by Niels Pflaeging
When Valérya Carvalho, Gebhard Borck and I founded the BetaCodex Network in the Spring of 2008, we were still calling it by its working title, Beyond Budgeting Transformation Network. We were looking for a different, and better name for the movement at that time: One that would hint at the solution for the messes in organizations, rather than at the somewhat narrowly defined problem of budgeting that we well knew was merely symptom of a much bigger problem that had befallen most organizations: command-and-control organizing.
We were also aware that solving that bigger problem would require new insights and new, practical theory. The big question was: How to go at it?
Papers 01–06: Groundwork on organizational transformation as we saw it then (Mar to Jun 2008)
We used the first half of 2008 to put a stick in the ground for the new network. When we started out in earnest, in March 2008 Valérya, Gebhard and I felt that we had to create a solid foundation for the movement we were trying to build. Remember: We had just broken away from the pretty well-established and rather successful Beyond Budgeting Round Table, BBRT, of which I had been a director for five years, and of which some remains still exist today. Throughout my years in the BBRT I had relied on a track record of insightful publications from the BBRT’s early years, plenty of corporate members and connections, an annual conference and meeting agenda, and an established brand. With the new network we were starting, we had to find and establish a brand, position us with a focus on transformation (not just talking), and articulate this different kind of vision and mission, too. Our conclusion was simple: While the BBRT had at some point decided to stop researching and sharing (and morphing from Givers into Takers, in today’s lingo), we would conduct collaborative research and share with verve and energy, in the process turning our insight “open source”.
In order to do that, we would first have to get out some essentials about the BetaCodex, however, as these essentials would naturally differ from how the Beyond Budgeting model had been articulated and communicated. We also needed to practices how to talk differently about transformation – on the stage, in workshops and in client relationships. Transformation was what the new network cared about and what it had to tackle head-on. This was achieved with the help of a first set of research papers. The first six of these research papers were published within a span of just four months. While the contents made sense in the context they were written in, some of the concepts on transformation and for positioning the BetaCodex may now, almost two decades later, seem a bit dated. Especially in the light of more advanced insight we later gathered around Cell Structure Design and Very Fast Organizational Transformation. But much of the contextualization and framing of Alpha, Beta and organizational transformation from the BetaCodex’ early days still holds up.
Papers 07–10: Breaking new grounds with practical theory (Oct 2008 to Jan 2009)
Our 7th paper would initiate a new stage in our research. Dynamic-Robust Problem Solving came about by chance. It has been our first “by invitation paper”, and our only one so far. I wish there were many more papers like this by now! But back to how the research came about. In the Summer of 2008, systems theorist Gerhard Wohland and I were invited to speak at a respected management conference in Iran. Gerhard and I had first met four years earlier, and we had come together at several events before, and discussing systems theory for organizations. But with the invitation to Iran we had the opportunity to spend plenty of time together, for the first time, and discuss his content and ours in more detail. We spend over a week together in Iran - running sessions at the conference in Teheran, but also getting to know the capital, and traveling the country a bit. This included visits to Isfahan, Shiraz and the ancient city of Persepolis – all guided by locals, so that we enjoyed the company of many, many Iranians during our stay. Before the conference, I reworked a slay of Gerhard’s powerful presentation slides and translated them into English, at the same time, to support his sessions. Gerhard had never published anything in English. So I asked him later if he wanted to share those slides with the world through a BetaCodex publication. He did, and so I performed another round of editing and reworking, and the paper was finished. It is one of the most conceptually dense papers we have produced, featuring absolutely no explanatory text. Which makes for an excellent read: You really have to figure out these concepts! Check out paper No. 7 here!
The next two papers, Turn your company outside-in, part I and II were our first published venture into the realm of Cell Structure Design. A lot of practical experience from BetaCodex consulting projects from the previous years went into these papers, and a lot of thinking around organizational structure and decentralized org design. Several cases from my consulting work appear in these papers, a bunch of new wordings we had figured out of the years, and plenty of literature-based research around decentralized, self-organized companies was worked into it all. Three books particularly inspired this research. These were The Self-Managing Organization by Purser/Cabana, Profit Beyond Measure by Jonson/Bröms and Adaptive Enterprise by Stephan Haeckel. While writing the paper, I could sense that we were articulating Beta much more clearly now, and that we were building Beta approaches while advancing adoption in the practice of companies. We were on to something.
Making Performance Work, the next paper, was less ground-breaking, but it was much-needed to round out our portfolio of topics. Prior to founding the BetaCodex Network, I had written dozens of articles about performance systems. I had also published two successful books in German that discussed relative performance systems. But we hadn’t articulated these concepts in the context of Beta yet. Now was the time to talk about relative performance topics very clearly, free from the shackles of “beyond budgeting” framing. This paper was highly visual, it featured very little text and proved hugely successful. The content is still very much up to date.
Papers 11–14: Breakthrough years and getting a grip on organizational structure and leaderships (2011 to 2013)
With research paper No. 11 and the concept of Org Physics, Silke Hermann steps onto the stage of BetaCodex research. Silke and I had teamed up in 2009 to do Beta consulting work together. In parallel, she ran a thriving psychological diagnostics company with 25 people and offices in Berlin and Wiesbaden at the time. It took us a while to articulate concepts for research, but the consulting work with Silke was more to the point, more versatile and more focused on steady executive support than what I had done before. At the end of 2010, we put a handle on Org Physics theory, which turned out to be a game-changer, in turns of conceptual articulation and clarity around decentralization. We knew back than that Org Physics – Explained was a breakthrough, not just with regards to org design, but also as probably the first theory of leadership(s) that deserved the name. This paper became hugely popular and led to several follow-up publications.
After my third book in German, The 12 laws of leadership (2009), I felt I needed to take a break from book writing. I wasn’t happy with the way my German publishers marketed and positioned my books. That was one thing. But I also sensed that my future books could be attractive to way more people if they were less focused on text. I knew that I wanted to produce more visual and more design-oriented books. But I had no idea how to do it. Then I discovered the slide decks of a Dutch colleague who had used hand-drawn illustrations in his work. The drawings were way too colorful for my taste, by I figured I could use such illustrations to articulate Beta concepts in a very different and more advanced fashion. The colleague generously gave me a thumbs up to use and re-mix his illustrations, to form the basis of my new writings. The result was a two-part paper called Organize for Complexity that became something of a hit online immediately. The double paper was quickly translated into four other languages by colleagues from around the world. And it became clear to me that more Beta content could be visualized, articulated and presented in this way: Very crisp, very clear and very intuitively. So these research papers led to the publication of the Organize for Complexity book, which has been translated into six languages, becoming a business book bestseller with over 60.000 copies sold (I stopped counting). The book is now in its 6th edition. The research papers are still highly useful.
Heroes of Leadership, our 14th paper, is completely different in style than the prior ones. It emerged from a pet project of mine. I figured we should pay homage to individuals who had influenced contemporary organizational thinking and practice - thinkers, academics, entrepreneurs, and mentors of mine - starting with Frederick W. Taylor. The challenge turned out to place these individuals in the context of Beta, in a readable and delightful way. Silke encouraged me to take a somewhat American stance on paper writing, by calling these individuals my heroes - which they all were. The research for the paper was a huge discovery for me, personally: I went deep into the writings by (and about) Follett, Taylor, Lewin, Deming, McGregor and many other great individuals we would talk about extensively during the following years. Surprisingly, the paper turned out to be our most popular by far, amassing over 140.000 views on Slideshare alone - the publishing platform we used at the time. The paper also became used in business school teaching, and it inspired several keynote talks of mine.
Papers 15–18: Reinventing transformation and a reawakened interest in management history (2019 to 2021)
After Heroes, Silke and I took an almost xix-year hiatus from research paper writing. The reason we paused releasing papers was severalfold. Starting in 2014, Silke and I published two highly successful books, undertook consulting work and international speaking in at least a dozen countries, and Silke had a thriving international B2B-business to run, too. Some concepts from our bestselling books Organize for Complexity and Complexitools (available in German only) warranted coverage in separate research papers – Consultative individual decision-making, Organizational Hygiene and Peer Recruiting, for instance. But we felt that BetaCodex research papers required somewhat broader topics. So we kept looking out for research topics to cover next, not quite sure where this search would take us.
In 2019, the moment came. Silke and I had figured out the OpenSpace Beta approach during the previous year, we had conceived, written and published the OpenSpace Beta handbook in Autumn. Now some conceptual backup we had worked out between 2014 and 2018 and that did not fit into the handbook needed to be synthesized and shared. We did so in two very distinct papers: Secrets of Very Fast Organizational Transformation and Change-as-Flipping. Both presented breakthrough thinking and concepts in the realm of organizational development and change. With these concepts (combined with OpenSpace Beta), we knew that we had finally cracked the mystery of how to undertake Beta transformation reliably, and fast.
It is safe to say that our following paper, The Invention of Managements, combined with the earlier Heroes paper and many other BetaCodex Network activities, put Mary Parker Follett on the map for people in the field of organizational development and agile around the world. Follett is now (again) rightly perceived as a key figure in management history. During my research into Follett’s work I came to realize that she had actually been the founder of an alternative school of management that would continue to exist in parallel to the much more popular Taylorist school of management thinking. identifying the Follettian school, its underpinnings and its key players was the topic of the Invention of Managements paper. It offered a new way of framing the BetaCodex stance on organizing, and identified its roots in members of the Follettian school like Lewin, McGregor and many others.
Reading Follett’s work more and more thoroughly also opened my eyes to the stunning clarity of insight that Follett (as a management philosopher, consultant and practitioner) had possessed about Org Physics. Org Physics in Follett’s words is testament to this in-depth research into Follett’s writings. In a way, the later research paper No. 23, Deming in Japan, 1950 to 1965, also belongs to this line of works. And we are certainly not done with the topic of understanding the threads of BetaCodex discovery and practice, over time.
Papers 19–24: Deeper inquiries into transformational practice (2023 to 2025)
By mid-2023, Silke Hermann and I had undertaken a whole bunch of OpenSpace Beta-based transformations with clients that had all integrated Cell Structure Design and Relative Targets socio-tech, thus enabling transformation within months. It was time to share our learnings from the transformation work in several countries and different industries with the world. A series of research papers on patterns in transformation has come out of this. In each of the four papers, we describe between 10 to 14 patterns we discovered in our work. Research doesn’t get much more practical than this. We think that these papers will enable companies to approach Beta transformation in a more self-assured and well-prepared way, and that it will help change consultants to support clients more effectively in their endeavors. As usual, the Patterns series of papers is highly visualized, featuring prose that’s “reduced to the max.”
There is currently an art exhibition on display in a museum here in Wiesbaden that’s entitled “work comes out of work.” The Deming in Japan 1950-1965 paper is a case in point. While conducting research into W. Edward’s Deming’s life and work for the What would Deming do? book of quotes, I decided to add some black-and-white photos to the book, to give readers a better idea of Deming the man. I got in touch with The Deming Institute for high-resolution photos and publication approval. A little later, with the advent of machine learning into design softwares, partially automatized photo coloring became more viable. This in turn led me to dabble with coloring some of the photos of Deming that I had collected. The results were so interesting and led me to so many insights about Deming, Japan, Toyota and Lean that I decided to share them with the world – with The Deming Institute’s approval, for sure.
I won’t go into the Slave to the Rhythm research paper here, as I have talked about it in articles very recently here and here. I might add, however, that five of our most recent research papers are now available in print, individually or combined, as The Transformation Bundle: A set of five papers (Nos. 19, 20, 21, 22 and 24) that can be purchased from the Red42 web shop.
Paper 25 onwards: What will the future of BetaCodex research bring?
What will the future of BetaCodex research bring? For the short term, this is easy to say. In the long term – not so much. Coming up next is research that Silke and I just finished writing up and that’s currently being prepared for publication. The forthcoming, 25th paper introduces OpenSpace DEV: It is an entirely new take on OpenSpace conferencing that’s especially well-suited for use in the realm of organizational development. The paper is, at the same time, a conceptual overview and an homage to Harrison Owen, creator of OpenSpace Technology, who passed away in 2024, aged 88.
Silke and I considered publishing a sound approach to OpenSpace large-group conferencing in organizational development as early as 2019, after we had published the OpenSpace Beta approach. We then thought about how to help more people grasp the potential of OpenSpace in organization-wide change efforts. Our attempts at bringing other OpenSpace practitioners in writing and publishing the concept went nowhere, however. This June, we felt it was time to go at it by ourselves, and to put our substantial experience with OpenSpace DEV in transformation work into writing.
I believe the upcoming paper is a wonderful example of how diverse groundwork on BetaCodex and Beta transformation can be – and indeed should be. If we dare to tackle all aspects of Beta transformation and if we don’t shy away from crossing boundaries into diverse fields of science, then there is an infinite amount of concepts and insights for us to identify and articulate. I believe such insights, beyond the reach of most academics who are stuck in their respective fields, will be of the highest value for peers, practitioners and consulting clients alike. You can see an overview of other current research projects in the BetaCodex community here.
BetaCodex research & you
It is worth repeating, at this point, that BetaCodex research is not supposed to lead to long (or lengthy) publications, or, god forbid, “all-encompassing” insights. There is no reason why research on a worthy topic needs to have more than, say, eight pages. Brief papers are are entirely desirable, as long as the content is serious and thorough. We can also share the burden of paper writing and designing among different members of the network. And the amount of topics we could cover is endless, of course, as there are infinite questions to tackle, in more or less detail.
Approaching 25 published BetaCodex research papers, the format is now well-established and a proven means of sharing, and of getting out the insight we gathered. Our most popular paper alone has reached more than 150.000 views by now, and all papers combined (in several languages) are probably closing in on a million views.
Most importantly: In my mind, everybody who learns something can do research. Our challenge remains to take the BetaCodex from what may by some be perceived as stuff being done by renegades well into the mainstream. Keep in mind that everybody wants Beta: We just have to deliver it!
I hope that reading this article you will feel stimulated to read, or re-read some of the research papers we produced up to now.
Very impressive overview of your great work!