Summer has arrived in the Basque Country, as has a spell of good surf, so I find myself doing the dance between busy work schedule, family time, and the constant draw of the sea.

We’ve made a commitment to ‘Family Fridays’ so for the first time in my adult life I’m not working a 5 day week. It feels liberating and a little weird in equal measure. I’m very much living the life I hoped to be living at this point and yet there’s a kernel of residual guilt for living it.

Enough about me. On the menu today are some important concepts - each can be consumed on its own - but when combined, have the flavour of something new - a more fluid, decentralised way of coordinating work, that I liken to a school of fish.

For dessert there’s a little palate cleanser from The Pope - emerging as one of the more informed and considered voices about AI on the global stage.

Bon appetit.

Concept 1 - Company Brains

If you’ve not come across this term yet, then I suspect you will. Tech loves a new zeitgeist-y buzzword and ‘company brain’ might be high up the list in the second half of 2026.

In essence the idea of a company brain is that you create a store of all the knowledge and context within an organisation, which people and AI agents are constantly interacting with - fetching the context they need to do their work and updating the collective knowledge through their actions.

Why is this idea catching on now? Because AI provides the tools to a) collect more data than ever, b) analyse large and complex datasets quickly and efficiently, and c) agents can now perform tasks with this information e.g. write code, send emails, solve customer queries.

The happy path here might be a genuinely useful application of AI that enables new ways of organising; perhaps even self-improving organisations.

The sad path is a dystopian surveillance state.

I’ll come back to what I think might determine the path in a moment.

Concept 2 - Decentralisation

At the heart of all organisations are questions about power. Do you believe power should be in the hands of the few or the many?

Our primary mechanism for organising large numbers of people to do things has mostly been to concentrate power in the hands of the few (with some distribution downwards) by putting people into hierarchies. Picture your classic org chart. Those at the top are trusted with the most power, and those at the bottom with the least.

Some will say this was borne out of necessity - often illustrating their point with a diagram of the Roman Army. But more and more I run into the logical flaws at the heart of this structure in the context of knowledge work - namely that those making decisions are too far removed from the things they’re deciding, and that people can’t really feel pride in or accountability for their work if they don’t have ownership.

Decentralisation flips our view of power and decision-making on its head. It doesn’t mean no structure, or that everybody decides everything, but it distributes power, decision-making and responsibility more evenly in an organisation, thereby allowing the organisation to take on a life of its own.

This is what we believe, practice and teach at Evolution and you can read about many more famous examples in Reinventing Organisations by Frederic Laloux.

I’ll come on to why this is more important than ever in an age of AI below.

Concept 3 - Governance Structures

This newsletter comes off the back of my latest podcast episode with Eric Ries, so I credit Eric as the source of some of this thinking. The episode focuses on Eric’s latest book, Incorruptible, which poses the question (and then answers it), ‘Can you build an incorruptible organisation?’

It used to be that companies had to be incorporated with a clear charter or reason for being. Then this very toxic idea of shareholder primacy took hold - a company only exists to maximise shareholder profits. What that means in practice is that most companies stand for ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

They won’t say that of course. They probably have a nice mission statement on the website somewhere. But when push comes to shove, they will legally be obliged to pick the route with the most short-term money on the table, regardless of everything else.

The Twitter board didn’t want Elon to buy the company, but when he threatened to back out, they were forced to sue him to make him complete the deal in the interest of shareholder primacy.

British company Vectura Group, which made inhalers for respiratory disease, was legally obliged to accept an acquisition offer from Philip Morris, the tobacco giant (and was later sold for parts.)

The list goes on.

But there are governance structures in place - ways to set up a company or institution - that legally commit it to more than shareholder profits.

If you want to know all the details then listen to the podcast (linked below) and read Eric’s book, for some great examples of big, successful companies who’ve gone this route - Patagonia, Novo Nordisk and Anthropic to name just a few.

1 + 2 + 3 = a new type of organisation

As already mentioned; each of these ideas can be taken in isolation. You can believe in decentralisation without building a company brain. Or you can found a company with a different governance structure that is highly centralised.

Not every organisation will combine these elements, but I think those that do, could do so in a way that creates something unique - that looks more like a school of fish than a marching Roman army.

A school of fish has no single leader. There is no CFO (Chief Fish Officer) bubbling directions to the lesser paid fish, or demanding a draft of their latest OKRs. Each individual constantly monitors and responds to the collective, knowing that their actions influence the rest of the school. It is a complex and fluid system of coordination.

With no designated leadership, transparency becomes a survival mechanism. There is no hoarding of information amongst a select few fish. In the presence of new information e.g. there is a shark over there that wants to eat us - information spreads instantaneously and each fish is expected to respond accordingly.

Despite lacking a leader and formal processes of planning, the school manages to achieve extraordinary feats - migrating long distances, fending off threats, and procreating, to name a few.

To make this a little more human for a minute - I think innovation in governance structures may serve an increasingly important role as a sort of heart of organisations. Something that makes clear and binding commitments to the common good. Serving as an ethical backstop on an organisation’s integrity.

Couple integrity with a company brain and I think you get a radically transparent and legible organisation, where everyone gets to see a live view of the big picture. Fewer shadows. Less organisational politics.

And this all lends itself to decentralisation. In fact I think decentralisation becomes almost the only option here, because without it, you just create the mother of all bottlenecks. Every employee has most of what they need to really crack on and do good work. All they really need is the authority to do so.

This won’t all be good

I’m not naive enough to believe this plays out well universally. So let me point to a few of the ways I can see this going wrong already (and I’m sure others will emerge).

Lack of integrity as a feature not a bug - the world seems to present more and more ways to monetise a lack of integrity. Rage baiting the internet, betting on world events using inside information, doing circular deals which inflate your stock price. Integrity is not necessarily the easy or the more lucrative path, and its certainly not the default. In the absence of integrity, all bets are off.

Surveillance state - it’s not hard to see the ways in which technology can be used to spy on people. Organisations won’t use the word ‘spying’. They may talk of performance cultures, openness and transparency. But the kind of monitoring and surveillance you can already see glimpses of is the opposite of performance culture. It’s micromanagement on technological steroids.

Centralised power - the single hardest thing for leaders is letting go of control. Whilst I talk above about the case for decentralisation, there will no doubt be leaders who use this opportunity as a moment to seize more control, not to relinquish it. It’s a big part of the appeal of AI agents to many leaders - a large and compliant workforce that will do what I say and won’t answer back.

Fragmentation - as more and more tech employees are enabled and expected to deliver work on their own - the designer/engineer/product manager all rolled into one - then there’s a risk of fragmentation as the social fibres of the workplace fray. We can already point to many ways in which we’ve made our lives more atomised and individualistic as opposed to collective. This may become the latest frontier of that, and no doubt there will be costs.

What’s it all for?

Too often this question gets lost. Too often we collectively kow-tow to the narratives of inevitability. This is happening whether you like it or not.

Too often the best practice and conventional wisdom emerge from a narrow set of actors asking a narrow set of questions.

But now, in amongst the chaos of change, is the right time to ask the hard questions.

Here is what the Pope had to say in his recent Encyclical -
In recent years, it has become increasingly evident how rapidly and profoundly digitalization, artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics are transforming our world. Technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity. On the contrary, it has formed part of our history since the beginning as “a profoundly human reality, linked to the autonomy and freedom of man.” [5] Over the centuries, technological development has significantly improved the living conditions of humanity. At the same time, each phase of progress has also revealed the ambiguity of tools that can cause harm when not oriented toward the good. Today, however, we find ourselves facing a new situation. The power and prevalence of emerging technologies are interwoven into the fabric of daily life, shaping decision-making processes and deeply affecting the collective imagination: “Never has humanity had such power over itself.” [6] New technologies open up a horizon extending in directions that are imaginable but not yet fully predictable. This complicates the assessment of their potential impact and the long-term effects they may have on both the dignity of individuals and the common good.