About the
Post-Industrial Institute

Reinventing Organizational Design for Knowledge Work

Frode Odegard founded the Post-Industrial Institute in 2004. We began with fieldwork helping leaders of complex enterprises with organizational transformation. Our focus was on reinventing organizational design for knowledge work. We developed and applied the Lean Systems Framework, combining a visual modeling language with methods for organizational design and learning that connected work processes, information, products, organizational structure, and culture. In 2012, our founder was named a Founding Fellow of the Lean Systems Society for this work.

The Post-Industrial Research Program Begins

We began investigating how exponential technologies and decentralization were changing the fundamental assumptions behind organizations and management. A study spanning 12,000 years of economic and organizational history led us to conclude that humanity was entering a transition from industrial to post-industrial civilization. Adapting organizational design for knowledge work would not be enough: this transition would require a new school of management science.

Higher-Order Organizations and the Value Stack

Three white papers examined our first decade of work. Extending Lean for Knowledge Work: A Retrospective reviewed ten years of helping knowledge-intensive organizations become learning organizations, and the lessons of adapting Toyota’s Lean to that purpose. Lean Leadership in a Disruptive World examined the obstacles to leaders developing their people as problem-solvers, and why disruptive technology was about to make those obstacles much larger. Higher-Order Organizations and the Post-Lean Future proposed a way out: organizations designed to generate other organizations, developing people and capabilities across successive ventures. In November, we introduced the Value Stack at the Smidig conference in Oslo, a model for understanding industry structures and opportunities for disruption.

AI Agents Inside Firms and Across Industries

Our presentations explored how intelligent agents could reshape both organizations and the markets in which they operate. We added agents as a distinct layer of the Value Stack and examined how AI could coordinate goals, schedules, and resources in organizations combining human and AI participants. These ideas established foundations for our later work on autonomous organizations and the Global Agent Economy.

Applying Post-Industrial Thinking to Investment and Governance

We worked with private equity firms, investors, and corporate boards to apply our research to industry disruption, investment strategy, and corporate governance. Through advisory work, board workshops, and presentations at international investment conferences, we applied the Value Stack and other frameworks to deal sourcing, due diligence, portfolio development, and value creation.

Governance in the Post-Industrial Transition

We published Corporate Governance in the Post-Industrial Transition, examining how boards could respond to technology-driven industry change and help management pursue organizational renewal and opportunities for disruption.

Launch of the Post-Industrial Forum

We launched the Post-Industrial Forum with an inaugural event in London, bringing together leaders building and transforming the organizations and industries of the future. Today, the Forum supports a continuous cycle of connecting, learning, applying, and sharing. Through online sessions and in-person workshops, its member-only working groups pursue shared learning goals, apply new concepts in members’ organizations with peer support, and share their experiences through Forum events, Summits, and publications.

Partnership with SRI

We launched the Post-Industrial Forum in Silicon Valley and began a strategic partnership with SRI, formerly the Stanford Research Institute. SRI became the primary host for our events, and we moved our offices to its campus in Menlo Park, California. Our online programs examined leadership during the pandemic, obstacles to organizational transformation, and the effects of accelerating decentralization on business models, brands, and work.

Self-Renewing Enterprises and Organizational Networks

Our work explored post-industrial enterprises as self-renewing networks, including the use of AI to generate new ventures. We examined how increasingly porous organizational boundaries and distributed ownership and control would require governance at two levels: individual firms and the networks connecting them. The Post-Industrial Forum’s online programs connected these organizational questions with changes in energy, transportation, manufacturing, finance, education, and space, alongside sessions on organizational renewal and the role of boards in transformation.

Decentralization and the Industries of Tomorrow

Our Post-Industrial Forum programs examined innovation beyond traditional geographic hubs, remote leadership, and enterprise transformation. We explored opportunities in space, manufacturing, and biotechnology, as well as decentralized digital commerce and the effects of geopolitical fragmentation on innovation and investment.

AI Agents and the Future of Firms

As generative AI reached a wider audience, our Post-Industrial Forum programs explored AI coordinating work, accelerating innovation, and changing organizational culture and leadership. Sessions examined smaller, more adaptive organizations, collaboration between humans and AI agents, and the safety, security, and trust needed as AI takes on greater responsibilities.

The First Two Post-Industrial Summits

We held our first two Post-Industrial Summits at SRI in Menlo Park, California. The AI Transformation, on February 28–29, examined AI’s impact on industries, organizational design, leadership, and innovation, with speakers from AWS, ServiceNow, Salesforce, Box, Broadcom, Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric, and other leading organizations.

AI Agents and Super-Productivity, on November 13–14, explored agent infrastructure, multi-agent systems, workforce transformation, and applications across business operations and the physical world, with speakers from NVIDIA, Google, Outshift by Cisco, SAP, Salesforce, Hitachi, Nokia, and other leading organizations.

Other Post-Industrial Forum sessions that year explored industrial AI, digital twins, and the redesign of work and organizations around networks of humans and AI agents.

The Rise of Autonomous Organizations

The rise of autonomous organizations was the central theme of our research and four Post-Industrial Forum programs. These examined key components: agents performing strategy work; agents improving organizational intelligence and helping overcome the knowing–doing gap; agents acting as economic participants across firm boundaries in the Global Agent Economy; and the design of autonomous organizations. The year culminated in the December publication of The Rise of Autonomous Organizations, arguing that agents’ greatest impact would be accelerating the evolution of firms and entire industries.

The Autonomous Organizations Summit

On February 4–5, we convened the world’s first executive-level summit dedicated to AI-powered autonomous organizations. Our third Post-Industrial Summit, again hosted by SRI in Menlo Park, brought together speakers from OpenAI, NVIDIA, Outshift by Cisco, Salesforce, Hitachi, and other leading organizations. The program explored organizational intelligence, collaboration between humans and agents, autonomous operations, innovation and venture development, strategy, governance, and the Global Agent Economy.