Germany’s rail system is being digitized and made future-ready. Technological innovation based on new digital technologies is one of the biggest levers for achieving this. Bringing these new digital technologies into the rail system is the responsibility of the Railway System Digitalization department within the “Digitale Schiene Deutschland” program.

Although the department’s teams began the initiative with a clear goal and a well-thought-out approach to developing the digital rail system, there is no blueprint for the rail system of the future—it must be reimagined from the ground up. To generate the necessary innovation power, many experts must be brought together, self-organizing to exchange ideas, and producing results through flat hierarchies, fast decision-making, and rapid prototyping.

The leadership of the Railway System Digitalization department was aware from the very beginning that the complex challenges could not be solved with a classic, static organizational structure. Since the project began in 2017, we have been supporting the team in building a self-organizing structure based on the Loop Approach.

At that time, the team was still very small but was expected to grow quickly. In the first step, it was therefore especially important to establish healthy and sustainable structures that could later be scaled.

We initially supported the first three teams and the steering group on their Loop journey through the three modules of Clarity, Results, and Evolution, which made the seven virtues of self-organization tangible for all team members. Alongside this, facilitation training and nonviolent communication workshops were conducted with some employees to help build a healthy feedback system.

In the next step, we co-created a Loop onboarding process that, now revised and refined, helps the growing number of employees integrate into the team’s new agile ways of working.

Today, an established “Loop Circle” within organizational and personnel development ensures that the organizational unit—now 200 employees strong—continues to evolve its self-organization-based operating system in a needs-oriented way. Because that is the core competency of self-organizing teams and companies: the ability to continuously develop themselves, change rules, add roles, and make responsibilities transparent.

Like all teams that organize themselves according to the Loop principles, the Digitalization Rail System team has also found its own unique way of working together. For them, it is particularly important that self-organization does not mean that there are no hierarchies or responsibilities anymore. On the contrary: individual responsibilities are made explicit and visible to everyone through governance processes and role definitions.

The difference is that in self-organization, hierarchical structure arises where a person has the best expertise for the current project phase. Hierarchy in self-organization is therefore competence-based, which helps the team very effectively to always align their work with the overarching mission: designing a future-proof rail system.

200

employees working in a self-organized way based on the Loop Approach

45

Loop Onboarding sessions that helped new employees integrate into the existing self-organized structures

17

Clear-the-Air trainings conducted

5

Circle Lead trainings conducted