For everyone who has the job and is still working out where to start.
Dawn Seed shows how your organization works today, from a single board to how the departments work together, and guides you step by step as you shape it: with a well-grounded concept, an app, an AI assistant that knows your organization, and in a pilot with me.
5 pilot spots starting in November, each with a weekly call with me.
EU-sovereign: language models can run entirely in the EU, if you choose
By the time the target is described, it has already moved.
Drawing a finished target picture of the organization usually takes longer than the target holds still. What companies need now is the ability to keep evolving their operating model: as a practice you keep up continuously, with changes that no longer hurt as much. AI helps with that, already on the way there.
Organizational development is often seen as black magic: a lot of gut feeling and little you can put your hands on. Just as often, it shrinks down to a new org chart. Neither does justice to the work that actually needs doing.
At its core, it comes down to three questions, put simply:
The right people in fitting structures, with ways of working that hold up: that is the operating model. Business model and strategy set the direction. Dawn Seed comes in where this turns into the everyday life of the organization, in how it is set up as much as in how work flows.
Voltfeld, a maker of charging stations, is the example organization in Dawn Seed. Here you see it in the six views the app draws today. Units and org chart show how it is set up; board, flight route and topology show how work flows. Agreements, meetings and AI agents sit right on these visualizations. The sixth view shows how the pieces point to each other.
How do we line up?
(full-size image, opens in a new tab) Who is on the field?
How does work run within one work system?
Which path does work take through the organization?
What contributes to what?
How does it all fit together?
Organizations are complex, and they stay that way. To find your way through them and shape them, you need better maps of the organization. These are made so that people and AI agents get their bearings on the same map, without oversimplifying and without over-structuring.
In the app you work with the same visualizations as above, together with AI agents that find their way around them just as you do.
You sketch an option right on the map and see what goes away, what changes and what is added. Agents work it through with you: Which flight route runs differently then, which team gets more work, which agreement no longer fits? Several scenarios sit side by side until you decide.
What you notice and what you decide is attached to the place it concerns: a team, a board, a role. That way everyone sees where things are stuck and why something is the way it is, and the agents see it too.
If the goal is an AI-native organization, the way there can now be AI-augmented too.
Frankly is the AI assistant in Dawn Seed, and it knows your organization. It walks through it with you, plays through options with you and, if you like, facilitates a workshop step by step until you reach a decision together.
What happens to an order on this route? Frankly answers from within your organization: which stages, which teams, which agreements apply.
An AI agent works at a specific stage, and everyone can see what it does. You and your team decide. Frankly makes sure you see more while you do.
Change as a practice. On the inside, you think in mental models: what makes up an organization. In the middle are the five steps you use to change it, as a loop. On the outside, you work hands-on, in Dawn Seed. In every step, AI agents work alongside you, and they know their way around the maps of your organization.
You clarify what you want to achieve or what is bothering you right now, and who should have a say.
AIFrankly facilitates a round in which you clarify this together, and captures the goals and the reason in a few sentences.
You map how your organization works today: teams, boards, flight routes, roles, agreements.
AIAgents compare this with your existing systems so you don’t start from zero; we set up that connection together in the pilot. Then they help sort what they find, enrich it and turn it into maps of your organization.
You take time for what you notice, pin it to the place it concerns, and turn it into a reason for change.
AIAgents hold this change conversation with you. In the future, they will also keep looking at your model with a specific question in mind and make visible what is building up before it hurts.
You design a change and record the decision with its reasoning.
AIAgents play through what-if scenarios with you and show what an option sets off elsewhere.
You put the change into practice with the people it affects, visible to everyone. How the changes flow back into your tools for collaboration, coordination and communication is something we set up together in the pilot.
AIAgents accompany the change step by step, keep the goals in view and show whether it works. That starts the next round.
Behind it is Dynamic Work Systems Design, an approach that builds on Flight Levels, Org Topologies™ and more. The language Dawn Seed uses to describe your organization is called DWSD, and it is openly documented at dwsd.md.
The topic is big, the starting point unclear, and the organization itself is hardly visible. That is why many people who have the job hesitate. Three situations I come across again and again:
She has been in charge of AI adoption for three months. On her desk: the mandate from senior management, a list of tool requests from the departments, and an org chart that stopped being accurate a while ago. She wonders which area to start with and who all of this affects.
Last week he presented the AI strategy to the leadership team. Now he is standing at the whiteboard, sketching his teams and wondering whether to hire for it or build it with the teams he has. How the teams actually work together today, he only roughly knows.
She runs a family business with a strong manufacturing side. The technology is moving faster than the organization around it, and the shop floor feels it first. She wants to change something without rebuilding the whole house at once, and she is looking for the first lever.
A first round of the loop, on a small scale: your next decision for the organization, in four questions.
Write down the answers and put them where you will find them again in a month. Then ask: What effect has this had? That is where the next round begins.
90 minutes. You describe what you want to achieve, and I suggest a slice of the organization to start with: one area, one product line or one site.
I map the slice in Dawn Seed with you and capture what you want to achieve. After that, you see your organization the way it is today.
In the weekly call, you and I look at what stands out, play through what-if scenarios and carry out the next step. Between calls, Frankly supports you in the app.
Your request has reached me. I will get back to you shortly with a suggested date.
Everything we map in Dawn Seed stays with you as plain text files: the views of your organization, observations, decisions. You can read them, version them and take them with you at any time, also after the pilot and without Dawn Seed.
I’m Thomas Krause, a work systems designer from Karlsruhe, Germany. I help organizations evolve and connect their strategy with their daily work. For me, much of that is a practice. Dawn Seed is the tool I use for this work myself, and now you and your team can use it too. In the pilot we work on it together until you use Dawn Seed on your own.
