From Org Charts to Self-Organization: How Charlotte Transformed an Audi Subsidiar

This is the story of how Charlotte helped transform Audi Business Innovation into a self-organized company, as part of the founding team that designed and led the initiative from the ground up.

As Chief of Staff to the CEO, one of Charlotte's core accountabilities was organizational structure. The question she kept coming back to: what is the most effective and lean way for a company to operate while still delivering on its outcomes?

Audi Business Innovation, or ABI, was Audi's answer to the future of mobility. An entrepreneurial unit with a bold mandate to redefine the space for Audi. On paper, Charlotte was moving boxes from A to B and back again. But she quickly realized that no amount of restructuring would solve the real problem: the inefficiencies in decision-making and alignment that ABI was genuinely struggling with.

The turning point came during her summer break, when she picked up Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux. The book gave her the push she needed. She came back to her CEO with a pitch: restart and reshape the entire organization around self-organized teams.

Leadership was hesitant at first, but curious. What would this mean for an organization of 200 people? Could they transform while continuing to deliver on their agenda and remain accountable to the parent company? ABI was created to produce business outcomes, after all.

So Charlotte and a small group of believers got to work. Rather than transforming everything at once, they started small, running pilots with volunteer teams and keeping leadership closely involved throughout. What began as an experiment gradually became a full company transformation. This article offers a closer look at how it unfolded: How Audi Business Innovation is working

That journey gave Charlotte a toolbox she continues to draw from. She introduced strengths-based development at Celonis, helped shape their values, and rolled out tension-based meetings and role accountability at Parloa. Self-organization is not a universal solution, but some of the tools that come with it are genuine gamechangers.