Since 2008, the BetaCodex Network has promoted organizational transformation. Not transformation of "just any kind", but of the paradigm-shifting kind: We have been promoting the transformation from "command-and-control" to "decentralized and democratic". In order to achieve such transformations for entire companies, regardless of size, organizational structures need to change within the molds of an approach we call Cell Structure Design. But structural change alone is not enough: In order to achieve and sustain a federative organization, performance systems must change, too: From the way futurizing is tackled, to how an organization deals with resource coordination, reporting, and employee pay. To make such transformation of performance systems attainable, I published the Relative Targets approach to performance systems, back in 2021. Relative Targets covers all elements of an organizational performance system. The approach carries a big promise: To bring consistency and relentless rationality to organizations' performance systems – everywhere.
Since the 1970s at least, we have known a great deal about organizations as systems, about social psychology and human nature at work. But the existing scientific insight on how human collaboration works and how complex social systems function is blatantly ignored and acted against, in companies and workplaces everywhere, every single day. "Practice", or the reality of management in organizations, appears to be profoundly detached from the available scientific insight we have at our disposal. Performance systems are somehow stuck in a different, pre-democratic age, it seems. Even supposedly "new" and more enlightened concepts around performance management are base don authoritarianism and paternalist beliefs.
At the same time, managers and executives, but also CFOs, corporate controllers, performance management specialists, finance people and accountants reside over performance systems that are intransparent, burdensome and hard to maintain, and that rely on command-and-control concepts, including planning, budgeting, cost management, resource allocation and incentivization. Functions like finance and HR, in short, are often decades behind the most fundamental scientific and practical insight.
The renaissance of "performance management" has been 80 years in the making. Will it finally take off?
Which is kind of odd, really. Between 1900 and 1960, Thinkers of calibre like Mary Parker Follett, Kurt Lewin, Viktor Frankl, Abraham Maslow, Frederick Herzberg and Douglas McGregor thought hard about the meaning of work to humans, and about human motivation and social dynamics at work. These thinkers consistently presaged a world in which organizations would make use of people's natural, intrinsic motivation, instead of whipping them into obedience. Between the 1950s and 1990s, systemically thinking management pioneers like W. Edwards Deming refined these notions and integrated them into full-fledged organizational approaches.
Deming and McGregor were among the first to pull these ideas together into practical advice, and to help organizations apply these companies consistently. Successive influential initiatives like the Socio-Technical Systems movement, and later the Beyond Budgeting Round Table, of which I was research director at some point of my career, advocated to not just question, but also to "transform" the nature of organizational performance systems. By and large, those movements failed to deliver the methods that organizations could use to undertake the transformations, in practice. Additional innovations, such as the OpenSpace Beta approach, were needed to allow for transformation that would. We cracked this secret in 2018. Seven years later, in 2025, we can report that the promise of Beyond Budgeting, Follett, Trist, McGregor and Deming is within reach to all organizations: Within weeks or months, not years or decades.
Fresh BetaCodex research outlines 12 typical patterns in adopting Relative Targets performance systems
This is the first BetaCodex Network research paper around the Relative Targets topic since 2009. Which may seem odd, as the Relative Targets approach so close to my own roots as a finance manager/corporate controller, and to the network's roots. In a way, with this 22nd research paper, we are reconnecting to a core theme that the BetaCodex was founded upon, which is a contemporary take on performance systems (or what some refer to as "performance management"). What makes the content of the new paper really fresh is that we describe the Relative Targets approach through the lens of real-world, ”time-boxed" transformation.
Here, we are not looking at Relative Targets through the lens of cases like Handelsbanken's or Buurtzorg International's. And not through the lens of "abstract theory", either. But as something that is pulled off within a time fame of weeks, or a few months. We as Red42 have undertaken these transformation processes with clients many times, since 2019. The 12 patterns that Silke Hermann and I identified during these client projects and that I describe in the paper are presented in the same sequence in which we at Red42 tackle them during Beta transformations, and in which every organization undertaking transformation will likely have to tackle them. There are quite a few insights to be found in the research paper that we recently stumbled upon in our consulting work.
As usual, the BetaCodex Network's research is presented in a colorful, richly illustrated way. With very short and crisp, no-nonsense texts. I hope that readers - practitioners, consultants and academics alike, will enjoy the format and the contents.
It's the promise of contemporary performance systems, fulfilled!
Relative Targets: Patterns in Practice is formatted as a PDF file, in a way that makes it attractive to read, to use in one's work, and to share. It should also come handy as a teaching resource. Read and download the paper, free of charge, here.
Additional resources
Watch an episode of BetaCodex LIVE about this research, with 🎼Rijon Erickson🎶 and Niels Pflaeging, here.
Find the Relative Targets concept overview in five languages and for free download here.www.relativetargets.com
Relative Targets is an open source, free social technology created by Niels Pflaeging, published under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license from Creative Commons, accessible under: www.relativetargets.com On this web page, you will also find a large amount of free resources that will help you learn more about the approach.
This text was written without the help of "A.I" text-generation tools. It was written by a human author in its entirety.
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