Most organizations run on unwritten rules and PowerPoint slides.
What if their structures could evolve like code?
Organizations are human systems. You don't engineer that away. But you can make it visible: who decides what, where work actually flows, what breaks when someone leaves. Version-control it. Review it. Test it against reality. That's what making organizations legible means.
/Now
As Principal Consultant at ORAYLIS, I advise the COO and Board on strategy and transformation. And I keep asking myself: why don't we treat org design with the same rigor as our data platforms?
On the side, I'm building two open-source frameworks. Org as Code puts org structures into version-controlled files: roles, teams, decision rights, all in YAML. Business Primitives does the same for business communication. A decision becomes a defined object. So does a risk, a metric, a status update.
/Org as Code
Org charts live in PowerPoint or proprietary HR software. Governance rules live in someone's head. When things change, nobody updates the slides.
Org as Code starts there. Roles, teams, decision rights: defined in YAML. When something changes, you see the diff. When something contradicts itself, a validator catches it.
Six Principles
- Structure as Code. Roles, teams, responsibilities: version-controlled files, not slides.
- Governance as Logic. Decision rights and escalation paths you can review, not just discuss.
- Change as Pull Request. Every org change gets reviewed. Every change is traceable.
- Reality as Test Suite. Does the structure match how work actually flows? Now you can check.
- Evolution as Deployment. Small rollouts, not big-bang reorgs.
- Knowledge as Documentation. How we work is always readable, searchable, current.
"Clutter and confusion are not attributes of information —
they are failures of design."— Edward Tufte
/Business Primitives
The board asks for a risk summary. Three people build three different slides. Same data, three formats, none reusable.
That's the communication problem. Organizations run on the same building blocks: decisions, metrics, risks, status updates. But nobody defines them. They live in PowerPoint, Word, and Excel. Locked in formats. Lost after the meeting.
Business Primitives gives them structure. A decision becomes a YAML object with a date, an owner, and a rationale. A risk has a severity, a likelihood, and an action. Composable, version-controlled, readable by humans and machines.
Atomic Business Design — Five Levels
The model borrows from chemistry and design systems:
- Atoms. The smallest units: Decision, Metric, Risk, Action, Timeline, Status, Stakeholder.
- Molecules. Atoms combined with purpose: Argument, Comparison, Status Update, Progress.
- Organisms. Working documents: Executive Summary, Risk Register, Dashboard.
- Templates. Reusable layouts: Decision Paper, Quarterly Review, Weekly Status.
- Pages. The actual output, composed from all of the above.
/Career
Connecting the Dots
Returned to ORAYLIS, this time advising the COO and Board on how the organization itself should work. Governance, team structure, strategic initiatives. A lot of what I've learned about building products, leading teams, and making complex things understandable comes together here. Then something clicked: organizations have two legibility problems. Their structures are ambiguous. And their communication is trapped in formats nobody can reuse. That's why I'm building Org as Code — for the structures. And Business Primitives — for the communication.
Leadership & Transformation
Managing Director of a tech spin-off with full P&L ownership, learning what it means when the org structure is your problem. Then Scrum Master and Agile Program Manager at a security technology company: leading without hierarchy, coordinating teams, driving transformation from the ground up. Top-down and bottom-up in quick succession.
Data Strategy & Governance
Four years at ORAYLIS, helping organizations turn their data into value. From project management to principal consultant. Established consulting formats like Data Strategy Assessments, built a market team from scratch, and supported recruiting to grow the practice. Worked across industries, guiding companies on their path to becoming truly data-driven. Learning how organizations create, govern, and fail at managing their most important asset.
Freelance & Consulting
Independent consulting across data analysis, web technologies, and project management. UI/UX concepts for an automotive brand, data strategy workshops for a banking academy, e-commerce analytics for retail. Always at the intersection: translating between business needs and technical solutions, facilitating workshops, building prototypes. The common thread: building things that work and look right, then figuring out why the organization around them wasn't keeping up.
Building & Entrepreneurship
Co-founded a digital agency in Wiesbaden: e-learning games for banking, editorial portals for financial services, social media strategies for a major bank. Small team, big clients, real products. After two and a half years, an honest realization: we were excellent executors but couldn't scale as a company. One client project became the bridge to full-time project management at a political foundation, where I built their online learning platform.
/About
Scientist and geologist by training. Built a company once. I studied rock formations before I studied organizations, and the systems thinking stuck. Then came information design, web technologies, project management, data strategy. The eye for clarity, intention, and structure never left.
Today, one system occupies me more than any other: how people work together. What holds things together, why they break, what makes them resilient. That applies to rock formations, company cultures, and board games alike.
Family man with two kids, Rhineland near Bonn. Pull-up bar in the garden, too many board games in the basement. I write things down before they're forgotten.
/top/Writing
On structure, clarity, and the systems that shape how people work together.
Why AI agents fail when no one writes down what the organization actually wants.
Every company has an org chart. Ask a new hire after three weeks whether they understand how decisions actually get made. That's what I'm working on./top