Flexible Studios: Rethinking Org Design for the AI Era (Part Two)
Inside the Flexible Studio Model
After I shared my last post, one comment in particular stuck with me because it asked the questions I think many leaders are trying to answer.
If teams become fluid, who owns the outcome? Who makes the final decision?
How do you reward someone who belongs to one home but contributes across multiple studios? And how much context switching can an in-demand expert realistically absorb before they become the bottleneck?
Those questions are really about organizational design.
How do you create an organization that's fluid enough to adapt as priorities change, but structured enough that people still have clear leadership, career development, accountability, and ownership?
That's the problem we've been trying to solve.
The more we've experimented with AI, the less I've come to think of this as a conversation about project teams or organizational charts.
It's really a conversation about separating two things we've traditionally treated as the same:
Where people belong.
And where work happens.
Once I started looking at the organization through that lens, a lot of other questions became easier to answer.
Separate where people belong from where work happens
For years, most organizations have tied reporting structures directly to the work. You join a team, you're staffed on a project, and your day-to-day experience is largely shaped by whatever initiative you're supporting.
That model worked because projects were relatively stable.
I'm finding that's becoming less true.
Priorities shift faster. Customer expectations change. AI is making it possible to move from idea to prototype in hours instead of weeks. The work is becoming much more dynamic, but people still need consistency. They need leaders who know them, help them grow, develop their craft, and think about their careers over years instead of quarters.
That distinction led me to the idea of Stable Homes.
A Stable Home isn't another delivery team. It's where someone belongs. It's where leadership, coaching, mentoring, hiring, and career development happen. Those relationships remain intentionally stable even as the work around them changes.
The work happens somewhere else.
Studios are temporary teams assembled around problems that matter. They form, evolve, and eventually dissolve as priorities change. People move between studios while remaining part of the same Stable Home.
For me, that's the key distinction.
People shouldn't have to reorganize every time the work does.
Accountability becomes clearer, not harder
One of the first questions people ask is who owns the outcome if people are moving between studios.
I actually think this model makes accountability clearer.
Every studio has one leader responsible for the outcome. They're accountable for the decisions, the tradeoffs, and ultimately whether the work succeeds. Their focus is delivery.
Stable Home leaders have a different responsibility.
They're focused on people. They're thinking about coaching, growth, hiring, succession planning, and helping individuals build craft and deep expertise over time.
Those are different leadership responsibilities, and I don't think they need to belong to the same person even though they might.
Allowing room and space to separate them where relevant allows leaders to focus on what they do best while giving teams much more flexibility in how they come together around the work.
From functions to aptitudes
One thing I've realized while thinking through this model is that I'm probably bringing a different perspective to the problem than many people inside large organizations.
Before joining a large enterprise, I spent much of my career building startups. In a startup, you rarely have the luxury of thinking in terms of functions. You don't ask whether something belongs to Design, Engineering, or Product because the organization simply isn't structured that way. You look at the problem in front of you, figure out what it will take to solve it, and assemble the right people around it. Everyone wears multiple hats, priorities shift constantly, and the team adapts as the business learns.
Looking back, I realize I've carried that mindset with me throughout my career, even inside much larger organizations. The difference now is that AI makes that way of working much more achievable at enterprise scale.
Instead of starting with organizational boundaries, I naturally start with the problem itself.
What aptitudes does this problem require?
Does it need deep technical judgment? Customer empathy? Systems thinking? Strong storytelling? Domain expertise? Someone who can rapidly explore ideas with AI? Every problem asks for a different combination.
That's one of the reasons the Flexible Studio Model resonates with me.
It isn't about eliminating functions or diminishing the importance of craft. Deep expertise still matters, and Stable Homes are where that expertise is developed. The shift is that work is no longer constrained by those functional boundaries. Studios allow the organization to bring together the right combination of human aptitudes and AI capabilities around the problem, then reassemble around the next one as priorities evolve.
I don't think AI is replacing disciplines. I think it's changing how those disciplines come together.
As production becomes abundant, judgment becomes scarce.
The value of the organization shifts to assembling the right combination of judgment, expertise, creativity, and AI capability around the problems that matter most.
That feels less like staffing a project and more like orchestrating a set of capabilities that can continuously adapt as the work evolves.
We're still learning
We're still experimenting with this model, and I expect our thinking will continue to evolve. Every conversation surfaces another question we haven't considered, and that's part of what makes this interesting.
What I do know is that AI has changed the way I think about organizational design.
For decades, we optimized organizations around the cost of production.
AI changes that equation.
Production is becoming abundant.
Judgment is becoming the scarce resource.
That means organizations built around functions may no longer be the competitive advantage.
Organizations built around judgment just might be.
In other words, how can we break down traditional corporate silos so expertise can assemble around problems as quickly as the business changes?
That's the experiment we're running.
I'd love to hear where you're seeing similar shifts.