Dreaming Big for a Better Organization

More than a decade ago, tire making giant Michelin began distributing decision-making and accountability across the organization. The aim was to tap into the latent initiative and ingenuity of its 117,000-strong workforce while recognizing every employee’s right to meaningful work and growth. Under the banner of responsabilisation—a French term that connotes both autonomy and accountability—Michelin began experimenting with production teams across plants around the world, challenging them to run their operations with far more discretion than they previously had. The experiment worked so well that by 2014, entire plants began adopting these practices, and by 2018, the change spread to headquarters units. Between 2017 and 2020, responsabilisation generated over half a billion dollars in manufacturing improvements alone.

I spent 2016 to 2018 studying these changes at Michelin, leading to a detailed piece Gary Hamel and I wrote for Harvard Business Review. Recently, I came across a summary of the “vision” for responsabilisation which Bertrand Ballarin, the leader of this effort, shared with me in 2017. At the time, Ballarin and his team were using it to orient staff across multiple plants around the new philosophy and practices. I’ve always loved this document—eight hand-drawn sketches showing the fundamental shifts they were pursuing across the company. It’s genuine, deep (despite the hand-drawn style), and comprehensive.

Michelin’s leadership team has given permission to share these illustrations, which I’m featuring here alongside my commentary. I hope they’ll prove as useful and inspiring to others as they have been to me.

1. Customers Up Close

Large organizations naturally drift toward insularity. Specialized roles fragment work into narrow tasks, internal metrics replace customer outcomes, and layers of process separate workers from market realities. Changing this requires ensuring customer feedback reaches everyone, creating clear connections between daily work and client needs, and giving workers a full view of how their efforts serve customers. As part of responsabilisation, production workers in one factory began tracking which tire batches went to which automakers, understanding each customer’s importance to plant performance, monitoring real-time quality metrics, and responding to customer complaints or defects. Like Haier with its “zero distance” philosophy, Michelin found that putting customers at the center sharpened everyone’s focus on creating value.

2. Results That Matter

Bureaucratic organizations lean hard on procedures—they’re predictable and measurable. Following procedures, checking boxes, and staying safe within bounds eventually become the mission, leaving bold moves and bright ideas on the sidelines. Responsabilisation at Michelin meant redefining accountability around actual impact. Teams gained freedom to adapt methods as long as they delivered results. In one plant, operators developed new ways to coordinate tire production across shifts without going through planning engineers. In another, teams took charge of quality control, creating their own methods for catching defects early. The focus shifted from following rules set from above to a shared responsibility for finding better ways to serve customers.

3. Teams in Charge

Compact, autonomous teams form the backbone of entrepreneurial organizations. They can act decisively while maintaining clear collective responsibility. Without bureaucratic buffers or matrix structures to hide behind, teams must own both wins and failures—a setup that speeds learning and improves decisions, as seen in organizations like Haier, Vinci, and Buurtzorg with their thousands of self-managing units. Another big performance benefit of autonomy is cohesion. Talking to teams across multiple plants, I kept hearing how taking on more—managing shifts, solving production issues, handling recruitment and onboarding, improving processes—knit them closer together and sharpened their focus on results. They were thinking and acting more like business owners, not passive order-takers.

4. Leaders Who Enable

When teams take real ownership, their managers must discover new ways to add value. One of my favorite stories from Michelin involves Olivier Duplain, a shift supervisor at the Le Puy-en-Velay plant in south-central France. Seeking to empower his team, Olivier asked his forty-person crew, “What responsibilities can you take from me?” They replied, “We don’t know what you do, Olivier—you’re here for morning checks, then gone.” In response to that eye-opening comment, Duplain started working shifts alongside them, and frontline workers shadowed him for a few days. Soon, the team took over scheduling and production planning, freeing him to ensure the right talent mix, coach colleagues through new challenges, and secure funding for better tools. Every manager and supervisor at Michelin was encouraged to prototype the kind of leader they wanted to be. With practice and perseverance, they learned to shift from controlling to supporting their teams.

5. Growth on Your Own Terms

At Michelin, like many traditional companies, managers and the Personnel function controlled career paths—deciding who advanced, what training they needed, when they moved up. This paternalistic approach ran deep, part of a culture stretching back generations at its headquarters in Clermont-Ferrand. Responsabilisation sought to change this fundamentally, creating an environment where people, not the system, shape their futures and build careers around skills and impact rather than climbing predetermined ladders.

6. Rewards Based on Contribution

Traditional compensation systems, with their top-down reviews and individual targets, fit poorly with high-autonomy organizations. Rigid incentives tied to narrow metrics falter when people own their work and team up across boundaries to tackle unscheduled challenges. Responsabilisation paved the way for a different approach—teams assess contributions, rewards mirror collective wins, and value creation outweighs hitting a myriad of preset KPIs.

7. Decentralization That Delivers

An organization relying on many small, autonomous teams could drift from shared goals or waste effort duplicating solutions. The architects of responsabilisation wrestled with this, seeking ways to make the whole greater than its parts. Take standards and shared processes for capacity planning, quality, and other critical manufacturing areas. The goal wasn’t to scrap them, but instead let the teams doing the actual work play a bigger role in their design and execution. The teams at the Olsztyn plant in northern Poland, for instance, proposed taking control of production scheduling from headquarters, arguing their direct customer contact enabled better decisions than distant planners could make. They invited headquarters staff to discuss the idea, made their case for managing monthly targets locally since they tracked demand shifts firsthand, and ran a month-long pilot. The test succeeded, production improved with no disruptions, and this approach became a template. Other plants followed suit, gradually shifting more decision-making power from the center to the front lines.

8. Radical Transparency

For empowerment to work, information cannot remain in the hands of HQ or senior managers. Frontline teams can’t make good decisions without access to the data that matters. This means moving from restricted information flows to open sharing, supported by collaborative tools. When people can see the whole picture—costs, quality data, customer feedback, market trends—they can find expertise across the organization, learn from others’ experiences, and take ownership.

Responsabilisation remains a work in progress—despite impressive advances, the Michelin team is the first to acknowledge there’s still distance to cover between aspiration and reality (for an update, see this interview Gary and I did with Michelin CEO Florent Menegaux). But they’ll also tell you that without a bold and clearly articulated vision, they wouldn’t have pushed so far.

I've included a complete set of illustrations below. My hope is that they'll help you imagine a more capable, human-centric organization. Share them with your team and ask: What resonates? What should our “From…To” shifts be? What concrete steps can we take to move forward?

It’s hard to start a journey when you can’t picture the destination. These sketches might just show you what’s worth reaching for.