Radical leadership without hierarchy

We think there is a particular kind of pressure in the air at the moment.

Shrinking budgets. Bloated agency models. Teams on the brink of burnout. Founders and Leadership teams pulled into every decision.

And yet the default response is often the same.
More layers. More sign-off. More control.

On Friday 27th March, we are opening our doors for a session with leaders and ambitious SME owners who suspect this moment calls for something braver.

It will be a candid, evidence-led conversation about what happens when you deliberately remove hierarchy and still expect high performance.

Joining us is Susanna Dinnage, former MD and Global President at Discovery, Animal Planet, Channel 5 & MTV Networks. She brings the perspective of large-scale corporate leadership and will challenge our self-managed model head on.

We will share, in practical detail:

• How we implemented a 4.5-day working week without compromising outcomes
• Why we removed traditional line managers and what replaced them
• How we built a high-performance culture without relying on hierarchy
• How decisions get made when founders are not the bottleneck
• Why we chose radical transparency, including financial transparency, and what changed as a result

We will also talk about what did not land as planned. The experiments that fell flat and the uncomfortable moments.

You will hear how self-management freed up founder time. How we set clear standards. How we deal with underperformance when there is no one hiding behind a job title.

In short, how autonomy and accountability can co-exist without slipping into chaos or complacency.

There will be space for questions throughout. If you are weighing up cultural risk, operational complexity, or simply wondering whether this could realistically work in your business, this is a room for honesty and being curious.

This session is for SME leaders & buisness owners who are exploring progressive ways of running their organisations and who still care deeply about their people, standards, results and commercial performance

If you are curious about what leadership looks like when it is not propped up by hierarchy, you will likely enjoy this session with us at our Seed HQ in Brighton.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Seed, Pavilion View, 19 New Road, Brighton and Hove, United Kingdom

Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

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