ten23 health®, based in Basel (CH), is a human-centred and sustainable pharmaceutical and biotech start-up. With globally recognised industry and regulatory expertise, ten23 health develops, produces and tests the medicines of tomorrow. Under the guiding principle ‘Patients, People, Planet’, the company is committed to developing its innovative services in a fair and sustainable way, focussing on people's health and the future of our planet.

The founder and managing director Hanns-Christian Mahler has always been driven by an adaptable and human way of working, so he left his former job in a pharmaceutical company to set off for new shores. He decided to train as a Loop Fellow and was trained by TheDive to build and manage teams in self-organisation.

When he finally founded ten23 health, Hanns-Christian was clear: this organisation should work according to the Loop principles from the ground up. In other words: self-organised, tension-based and consistently based on strength-oriented roles and responsibilities.

With the Loop Approach, we have created a framework for transforming organisations from the inside out, team by team. ten23 health has proven to us that the Loop Approach also offers a suitable framework as a starting point for building self-organising organisations.

As Hanns-Christian Mahler had worked with the Loop principles himself as a Loop Fellow, he was aware from the outset that our transformation approach The Loop Approach® would be the right operating system for his organisation.

The first 20 employees were guided through an adapted loop journey with our co-diver Elena Lange. It was based on the process structure of the loop and is divided into the three modules ‘Clarity’, ‘Results’ and ‘Evolution’, with the only difference being that the loop journey was cut into slightly smaller portions for this project.

The starting point was an offsite with the first 20 employees, where everyone worked together to lay the foundations for ten23 health: the purpose and values were defined in order to give the organisation as much direction as possible in the future. The team also familiarised themselves with the Holacracy tool Holaspirit, the communication tool Slack and the task management tool Trello. This enabled them to organise their structures and processes in an agile way right from the start in order to become effective as quickly as possible and directly test the principles of tension-based working.

In the following two months, the team focussed on the basics of team effectiveness and individual effectiveness and was introduced to the tactical and governance meeting formats. The team also immersed themselves in the feedback and conflict competence and adaptability modules.

One benefit that organisational developers like us can only dream of is that there was no resistance to the design of the organisation.
The entire 20-strong team showed great commitment and a willingness to learn, so that the collaboration was fruitful from start to finish.

The team in Basel has since grown by a further 22 members. Four of these People & Culture Circle members are being trained as Fellows at the Loop Academy. In this way, ten23 health can ensure that the Loop continues to spread throughout the organisation after the project.

Working in a role- and tension-based way from day 1 of the foundation was a gift, because it reinforced the spirit of optimism and everyone knew how to contribute new ideas and implement them immediately

Purpose and values work helped the team to feel very connected to the organisation early on

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

40

Employees after 8 months

200+

Employees today

740+

Roles with responsibilities

36

Circles