Designing and navigating your own transformation journey

This case is based on our work with the elderly care department in the Lidingö municipality and an interview with Linda Löfkvist, who leads the department.

Some transformation journeys begin with a mandate or a structural redesign. Linda’s journey began with a question she kept asking out loud throughout her journey: “What kind of organisation do we need to become, and why does it matter beyond our own walls?”

Linda leads the elderly care department within the Lidingö municipality, a small island city outside of Stockholm. What she and her team have built over several years is a living culture, one that started internally and has gradually extended outward into the neighborhood, the city, and eventually to far remote places like South Korea. Yes, South Korea.

A clear vision and purpose as the foundation

Before any ritual, any community initiative, or any structural change, Linda invested heavily in communication as a sustained narrative: painting a picture of what was coming and why their way of working needed to change to meet it.

The picture she painted was honest. Demographic pressure is increasing. The proportion of older people is growing while the working-age population is shrinking. AI is reshaping what humans do and what they need. The traditional service delivery model, where the municipality acts as a provider and citizens as recipients, cannot scale to meet these challenges. Something more distributed, more relational, more co-creative was needed.

She adapted this argument in different contexts depending on the audience. In management meetings, it was strategic. In conversations with her staff, it was personal. At every level, the core message was the same: we are not doing this because we have been told to. We are doing this because the world has changed, and we need to change with it, and when we do it, it creates something better for the people we are here for–citizens.

This investment in shared purpose and a picture of the desired future became the pillars that supported their transformation journey. When people know where the direction is and trust the intentions behind it, they can take initiative without needing to check in at every step. Linda describes this directly: everything that has followed came from people who felt safe because the direction was clear.

Saying “yes”

One of the most consistent observations about Linda from colleagues is that she says yes to almost everything her team proposes. Ideas arrive, often unusual ones, and she does not filter them through an approval logic. She listens, reflects, and finds a way to support.

This is a deliberate practice, grounded in a specific belief: if people bring an idea, they are bringing a piece of themselves with it. Shutting it down sends a message about what kind of organisation this is. Welcoming it, even if it is imperfect or risky, sends the opposite message.

Building a strong culture for shared leadership

The result is that the team has developed a creative set of practices entirely from within. A colleague who is a trained chef organises outdoor barbecues where the team gathers, cooks, and eats together. He thinks of everything: the skewers, the fire, the flatbread. He is not doing this in his administrative role. He is bringing his whole self, and the invitation to do so came from the culture the team has built together with Linda’s support.

On Fridays, they have yoga sessions which are held in a circle and led by staff members. It is not exercise in the conventional sense. Participants check in with themselves, share what they are grateful for, and speak openly about what is difficult. The format creates connections that are hard to develop during work meetings. Attendance is not obligatory, and some people sit on the edge for the first session or two. By the third, something has usually shifted, and people end up joining.

There are “learning books”, small notebooks each team member carries. Meetings often begin with someone sharing a reflection from their learning book, something captured during the week, a high or a low, whatever feels true. They have developed other forms of meeting each other. Walking meetings in the forest. Monthly learning forums where colleagues share what they have discovered, present new ideas, try out new methods, sometimes unfamiliar, like poetry, movement, and new forms of dialogue. These forums are intentionally driven by team members.

What these practices share is that they build the relational tissue that makes shared leadership possible. You cannot ask people to take initiative, give feedback, navigate conflict, and make decisions together if they are essentially strangers who happen to occupy the same department. The rituals create a safe space to build trust, open up to each other and slowly get to know each other on a deeper level–the foundation that helps strengthen collaboration and mutual support in the team.

Results of the work done

The outcomes are visible. Individuals have grown and developed their potential way beyond their formal roles and job titles. Some of the individuals who were quieter and whose voices were rarely heard in group settings before are now the lead facilitators and drivers of change. They have the courage to read their own poems and share stories in front of politicians and other important decision-makers.

Hard-core indicators have also flourished. Sick leave has fallen. Staff retention has improved. Fewer external consultants are needed, and therefore, costs are lower. Colleagues report high levels of motivation, work satisfaction and well-being in yearly workplace surveys. People who work in other parts of the city’s administration have started asking to be placed on Linda’s team, or, if needed, have the opportunity to collaborate with them– even in their free time. Because it gives them energy.

Distributing leadership beyond the team and into the bigger ecosystem

What makes Lidingö’s journey different is how far they have already come. Most teams that embark on this kind of work focus inward, strengthening the culture and capabilities of their own group. Linda’s team did that, and then kept going.

The reasoning was clear to her from the start. The challenges she was working on– loneliness among the elderly, social fragmentation, the disconnection between institutions and communities–cannot be solved by any single department or organisation acting alone. The municipality is one actor in a wider ecosystem. If the goal is resilience and belonging at the community level, then the work has to involve the whole community.

Using GIS data (geodata) to map out where isolated residents lived, the team identified specific neighbourhoods and began building local, self-governing communities in each. These are local communities led by residents who take their own initiatives, and are part of a network connecting them to each other, which the municipality helps to organise.

In Skärsätra, one such community gathers on the first Tuesday of every month for a shared meal. Leo and Kiki, who ran a restaurant until the pandemic forced them to close, cook for the community. Kiki has been blind since childhood and still cooks. The meal this particular evening was polenta, slow-roasted meat and lemon panna cotta, with a proper wine list, for eighty kronor (80 SEK) a head. Neighbours arrived, greeted each other by name, noticed who was missing and went to check on them. A local politician attended at Linda’s invitation. He sat, ate and listened. He is coming back and wants to spread this concept.

This is a community that has found its own form and feeds itself. Linda’s team created the initial conditions and helped it establish its structure. Now it largely runs itself, and the municipality’s role is to stay connected, notice what is needed, and link this community to other parts of the network when it helps and when they need to work together for the greater good.

The network of different actors and local communities that the municipality has built has grown substantially over time. An interactive map covers the entire island: churches, civil society organisations, local businesses, including hotels, and art institutions are all working together. Millesgården, the famous sculpture museum, is now an active participant. When the group identified that some segments of the elderly population were not being reached by anyone, they brought the question to the network and asked who would be willing to take it on. The Red Cross and a local church developed something new together.

The municipality has also encouraged relational bonds and shared leadership across different generations of citizens. On one hand, they placed senior citizens in schools who became friends and mentors to children who were isolated, without friends and struggling with mental health issues. The seniors are warmly welcome. On the other hand, senior cafés at schools run by students were initiated. They are attended weekly by older residents who feel lonely and need company. The students bake, organise activities, and handle the music quiz. The seniors come. One elderly man learned how to use his mobile phone because a student helped him download an app. He was delighted.

Linda describes a phone call she received from a colleague while riding the bus to a hospital. They agreed: this community, all its actors, and all its work, needed to be formally celebrated once a year. They found a date – All Friends’ Day on June 30th. Three years later, the national public health authority adopted it as a national day in Sweden, with other municipalities following their lead and joining the celebration. South Korea and the World Health Organisation (WHO) have shown interest in Lidingö municipality’s work and invited them for exchange and collaboration so they can spread their good practices internationally too.

Working with resistance

Linda does not suggest this journey has been frictionless. The main challenge has been internal: reaching parts of the organisation where managers are accustomed to more traditional patterns and either do not see the need for change or find it threatening.

Her approach has evolved. Early on, she tried to engage everyone. That took a lot of energy without producing much movement. Over time, she shifted her strategy: start where the engagement already exists, work with the willing and the curious, let results build visibility, and trust that the platform creates its own momentum. Working with people who are engaged brings her the joy she needs as motivation in her own work.

When someone who was previously resistant eventually comes around, the response is simple and genuinely welcoming. No bragging about the past results or telling them what they should do. Just: ”What do you think? How can I help?” Begin where you are. This quality of reception–available to anyone regardless of where they are starting, and attuned to their specific needs and situation–is part of what makes her approach work.

The same principle applies at the organisational level. When connecting with a new team or leader, Linda starts with their challenge rather than her method. What are they struggling with? What do they need? The approach follows from that, rather than leading with it.

One last piece of advice

Lidingö’s journey describes, in a powerful way, what can happen when leaders invite colleagues and citizens to be their whole selves, using their passions and potential beyond formal roles or titles. It also tells a story of how focusing on building trust, deep relationships, collaboration and collective leadership–not only within the team and other parts of organisation but also with different stakeholders, including citizens–can have a strong effect on the broader well-being of the whole society. In some ways, it is hard to summarise the Lidingö case because it covers so many interesting examples, stories, and practices, and many of their outcomes cannot be measured only with traditional performance indicators. They have improved the quality of work life for many colleagues, and the quality of life for many local residents by building a strong local community that sustains itself. They have built an ecosystem that connects many actors who collaborate around a shared purpose, which has had an impact on the lives of many individuals.

Linda talks about this in terms of what she believes organisations are ultimately for. The work of building resilience in communities, of weaving connections across generations and organisational boundaries, of creating places where people want to be and feel that they can contribute, is not a side effect of the real work. It is the real work. Everything else–the structures, the rituals, the measurement frameworks–exists to support it.

Her advice to others who want to start is simple: find a community of people who are exploring the same questions, because the sense of shared direction and mutual support is what makes it possible to keep going. Begin with and focus on the curious rather than the skeptical. Create forums for reflection to capture learnings. And trust that what you build, if it is rooted in people’s own energy and initiative, will grow further than you can currently see. Since you will run into resistance and obstacles along your way, connect with other like-minded people from other organisations–even other countries–who can inspire you and keep you motivated. Linda also mentioned that the group of transformation agents in our project, and before that, at Samverket (a hub for co-working and systemic transformation in the Swedish public sector), had that role for her. So find yours.

This case is based on our work with the Strategic Development department in the Umeå municipality and an interview with Mikael Brändström, who leads the department.

When the Strategic Development department was formed under Umeå’s City Management Office, it came with an unusual mandate. Rather than organising the new unit the conventional way, with clear unit managers, defined sub-teams, and a layered hierarchy, the city director at the time gave Mikael and his team permission to try something different. Forty-three people. No fixed hierarchical subdivision below the department level. An open question: Can a public sector unit of this size operate with genuine shared leadership and self-organisation, and if so, what does that actually require?

That question has been the spine of a two-year journey, and the answer (still emerging) has produced some of the most concrete and transferable learnings of our Forte project.

The power of language

One of the first and most deliberate choices Mikael made was to be careful about language. Terms like psychological safety, self-organisation, and self and shared leadership carry weight in some contexts, but in a municipal environment, they can also trigger skepticism, eye-rolls, or the kind of defensive confusion that slows everything down before it starts. Mikael drew on a lesson from an earlier project: the more new concepts you introduce, the more energy is spent on the concepts rather than the change in behaviours and ways of working you are trying to create.

So instead of talking about these concepts, the team talked about what behaviours they wanted in their department. Instead of calling it “culture work”, they called it “working out what kind of work principles they needed in order to function well”. The difference is subtle, but one conversation invites people to discuss an abstraction, and the other invites people to talk about what actually happens when someone takes a phone call in the quiet zone and just keeps talking.

The team landed on working with five key areas, building partly on Laloux’s work on self-managing organisations and finding their own approach to it. These covered decision-making, information transparency, conflict resolution, dynamic roles rather than fixed roles based on job descriptions, and feedback culture as the foundation for continuous development. Each principle was paired with specific behaviours: what does it actually look like when we are living this, and what does it look like when we are not?

This grounding has shaped how they develop the department’s culture and processes over time. Recent staff meetings have focused on feedback, not as a topic to discuss but as something to practice. With the department in the middle of transition to an activity-based workplace, real scenarios come up constantly: how do you give feedback to a colleague who keeps talking on the phone in a quiet zone? What do you say, and how do you say it in a way that strengthens rather than damages the relationship? These are the moments where abstract principles become real.

Mikael was also conscious that they needed to work on the transformation at different levels. This included both strengthening certain skills that were lacking among colleagues and, in parallel, doing things that would change their culture and processes in order to build more structural support for distributed leadership.

Facilitation as the core capability

When Mikael’s team assessed what skills the department would need to strengthen to genuinely change how it operated, facilitation came up immediately. Not facilitation in the narrow sense of running structured workshops, but facilitation as a broad capacity to move groups through complexity, conflict, and change without relying on hierarchical authority to get things done.

They adopted a methodology called Whole Person Process Facilitation, which centres on bringing the full human being into change processes rather than just their professional role. Around 40 to 50 people across Umeå municipality have now been trained in this approach, run in collaboration with a neighboring municipality to spread the cost and build cross-organisational connections at the same time.

The result of this investment has been significant. In most organisations, the manager runs the staff meeting. In Mikael’s department, people trained in facilitation now take responsibility for designing and leading these meetings, without the manager present in a facilitating role. The formal management point still exists on the agenda because it has to: legal responsibilities around workplace safety assessments and similar matters require a designated manager to be accountable. But the format and quality of the meeting itself is the responsibility of facilitators and participants.

This shift matters beyond the quality of the meetings. It is one of the clearest structural expressions of shared leadership available within the constraints of public sector governance. You cannot remove the manager’s legal accountability, but you can redistribute the actual work of leading collective processes to people throughout the team and organisation. And when those people grow into that responsibility, something changes in how they understand their own role within the organisation.

Several of the early facilitators have since become genuinely expert practitioners, and some are now leading training sessions in service design and innovation methodology for others. Capability built in one place spreads to many other places.

Redistributing decision-making through structural changes

Alongside their work on culture and capability, Mikael’s team made a series of structural changes designed to distribute decision-making throughout the department.

The budget process is the clearest example. Traditionally, a department head owns the budget, which includes managing budget allocations, approving invoices and costs, and reporting to leadership. Mikael’s team redesigned the budget process from the ground up. All costs are now transparent and accessible to every member of the department through the financial reporting system, with the exception of individual salary information due to data protection requirements. Together, the team makes an initial budget plan and decides how to distribute resources between different projects and initiatives. Work groups or team members who want to draw on the operational budget submit a request with a priority rating. These are combined into a shared overview, and if the total exceeds available resources, the team works through the prioritization together rather than leaving it to the manager alone.

After each four-month period, everyone who has requested resources does a check: Do I/we still need this? Has the need changed? Can anything be reallocated? The budget becomes a living thing rather than a fixed annual constraint. It also becomes a vehicle for practising transparency and shared decision-making principles the team has committed to.

At the city level, a similar structural reform was introduced recently. Previously, central innovation funding was held in a pool that departments could apply for. This created a dynamic where the departments that did not receive funding felt no incentive to develop. In the new approach, 0.5 percent of each department’s operational budget is directly distributed into innovation, with the requirement that it be used for development and innovation work done together with others. The largest departments receive tens of millions; smaller ones receive less. But the logic is the same: development capacity must be built throughout the organisation, not concentrated at the centre or isolated within departments; it must be exercised in collaboration across organisational boundaries.

Adapting HR processes from within

Not every structural change can be made from scratch. Many of the processes that govern how people are recruited, developed, and evaluated are embedded in municipal-wide HR systems that individual departments cannot simply replace. Mikael’s approach has been to work within these constraints.

The annual development conversation is a good example. In Umeå, as in most public sector organisations, a formal performance and development talk is required by the HR process and must be held by the manager with every employee in their team. That cannot be changed at the department level. But what can be changed is how people prepare for it. Before the formal conversation, every team member now finds two colleagues and has a peer conversation: What do you think I should be focusing on developing, and what have you noticed about where I am strong and where I have room to grow? That input then feeds into the conversation with the manager, making it richer and reducing the dependency on a single person’s necessarily partial perspective. The talk can also be more owned by the employee rather than the manager, who exercises self-leadership in that situation. Questions connected to self-leadership and shared leadership are integrated into the development conversation.

The team has also decoupled development conversations from the yearly salary review talk. When both topics live in the same conversation, the dynamics tend to collapse into something closer to a performance review, where self-advocacy and risk-aversion shape what people say. By separating more continuous development conversations from the annual salary review, the team creates a more honest space where genuine reflection can take place. Development is something that happens continuously within the team, as colleagues support each other through regular feedback sessions.

Recruitment has become a relationship-building tool. When recruiting and onboarding new people, questions related to self-leadership and shared leadership are part of the process. When new team members are onboarded, they are invited to talk about their personal values, passions, purpose and the impact they want to make through their work (using the Personal Canvas, the practice described in Chapter 2) with their colleagues, so they can get to know each other better.

Another practice called Department buddy has been introduced to deepen relationships, not only within the team but also with other departments. Each member of the strategic development unit nominates a partner department they take particular responsibility for getting to know–through periodic informal check-ins, the occasional leadership meeting attendance, and simple presence. The goal is not to be useful in every conversation, but rather to ensure you are not a stranger when collaboration is needed.

The co-leadership structure

As the department grew and Mikael’s calendar filled with steering groups, working groups, and citywide responsibilities, a practical challenge emerged: the formal department head was increasingly unavailable for the kind of informal and relational leadership that makes a self-organising environment function. The solution has been a complementary structure. Mikael holds the formal role of Development Director, carrying external representation and formal accountability. Magnus and Vanja hold unit manager titles, but they function more as the relational anchors of the department. They are present in the kitchen in the mornings and accessible throughout the day, creating the conditions for informal conversation and peer support that the formal structure cannot fully provide. As Vanja has settled into the role over time, the balance has evolved. Mikael describes feeling more genuinely available himself now, as the weight is distributed differently.

The insight is that when one person carries all of the formal leadership, that person’s calendar becomes the bottleneck for everything that requires leadership to happen. Distributing the informal dimensions of leadership to others does not dilute accountability; it creates the conditions for the work to flow.

What has changed and what remains difficult?

The moments that feel most meaningful are often small. A department meeting held entirely by the facilitation team, without the manager needing to drive it, and leaving people feeling it was one of the best meetings they had attended. Overhearing that colleagues are co-creating something, solving a problem on their own, without needing to route it upward. These are the signals that something has actually shifted.

There is also something revealing about the department’s survey results. They are not uniformly better. In some dimensions, scores have gotten harder rather than easier. Mikael reads this as a positive sign: when people develop a stronger sense of agency and a more critical understanding of how the organisation works, they become more willing to name what is not functioning. That is not a failure of the work. It is evidence that people have moved from passive acceptance to active engagement.

The most persistent challenge is the boundary with the surrounding hierarchy. When team members act on the distributed authority they have been given and try to work across the wider organisation in ways that do not follow conventional channels, they sometimes encounter friction from directors and managers elsewhere, who experience this as undisciplined or disrespectful of the established order. Mikael is direct about the fact that this is still the hardest part: protecting a team that has learned to operate differently from a system that was not designed for it.

His approach has been pragmatic. Work most intensively with the parts of the organisation that are open. Do not waste energy trying to force entry into structures that are not ready. Build the relationships and the track record that will gradually shift what others believe is possible.

What are three things worth taking away from this journey?

The first thing Mikael says is that this is not a project. There is no completion date. The work is ongoing as things continue to move, change and develop, and treating it as a finite initiative is the surest way to undo whatever progress gets made.

The second is that the manager has to change personally. Not symbolically, not in terms of how they speak about leadership in meetings, but in actual behaviour: what they choose to decide, what they invite others to decide, where they step back. This is harder than it sounds, and Mikael describes still working on it every day, supported by the honest feedback of close colleagues.

The third is perhaps the most practical. Do not add the transformation on top of everything else. Embed it in what already exists: in how the budget is built, how meetings are run, how development conversations happen, how new people are brought in. If the only time people engage with these ideas is during a dedicated workshop, the ideas will stay in the workshop. The practices need to live in the actual work.

This case is based on our work with the Development and innovation unit in the Uppsala municipality and an interview with Niklas Huss, who leads the unit.

Some transformations begin with a manifesto. This one began with an elevator and the word “hello”.

When Niklas joined the municipality, he noticed that people walked past each other in the corridors without making eye contact, let alone saying hello. The organisation had a written commitment to being welcoming and inclusive, but the day-to-day reality told a different story. Rather than launching a culture initiative with a name and a logo, he started riding the elevator and asking people how their day was going. The elevator was slow. Nobody could escape. Over weeks, something shifted. A colleague who had worked there for over thirty years and initially pushed back on the idea of building broader connections across teams later stood up in a group session and said: “There is a revolution happening on floor 7.” She had noticed the ripple effects, the changed tone, the small conversations multiplying outward. Her insight: through small steps, you can create enormous change.

Starting with changing the system

A large municipality is, by design, a rigid structure. Legal accountability, equal treatment, and democratic governance all require consistency and process. These are not flaws to be fixed; they are features. But the same structures that ensure fairness can make genuine adaptation nearly impossible. New challenges that cut across departments, problems that live in the spaces between organisational units, systemic issues that require collective ownership rather than individual mandate, all of these tend to get compressed into siloed responses that address symptoms without touching causes.

Niklas’s starting point was to understand complex challenges that the municipality was facing and the political goals related to them. He understood that he needed to connect his ambitions around systemic transformation with those challenges and strategic instruments politicians use to steer public administration. He linked several of the complex social challenges, like “rising insecurity”, “mental health pressures”, “involuntary loneliness”, and “growing disconnection” under the ambition to strengthen social togetherness (social gemenskap) and resilience in the municipality. He succeeded in having this ambition set as a priority in the strategic documents defining the municipality’s budget and goals, with the expectation that different departments would work together to achieve it. The ambition to work with different challenges was already there before him. What was missing was a mechanism to act on them collectively and through a more holistic and systemic lens.

He didn’t start by proposing a transformation methodology. Instead of asking permission to work differently, he created the conditions under which working differently became the expected approach.

Building relationships before building programs

Once the mandate existed on paper, the next move was relational. Niklas began identifying and convening people from across the organisation who were already working on related challenges but were not collaborating. Strategic staff, sustainability coordinators, community development officers, communications leads, facilities managers, and directors of subsidiaries. People who shared an interest in the same systemic problems but whose work was separated by administrative boundaries.

He did not call these gatherings a “leadership development program”. He called them opportunities to explore what they were each doing, finding unexpected synergies, and seeing the system from a wider vantage point. The aim was to shift how these individuals understood their role: not as representatives of their own unit or department, but as co-owners of a larger shared purpose–to make their municipality a thriving place to live in.

The facilitation methods mattered. In one early gathering, he brought a choreographer, commissioned through a national research institute, to lead participants through an experience of a particular neighbourhood that had lost its social infrastructure: a large secondary school with a local library and facilities for community events had closed. The space had gone quiet. The community had fragmented. Participants were invited to move around this large abandoned facility and its neighbourhood in silence, to observe, to feel what was present and what was absent. They shared what they felt and noticed, first in pairs, then in the larger group. The room was filled with strong emotions. Everyone was touched. Roles and titles were temporarily set aside.

This is not the kind of activity that appears in traditional municipal meetings. But it served a specific function: it broke through the professional facades that normally govern interactions between people with different organisational titles and hierarchical positions. Vulnerability, a shared experience, and genuine curiosity became available in a way that a conventional workshop would not have unlocked. Several participants who met in those early sessions later chose to meet and explore new possibilities for working together around shared goals.

From culture to structure

Alongside the relational work of building a network between people from different parts of the municipality, Niklas was building new processes. He identified small pockets of possibilities–places where first experimental projects could be initiated to showcase how the city can work with systemic transformation and more collective forms of leadership. For example, in a residential neighborhood where the closure of the school and library had created visible social deterioration, as mentioned above. He would invite actors across the municipality who could contribute to such pilot projects. This was not a project with a fixed design, but a prototype with an explicit intention to engage participants in emergent processes of co-learning and adaptation. Citizens, local organisations, cultural entrepreneurs, and civil servants worked together to explore what the space could become. A participatory budgeting process was introduced so that residents could help direct how municipal resources were deployed in their own neighbourhood.

In parallel, he developed a new annual process designed to complement the existing budget cycle. The standard budget process tends to produce siloed plans because each unit plans for its own remit. The new process created space for cross-organisational futures work, where staff from different units could co-develop activities together before the plans were finalised. The aim was not to replace the existing system but to add a complementary stream that enabled collective design.

He also invested in developing skills needed in systemic transformation. Staff are trained in capabilities like facilitation, futures thinking, co-design methods, how to hold open processes with citizens, and how to prototype with them rather than plan. These competencies do not advertise their deeper purpose. They simply make people more effective at working together across boundaries.

And Niklas ran an explicit campaign to change the basic social texture of the organisation. The elevator experiment became a formal initiative, a “say hello” campaign, executed not through communications but through the facilities team, which had the physical reach and the logistics to make it real. Coffee was provided at elevator banks. Flyers were distributed. A LinkedIn post he wrote about the initiative was spread broadly and generated conversations across the sector. Small gestures, visible commitment, genuine follow-through.

The leading together structure in practice

Niklas operates with what might be described as a complementary leadership structure. He holds a formal position, but he does not lead this work alone, and he does not position himself as the expert bringing transformation to people. He works alongside others who carry different kinds of authority: political leaders who provide the mandate, administrative directors who provide organisational permission, facilitators and educators who develop specific capabilities, and community actors who bring local legitimacy.

He describes his role with a metaphor he has made official. His title, informally used but genuinely meant, is “human gardener”. He plants, tends, connects, and waits. He does not harvest for himself. The logic underneath this metaphor is that, in a complex system, transformation cannot be installed; it must grow organically. The gardener’s work is to create the conditions for growth, to protect what is fragile, to prune what is crowding out the light, and to trust that the organism knows something about what it needs.

This orientation also shapes how Niklas manages relationships with those who feel threatened by what is emerging. When the existing hierarchy becomes uncertain about what is happening–because things are moving in ways that were not pre-authorised, because people are collaborating in new patterns, because initiatives are gaining momentum outside of normal channels–his response is not to accelerate or to fight. He absorbs the concern. He connects the work back to the official strategy. He invites those who are resistant to participate rather than critique. And sometimes he simply protects the emerging work by not making it fully visible until it is strong enough to withstand scrutiny.

He is direct about the cost of this. Transformation of this kind is not like a smoothly managed project. It is a complex process, emotionally demanding, politically exposed, and often exhausting. He has developed personal self-leadership practices to sustain himself: annual solo retreats where he reflects on whether his inner compass is still calibrated, and engages in meditation, physical practice, and gardening in the literal sense. He does not present these as optional extras. They are part of his personal self-care infrastructure.

What does this journey suggest?

Niklas’s approach offers a specific lesson for those operating inside large, established organisations. Resistance to new concepts is not always resistance to what the concepts represent. Sometimes it is resistance to the label, the jargon, the implicit critique of everything that came before. By not naming the transformation, by letting it grow through structural changes, new skills, relational investments, and small visible experiments, Niklas made it harder to argue against and easier to join.

The framework was never the point. The relationships were the point. The new processes were the point. The capabilities people built were the point. The shift in how people understood their own agency, their own mandate, their own role in the larger system, that was the point. A stronger local community and the well-being of citizens was the point.

By the time anyone might have thought to ask what this approach was called, it was already producing results that were difficult to dispute.

Most transformation efforts fail not because the ideas are wrong, but because they never make it into the everyday systems that govern how an organisation actually operates. Job descriptions, recruitment, onboarding, performance and salary reviews, training and competence development, leadership profiles, forums and programs: these are where culture is either reinforced or quietly contradicted. This journey is about how a few HR strategists participating in our projects set out to close that gap.

Developing new language and shared frameworks

In several participating organisations, terms like self-leadership or trust-based leadership already existed in their strategic documents, business plans or policies. But rarely was it clear what these terms really meant and how they could be embodied in culture and ways of working. Very little had been done in practice. Some of the HR strategists began exploring how they could support transformation through small steps, attempting to build an infrastructure without waiting for a perfect mandate or a top-down directive.

One of the first challenges was definitional. For example, self-leadership means different things to different people, and when a concept means everything, it ends up meaning nothing in practice. Providing simple frameworks around key concepts, such as self-leadership, and anchoring them in existing research was one of the things the HR practitioners in our project did. For example, they defined self-leadership in three dimensions: self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-direction. This gave managers and employees a shared vocabulary–a way to talk about something that had previously been vague and easy to dismiss.

Making those definitions accessible and visible to employees and managers on the intranet was another step in this process. But posting content on the intranet changes almost nothing on its own. The real work, as some of the HR practitioners said, was getting in front of people.

They attended leadership meetings and forums across different departments and support functions. They led introductory sessions about basic terms that combined theory and practical exercises, with some of these sessions being in person, others remote, depending on how each part of the organisation operated. After addressing the management layer, similar conversations were brought to all-staff meetings, which required persistence. Not everyone was immediately enthusiastic. There was resistance, competing priorities, and the usual organisational inertia that greets anything that does not fit neatly into existing routines.

From self-leadership to leading together

One insight from this process that HR practitioners shared was that self-leadership cannot be treated purely as an individual matter, even though organisations often push for self-leadership, placing more pressure on individual responsibility. When people encounter the concept only in a lecture, course or article, it tends to stay abstract. When a team explores it together and figures out how team members can support each other in practising self-leadership, something different happens.

When people started reflecting on their own needs and working styles alongside their colleagues, they learned things about each other that had not come up before: someone’s need for recovery time, someone else’s preference for how to receive feedback. These disclosures built trust, and trust created the psychological safety that made further change possible.

An exercise that became particularly popular in one organisation is called My Ideal Work Week. Teams worked through questions about how they actually wanted to structure their work time, where they were losing energy, and how they were prioritising. What emerged was often surprising: people discovered that their colleagues had very different needs and rhythms, and that surfacing these differences was not destabilising but relieving. It gave teams permission to talk about how they worked, not just what they were working on. It supported them in co-creating shared agreements on how they could work better together.

Supporting teams in developing new ways of leading together

Another thing the HR practitioners in our projects tested was away from work limited by policies and standard HR processes, and towards more customised support for managers and teams. When teams struggled, the HR practitioners offered to facilitate workshops on topics that could help improve team dynamics and nudged members to practise more shared leadership–without necessarily labelling it as such. For example, they might focus on discussing shared values and purpose, exploring the team’s experience of psychological safety and ways to improve it, or agreeing on how to work better together and share responsibilities for team rituals and meetings.

Similar support was provided by some of the internal development units in participating organisations. In one organisation, where the development unit participated in our project, some of the developers who work with different teams in their organisation began integrating methods they’d learned from our project into their own work with teams. In this way, practices that support shared leadership were spread to different parts of the organisation.

Development programs for managers and employees

One HR practitioner developed a structured programme for the managers on creating conditions for self-leadership, which was designed and delivered in partnership with an external provider. The programme runs over seven to eight months and combines formal learning with peer learning groups and ongoing network sessions. Around 60 managers have already completed it. Multiple participants have described it as having changed not only how they lead their teams, but how they approach their own lives. The goal is that every manager will go through this programme eventually. To sustain the learning, an alumni structure with two gatherings per year was developed, keeping the cohort connected and continuing the conversation over time. The logic is simple: a single training experience fades; a community of practice does not.

In another organisation, a few facilitators from the development unit developed a Leadership program for non-managers, spreading the idea that leadership is a shared practice that needs to be distributed across the organisation rather than limited to formal management. In this way, they tried to integrate knowledge and methods from our project with their existing methods for leadership development and disseminate them across the organisation. The programme was so popular among employees that they ended up making it a more regular training programme.

The challenge with such training programmes is that they cost money and time. The economic and time pressure on short-term deliveries can often prevent managers and employees from accessing relevant training. This is a structural constraint that needs to be worked around. One way to solve this is to use internal staff to deliver such training programmes rather than hiring more expensive external consultants. In our projects, we saw that especially development and innovation units had colleagues with strong facilitation skills who were the first to go out to organisation and support individuals and teams with training and competence development. Sometimes it is possible to find alternative forums for learning, such as self-organised study circles. To run those, HR or development functions can provide initial support and train ambassadors, which in turn then help spread knowledge by initiating such study circles. They can be run as extended lunch conversations to make them more easily accessible to colleagues who feel pressured by time.

Bringing collective leadership and a wider systemic transformation to senior roles

From supporting individuals and teams with strengthening their self and shared leadership skills, some HR practitioners found ways to advance the larger topic of systemic transformation and the distributed leadership needed to support it among top management. In one organisation, the senior management team began discussing transformational leadership after being exposed to guest speakers at their annual leadership forums facilitated by HR. Evaluations showed a measurable shift in awareness: managers who had been exposed to the concepts once returned a year later, noticeably more prepared to engage with them.

Afterwards, transformational leadership was integrated into shorter and more regular monthly leadership sessions as a theme, inviting internal and external speakers to highlight different aspects of leading during transformation. Not every manager arrives convinced. In early sessions, some participants were visibly dismissive of what they were hearing, regarding it as another management trend. Changing how people understand leadership requires repeated exposure over time, as well as concrete examples demonstrating the difference it makes, and enough time for skepticism to give way to genuine curiosity.

Rebuilding HR processes from the inside

The point HR practitioners have been raising in our project is that lasting change requires making changes to the systems themselves, not just the programming around them. HR processes–the ones that govern how people are recruited, welcomed, developed, and evaluated–encode assumptions about how organisations work. If those processes are built on mechanistic top-down principles that remain unchanged, they will undo whatever the training and workshops are trying to build.

In recruitment, some organisations from our projects are rethinking what they need to look for in new employees and how interviews should be structured. This is so that the candidates who understand and can operate in more participatory environments and self-managed teams are more likely to be identified and selected. In onboarding, some organisations have integrated practices related to self-leadership and shared leadership, or built transformation thinking into how both new employees and new managers are introduced to the organisation.

The performance conversation process is also under examination in some places. The traditional structure relies heavily on manager-to-employee feedback, which reflects a hierarchical assumption: the person above you knows best what you have achieved and what you should develop. This is worth questioning, as the colleagues who work alongside each other daily often have richer insight into each other’s contributions than a manager who is responsible for many people and further removed from the day-to-day work. Moving towards more collective feedback practices–where peers give each other input regularly rather than waiting for a formal annual conversation– would change not just the format but the underlying relationship between accountability and leadership.

Transforming the HR function

Some HR practitioners in our projects acknowledge that supporting systemic transformation from hierarchies towards more participation and collective forms of leadership demands changes in how we understand HR as a support function. The traditional HR role is oriented towards top-down policy and standardisation of HR processes, often delivering finished answers on how things should be done. In a global world where the public sector must operate in a fast-paced, complex, and ever-changing environment, the role of HR is evolving. HR needs to learn how to hold space for tough questions and conversations, build systems that support reflection and experimentation, facilitate collective processes adjusted to specific needs and contexts, and build networks of people across organisational boundaries rather than only supporting vertical relationships within them.

The capabilities HR practitioners in our projects consider most important for them to develop in the future are facilitation, organisational design thinking oriented towards systemic logic rather than hierarchy, and a learning mindset that treats failure as information rather than as something to be avoided. People analytics and the use of AI tools are also crucial. These technologies will increasingly help HR understand both the bigger picture of the whole organisation within its larger ecosystem and the specific needs of individuals and teams.

To those considering taking a similar path, the HR professionals in our projects offer this advice: Start small. Pilot things. Do not wait for perfect conditions or full organisational buy-in before beginning. Lobby upward without giving up when you meet resistance, because resistance is a normal part of introducing anything genuinely new. Find colleagues and mentors who can help you carry the weight of the work and make sense of what you are learning. Accept that the change you are working towards will not happen overnight. Sustaining the effort requires recognising and celebrating even small progress made along the way. The goal is working towards an organisation that has developed the capacity to function well while change is the normal condition, not something that occasionally disrupts a stable baseline. Building that capacity is ultimately what HR is for, they advise.