ten23 health® based in Basel (CH) is a human-centered and sustainable pharma and biotech startup. With globally recognized industry and regulatory expertise, ten23 health develops, produces, and tests the medicines of tomorrow. Guided by the principle "Patients, People, Planet", the company is committed to developing its innovative services in a fair and sustainable way, putting people’s health and the future of our planet at the center.

The founder and CEO Hanns-Christian Mahler has always been driven by an adaptable and human way of working, which led him to leave his former role at a pharmaceutical corporation and set out for new horizons. He decided to complete a Loop Fellow training and was empowered by TheDive to build and lead teams in self-organization.

When he ultimately founded ten23 health, Hanns-Christian was clear: this organization should operate from the ground up according to the Loop principles. That means self-organized, tension-based, and consistently structured around strength-based roles and responsibilities.

With the Loop Approach, we created a framework to transform organizations from within, team by team. ten23 health proved to us that the Loop Approach also provides a suitable starting point for building self-organized organizations from the ground up.

Because Hanns-Christian Mahler had already worked with the Loop principles as a Loop Fellow, he knew from the beginning that our transformation approach The Loop Approach® would be the right operating system for his organization.

The first 20 employees were guided through an adapted Loop journey by our Co-Diver Elena Lange. It was based on the Loop’s process structure and divided into the three modules “Clarity,” “Results,” and “Evolution”—with the only difference being that, for this project, the Loop journey was broken into slightly smaller portions.

The starting signal was an offsite with the first 20 employees, where everyone laid the foundation for ten23 health together: the purpose and values were defined to give the organization as much orientation as possible going forward. The team also learned the Holacracy tool Holaspirit, the communication tool Slack, and the task management tool Trello. This enabled them to design their structures and processes in an agile way from the very beginning, becoming effective as quickly as possible and directly testing the principles of tension-based work.

Over the next two months, the team focused on the basics of team effectiveness as well as individual effectiveness and became familiar with the meeting formats “Tactical” and “Governance meeting.” The team also dove into the modules on feedback and conflict competence as well as adaptability.

A luxury that organizational developers like us can only dream of is that there were no internal resistances when it came to shaping the organization. We lovingly call this state the Honeymoon Effect: the combination of completely newly formed teams and a completely new way of working led everyone to be visibly open-minded, despite the question marks in their heads. Across the entire 20-person team, there was a strong commitment and willingness to learn, making the collaboration productive from start to finish.

Since then, the team in Basel has grown by another 22 members. Four of them, from the People & Culture Circle, are being trained as Fellows in the Loop Academy. This allows ten23 health to ensure that Loop continues to spread throughout the organization even after the project has ended.

From day one of the founding, working in a structured, tension-based way was a gift, because it amplified the pioneering spirit and made it clear to everyone how they could bring in new ideas and implement them immediately.

Purpose and values work helped the team feel deeply connected to the organization from the very beginning.

By training employees in the Loop Academy, ten23 health becomes independent of external consulting.

40

Employees after 8 months

200+

Employees today

740+

Roles

36

Circles