomes of their work. Instead of building rigid processes, leaders should focus on giving people the business context they need to perform and deliver.
→ What to do next?
- List the policies and approval steps that exist mainly because of one past incident or a small minority of people. Which ones could you remove or simplify?
- Ask your team which rule or process slows them down the most without adding real value.
- Test how well people understand the business context. Could each team explain the company’s key priorities and how their work affects the results?
- Pick one control mechanism, replace it with a clear expectation, and follow what happens.
3. Reward Experiments, Not Just Successes
“Failure was my feedback. Feedback is knowledge. And knowledge is power. So really, failure is your power,” underlined Steven Bartlett.
You can’t fail if you don’t experiment. The more experiments you run, the more you fail, and the more feedback you get. Steven relies on constant experimentation and has made it a key part of the culture in his companies.
The importance of experimentation is nothing new, yet in real life fear, bureaucracy and hesitation often get in the way. Steven’s cure was to make experimentation a habit by incentivizing it. He emphasized that you should not reward only successful experiments. Reward the number of experiments, whether they succeed or fail.
He also reminded leaders to separate irreversible decisions, such as large changes in organizational structure, from reversible ones, such as testing a new product or marketing campaign. The first kind deserves careful analysis. The second should be made as quickly as possible so that precious time isn’t wasted.
→ What to do next?
- Start tracking how many experiments your teams run each quarter, and make that number visible.
- Sort your upcoming decisions into reversible and irreversible. Are you spending too much time on choices that could easily be undone?
- At your next meeting, share a failed experiment and what you learned from it. When leaders go first, others follow.
Think about how your current incentive system treats a well-designed experiment that fails.
Part 2: Use AI with Intention
4. Build a V2 of Your Company
Shawn Kanungo pointed out that most companies use AI to build on top of their existing organization. He suggested that the real advantage lies in using AI to reimagine and rebuild the organization from scratch. When you start from a clean sheet, you don’t settle for 10% efficiency gains. You can find significant leaps in capability and speed.
Even if you never rebuild your whole organization, the exercise is valuable in itself. The best way to understand how AI will change our organizations and our lives is to use it yourself, and designing a V2 will likely help you spot opportunities you would otherwise miss.
→ What to do next?
- Hold a half-day workshop with your leadership team around one question: if we founded this company today with the AI tools now available, what would it look like? Which roles, processes, and layers would exist?
- Compare that V2 with your current organization and choose the two or three biggest gaps to explore further.
- Make sure every member of your leadership team uses AI hands-on in their own work, not only through reports from others.
5. Decide Where Automation Wins and Where Humans Are Needed
Even as a strong AI optimist, Shawn also stressed that not everything should be automated. He believes two types of organizations will succeed in the future:
Fast and frictionless: companies that rely on speed, automation and effortless self-service.
Intentional friction and deep craftsmanship: companies that deliberately slow the customer experience down to create memorable, face-to-face, deeply human connections.
According to Shawn, every company should avoid being stuck somewhere in the middle. He advised leaders to take a fresh look at all of their processes and think carefully about where the human touch is necessary and where automation wins.
→ What to do next?
- Decide which of the two models your company, or each of your business units, is mainly aiming for.
- Map your customer journey and mark each touchpoint: should it be frictionless, or is it a moment where human craftsmanship creates real value?
- Ask yourself where you are currently stuck in the middle, neither fast enough nor human enough.
6. Make Sure Your Tools Reflect Your Values
“How can we say that we want creative and divergent thinkers and a diversity of thought if we’re training people a million times a day to ask a question, get one generated response, and call it a day?”
Rahaf Harfoush shook the room by reminding leaders to take a breather with AI and make sure their organizations use it intentionally. She explained that people start losing their mastery of thinking when they accept the first quick answer AI gives them. That’s why organizations can’t stop investing in human expertise. AI is only valuable if the person using it can properly evaluate the work it has done.
Rahaf also pointed out that every application, software algorithm and workflow tool contains its designers’ assumptions about what productivity, communication, and performance should look like. Leaders should therefore make sure the tools they choose actually support their organization’s mission and goals. Rahaf offered two steps:
- Create a beliefs manifesto: together with your team, define what success, high performance and healthy work habits look like in your company culture.
- Conduct a tech audit: evaluate each tool you use. Does it reinforce your cultural values, or does it pull your people toward counterproductive shortcuts? Based on the findings, decide whether to keep, adjust or replace it.
→ What to do next?
- Book a session with your team to draft the first version of your beliefs manifesto. Keep it short enough to fit on one page.
- Audit your five most-used tools against the manifesto, starting with the one where people spend the most time.
- Ask yourself where your organization accepts the first AI answer without question, and where that would be most risky.
- Think about how you’ll keep building human expertise, for example by having junior employees solve some problems without AI first.
Part 3: Invest in People
7. Treat Hiring as Your Most Important Job
According to Steven, a common mistake leaders make (himself included) is believing the organization’s success depends mostly on their own effort and how much work they put in. That is part of the equation, but the team you surround yourself with has a much bigger impact.
“Everything in your business is downstream from a human being’s brain. That is the first foundation of business. It is the brains you assemble and the culture you bind them together with.”
Steven also noted how surprisingly little attention leaders seem to give to attracting top talent, even though it should be one of their main priorities. Offering the highest salary isn’t the answer. Steven explained that it often comes down to alignment around meaning and personal goals: can your organization’s mission help the person climb their personal Everest?
→ What to do next?
- Look at your calendar from the past month. How much of your time went into finding and attracting top talent?
- In your next interview with a key candidate, ask about their personal Everest, and be honest about whether your organization can help them climb it.
- Identify the three to five roles that matter most for your strategy, and make sure you know who you’d want in them, even if those people don’t work for you yet.
8. Build a Culture of High Challenge and High Support
Simply put, culture is the way people do things in your company. Angela Duckworth reminded us that while individuals mostly choose the culture they join, leaders choose the culture they grow. Looking ahead, what kind of culture do you want to grow?
For a high-performing culture, Angela argued that you should pair high challenge with high support. Set an ambitious bar for performance, and make sure people also have a solid foundation of emotional security and resources.
→ What to do next?
- Draw a simple 2×2 grid with challenge on one axis and support on the other. Where is your team today? Ask your team members to place it too, then compare answers.
- For every ambitious goal you set, name the specific support that comes with it, whether that’s time, resources, coaching or psychological safety.
- When someone on your team struggles, notice your first reaction: do you lower the bar, or raise the support?
9. Make Mentorship the Norm
Angela also spoke about the importance of an environment that supports high performance. Individual effort matters greatly, but we reach our true potential when our situation supports our performance.
She explained that peers are important for horizontal solidarity, but mentors are essential for growing vertically. Everyone needs a teacher who gives feedback, points out mistakes, and suggests ways to improve. The easiest way to get started is to arrange regular five-minute conversations between junior and senior people in your organization.
Also, have you heard the saying “to teach is to learn twice”? It’s often so that mentorships are beneficial for both parties; the mentors can learn a lot in the process as well.
“Great leaders create organizations where mentorship is the norm.”
→ What to do next?
- Pilot five-minute mentoring conversations in one team for a month, then collect feedback and decide whether to scale.
- Ask yourself who your own mentor is right now. Leaders need vertical growth too.
- Make mentoring part of what you expect from senior people, and recognize it in their performance discussions.
10. Make Feedback Like Breathing
Patty urged leaders to finally stop doing annual performance reviews. How useful is feedback that arrives several months after something happened? According to Patty, not very.
She explained that feedback should be like breathing: practical, immediate and continuous. When you notice someone doing something well, tell them right away that their contribution made an impact. When something goes wrong, point it out and offer a clear solution for next time.
→ What to do next?
- Set yourself a simple goal: give at least one piece of specific, immediate feedback every day this week.
- Review your current performance review process. What would you lose by replacing the annual review with continuous conversations, and what would you gain?
- Train your managers to give feedback in the moment, and to ask for it in return.
The Human Edge Starts with How You Organize
The talks were very different, but one message kept coming back. When everyone has access to the same technology, what sets you apart is how you organize, trust and grow your people. You don’t need to put all ten ideas into practice at once. Pick the one that would make the biggest difference for your organization right now, and start there.
