Boundaryless Conversations Podcast

By Boundaryless SRLTechnology

Boundaryless Conversations Podcast episodes

March 03#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

Episode recorded on Dec 01, 25
Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Get in touch with Boundaryless:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_
Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo

Music
Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music
43 min
February 17#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

Episode recorded on Jan 12, 26
Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Get in touch with Boundaryless:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_
Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo

Music
Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music
43 min
February 03#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

Episode recorded on Jan 09, 26
Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Get in touch with Boundaryless:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_
Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo

Music
Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music
48 min
January 20#133 - Is Another World Possible? Transition Design - with Cameron Tonkinwise
One of the leading voices in transition design for sustainability and societal change, Cameron Tonkinwise, Professor of Design Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, joins us for a deep conversation on what design must become in an era of systemic collapse.
In this episode, he speaks on why the logic that drives most businesses - efficiency, growth, and value capture- is often fundamentally at odds with what people actually want and need, and how this tension is giving rise to alternative value systems that challenge dominant capitalist structures.
We also explore the evolving role of universities as critical spaces for experimentation and sense-making, and why their ability to shape imagination, culture, and future practitioners may be more important now than ever.

As A long-time observer of how design, education, and economic systems co-evolve, Cameron brings a rare ability to connect theory with lived societal consequences.
He explores how design is both an ontological and political practice, shaping how people live, relate, and care for one another.
Drawing on decades of experience in social innovation and design education, he shows why transition is about co-creating shared visions, not delivering pre-defined solutions.
Whether you’re a designer, an educator, or someone curious about how our systems and values could evolve, this conversation is for you.

Key Highlights
👉 Design is not neutral problem-solving; it actively shapes how people live, relate, and understand what is possible.
👉 Most business models are structurally optimised for efficiency and value capture - not for meeting human or societal needs.
👉 Systemic transitions cannot be engineered, scaled, or optimised without losing their democratic and participatory core.
👉Capitalism maintains dominance by presenting itself as the only viable system, while alternative value systems and economies already exist beneath the surface.
👉 What counts as “value” is not fixed; it is produced by institutions, infrastructures, and cultural norms - and can be redesigned.
👉 Universities play a critical role as spaces where future practitioners, imaginaries, and societal norms are formed - their decline risks narrowing the futures we can collectively imagine.
👉 Designers’ unique contribution to transition lies in making change livable at the human scale, not in accelerating adoption or efficiency.

Topics /chapters
(00:00) Is Another World Possible? Transition Design - INTRO
(01:34) Introducing Cameron Tonkinwise
(03:33) Designing Transitions: From Small Interventions to Systems Change
(10:40) Technology, and the Politics of Design
(22:07) What does good design now look like?
(29:05) The Designer’s Role in Interdisciplinary Systems
(34:20) Creating new contexts for care
(49:56) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions
Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/tonkinwise-cameron

Episode recorded on Dec 18, 25
Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Get in touch with Boundaryless:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_
Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo

Music
Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music
56 min
January 06#132 - Enterprise Architecture: Selling Options for the Future, at a Cost - with Gregor Hohpe
Gregor Hohpe - one of the world’s leading voices in enterprise architecture and platform thinking, and author of ‘The Software Architect Elevator’, ‘Enterprise Integration Patterns’ and ‘Platform Strategy’- joins us to dive into how enterprise architecture is about navigating the tradeoffs needed to enable future optionality in the organization.
He reframes the architecture problem from a technical one to a practice of selling options, and unpacks why shared language and domain understanding along with strategic clarity matter more than ever now with GenAI.
In this fast approaching future GenAI no longer makes it possible to hide organisational dysfunctions, it exposes them relentlessly: the question then is what leaders and architects can do about this.

In this episode, we succeeded to bring in Gregor’s perspective on architecture as a strategic, systems-level discipline not as a technical practice.
Drawing on his experience as a long-time advisor to large organisations navigating platform transitions, we explore how to bridge strategy and implementation, and how to create coherence across silos, enabling teams to make better decisions together.
Join us as we discuss how architecture guides strategic choices and helps you build optionality.

Key Highlights
👉 Architecture can also be seen as a practice of selling options - enabling organisations to defer decisions and adapt as strategy and context evolve.
👉 Optionality always comes with a cost: more flexibility introduces greater complexity, so architects must continually balance benefits against trade-offs.
👉 Good architecture cannot be designed inside IT alone - it must be grounded in business intent, market direction, and strategic positioning.
👉 Domain understanding shouldn’t live only with data teams - it requires joint meaning-making across business, tech, and architecture.
👉 GenAI amplifies organisational dysfunction rather than fixing it - faster code and automation expose weak strategy, unclear domains, and siloed thinking.
👉 Those who work only within narrow silos are the most replaceable; future-relevant capability lies in boundary-spanning, systems thinking, and cross-domain judgment.
👉 As technology accelerates delivery, organisations must strengthen reflection, modelling, and decision-making - because the bottleneck shifts from building software to understanding what to build.
👉 Shared ontologies and domain modeling are essential for collaboration and extensibility - without them, organisations struggle to integrate partners, ecosystems, and platforms.

Topics /chapters
(00:00) Enterprise Architecture: selling Options for the Future, at a Cost - INTRO
(01:32) Introducing Gregor
(03:06) Beyond Business vs Tech
(07:35) How does organization attitude connect to its architecture?
(16:12) Designing Architecture for Strategic Coherence
(23:30) Creating Shared Ontologies
(30:22) Changing the Narrative from Transactional to Conversational
(43:47) How can organisations remain context-conscious?
(50:53) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions
Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/hohpe-gregor

Episode recorded on Dec 01, 25
Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Get in touch with Boundaryless:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_
Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo

Music
Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music
56 min
December 23, 2025#131 - The Age of Potency: How Meaning, Work, and Trust Are Being Rewritten - with Jasmine Bina
What happens when work no longer guarantees reward and time itself feels unanchored?
In this episode, Jasmine Bina - brand strategist, cultural futurist, and CEO of Concept Bureau - joins us to explore how meaning, culture, and value creation are being reshaped in societies and affecting our organisations.
Drawing on her latest work, Age of Potency, Jasmine unpacks how cultural resets have now created “vacuums” that are being filled through new forms of identity, experimentation, spirituality, and community, among others.
We discuss what this shift means for organisations and brands, why optimisation and expertise are giving way to experimentation, and how brands can play a role in helping people form new meaning systems.
This episode offers a powerful lens for understanding cultural change and why the next era of value creation will belong to those willing to engage with uncertainty.
Jasmine takes us inside her work of tracking emerging signals at the edges of society, sharing how “Exposure Therapy” - her practice and community - deliberately immerses strategic minds in unfamiliar and often overlooked cultural spaces where new forms of meaning, and the future itself, first take shape.
Together, these reflections offer a powerful perspective on brand-building as a disciplined practice - less of a formula that needs to be applied, and more of a form of training that strengthens perception, resilience, and judgment in times of deep cultural change.

Key Highlights
👉 Culture is not collapsing but reorganising, as traditional sources of meaning around work, trust, and time lose their power and create cultural “vacuums.”
👉 When work no longer guarantees reward, people begin experimenting with new identities, values, and meaning systems beyond professional success.
👉 Trust does not disappear in times of crisis - it relocates to spaces where people willingly embrace vulnerability, often outside mainstream institutions.
👉 Brands and organisations can no longer rely on optimisation and expertise; experimentation is becoming the primary way to generate new insight and value.
👉 The future of culture is already visible in people’s private lives, where latent identities and unmet desires take shape long before markets recognise them.
👉 Exposure to unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and marginal cultural spaces is essential for sensing emerging signals.
👉 Optimism is not wishful thinking but a strategic posture that enables better pattern recognition and more meaningful connections across signals.
👉 Technology does not determine the future on its own - culture bends technologies to human needs, values, and belief systems.
👉 Brands that matter in the next decade will help people navigate uncertainty by offering new narratives about what it means to live well, belong, and contribute.

Topics /chapters
(00:00) The Age of Potency: How Meaning, Work, and Trust Are Being Rewritten - Intro
(01:23) Introducing Jasmine Bina
(08:44) Organisational and Consumer Responsibilities in the Age of Potency
(12:39) Are companies prepared for the cultural shifts?
(16:10) Are organisations looking into brand textures?
(19:41) What’s the culture one can hold onto?
(22:36) The Culture of Limits
(30:30) What should we be thinking about as brands?
(34:21) How do you avoid self-fulfilling prophecies?
(43:15) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions

Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/bina-jasmine

Episode recorded on Nov 13, 25
Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Get in touch with Boundaryless:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_
Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo

Music
Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music
47 min
December 09, 2025#130 - Thinking Beyond the Existing Theories: Evolution in Liminal Times with Dave Gray
Dave Gray, acclaimed author and designer, joins us in this episode to explore how organisations can navigate profound technological and societal shifts by thinking outside their traditional theories.
With his decades of helping organisations rethink their value architectures, and his work on liminal thinking and visual frameworks, he reflects on how AI, and other fast-moving cultural changes are reshaping the very assumptions businesses operate on.
We also discuss why the biggest opportunities emerge outside a company’s existing theory, how architectural innovation differs from component optimisation, and why loosening organisational structures can create more space for play, experimentation, and discovery.
Tune in as we learn to embrace ambiguity, enable play, and help design companies that evolve with the liminal times we’re all living through.

Throughout his career, Dave has been a leading voice in helping organisations make sense of complexity. He has co-authored Gamestorming, a foundational playbook for collaborative problem-solving, and written several other seminal books that pioneered reframing organisations as adaptive, networked systems and embracing change.
In this episode, he shares his experiences from his newer ventures like the “School of the Possible”, and “Visual Frameworks”, helping us reframe our mental models and being able to “see differently,”.

Key Highlights
👉 Organisations struggle to see signals outside their existing theory, categories and mental models: ones that make them efficient but also make them blind during liminal times.
👉 Customers are constantly evolving - which means they often see shifts in value long before organisations do. Paying attention to customers is one of the most reliable ways to notice what’s changing outside your existing theory.
👉 Innovation requires the ability to visualise and hold ambiguity - letting go of familiarity to notice what doesn’t fit the current map.
👉 Architectural innovation means breaking the system into pieces and reassembling it from first principles - not just optimising components.
👉 Failure is essential - most experiments will fail, but a few (like AWS for Amazon) can redefine the complete business.
👉 Paying attention to anomalies and accidents can unlock entirely new markets.
👉 You can’t think your way into a new worldview, but you act your way into one through play, prototyping, and exploration.
👉 Looseness, redundancy, and play at the edges enable organisations to notice weak signals and adapt faster than tightly optimised systems.

Topics /chapters
(00:00) Thinking Beyond the Existing Theories: Evolution in Liminal Times
(01:30) Introducing Dave Gray
(03:57) At the Inflection Point: AI, Media, and the End of Business as Usual
(21:04) Building Constraints in Innovation
(24:38) The Outside-In Perspective for Organisation Building
(31:21) Building businesses with new theories of value
(42:48) What’s the future of customer co-creation?
(48:18) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions
Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/gray-dave

Episode recorded on Nov 13, 25
Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Get in touch with Boundaryless:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_
Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo

Music
Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music
54 min
November 25, 2025#129 - Why I Don’t Call it “Self-Management” Anymore - with Lisa Gill
Lisa Gill - a coach, facilitator, and host of the acclaimed Leadermorphosis podcast - joins us to explore the evolving world of self-managing organisations.
Drawing on over a decade of experience and examples from companies like Buurtzorg and her own work at TUFF Leadership, Lisa speaks about what makes radically decentralised organisations work: dynamic hierarchies, enabling structures, and accountability without coercion.
Drawing on lessons from allied fields such as social justice and disability justice, she emphasises that accountability is a relational practice rather than a top-down mechanism, and that true accountability requires choice, trust, and transparent communication.
This episode is packed with essential insights and practical nuggets that you can take back and reflect on, so don’t miss out.

In this episode, Lisa takes us deep into the realities of implementing self-management and radically decentralised organisations in practice.
Reflecting on the self-management movement's trajectory, she discusses the concept of the "green trap" - a common organisational sticking point - and uses it to emphasise why psychological comfort without sufficient accountability is unsustainable.
She also covers several other core topics for the future of decentralised organisations - like the five organisational systems, the importance of inner shifts, what it means to create environments where people can sit in discomfort, learn, and grow without relying on coercion, and so much more.

Key Highlights
👉 Self-managing organisations thrive on dynamic hierarchies, enabling structures, and distributed decision-making rather than rigid top-down control.
👉 Accountability works best as a relational practice grounded in choice, trust, and transparent communication, not coercion.
👉 True accountability requires freedom: individuals must be able to say no for their yes to be meaningful and fully owned.
👉 Balancing care and performance creates spaces for development where individuals and teams can grow sustainably.
👉 Psychological safety paired with challenge fosters both learning and innovation, avoiding the traps of comfort or anxiety extremes.
👉 Exposure to real consequences - like zero distance to customers - builds responsibility and encourages self-correcting behaviour.
👉 Both market performance and human-centred care can coexist when organisations prioritise autonomy, clarity, and alignment on values.
👉 Commitment-keeping and follow-through are foundational principles for self-managing, high-trust organisations.

Topics /chapters
(00:00) Why I Don’t Call it “Self-Management” Anymore - INTRO
(01:22) Introducing Lisa Gill
(03:19) Introducing Self-Management
(11:41) Radically decentralised organisations and the future of Collaboration
(19:03) Operationalizing Decentralization in Self-Managing organisations
(24:56) Learnings on Self-Reflection from Allied Industries
(30:10) What's the Future of Self-Management?
(38:22) Enabling Ecosystemic Transformation
(44:18) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions
Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/gill-lisa

Episode recorded on Oct 17, 25
Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Get in touch with Boundaryless:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_
Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo

Music
Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music
49 min
November 11, 2025#128 - The Benefits of Programmable Organizations with Spencer Graham and Nicholas Naraghi (Hats Protocol)
Spencer Graham and Nicholas Naraghi, co-founders of Hats Protocol, pioneering the design and experimentation of decentralised, programmable organisations, join us in this episode to explore how these new forms of collaboration can enable new ways to organise, govern, and create value collectively.
They discuss the future of organisational design, including how AI agents can take on roles, how frameworks and reusable templates accelerate experimentation, and why adopting different role-based “Hats” can help individuals contribute meaningfully in new, decentralised ways.
They also speak on how decentralisation can lower risk, increase system “hardness,” and improve predictability, while reflecting on what it means to distribute responsibility in a world where the boundaries of firms are increasingly fluid.
Tune in to discover a more participatory way of organising that helps solve the principal-agent problem.

Together, Spencer and Nicholas have been pioneering new ways of structuring DAOs and digital-native organisations, making roles programmable, modular, and resilient for several years now.
In their work, they bring deep experience in building DAOs, governance frameworks, and infrastructure that allow organisations to operate with greater transparency, adaptability, and distributed decision-making.
As we explore role-based structures to enable meaningful participation, we learn what it means to build adaptive systems capable of tackling complex challenges in a decentralised world.

Key Highlights
👉 Decentralised organisations reduce the cost of organising by embedding rules, roles, and incentives directly into software, minimising the need for traditional bureaucratic structures.
👉 AI agents can take on organisational roles, augmenting human capabilities and enabling more modular, scalable coordination.
👉 Lowering coordination costs increases the responsibility for individuals to participate meaningfully in organisational life.
👉 Roles within organisations can be made programmable and modular, allowing for flexible experimentation and adaptation.
👉 Reusable frameworks and templates accelerate organisational experimentation, letting groups test new coordination methods quickly.
👉 Individuals may act like “micro-organisations” with AI agents representing them, but collaboration will always remain necessary for complex problem-solving.
👉 Tokenisation and algorithmic governance allow individuals to earn ownership and rewards proportional to the value they create in an organisation.
👉 Participating in decentralised organisations requires embracing uncertainty, both in outcomes and in coordination dynamics.

Topics /chapters
(00:00) The Benefits of Programmable Organizations
(01:39) IntroducingSpencer Graham and Nicholas Naraghi (Hats Protocol)
(03:35) From DAOs to Roles: The Birth of the HATS Protocol
(10:11) The Principal-Agent Problem
(15:00) Getting Buy-In on Protocols
(22:03) Separating Tech from the Principal-Agent Problem
(30:31) When Organizing Becomes Cheap: What New Organizations Will Emerge?
(40:43) Uncertainty with Autonomy
(46:05) Will “Organising” become a necessary skill?
(49:05) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions
Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/protocol-Hats

Episode recorded on Oct 01, 2025
Find out more about the show and the research at Boundaryless at https://boundaryless.io/resources/podcast/

Get in touch with Boundaryless:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/boundaryless_
Website: https://boundaryless.io/contacts
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/boundaryless-pdt-3eo

Music
Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music
55 min
October 28, 2025#127 - Organising as World-Building: How AI & Platforms unlock Human Flourishing with Lee Bryant
A thought leader and pioneer in platforms and ecosystems, partner at Speed Invest and an instructor at Reforge, Sameer Singh joins us on this episode to reintroduce the world of platforms, challenge the idea of AI as a platform shift, and talk about what makes products truly memorable in a market over-proliferated with choices. He helps us “Separate signals from the noise,” and shares his practical insights into what makes today’s startups investable: from founders with missionary zeal to data-informed decision-making, and so much more. For anyone curious about the intersection of AI-enabled consumer experiences and the evolving world of platforms, this episode is a must-listen.
Sameer brings deep expertise in platforms with a sharp focus on scalable distribution models, retention, and core problem-solving.
In this episode, he discusses his recent investments, framing generative AI as a powerful layer within the technology stack that can unlock new forms of multiplayer interactions and creative experiences.As always, he shares practical insights for entrepreneurs navigating the evolving landscape of marketplaces, social products, and what the future looks like for AI-enabled consumer experiences.

Key Highlights
👉 Organisations are evolving beyond rigid hierarchies as transaction costs fall and capabilities expand.
👉 Building a resilient organisation requires focusing on platforms that enable value creation, not just managing people.
👉 The “platform philosophy” allows organisations to extend beyond formal boundaries, inviting external talent and partners to participate.
👉 World-building in organisational design creates a compelling culture and environment that attracts talent, fosters engagement, and drives innovation.
👉 Automation, orchestration, and composability can empower employees to focus on high-value work rather than repetitive tasks.
👉 Leaders need to act as architects of the workplace and navigators of uncertainty, rather than bureaucratic monitors.
👉 Mapping organisational capabilities and continuously developing them is essential for strategic advantage, especially in knowledge-based and customer-facing work.
👉 Agentic AI and other emerging technologies can become subsidised enablers, helping organisations build “machines that create machines.”
👉 Employees can act as distributed designers: automating repetitive work and contributing to the evolution of the organisational platform.

Topics /chapters
(00:00) Organising as World-Building: How AI & Platforms unlock Human Flourishing - Intro
(01:37) Introducing Lee Bryant
(03:10) Thinking about Organisational Design from the edge
(13:48) The Agent and Human Interaction
(20:17) Composing Capabilities Across Boundaries
(29:42) Balancing Humanity and Automation: Rethinking AI in organisations
(36:04) Rethinking the idea of an organisation as transaction costs reduce
(42:17) Building platforms that enable Value: Rethinking an organisation’s Core
(51:24) Breadcrumbs and Suggestions

Remember that you can always find transcripts and key highlights of the episode on our website: https://www.boundaryless.io/podcast/bryant-lee

Episode recorded on Oct 2, 2025
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Music
Music from Liosound / Walter Mobilio. Find his portfolio here: https://blss.io/Podcast-Music
58 min