Pain: Bergzeit is on a growth course with more than 100 new employees in the year before the project started. At the same time, two years earlier, they began to gradually move into a new way of working with agile squads and Scrum. At the beginning, it is all about establishing a tailored approach that combines classic departmental structures and cross-functional, agile working.

‍Gain: They are all motivated at Bergzeit. In this respect, the bottom-up approach was crowned with success, in which a "transformation team" of committed volunteers was found who wanted to dive more deeply into agile working. In the meantime, this team of 14 dedicated employees acts as a valuable multiplier and knowledge carrier for agile hacks, facilitation skills and much more, spreading their competencies into the company. This creates a good foundation for taking the next steps. The focus here is primarily on developing a shared vision of Bergzeit as an agile organization and establishing agile governance throughout the company.

Pain: The complex goal of closing the ecological loop in the functional apparel industry by 2020 required a creative approach across all divisional boundaries and completely new ways of working together to create sufficient space for disruptive innovation and growth.

‍Gain: Cross-functional collaboration has unleashed collective creativity. At the same time, new mechanisms help to make effective decisions at team level and to resolve tensions autonomously. Over the 2-year monitoring period, a development took place from a more traditional, hierarchical structure to an organization in which people can grow their potential through leadership roles (professional/cultural) and contribute to achieving the ambitious goal.

Pain: The company had grown rapidly across two locations and was intensely engaged in the question of what kind of organizational model could sustain their particular culture of social proximity, high professional standards and community as they grew.

Gain: With the help of elements of sociocracy 3.0, the flat hierarchy and agile collaboration in projects were brought to a new level. In an intermediate step, a newly created governance circle bundled structural leadership work and fulfilled a two-pronged purpose: releasing acute tensions from teams and developing a sustainable organizational model that maximally empowers newly created, semi-autonomous teams in value creation and enables personal and cultural development.

Pain: The Leadwise founders developed the idea to build a global, digital learning community on self-organization at a time when online learning opportunities were the exception. However, there were several stumbling blocks in the implementation, including the financial viability of the project.
‍
Gain: The founders realized which steps they needed to take and how to take them in order to turn the idea into a real product. Through a team coaching process, they strengthened their common image and were able to distribute corresponding tasks in a strength-oriented manner or recognized in which areas they needed to seek outside support. They got back into a common flow and managed to realize their product and integrate it into the Semco Style Institute.

Pain: The start-up had grown rapidly in a short time. In addition to high operational pressure, there was a diffuse dissatisfaction and a loss of the common "we-feeling". This led to the need to anchor the implicit mission statement shared among the founders in the entire team.
‍
Gain: In an early phase, the start-up dealt with the question of which people in the company should act together and how, and which principles and values should guide their actions. Based on this, the start-up was able to specifically find and develop potential talents who fit the corporate culture. People who (want to) grow with their tasks, who act in the interests of the company and who give new impulses based on their own responsibility.

Pain: With over 260 employees, the IT service provider was continuing to grow and realized that previous organizational structures were reaching their limits.
‍
Gain: Out of various possible organizational forms, the company decided to apply methods from Sociocracy 3.0 to improve the way of collaboration, strengthen delegation and make decisions where the knowledge is. In a retreat, we accompanied the managers to deepen and try out elements from Sociocracy 3.0. As a result, employees were motivated and empowered to gradually take on more responsibility. A uniform, value-oriented and (even) more agile setting emerged, which met with broad acceptance and strengthened the employees' sense of personal responsibility.