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Truls Jørgensen og Audun Fauchald Strand — Heis Podcast · podcast · 2025-10-10 source ↗ Reader 🖥️

Hands-On Leadership & the Pendulum Team Autonomy Technology Leadership (Heis)

Heis is a podcast about technology leadership across the different organizational floors of a company — riding the elevator up and down to talk with leaders at every level — built on the conviction that autonomous teams still need leadership, that traditional management does not fit the team model, and that the leaders modern technology companies need are people with hands-on experience from working in teams and with technology.

practical · expository — a mission statement / show introduction in conversational interview form — Two-host introduction. Roughly 2.5 minutes. Truls opens with the metaphor; Audun delivers the show's substantive thesis about leadership and the team model. Speakers were inferred from self-introductions in the transcript — first speaker introduces 'Heis' as a metaphor and then asks Audun to explain why people should listen, so the opener is Truls (he later identifies himself by name); Audun then speaks at length about leadership.

Structure

Part	Role
The 'Heis' (elevator) metaphor	Opening framing — names the show and explains why: technology leadership exists on different organizational levels ('ulike etasjer'), and the hosts will 'take the elevator up and down' ('ta heisene opp og ned') to visit leaders on each floor
Host self-introductions	Credentialing — Audun introduces himself as currently a director for platform and infrastructure (and technology principal); Truls says he was a technology principal at NAV alongside Audun for eight years, recently moved to private sector, now works in EU (likely Entur, given context)
The thesis: autonomy requires leadership	Core substantive claim — Audun argues that even though team autonomy is important, leadership is still needed; the old style of leadership did not work; leadership must 'play on the team' (spille på lag) with the team model
Call to developers and technologists	Aspirational/recruiting frame — the hosts want to inspire current developers and technologists to see themselves as future leaders, on the premise that this kind of leadership requires having worked in teams and with technology
Every company is now a technology company	Closing universalization — the claim that all businesses are technology businesses whether they want to be or not, which changes how they operate and which leaders they need

Key terms

Propositions

explicitTechnology leadership exists at every organizational level, and a podcast about it should move between those levels rather than focus on a single one.
explicitdevelopedAutonomous teams still need leadership — autonomy alone is insufficient.
extends ←4) Morten Eikeland: Det finnes alltid et hierarki · p20 — Grounds the show's thesis that autonomous teams still need leadership in two structural mechanisms: superlinear internal coordination cost and the external need for a single spokesperson.
explicitTraditional leadership ('ledelse på gamle måten') does not work in organizations built around autonomous teams.
explicitEffective leadership for the team model must 'play on the team' (spille på lag) with that model — i.e., be aligned with and supportive of team autonomy, not in tension with it.
explicitThe kind of leadership the team model requires demands prior experience of having worked in teams and with technology.
explicitDevelopers and technologists should see themselves as potential leaders and a source of organizational value as leaders, not only as individual contributors.
explicitEvery company is now a technology company, whether it wants to be or not.
explicitThe fact that every company is a technology company changes how those companies operate, how leaders lead, and which leaders they need.
implicitThe hosts' lived experience at NAV (and now Entur/private sector) qualifies them to discuss technology leadership.

Arguments

Organizations using autonomous-team models need a new kind of leadership — one that plays on the team rather than directs it — and that leadership must come from people with hands-on team and technology experience.

Implicit premises:

Leadership style and operating model must be coherent with each other — a team-based operating model cannot be paired with hierarchical leadership without dysfunction
Outsider leaders without team/technology experience cannot intuit what 'playing on the team' actually requires
NAV's experience generalizes: what the hosts saw there reflects a broader pattern in technology organizations

The Heis podcast is broadly relevant — its audience is not just engineers at tech firms but anyone navigating modern organizational leadership.

Implicit premises:

If technology reshapes leadership requirements universally, then discussions of technology leadership are universally relevant
Listeners outside obvious tech roles will recognize their own situation in the show

Narratives

Truls and Audun spent eight years together as technology principals at NAV, where they observed firsthand both the value of team autonomy and the inadequacy of old-style leadership for that operating model.
→ Establishes shared experiential authority and grounds the abstract thesis (autonomy + new leadership) in a concrete organizational context — NAV, Norway's largest public-sector technology organization, widely studied as a team-model example.
Truls has recently moved from NAV to the private sector (now at what is almost certainly Entur, mistranscribed as 'EU' by Whisper).
→ Signals that the hosts' perspective spans public and private sector technology leadership, broadening the implied scope of the show beyond NAV-style public-sector organizations.

Questions addressed

⭕ Why is this podcast called 'Heis'?
answered — because technology leadership exists at multiple organizational levels ('etasjer'), and the show will move between them like an elevator, visiting leaders on each floor
⭕ Why should listeners listen to these two hosts?
answered — they have eight years of shared experience as technology principals at NAV plus subsequent private-sector experience, giving them firsthand insight into the team model and its leadership requirements
⭕ What is the podcast actually about?
answered — technology leadership at multiple organizational levels, specifically the kind of leadership compatible with autonomous-team operating models
⭕ Who is the podcast for?
answered — primarily developers and technologists who might become leaders; secondarily anyone leading in an organization that runs on technology (which, the hosts claim, is now all organizations)
⭕ What concretely does 'leadership that plays on the team' look like in practice?
left_open — Audun names the requirement but does not unpack it; presumably this is what the rest of the show will explore through guest conversations
⭕ How exactly does technology reshape what kind of leaders companies need?
left_open — stated as background premise but not unpacked in this welcome episode
⭕ Which leaders, on which floors, will the show actually visit?
left_open — the metaphor commits to multi-level coverage but the welcome episode does not preview the specific guest slate or level mix

Gaps

incompleteThe thesis that traditional leadership doesn't work with autonomous teams is stated as observed fact ('vi så i NAV') but never specified. Which behaviors of old-style leadership failed? What were the visible symptoms? Without examples, the claim functions as a slogan rather than an argument — appropriate for a welcome episode, but the show will need to deliver the substance.
incomplete'Leadership that plays on the team' (spiller på lag med teammodellen) is the show's positive claim but is left almost entirely uncashed in this episode. The metaphor is suggestive (cooperative, aligned) but does not yet distinguish this style from related ideas — servant leadership, Team Topologies-style enabling teams, or Cutler-style 'conditions over directives' leadership.
closed by10) Una Aamodt Mathisen om å lede når du ikke har fasiten — Cashes out what 'leadership that plays on the team' means in practice: publicly acknowledging not knowing, a three-phase role (listening, hypothesis-shaped direction, closing the learning loop), direction and autonomy as mutually constitutive, and restraint toward distrust signals.
incompleteThe argument that this kind of leadership requires experience 'from working in teams and with technology' is asserted but not defended. It excludes by implication leaders from non-engineering backgrounds; whether and why that exclusion is justified is not addressed.
incompleteThe 'every company is a technology company' claim is delivered as a closer without supporting argument. It is a common premise in contemporary tech-leadership discourse but the episode does not engage with the well-known counter-readings (that 'tech company' loses meaning when applied universally; that technology intensity is a spectrum, not a binary).
incompleteThe elevator metaphor implies vertical movement between hierarchical levels, but the show's stated commitment is to a team-model world where hierarchical levels are deliberately flattened. There is a latent tension between 'visit leaders on every floor' (which implies floors exist as distinct strata) and 'leadership that plays on the team' (which implies the strata are less salient). The episode does not address this tension.