#135 - Transforming Bureaucracy into Software Platforms - with Jos De Blok

About this episode

Jos De Blok discusses transforming bureaucracy into software platforms and the principles behind Buurtzorg's success in self-managed organizations.

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…

People in this episode

Host: Boundaryless SRL

Guest: Jos De Blok

Topics covered

• self-management
• bureaucracy
• healthcare
• leadership
• software platforms
• community-based organizations

Keywords

• self-managed organizations
• Buurtzorg
• leadership
• bureaucracy
• community healthcare
• Net Promoter Score
• horizontal dialogue

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Buurtzorg

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