Allchiefs
culture
strategy
expression
Jul 2019
Story: Allchiefs
Allchiefs set out to leave behind top‑down drag and build a collective of owners. The brand needed to feel alive: something people could live, not just present.
Allchiefs
Picture this: a group of driven professionals who'd had it with org charts. They wanted a company where nobody gets promoted because "it's your turn", where entrepreneurship isn't a poster on the wall, and where the word boss quietly retires. Beautiful in theory. Slightly terrifying on a Monday morning.
Because here's the catch with a flat structure: remove the hierarchy and you also remove the scaffolding most companies quietly lean on. No cascading decisions, no "because the director said so", no reassuring lines on a slide. Replace that scaffolding with nothing, and a playground without bosses turns into a group chat with opinions.
From hierarchy to heartbeat
We joined the founders as co-conspirators, not consultants. No 60-page deck, no maturity model, no workshop ending in sticky notes nobody reads on Tuesday. Instead we ran strategy, expression, and internal culture as one braided track; you can't brand your way into a culture you haven't built, and you can't build a culture without language for it.
The engine under the hood was 23plusone, our science-based method that maps the 24 emotional drivers behind why people choose, stay, and care. We put the founding group through it and watched for the drivers that kept lighting up: autonomy, vitality, ambition, belonging. Not a vibe. A pattern. Repeatable, testable, and hard to argue with once it's on the table.
That pattern became the brief for everything else. The name Allchiefs showed up almost on cue, the kind of word you suspect was already in the room waiting for permission. From there we translated the emotional core into the daily stuff: how meetings open, how decisions get made, how new people are welcomed, how wins get shared. Culture as choreography, not a values poster in the kitchen.
"BR-ND People didn't just hand us a brand. They gave us the language and the feeling for the culture we'd been trying to describe for years. Proper partners, not polite advisors." Wanda van Kerkvoorden, co-founder of Allchiefs
From playground to proof
Today, Allchiefs is what happens when a company stops performing culture and starts living it. People don't survive the week, they shape it. Ownership isn't a perk; it's the operating system. The brand isn't something the marketing lead defends in meetings, it's something every chief carries into the room before anyone says hello. They've since become a certified B Corp. So have we. Fellow travellers on the road where profit and purpose don't have to pick a side.
The quiet punchline: a playground without bosses still needs rules. Just better ones, written by the people who actually play on it.
Curious what your own playground would look like?
If you're building a company with less hierarchy and more heartbeat, let's run the 23plusone lens over it together. No cascading decks. Just a sharper picture of the drivers you're already betting on, and a plan to make them visible in the daily work.
Reach out to Kim or Alexander if you're looking for something similar
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