We are at a critical point in the development of place-based strategy and working at Bromford Flagship. During 2026 we will move from a test and learn approach in a limited number of places to a wider roll out.

This is the juncture that most innovations fail – can they spread without compromising what made them unique in the first place?

The work we have seen emerging from our current pilots is testament to the power of smallness. These pilots have succeeded precisely because they are tiny, unique, and autonomous from the host. They have been organic rather than managed. They have their own personality types, their own strengths, their own flaws.

As we move toward the proposed rollout of 78 place-based approaches each supported by a team, we face a crucial strategic inflection point: how do we scale our impact without succumbing to the fundamental structural flaws that kill innovation?

The Promise of Decentralisation

In most organisations a tension exists between the legacy of industrial-era management (standardisation, hierarchy, and economies of scale) and the emerging imperative for agility, localisation, and human-centric work.

This tension is nowhere more visible than in the attempts to implement place-based working in the public sector and decentralised or self-managing teams in the private sector. These models promise to resolve the inefficiencies of bureaucracy by pushing decision-making power to the edge of the organisation, where interaction with the customer or citizen actually occurs.

Successful implementaions of these models are few and far between. Most people know of the names Buurtzorg and Haier for a reason: they are total outliers rather than the norm.

Approaches that seek to replicate their principles of autonomy and self management are marked by:

• An initial cycle of enthusiasm
• The pilot implementation
• Rubbing up against systemic friction
• The eventual compromise or reversion to the status quo

In the digital and corporate sectors this can result in ‘decentralisation theatre’ which describes the performative adoption of decentralised structures—such as squads and tribes in software engineering, or DAOs (Decentralised Autonomous Organisations) in Web3 that sound good on paper but often mask a highly centralised reality.  It’s really easy for organisations to adopt the vocabulary of decentralisation (e.g empowerment, bottom-up, place-based) without altering the infrastructure of control.

In the UK public sector, this is often visible in the localism agenda, where central government devolves duties to local councils but retains tight control over funding formulas and policy constraints, effectively turning local government into a delivery arm of the central state rather than an autonomous sphere of governance. 

In unsuccessful attempts to replicate the success of a Buurtzorg or Haeier a sort of pseudo-autonomy is adopted, as employees or local teams are nominally granted the freedom to make decisions. However, the parameters of those decisions are so tightly constrained by central metrics, budget limitations, and reporting requirements that the autonomy is completely illusory.

Centralisation’s Immune Response to Decentralised Work

Attempts to transplant the Dutch Buurtzorg model of district nursing into the National Health Service (NHS) serve as excellent case studies for how organisational practices compromise decentralised working. Buurtzorg, founded by Jos de Blok in 2006, revolutionised home care in the Netherlands by replacing managers with self-governing teams of nurses who handle the entire process of care, from intake to discharge, supported by a lean back office and sophisticated tech.

When this model was introduced to the NHS, a system characterised by extreme hierarchy, specialisation, and regulatory oversight, it encountered a series of systemic rejection mechanisms.

In essence, the Buurtzorg implementation became an example of pseudo-autonomy—the vocabulary of self-management was adopted, but the centralised infrastructure of control remained, rendering the new way of working inoperable.

Navigating the Immune Response

To make approaches successful organisations must move beyond ‘implementing a model’ to ‘redesigning the system’.

These are not exhaustive but are central ways in which the auto-immune can be countered:

• Create Separate Entities: As Haier demonstrated, it is often more effective to create a new operational entity with its own HR/Tech/Finance rules than to try and carve out a space within the legacy mothership.   
• Radical Back Office Reform: The back office must be stripped of its control functions and repurposed as a service provider to the (place-based) teams.
• Outcome-Based Accountability: Hierarchy must shift from measuring process (compliance) to measuring outcomes (citizen health/happiness), creating the space for local variance in how those outcomes are achieved.

Genuine place based and decentralised approaches are not merely structural changes; they are assaults on the fundamental logic of the traditional organisation. The traditional organisational model is designed to minimise variance and maximise control, whilst place-based and decentralised approaches seek the very opposite.

When a decentralised unit is introduced into a centralised host, the host’s systems react as an immune system would to a foreign body, isolating and neutralising the threat.

The only way to counter this is not to concentrate on scaling your innovation, but rather to change the very system itself.

Photo by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on Unsplash