Pods, Agents, and future Org Charts

Hey!

As always, I promise to provoke you so you can stay sharp and on top of your game.

Alright, here we go.

Ai is changing a lot our businesses…I’ve been thinking a lot how teams and businesses organise themselves.

Here are some thoughts… remember, you don't have to believe me. These are just provocations and a bunch of imperfect not fully cooked thoughts.

Picture three ways a business can spread power around.

Centralised is one big bubble in the middle. Everything hangs off it. All roads lead to Rome.

Decentralised is a few big bubbles, each with their own cluster. Still hubs. Still slow.

Distributed is heaps of tiny bubbles, all linked to each other. Every unit can act. Every unit can decide.

A distributed model is a difficult model to execute in business, specially as it scales, startups tend to enjoy it at the start as everyone helps everywhere and everyone is connected to the real customer work.

How do we create a model where small distributed autonomous units, pods,  go to the work instead of the work coming to them.

Let me dig a little more…

Think nurses. Think your immune system.

When things are centralised, the centre hands out work. People wait for it. When things are decentralised, hubs hand out work. Still a queue.

When things are fully spread out? Pods attack work. They sense a problem and they swarm it. Like your immune system does. No ticket. No queue. No "let me check with my manager." All they need is a clear mission.

Nurses operate similarly. Set the mission. Let the pods sort it.

Now here's where it gets wild. Add AI agents.

A pod of 4 people. Each one running maybe 100 AI agents.

Four people. 400 agents.

You need 10 pods. That's 40 people. And you get the same output as 1,200 devs in a normal setup.

Forty people! Small enough to all know each other by name. Each pod out there on missions, backed by agents that don't sleep, don't complain, and don't call in sick.

The maths is nuts. And it's already starting to happen.

But you can't skip the chemistry

You can't just grab 4 random people, chuck them in a room, and call it a pod. There's a chemistry to it. You really can't fake that.

Small dedicated teams like Nurses bond through brutal shifts. The unit forms through pressure, time, and closeness.

So here's where my brain went: pod makers.

You get hired. First 3 to 5 months? You're in a pressure cooker with other new people. Solving real problems together. Getting to know each other. Figuring out who clicks with who.

People mix, swap, try different combos. Pods form on their own. When they click, you let them go.

And here's the best part. Pods look after themselves.

People are more autonomous inside a pod, they take care of each other, they are self sufficient.

The feelings stuff. The hard chats. The "pull your head in" moments. All inside the unit.

And maybe something bigger shifts. People stop working for the company. They start working for each other. They're on a mission. They care about the person next to them and the problem in front of them.

Way better energy than "my KPIs say I should care about this."

Give me a pod. Give me a problem. I'll sort it out.

So what does leading look like in all this?

Last thought. The old game was building empires. Build your team, your turf, your budget. Play the politics.

The new game? Run a network. Way more fun.

Four things matter:

How many pods do you have? How many small, sharp units?

How mixed are they? Different skills, different agents, different angles.

How well are they linked? Your job is to plug pods into each other. That's the gig.

How fast do they move? Email is too slow. Real time is where the power is.

Go flat. Put skills right inside the pods. Product, design, tech, planning. All in the unit. The old walls come down.

Anyway have a think!

Yew!

Love,

Gus!