Go to the Floor (Gemba)

Leaders learning by being physically present where value is created — walking the floor, sitting with teams, listening — instead of governing by decree and dashboard.

Also known as: Hospitering, hospitering, gemba, ta folkene på gulvet på alvor, Toppen / gulvet, gulvet, dusje i informasjon (to shower in information)

How authors use it

Oldest first (extraction date when no publication date is known).

Documents (6)

• What New CEOs Get Wrong About the Job HBR IdeaCast (hosts Alison Beard, Adi Ignatius; guest Nitin Nohria) · 2026-09-22 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  New executives systematically misjudge the CEO role because it inverts the very competencies that got them promoted — operating, knowing, and being obeyed — and succeeding requires deliberately relearning the job as one of creating conditions (for a team to run the company, for the truth to reach you, for the board to trust you, for the organization to move without you in the room) rather than exercising direct control.
• Model the Transformation You Expect Employees to Deliver Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez · 2026-07-22 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  Organizational transformations succeed or fail not because employees resist change but because senior leaders either do or do not visibly perform, in their own calendars and decisions, the same risk-taking, uncertainty-tolerance, and willingness-to-reverse-course they are asking employees to adopt.
• 15) Kari Olrud Moen om strategi, kunsten å velge bort og forskjellen på å være tydelig og skråsikker Truls Jørgensen og Audun Fauchald Strand — Heis Podcast · 2026-04-20 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  Strategy is the disciplined act of choosing what NOT to do, justified by a credible read of where the world is going; doing it well requires leaders who are clear (tydelig) about direction without being dogmatic (skråsikker) about what they cannot yet know, and who keep the chosen direction connected, top and bottom, to what the organization is actually capable of and willing to move on.
• 7) Stine Haugseth: Insourcing, retning og strategi på en ølbrikke Truls Jørgensen og Audun Fauchald Strand — Heis Podcast · 2025-12-15 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  Insourcing, retning, and strategi-på-en-ølbrikke are three faces of one leadership move: pulling the locus of decision-making in-house and then compressing direction tightly enough that a distributed organisation can actually act on it — insourcing repatriates the people who must own the work, oppdragsbasert ledelse and sirkler av autonomi give those people a clear mission with explicit frihetsgrenser, and the ølbrikke forces utviklingsstrategi down to the few hovedområder a development organisation can actually carry, with OKRs underneath and an explicit business case underneath that.
• 3) Christin Gorman leder uten tittel Truls Jørgensen og Audun Fauchald Strand — Heis Podcast · 2025-10-27 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  Title-less leadership is influence through clear, accountable public voice — anchored in actually delivering working software and a financial freedom that lets you keep telling the truth — and it is one legitimate, complementary mode of leadership in a tech industry that needs many such modes, even though it has real costs (intimidation effects, defensive listeners, and an asymmetry where formal leaders take credit when title-less leaders' ideas do get adopted).
• 2) Hans Christian Holte dusjer i informasjon Truls Jørgensen og Audun Fauchald Strand — Heis Podcast · 2025-10-20 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  What senior public-sector leadership at NAV's scale actually consists of is the disciplined acceptance that you cannot retain most of the information that washes over you — that you must filter to a few central themes, lean heavily on competent people around you, deliberately ride the elevator between strategic altitude and the work itself ('T-ledelse'), and treat technology development not as a domain you keep up with personally but as the most potent strategic lever you must integrate with legal, professional, and user-experience perspectives to bring the whole organization, not just the directorate, forward.

Propositions touching this concept (1)

By publication month, oldest first (extraction month when no publication date is known).

2025-12

• explicitcorroboratedHospitering — sitting in teamrom, walking the gulvet — is how a toppleder stays epistemically grounded; disagreement among technologists is the highest-leverage learning input.
  7) Stine Haugseth: Insourcing, retning og strategi på en ølbrikke · p19

Open gaps (32)

• incompleteThe rule 'don't run the company yourself' is stated as near-absolute, but real CEOs face moments (a safety incident, a fraud discovery, an active M&A crisis) where direct, hands-on intervention is clearly expected and appropriate. Nohria gives no criteria for distinguishing legitimate crisis intervention from the pathological over-involvement he warns against.
  What New CEOs Get Wrong About the Job — read next: Contingency-theory leadership literature on when centralized command is warranted vs. harmful (crisis management, high-reliability organizations).
• incompleteThe 'go to the front line for truth' advice treats frontline perception as a single recoverable signal, but doesn't address that frontline sources can themselves hold confidently contradictory reads on 'what's really going on' (a customer-service rep vs. a factory-floor engineer), and gives no method for reconciling or weighting conflicting frontline signals beyond 'talk to them.'
  What New CEOs Get Wrong About the Job — read next: extract-hbr-frontline-workers-solve-problems, which offers a structured method (interviews, customized surveys, cocreated/ranked solutions) for actually aggregating frontline input rather than relying on ad hoc conversations.
• incompleteThe claim that CEOs get fired because they 'mistook politeness for support' is Nohria's own retrospective pattern-read of anecdotal workshop conversations with already-fired CEOs. There's no base rate offered, and no comparison group — CEOs who did read the board accurately and were fired anyway, or CEOs who ignored this advice and survived — so the causal weight of 'board-reading skill' versus underlying company performance is left unclear.
  What New CEOs Get Wrong About the Job — read next: Empirical CEO-succession/dismissal research (e.g., studies correlating board engagement practices with tenure and forced-turnover rates) that isolates board-reading skill from performance as a predictor.
• incompleteThe claim that '80% of the CEO job hasn't changed in 30 years, 20% is external' is asserted from Nohria's own workshop observation, with no operational definition of what's actually being measured — time allocation, topics discussed in the workshop, or skill demands are three different things that could each yield a different ratio. As stated, the 80/20 split is a memorable number but not a falsifiable claim.
  What New CEOs Get Wrong About the Job — read next: None specific — this is a call for the underlying workshop data (if it exists) to be operationalized and published rather than asserted as a round number.
• incompleteThe cost side of the information shower is not addressed. Every person who 'prepares and wants to land maximum points in their slot' is paying a cost: compressing their best case, choosing what to leave out, presumably also accepting that most of their points will be among those that 'rinse down the drain.' A senior-leader-centric view of information overload treats it as a load problem on the receiver; a system view would ask what happens to the people producing the information for the shower and what the aggregate organizational effect is when many serious efforts produce one-slot compressions that the receiver does not retain. Holte's metaphor invites this question and the conversation does not pick it up.
  2) Hans Christian Holte dusjer i informasjon
• incompleteThe criteria for which 'few central themes' Holte holds are not made explicit. He mentions specific filters: digital representation as a near-term must-solve at NAV offices; the NAV-office counsellor as a long-term focus; user experience as his current energise-zone. But how those particular bets emerged from the shower — what got filtered out, by what test — is not described. This is the operationally most interesting question and the most strategically sensitive; an answer might also be politically costly to give.
  2) Hans Christian Holte dusjer i informasjon
• unaddressedThe piece does not address what happens when Holte's filtering is wrong — when a theme that should have made it through the filter did not. The arbeidsavklaringspenger case is named as a failure of broad-enough thinking, but the role of his own information processing in that failure is not interrogated. A self-aware leader could productively unpack the failure mode of accepted forgetting: the information you accept losing may include exactly the information you should have kept.
  2) Hans Christian Holte dusjer i informasjon
• incompletePublic-sector context shapes what Holte can say. As sitting NAV director he must be careful about politically loaded territory (the stat/kommune split at NAV offices, decisions about digital identity, the politics around the user-experience unit). The conversation rides these edges and signals them ('certain politicians are squinting at us') but cannot fully unpack them. This is a structural feature of the format, not a flaw — but it limits how much of Holte's actual filtering criteria can surface.
  2) Hans Christian Holte dusjer i informasjon
• incompleteThe 'T-ledelse' reframe of the hosts' heis-fører concept is elegant, but the question of where T-ledelse fits in a 22,000-person organisation with multiple levels — and whether T-ledelse from the very top can substitute for translation roles at the middle — is not resolved. The hosts' own concept (heis-fører at middle levels) and Holte's reframe (T-ledelse from the top) may not be alternatives at all; the conversation does not address whether both are needed.
  2) Hans Christian Holte dusjer i informasjon
• irrelevantThe episode does not address the dusjer-i-informasjon dynamic outside the senior-leader context — at lower organisational levels (where 'preparation by counterparties' looks very different), or in private sector (where Holte has no recent experience). The framing is specific to Holte's altitude in Norwegian public-sector leadership, and the conversation honours that specificity rather than over-generalising — which is appropriate for the form, though a syntopical reading across episodes might generalise it.
  2) Hans Christian Holte dusjer i informasjon
• incompleteThe episode does not address whose work is *invisible* without a title — those without platform, conference speaker credibility, financial cushion, or social safety to speak controversially. Gorman names her own preconditions (cheap living in Drammen, ability to return to retail work) but does not extend the analysis to those whose preconditions do not hold. Title-less leadership in her account is universally legitimated but materially restricted.
  3) Christin Gorman leder uten tittel — read next: Read against Cutler on institutional overload and 'who gets to think' / power and space (TBM 413); against work on visibility and credit allocation in tech (especially gendered patterns); and against critiques of 'thought leadership' as a privilege economy. The Bekk/Kodemaker consulting ecosystem also deserves examination as the platform infrastructure that makes Gorman's mode possible at all.
• incompleteWhen is the formal title load-bearing? Gorman gestures at the answer (taking unpopular fights, decisive 'I'm not paying for that' moves) but does not theorize when title-less voice strictly cannot substitute. The carpenter renovation analogy works because the homeowners had authority — Gorman in a team without it cannot replicate that pattern.
  3) Christin Gorman leder uten tittel — read next: Read Morten Eikeland (Heis ep 4) 'det finnes alltid et hierarki' as the explicit counter-claim. Also read Una Aamodt Mathisen (Heis ep 10) 'lede uten fasit' as a complementary refusal-of-answer-key mode. The cross-cutting question: which leadership functions can be unbundled from title and which cannot?
• incompleteThe asymmetry of credit ('formal leaders take recognition when title-less leaders' ideas land') is named as a price Gorman is willing to pay, but not analyzed as a systemic problem. Who benefits from this asymmetry? It serves the formal leadership class — both the leaders who take credit, and the system that does not have to compensate the title-less.
  3) Christin Gorman leder uten tittel — read next: Read on credit assignment in collaborative work, on academic citation/recognition norms, on the labor economics of 'thought leadership' (Substack, conferences). Connects to Cutler on 'directly responsible individuals' from the recognition side.
• incompleteThe framing of public-sector dysfunction as 'budget growth instead of value delivery' is a strong claim presented anecdotally. The implicit comparison to private sector ('we are on the same team') under-acknowledges that private-sector alignment is also engineered and partial — shareholder vs. employee interests, sales vs. engineering, short- vs. long-term.
  3) Christin Gorman leder uten tittel — read next: Read Nils Brede Moe (Heis ep 9) on the AI-paradox and learning culture; read public-sector reform literature (NAV's 'optimizing for fast flow' is on the user's list). Also read industrial-organization work on aligned vs. misaligned incentives across sectors.
• incompleteImplicit premise about authority and self-correction ('I trust my own thinking only because I have to argue for it') is asserted as autobiographical but generalized. The argument that formal authority degrades judgment by removing resistance deserves more scrutiny — many formal leaders maintain rigorous self-criticism, and many title-less voices ossify.
  3) Christin Gorman leder uten tittel — read next: Read on epistemic humility and authority (Annie Duke on 'Thinking in Bets' framing of belief-updating; Greger Teigre Wedel (Heis ep 12) 'når sjefen har svaret' on the inverse problem). Also Beck on Tidy First / TDD as institutionalized self-correction independent of authority.
• uninformedThe episode does not engage with how AI coding agents change the picture of who counts as a 'delivery-grounded' practitioner. Gorman's 'basis' criterion is rooted in writing code yourself — but what counts as that basis when much code is now generated and curated? The 'AI replaces ticket-converters' framing is correct but stops short of asking what the basis becomes.
  3) Christin Gorman leder uten tittel — read next: Read Heis ep 11 (Vilde Opsal / Anders Sveen AI special) and ep 13 (Tobias Torrissen on code quality + AI); read the user's Kent Beck Tidy First and Claude Code material — what is the 'basis' equivalent when the medium shifts?
• incompleteHaugseth's account is built on insourcing successes (Mattilsynet, NAV). There is no narrative of an insourcing that failed or backfired — no analysis of when insourcing produced worse outcomes than the status quo. The closest is the NAIS-reflection (where she would have stayed less ambitious about own platform), but that is presented as 'should have piggybacked,' not 'insourcing failed.' The asymmetry shapes what is visible: insourcing's hazards (talent risk, two-year ramp where the org loses access to specialists, capability concentration in a few key hires who then leave) are absent from the framing.
  7) Stine Haugseth: Insourcing, retning og strategi på en ølbrikke — read next: Susanne Justesen / John Cutler on the cost of capability concentration; the Norwegian NAV 'Optimizing for Fast Flow' article (already in the user's library) for a parallel account that emphasises the work-system rather than the ownership question; Capacity Planning literature on staffing as a long-cycle bet; failure-case writing on insourced platform teams that lost their flywheel (Stripe / Etsy public postmortems are useful counterpoints).
• incompleteThe business-case for insourcing is asserted but not specified. 'Either konsulentene get ny oppdrag andre steder, OR rådgiver-hverdagen improves enough to boost inntekt' is a frame, not an analysis. What kind of measurement? Over what horizon? Who validates the case 24 months in? The hard version of the case — that some insourcing pays for itself only in scenarios that don't materialise — is not engaged.
  7) Stine Haugseth: Insourcing, retning og strategi på en ølbrikke — read next: Roger Martin on the strategy-stack from where-to-play to how-to-win; cost-of-delay literature; Dan North on staffing-as-bet.
• incompleteThe ølbrikke method is presented as a virtuous compression artifact, but the failure mode — that radical compression elides important trade-offs and lets every reader project their preferred reading onto the three hovedområder — is not addressed. Olrud Moen (ep 15) discusses the strategy-as-PowerPoint failure mode explicitly; Haugseth's ølbrikke could fall into a sibling failure mode (the strategy-as-slogan trap).
  7) Stine Haugseth: Insourcing, retning og strategi på en ølbrikke — read next: Olrud Moen Heis ep 15 (recently extracted) — direct counterpoint on strategy compression; John Cutler's TBM on 'making the trade-off visible'; Roger Martin on integrative thinking; Donald Sull on 'simple rules.'
• incompleteThe sponsor-group mechanism is described in the abstract; what happens when the two sponsors disagree, or when a sponsor leaves konsernledelsen mid-oppdrag, or when sponsor priorities conflict with what the team's konsernledelse-wide one-pager actually says, is not analysed.
  7) Stine Haugseth: Insourcing, retning og strategi på en ølbrikke — read next: Marty Cagan / SVPG on product strategy governance; Cutler on accountability culture and DRIs (directly responsible individuals).
• incompleteHaugseth's epistemic update on skye is offered as an instance of changing her mind, but the underlying mental model that drove her earlier full-pro-cloud stance is not interrogated. What other current convictions might be in the same epistemic position now? The 'how does a leader earn forankring on the world' question (same as the Olrud Moen ep 15 gap) is unaddressed.
  7) Stine Haugseth: Insourcing, retning og strategi på en ølbrikke — read next: Annie Duke 'Thinking in Bets' (already in user's library) on calibration and the cost of being skråsikker about probabilistic claims; Philip Tetlock on superforecasting; Donella Meadows on systemic leverage points.
• incompletePower and political economy are visible at the edges (the consultant houses' motstand to Mattilsynet cancellations; the 'kjipe' work of handling underperformance) but never named as power. The political cost paid by the consultant houses, by the developers whose subkulturer were dismantled, and by the avdelingsledere who had to take on accountability for cross-team samhandling is not analysed.
  7) Stine Haugseth: Insourcing, retning og strategi på en ølbrikke — read next: Cutler 'Power and Space' (TBM 413, already in user's library); Pfeffer 'Power' on organisational politics; Hamel/Birkinshaw on managerial innovation and its political cost.
• incompleteThe 'privilegium ikke identitet' frame is named but not connected back to the operating-model questions earlier in the conversation. A leader who treats the role as borrowed time presumably should design the operating model so it survives their departure — i.e., the ølbrikke and the sponsor-group should ideally outlast the leader. That implication is not drawn.
  7) Stine Haugseth: Insourcing, retning og strategi på en ølbrikke — read next: Cutler on operating systems as artefacts that survive their author; Olrud Moen ep 15 on 'strategy as the few sharp trade-offs that nobody else has the authority to set' — and the corollary question of what the leader leaves behind.
• incompleteThe criterion that distinguishes strategic deselection from defensive or pathological deselection is named (the climate example) but not developed. When the urgent legitimately overrides the important and when it doesn't is left unanalyzed.
  15) Kari Olrud Moen om strategi, kunsten å velge bort og forskjellen på å være tydelig og skråsikker — read next: John Cutler on institutional overload (TBM 412) and the cost of context collapse; Hamilton Helmer's 7 Powers for a more analytical theory of when narrowing is value-creating vs. value-destroying; Roger Martin's 'Playing to Win' for the 'winning aspiration → where to play → how to win' chain that forces the warrant question explicitly.
• incompleteThe people on the wrong side of deselection ('det er noen folk bak') are acknowledged but their experience and what leaders owe them is not analyzed. The 'kjipe oppgavene' frame keeps it at the level of leader-discomfort rather than treating the human cost as its own analytical object.
  15) Kari Olrud Moen om strategi, kunsten å velge bort og forskjellen på å være tydelig og skråsikker — read next: Annie Duke's 'Quit' for the ethics and cognition of stopping; Cutler on accountability culture vs. blame; literature on layoffs/restructuring as legitimacy work.
• incompleteThe HOW-sharpening proposal (be sharp on tempo vs. error-tolerance, not on implementation) is offered as a resolution but not tested against the failure modes of values-as-strategy (where 'speed over perfection' becomes a slogan everyone reinterprets locally).
  15) Kari Olrud Moen om strategi, kunsten å velge bort og forskjellen på å være tydelig og skråsikker — read next: Cutler on operating systems and 'making the trade-off visible'; DORA/Accelerate on what concrete operating principles actually correlate with outcomes; Beck's Tidy First? framing for how small-scale design decisions encode strategic posture.
• incompleteThe relationship between 'kompani-bets' and the legitimacy economy of an autonomous team-of-teams organization is sketched but not modeled. How many bets per year? Who funds them? How does the organization recover from a bet that fails publicly?
  15) Kari Olrud Moen om strategi, kunsten å velge bort og forskjellen på å være tydelig og skråsikker — read next: Spotify's own writings on the post-bets era and what replaced it; Marty Cagan / SVPG on product strategy at scale; Cutler on directly-responsible-individuals and accountability when top-down moves intrude.
• incompletePublic-sector strategy is dismissed as 'mer taktikk' but the conversation does not return to it. Whether public-sector leaders can do something like deselection (and what its political constraints look like) is a productive missing thread for a podcast whose hosts work in NAV-adjacent contexts.
  15) Kari Olrud Moen om strategi, kunsten å velge bort og forskjellen på å være tydelig og skråsikker — read next: Mark Moore on public value; Mariana Mazzucato on mission-led public strategy; specific Norwegian writing on NAV and Statens forvaltningsapparat strategy work.
• incompleteStrategy as power is gently visible (who gets the IT-køen priority that Vips got) but not analyzed as power. The political economy of must-win-battles inside a large organization — who loses access to resources, and through what mechanism — is left implicit.
  15) Kari Olrud Moen om strategi, kunsten å velge bort og forskjellen på å være tydelig og skråsikker — read next: Cutler on power and space (TBM 413, recently in user's library); Pfeffer on power in organizations; Helmer/Porter for the strategic value of being explicit about who-loses-what.
• incompleteEvery case in the article — Gupta, Horta-Osório, the unnamed industrial-company CEO, the energy-company CEO, the pharma CFO, the retail-bank CEO — sits at CEO, chairman, or C-suite level. The article's own opening claim ('the bottleneck is at the top') is never tested against a case where the bottleneck is one level below the top: a business-unit leader or VP whose own boss is not modeling the transformation. It is left unaddressed whether visible modeling by a sub-CEO leader can still move their own team's behavior, or whether the effect requires the very top of the hierarchy to model it.
  Model the Transformation You Expect Employees to Deliver — read next: Read alongside middle-management- or informal-leadership-focused accounts of change agency operating without top-level air cover, to test whether 'modeling' works bottom-up/mid-up or only top-down.
• incompleteThe McKinsey and Prosci statistics (5.3x more likely to succeed; 79% vs 27%) are presented as if the causal arrow runs cleanly from leader modeling to transformation success. The article does not consider or rule out reverse causation (transformations that are already succeeding for other structural reasons — better resourcing, less internal politics, a healthier starting culture — may simply free leaders to model behavior visibly, rather than the modeling causing the success) or confounding (leaders confident and secure enough to visibly take personal risk may be systematically different, and more effective for unrelated reasons, from leaders who are not).
  Model the Transformation You Expect Employees to Deliver — read next: Read alongside the original McKinsey and Prosci methodology write-ups to check whether either study attempts to control for confounds or establish direction of causality, or is purely correlational self-reported benchmarking.
• uninformedThe article treats the Credit Suisse collapse as if the modeling failure were the decisive cause ('at its heart is Horta-Osório's failure to embody and model the transformation'), while its own text names the Greensill and Archegos losses (the latter alone costing about $5.5 billion) as having already 'laid bare' the cultural problem before Horta-Osório's appointment. It does not engage with the possibility that Credit Suisse's fate was already largely sealed by those prior losses and the resulting collapse in market and counterparty confidence, independent of whether the chairman personally modeled accountability afterward.
  Model the Transformation You Expect Employees to Deliver — read next: Read banking-sector post-mortems on Credit Suisse's collapse (regulatory reports, the Swiss FINMA assessment) that weigh governance/risk-control failures against leadership/cultural factors, to establish whether the modeling-failure framing is proportionate to its actual causal weight.