Sergio G. Caredda

Senior HR Director, Global Functions, Campari Group

A Shift in the Organisational Landscape

In today’s rapidly evolving business environment, organisations are under increasing pressure to remain competitive while also addressing growing social, technological, and environmental expectations. Traditional corporate structures—rigid hierarchies, fixed roles, and efficiency-driven processes—were designed for an era of predictability. They are now fundamentally misaligned with the pace, complexity, and unpredictability of the world around us.

The last few years have brought this tension into sharp relief. From global pandemics to geopolitical shocks, from digital disruption to climate crises, businesses are waking up to the limits of legacy models. Leaders are discovering that agility, resilience, and trust are not outcomes of command-and-control mechanisms—they are the result of intentional choices, system design, and cultural coherence.

At the same time, the rise of technology—from AI to automation to platform models—requires businesses to constantly reconfigure their operations and capabilities. Organisations that once thrived by doing one thing well must now become multipurpose, multidisciplinary ecosystems. In this context, the question becomes not just “how do we stay efficient?” but “how do we stay coherent as we evolve?”

What’s emerging in response is the rise of the Intentional Organisation. These organisations are not just reacting to change; they are proactively shaping themselves to be fit for purpose, values-driven, and aligned from the inside out. Rather than rely on episodic transformation, they embed learning, alignment, and adaptability into the core of how they operate. They are guided not just by quarterly metrics but by clarity of purpose, a commitment to people, and an awareness of systemic impact.

The current scenario is giving striking evidence. Political polarisation in several countries has backfired companies that had modelled parts of their social policies to trending topics (Diversity and Inclusion, Corporate and Social Responsibility, Economic Solidarity) without strong internal roots to operationalisation of values in behaviours. Yet the same level of tensions is affecting corporations that seemed to align to the cost-optimisation playbook of externalisation, outsourcing, offshoring. Companies created a coherent inside-out story line, that is now being challenged by political and societal pressure. As these organisations try to react, they will find immediately challenged by the effect of trying to establish congruence mechanisms with a world that is polarized.

In a world of uncertainty, the Intentional Organisation doesn’t promise control—it offers congruence. It integrates purpose, people, and systems into a dynamic whole. It offers an alternative to reactive change management: one grounded in continuous sensemaking and conscious design. It is not just a model—it is a mindset. And that makes all the difference.

What Makes an Organisation Intentional?

An Intentional Organisation does not emerge by accident. It is the product of a deliberate, reflective, and values-aligned approach to organisation design. It begins with a clear understanding of why the organisation exists—its purpose—and builds all structures, systems, and behaviours in service of that purpose. The goal is not perfection, but coherence.

Four characteristics are commonly found in Intentional Organisations:

1. Purpose-Driven: They are grounded in a meaningful reason for being, beyond just profit. This purpose is not confined to a poster on the wall—it is woven into strategy, operations, customer experience, and employee engagement.
2. Systemically Congruent: Intentional Organisations align their internal architecture—strategy, structure, culture, governance, and processes—so that each element reinforces the others. This creates a sense of organisational integrity and clarity.
3. Human-Centric: People are not seen as mere resources but as co-creators of value. These organisations prioritise wellbeing, inclusion, and autonomy, creating conditions for people to thrive.
4. Learning-Oriented: Change is not a one-off project. Intentional Organisations cultivate learning loops, feedback mechanisms, and the psychological safety necessary for adaptation and innovation.

These features allow the organisation to remain stable in its values, while flexible in its operations—a dual capacity critical for the times we live in.

So, think of the Intentional Organisation as a living system. It breathes, evolves, and adapts. Unlike rigid bureaucracies, it does not resist change—it absorbs and learns from it. Intentionality means that every policy, every platform, every team structure is examined through the lens of purpose and values.

One powerful example of this is Patagonia. The outdoor apparel company has embedded environmental stewardship into its business model. From sourcing materials to shaping corporate governance, every decision is guided by a mission to protect the planet. Employees are empowered to act on these values, and the brand’s reputation reflects this consistency.

Other companies, like Buurtzorg in the Netherlands, show that intentionality works even in complex, regulated environments like healthcare. Buurtzorg’s self-managed teams deliver high-quality home care while maintaining flat hierarchies, simple IT systems, and strong client relationships. Their model has been replicated globally—not because of a massive marketing push, but because of its coherence.

These examples show that intentionality is scalable. It is not limited to startups or idealistic outliers. It is a strategic capability that can be cultivated at any stage of an organisation’s life.

The Building Blocks: The Organisational Evolution Framework

The Organisation Evolution Framework, offers a comprehensive model for understanding and managing organisation design and transformation. It identifies key components, including Business Models, Strategy, Operating Models, Organizational Models, Leadership Models, Purpose, Corporate Culture, and the Organization Ecosystem. Each component plays a critical role in the organization’s success, not just alone but in a constantly evolving, dynamic relationship with the each other component.

The elements of the component exist in every organisation. Formalisation is not a required element. In analysing an organisation it is actually rare that all these elements are fully defined and documented. They are all however traceable from a number of Visible Artefacts that can be observed and described.

Each component of the model can be broken down to different building blocks, that all together assembled constitute the fabric of the organisation. Available literature often attributes these building blocks to various components (an example is “capabilities”, seen often as elements of Business Models, Operating Models or Organisation Models). The taxonomy that I propose is therefore subjective. What I tried to do is however to identify, for each component, the Critical Element: i.e. that building block that, if inconsistent with the rest of the organisation construct, can create issues on the overall effectiveness of the organisation design.

Effectiveness of an organisation is therefore the result of the consistency of all components of the model. Which can be traced, to its minimum, to the consistency of all critical elements of the organisation.

The framework can be further utilised to explore two very important dynamics:

1. Intentionality vs. Emergence in design, i.e. how many of its components are intentionally designed vs. emerging as result of the interactions of the organisational system.
2. Consistency vs. Congruence across the components, i.e. how many of the building blocks have similar, consistent patterns of behaviors vs. how much the entire system is intentionally designed as harmoniously congruent towards design principles, values and objectives.

I’ve dedicated a lot of effort in analysing each component, as there are plenty of theories or models covering each one of them. Live on my blog you can for exampkle find a collection of more than 200 Leadership Models. As with all models, there is nothing that is inherently “right” or “wrong”. It is the relationship between the components that matter. And the continuous flow between consistency and congruence that makes the difference between an Intentional Organisation and any other organisation.

The Organisational Evolution Framework: A Visual Map displaying all the
Organisation Design Building Blocks

Defining Intentional Design

Traditional Organisation Design has been focused on achieving consistency across critical elements. You would traditionally define a strategy, identify capabilities, and define a coherent organisational model, often benchmarking similar organisations. The problem with consistency is that it creates an inside focused perspective. Way too often leaders fail to identify external change drivers.

The alternative to this is in Intentionally and Deliberately Designing an organisation built for resilience and flexibility. If this might be easier at the inception stage of the organisation itself, it also needs to be translated into a continuous intentional design process that trains the organisation in always Listening to the Environment, making sense of change, and adapting when and where is needed across all its organisation dimension.

When people feel comfortable and confident, when we understand how things work, when we can move through the organisation and the ecosystem seamlessly without needing to learn or figure it out, then we’ve reached a status of Intentional Design.

That’s why Intentional Organisations need to be very much linked to the capability of continuous transformation and persistent change. As they have leadersh capable of continuously practicing intentional design.

Intentional Design is an Act of Deliberate and Purposeful Leadership .

The Intentional Organisation vs. Traditional Organisational Archetypes.

I’m often asked to assess how an Intentional Organisation relates to more Traditional Organisations. The answer is not easy, because albeit we can trace an “archetype” of the traditional organisation (based on hierarchy, division of labor and bureucrac y), there is no such a “model” for an Intentional Organisation. Actually, defining a static “model” to be applied and implement an Intentional Organisation concept, would completely miss the point.

However, we can find a few traits that can help describe a different approach to various elements of the organisation. Let’s see them recapped into the below table:

	Traditional Organisational Archtetype	Intentional Organisation
Purpose	Profit-focused or compliance-driven	Clear, meaningful, and integrated
Structure	Hierarchical, fixed roles	Networked, dynamic teams, skill based
Culture	Emergent, reactive	Designed, aligned with values
Leadership	Top-down authority	Distributed, facilitative, stewardship
Decision Making	Centralised, approval-based	Decentralised, principle-guided
Metrics	Output-based, lagging indicators	Impact-based, learning-oriented
Change	Episodic transformation	Ongoing adaptation
Governance	Control-focused, bureaucratic	Enabling, transparent, trust-based
Technology	Imposing, guiding compliance, workflow based.	Enabling, adapting, delivering value.

This comparison is not to suggest one model is “bad” and the other “good.” Rather, it highlights some common directions of shift.

Can a traditional organisation be intentional then? The answer, to the surprise of many readers, is yes. After all, the bureaucracy described for the first time by Max Weber when analysing the Prussian army, was a model intimately congruent with the objectives it had set forward. The engineering approach proposed by Henry Ford was fully congruent with the value creation pattern of a company that wanted to provide cheap cars to all Americans.

Things went wrong when those specific experiments have been taken out of context and transformed in benchmarks or off-the-shelf designs for other organisations, with a copy and paste attitude that has created rifts across organisational components, instead of organic congruence.

Until the external environment has been stable, these rifts have only seldom produced big issues. But with recent changes, the capability of the traditional archetype to answer the incessant adaptability demand have fallen short. Creating a path for new experimentations.

And an important learning. Whenever we take some design elements that have been successful in a company, and we try to “copy and paste” them into another org, we risk repeating the same mistake.

From Vision to Design: Building Blocks of Intentionality

How does one go about building an Intentional Organisation? The answer lies in rethinking key elements of organisation design—from purpose and structure to leadership and culture. At the heart of intentional design is the discipline of asking “why” before asking “how.” Why do we work in this way? Why is this process designed like this? Why are these behaviours important?

Start with Purpose
Purpose is not a communications exercise. It is the moral and strategic foundation of the organisation. A clear and authentic purpose creates alignment, motivates employees, and guides decisions in moments of ambiguity. Yet be careful: too much of the literature around purpose tries to give a connotation of the purpose as a universal moral judgement separating “good” from “bad” organisations. Although each of us can apply its personal moral metrics in evaluating this, it is a fact that several very successful organisational structures possess a Purpose that can be considered immoral to many of us. An example in point is Beretta, one of the oldest weapon’s factories in the world, its origin dating back to 1526. It’s a company that has had a strong purpose that ensured continuity for multiple centuries, with a strong grounding into local communities. Yet some would perceive it’s business not aligned to their personal values or beliefs. Intentionality is not a moral absolute.

Design Deliberately
Rather than inheriting legacy structures, Intentional Organisations design their operating models consciously. They choose decentralised structures where autonomy is needed, or cross-functional networks when speed and innovation are required. They define clear roles and accountabilities—not based on power or history, but based on strategic relevance.
This reflective discipline allows for organisational self-awareness. And from self-awareness comes better design. For example, when a company realises its formal org chart contradicts its desired culture of collaboration, it can intentionally restructure to support more cross-functional work. When it recognises that performance metrics drive unhealthy competition, it can redesign its incentives to reward learning and teamwork.

Balance Consistency and Context
While consistency is valued, congruence is more important. This means applying shared principles flexibly, adapting to context while maintaining alignment. A global framework might set the values, but allow for cultural variation in how they are expressed.

Build a Living Culture
Culture is not static. It is shaped by daily interactions, systems, and leadership behaviours. Intentional Organisations map their culture using tools like the Culture Canvas to make it visible and designable. They nurture psychological safety, model values, and create rituals that reinforce identity.

Foster Distributed Leadership
Leadership is no longer the job of a few individuals at the top. In complex systems, leadership must be distributed across levels and roles. This involves developing leadership capability, creating space for shared decision-making, and encouraging initiative.

Technology and Measurement: Designed with Intentionality

Too many transformations across companies are technology driven and input focused. Executives fall in love with the last technology trend, and decide to implement to their organisation, that ultimately must adapt to the software.

One domain where Intentional Design really makes a visible difference is the adoption of new technology. Intentional Organisations make mindful choices about which technologies to use, how they are implemented, and what behaviours they support. They prioritise platforms that enable transparency, collaboration, and learning. Importantly, they assess the human impact of tech—not just the efficiency gains.

Measurement, likewise, is approached as a form of strategic storytelling. Instead of merely tracking output, Intentional Organisations measure alignment: Are we doing what we said we’d do? Are we progressing toward our purpose? Tools like OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) help align goals across teams while maintaining flexibility. Meanwhile, ESG metrics provide visibility into environmental and social performance.

Technology as an Enabler
Technology is a double-edged sword in modern organisations. It can amplify connection, creativity, and insight—or it can overwhelm, isolate, and distract. Intentional Organisations approach technology as a servant to their purpose, not as a driver of it. They evaluate whether a tool supports collaboration, autonomy, and alignment.

The rise of remote and hybrid work has made digital infrastructure central to the employee experience. Tools like Slack, Notion, Miro, and Zoom have reshaped collaboration—but their success depends on intentional norms. For instance, GitLab’s all-remote team uses handbooks, async workflows, and documentation to make collaboration inclusive and efficient. By contrast, many organisations struggle with tool overload and unclear expectations.

In a moment where the technology is going through yet another revolution, with AI, it is really important to understand a few principles that can make technology adoption more “intentional”.

1. Augment human capabilities—automate low-value tasks but preserve space for creativity and empathy and added value human ingenuity.
2. Support transparency—ensure information is accessible and searchable and siloed mentality is not reflected in data design
3. Enhance learning—use analytics not just to track, but to learn
4. Fit culture and workflow—introduce tools that reflect how your teams actually operate, and extend these to stakeholders outside the organisation, where possible, to create real platforms of value creation.

Technology becomes a strategic advantage when it aligns with values and design—not when it dictates them.

Metrics that Matter
Metrics are not neutral. What we measure shapes behaviour. While financial indicators remain essential, Intentional Organisations broaden their scorecard. They track employee experience, social impact, learning velocity, and sustainability. Interface, the global flooring company, famously adopted a metric to measure carbon negativity—then aligned R&D and operations to meet it.

Measuring what really matters and not just what can be measured is an important attribute to nurture intentionality. Too often companies are engulfed by reports, scorecard, indicators that have nothing to do with real value creation, but rather focus on compliance, benchmarks, comparability. The ripple effect of this impacts key process that often dictate the rhythm of company’s life (think budget), despite rarely aligning with context and value creation.

How many roles in a traditional organisation can really measure how they influence the organisational performance? Despite this, we have all lived in the hope that our incentive scheme would drive the performance of the organisation. But we measure outputs, not impact.

Measuring what matters means reflecting strongly on impact measures, focusing on far fewer metrics, but more consistent with the overall Value Creation patterns, and aligned with each driver lifecycle.

Culture and Stewardship: The Glue of Intentionality

Culture in organisations is often described as “the way we do things around here.” But in the Intentional Organisation, culture is more than an emergent pattern—it’s a designable system. It is shaped by the choices leaders make every day: what is rewarded, what is ignored, what is tolerated.

In practical terms, culture becomes visible through rituals, language, symbols, decision-making norms, and informal networks. Intentional Organisations actively map their cultural traits using frameworks like the Culture Canvas or Edgar Schein’s levels of culture. These tools help surface invisible assumptions and align behaviours with declared values.

For example, if innovation is a declared value, yet failure is punished, the culture sends mixed signals. Intentional design means aligning recognition systems, learning opportunities, and even physical workspaces with cultural aspirations.

Leadership is particularly influential in shaping culture. Micro-behaviours—such as how leaders handle feedback or uncertainty—send strong cultural signals. That’s why intentionality requires that leaders not only articulate values but embody them. The best cultures are not the most fun or the most polished—they are the most aligned and coherent.

This is why Leadership in the Intentional Organisation is not about control—it’s about stewardship. As complexity rises, the role of a leader shifts from being the “answer giver” to being a facilitator of collective intelligence. This requires humility, emotional intelligence, and a commitment to lifelong learning.

I chose to use the concept of stewardship also because it solves some of the intrinsic issues with the word leadership. It is too often associated with a “positional status” and it is abused as a managerial concept.

Stewardship is about accompanying towards a direction, it’s about being a knot in a network, not about being at the apex of an organisation. And implies a few characteristics that can be applied independently from the leadership model that the individual organisation embodies:

1. Self-awareness – Understanding one’s own values, biases, and behavioural patterns.
2. Networking capability – Building trust, listening deeply, and resolving conflict constructively.
3. Systemic thinking – Seeing the organisation as a living system and making decisions that consider interdependencies and long-term impact.

Intentional Organisations invest in stewardship or distributed leadership by creating learning pathways, coaching cultures, and peer-led development initiatives. They flatten hierarchies not just to save costs, but to unleash intelligence. In doing so, they cultivate the kind of leadership needed for the future—not dominant, but developmental.

Building Governance in the Intentional Organisation

Governance is often the most overlooked element of organisation design. Yet in an Intentional Organisation, it plays a vital role in aligning autonomy with accountability. Traditional governance models rely on centralised decision-making, formal approvals, and rigid escalation paths. These systems may prevent chaos, but they also stifle creativity and slow down innovation.

Intentional governance flips the script. It decentralises authority while providing clear guardrails. Decision-making rights are distributed based on expertise and proximity to impact, not rank. Cross-functional teams operate under shared principles. Escalations are replaced by peer reviews, advisory groups, or consensus protocols.

For example, companies inspired by Holacracy or Sociocracy use consent-based decision-making, where proposals move forward unless there is a reasoned objection. Others adopt a RACI model (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) but update it to reflect real team dynamics, not just formal reporting lines.

Good governance in intentional systems is lightweight, transparent, and trusted. It creates clarity without control. And it ensures that freedom does not lead to fragmentation.

The Ongoing Practice of Intentionality

Intentionality is not a fixed destination. It is a mindset and a practice. Organisations that commit to it must embrace continuous reflection and redesign. The environment will change. New challenges will emerge. What remains constant is the need for coherence between purpose, design, and action.

To sustain this, Intentional Organisations embed feedback loops. They run regular retrospectives. They listen actively—to employees, customers, communities. They treat misalignment not as failure, but as insight. This makes the organisation not just resilient, but regenerative.

In other words, practicing intentionality requires infrastructure. Leaders must create spaces where sensemaking is normalised. Retrospectives, design sprints, and internal hackathons are some of the methods used to ensure ongoing alignment. Culture surveys, listening tools, and shadowing programs help identify blind spots between intention and experience.

An effective way to maintain intentionality is through organisational rituals—recurring practices that reinforce purpose and values. For example, some teams begin weekly meetings by revisiting their mission. Others close projects with learning retrospectives that become inputs to future planning. These rituals turn abstract values into everyday actions.

Moreover, leadership must be willing to be challenged. Intentional Organisations invite dissent, encourage upward feedback, and treat learning as a strategic asset. As a result, they become more resilient—not because they avoid failure, but because they grow from it.

Intentionality is the opposite of autopilot. It demands presence, care, and courage.

Final Word: Design the Organisation the Future Needs

We stand at a crossroads in the history of business. The old models are no longer sufficient. But the new ones are still being shaped. As leaders, we have a choice: to replicate patterns of the past or to design with intention.

The demand for intentionality has never been greater. As stakeholders ask harder questions—about equity, climate, trust, and dignity—organisations must become more than replicas of other machines. They must become communities of purpose and value creation for all their multiple stakeholders. That means turning values into operating systems, and principles into practice.

The Intentional Organisation is not a luxury. It is a necessity. It enables performance, attracts talent, builds trust, and earns legitimacy. It’s about creating uniqueness where we create value, avoiding the “me-too” model that too many are selling around. It’s about right-sizing to our ambitions, and constantly evolving to necessities of our customers. It’s about delivering long-term value to the shareholders and constant motivation to all employees. It’s about delivering innovation at every turn, while constantly challenging with “do we need to do this”. It’s about being perceived as “congruent” from the outside in. Your service, your product, reflecting your customer’ expectations.

How to do this? Here I outline a simple path, that in many ways is not dissimilar to many types of strategic or transformational interventions. With one big caveat, this is not a single initiative, but rather an entire mindset that constantly permeates the entire organisation. So, think of the following as a “recipe”, but where the ingredients do not necessarily need to be added in a specific sequence, and quantities will simply depend on the final result you want to obtain and your context.

Ingredient 1: Discovery and Diagnosis

• Map your current organisational design: structure, culture, systems, and leadership, using the Organisation Evolution Framework as a reference point.
• Identify any misalignments between declared elements and lived experience by employees and stakeholders.
• Use tools like the Culture Canvas, Strategy Canvas, stakeholder mapping etc. to visualise insights.

Ingredient 2: Purpose and Principles Clarification

• Identify what Value means for your organisation.
• Revisit or co-create your purpose. Why do you exist? Describing it into a statement might help, although alone does not guarantee success.
• Define principles that will guide design decisions—e.g., transparency, trust, autonomy.

Ingredient 3: Prototyping and Experimentation

• Identify areas with the greatest tension or opportunity (e.g., decision-making, meetings, feedback) or where value creation is unclear.
• Launch micro-experiments—safe-to-fail pilots with built-in learning loops.
• Document and share insights across teams.

Ingredient 4: Capture Emergence

• Designing all components in all details at pace is impossible, and probably useless. Therefore, exploit the characteristics of emergence of every system and the environment and identify value creation patterns.
• Build listening skills for early warnings and weak signals.
• Adopt value creating patterns independently from their origin.

Ingredient 5: Systemic Integration

• Translate successful experiments into formal practices, supported by updated policies and leadership norms where necessary.
• Embed emergent practices with the same level of formalisation.
• Align incentives, recognition, and technology with the new design.
• Train managers as designers and coaches, not just controllers.

Ingredient 6: Continuous Evolution

• Establish regular review cycles to revisit alignment and learning.
• Celebrate what works, reflect on what doesn’t, and adapt in response.
• Build intentionality into onboarding, performance, and strategy processes.

Intentional Organisations treat change as a living practice—not a one-time fix.

A Call to Action: Be an Intentional Designer

We are no longer in an era where change is occasional or optional. The future of organisations is being shaped now—in boardrooms, project teams, product labs, and every conversation that happens in front of the watercooler. This is the most intriguing aspect of the concept of Intentional Design. Every person in the organisation can contribute to it. And it all starts by stopping and asking yourself a few questions.

1. Is the process I am trying to improve at all necessary?
2. Is that vacancy in my department really needed?
3. Do I really need a team to deliver the value that the organisation asks me?
4. Why are we giving this service to our customers this way? Is there something I can do to improve the value that the customer perceives through it?
5. Is the project I have been assigned to really aligned to the value creation patterns of this organisation?
6. Is there a way I can better utilize the resources I am given?
7. How do I develop my skills to build future capabilities that are useful for my organisation?
8. What type of role-model am I towards my colleagues?
9. What can I learn from the project that I just concluded? How do I embed this into the organisation?
10. What’s your intentional question?

A trait we have not discussed so far about Intentional Organisations, is that their capability to stimulate self-awareness and reflections often creates a stronger sense of ownership and commitment across all employees. This is vital, because intentional design becomes a community effort and not just a choice of a few specialists or leaders.

As your organisation adventures into a new transformation, the question is not whether your organisation will change. It is whether that change will be intentional. You may design a model for the future, but the key issue how you implement this in practice. This is going to be the result of specialists’ effort in a few domains, and a continuous flow of individual nudges that constantly steer the course of each action in the organisation.

Intentional Organisations are not perfect. But they are in the present and ready for the Future. They actively live in their context and constantly interact with it. They ask better questions. They adapt without losing their soul. They hold themselves accountable not only to profit, but to the value they create for all stakeholders.

And they are built by leaders—at every level—who choose to intentionally design their paths, not drift.

If this article leaves you with one message, let it be this: the future will not be inherited—it will be designed. And every meeting, every role, every decision is a chance to make that future more intentional.

That choice is yours.

Case in Point: Netflix’s Intentional Operating Model

Netflix is a leading example of an organisation that has embedded intentionality into its DNA. Rather than follow conventional wisdom, Netflix chose to build an operating model based on trust, radical transparency, and personal responsibility.

Their famous Culture Deck, widely shared in the business world, is not a marketing gimmick but a lived document.

Netflix’s culture is rooted in the belief that people perform best when they’re trusted, empowered, and held to high expectations. This belief permeates every aspect of their operating model—from talent management to strategic decision-making. Managers at Netflix act more as context providers than controllers. Instead of approval hierarchies, employees are trusted to make decisions aligned with company goals. The assumption is that great people make great decisions when they are given clear information and accountability.

Their approach to feedback and transparency is also instructive. Netflix encourages candid feedback at all levels, fostering a culture where issues are surfaced quickly and openly. Regular “360” reviews are not tied to compensation, but to development and learning. By separating performance management from punitive frameworks, Netflix creates a feedback culture that builds trust and speeds up learning.

Their Talent Density model, their rewards strategy and their “up or out” model (with high severance packages) seemed at odd with the above. In reality, it helped them build a congruent model inside and outside, that helped them also face business uncertainties.

Even in highly competitive and fast-paced industries, Netflix shows that a principles-based, intentional approach can outperform rigid bureaucracies. Their continual success in adapting to streaming, global content production, and evolving consumer expectations demonstrates how intentionality fuels adaptability.

Importantly, Netflix adapts its organisation design over time. As they expanded globally, they rethought content development, regional empowerment, and even organisational norms to reflect cultural diversity. Their approach is not rigid—it’s principled and adaptable. This commitment to coherence over control has enabled them to remain innovative, responsive, and aligned with their mission to entertain the world.

By Sergio Caredda