The Shift · 3 to 6 June 2027 · In nature, the Netherlands
AI is changing how companies can be organized. A gathering with festival soul for founders and leaders building the next kind of company.
Rooted in nature, powered by AI.
Through AI, a shift in how companies are organized is happening, whether we act or not.We can shape it, or be shaped by it.
For two thousand years, moving information meant marching it up and down a chain of command. Hierarchy was the workaround for slow information. AI has lifted that constraint, and every company now stands at the same fork in the road.
On the first road, AI optimizes the old pyramid. The middle layer is replaced by agents, decisions run faster from the top, and the people at the bottom do what the system tells them.
On the second road, the same tools help us build something alive: small, trusted groups that move fast toward something they believe in, kept in sync by AI underneath, with people at the creative edge.
If we do nothing, we end up on the first road. The second one has to be built on purpose.
The Shift is for the people who want to take the second road and work out together what it takes. Underneath sits an older question: how should human beings organize, now that we can choose?
You know the feeling: good people, full calendars, and still the energy leaks away in meetings about meetings. The companies that move now are the ones where people know what they want to happen, and trust each other enough to make it real.
A company still has to earn its living. What is changing is how it gets there. The shouting boss has mostly left the modern company; the pyramid has not. Teal, Holacracy and self-management were early answers to the complexity of large organizations. They did not work everywhere, and much of what they asked for still has to happen: clear, written ways of working that everyone understands.
What is new is that those rules no longer depend on everyone reading them. Written down, they become part of the system itself, guardrails that let a company run at scale. A few companies already work this way. Most have not started.
Nobody has the full answer yet, and with technology moving this fast, nobody will find it alone. So we think it through together: what the operating system of the next company looks like, and what happens to the humans inside it.
What stays human is agency: knowing what you want to happen, and having the trust, courage and taste to make it real with others.
employees worldwide is engaged at work, the lowest level since 2020.
Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026of the workday goes to coordination: searching, switching apps, status meetings.
Asana, Anatomy of Work Index 2023Organizational culture and support explain about twice as much of what AI delivers as individual skill does.
Microsoft & LinkedIn, Work Trend Index 2026People belong at the creative edge. Companies are organisms with a purpose of their own. The best ones serve both.
Nature has organized itself this way for a very long time. We want the same in our companies, and AI will help us get there.
Small groups work like cells. Cells join into larger parts, and the parts grow into one body with a shared, evolving purpose. You tend a company like this, listen to it, and let it change shape as it grows.
In nature, living systems coordinate on their own. Every cell knows its part, and its membrane decides what comes in and what goes out.
In human systems that coordination never happens by itself. We have to take care of it together. This is where the new tools help: they carry the information between groups, so people have time for the conversations only people can have.
How you lead on a normal Tuesday: what you decide, what you let go of, what you say out loud.
Enough trust to say what is true, decide fast and fix things early.
Growing without adding layers: many small teams, clear principles, and AI as the shared nervous system.
What the company exists for: its customers, society, the planet, and how a living company reaches that purpose more easily.
Forty people, four days, in a beautiful landscape in the Dutch countryside. The main room is a large tipi. There is a fire, long tables, music, and the best AI there is, working beside you the whole time.
We start by building one shared language, so that for four days everyone is talking about the same thing. Then the floor is open: anyone in the room can show their own company, next to the few people we invited to speak. Together we think about how to build the future for real: in a team of fifteen, and in a company of ten thousand.
And we celebrate. We eat well, walk outside, dance and sit around the fire. Joy is part of the work.
What counts is what a company gives back to the people in it: time, energy and room for the work and the life they care about.
Nature reminds us what we are alive for. Technology carries the routine, so people can do what only people can: truth, trust, attention, courage and taste.
You leave with a picture of where your company could go, and the first steps to get there: how you want people to work together, decide and trust each other, and what AI should carry for them. One experiment or a whole new setup; you choose.
Sleep outside, walk, eat food from the land, sit around the fire.
Music, dancing and fire on Saturday night.
Founders and leaders who build companies themselves look at yours with you, and you look at theirs.
AI that translates between groups, remembers what was said, and turns a conversation into a prototype before dinner.
The operating system underneath: what it carries and what it should never carry.
The inner work and the trust between people.
The structure: small groups, clear principles, how it all holds together.
Three threads run through all four days, and AI works beside us the whole time: it takes notes, connects what different groups say and helps build prototypes. Guest names follow.
Four days can start something. Changing a company takes longer, so The Shift goes on after June.
A short reflection on where you lead from, and where your company stands today.
A shared online space opens, so you arrive already connected. It stays open after June.
Understand what is changing, see your company clearly, and choose where you want to take it: one experiment or a whole new setup.
Three meetings with your small group in the 90 days after June, to put what you decided into practice in your company. Go the whole way and you are invited into the founding community of The Shift.
Want hands-on help afterwards, with the AI backbone, the organization design or the culture? Each of us offers that separately, and we will tell you openly what it costs.
Founders, CEOs, owners and leaders with real decision power, who are curious whether parts of their company are ready to be designed anew, and want to pioneer what comes next.
Companies rarely fail because they do the wrong thing. They fail because they keep doing the right thing for too long. Much of what worked until now may still work. AI is changing what is possible.
We don't arrive with finished answers. We bring our own ideas on organization design, on AI as the operating layer and on what people need to grow, and we put them on the table openly. We look for people who have spent real thought on this shift too, and who will push back on ours.
The shift happens when you take it home and change your own company.
Founders and CEOs who want to shape the future of their company actively, and look for what is ready to change now.
From B Corps, EO, YPO and family businesses: leaders who care what their company is for, and want to work on how it runs.
People who have experimented with Teal, self-management, radical autonomy or other ways of setting up a company.
A few voices where organization design, consciousness and collective intelligence meet.
How do we want to work together, now that AI lets us choose?
Each of us came to it from a different side: Loes from the inner work and trust between leaders, Claus from twenty years of designing organizations, Krys from building companies and the AI systems that run them. The Shift is where we put the three together, carried by our three companies, Inspired Advisory, p4d and startcreating.ai, and powered by The Argonauts.
We do not only talk about this. Each of us already builds AI into the way we work. Claus's firm runs on AI for about two thirds of its work today and plans to run on it completely by June: a living example of what this looks like in a company of fifteen people.
Thread: leadership & trust
Organizational psychologist and YPO forum facilitator, co-founder of The Argonauts. She helps leaders build cultures of trust and takes management teams to the place where they dare to be honest with each other.
Thread: organization design
Managing partner of p4d, an organizational development partnership. For about twenty years he has designed companies built to grow, adapt and last, and today he rebuilds his own firm around AI.
Thread: AI & systems
Founder of Inwedo, a software company he has led for nineteen years, co-creator of The Argonauts, and the person behind startcreating.ai, where founders and executives build their own AI teams. He runs his companies on the kind of system The Shift is about.
Plus a few invited guests who have already changed their own companies.
Inspired Advisory · Loes FokkerLeadership and culture work for management teams: building the trust that lets people be honest with each other and decide together.
p4d · Claus-Bernhard PakleppaAn organizational development partnership. p4d designs organizations built to grow, adapt and last, and is rebuilding itself around AI.
Where founders and executives build their own AI teams, and learn to run a company on them.
The Argonauts host The Shift. Partners follow.
Two questions: what draws you to The Shift, and where AI stands in your company. A few sentences each is enough.
We read every request ourselves and get in touch personally.
If it fits, you get your place, and the journey starts with a short reflection before June.
40 places. Request an invitation and one of us will come back to you personally.
Request an invitation