Hacking Organizations: What Moves and What Remains with Priel Korenfeld
with Priel Korenfeld, Organizational Hacker & Partner at Copernicana
Organizational hacker Priel Korenfeld explores how to make organizations more flexible and habitable for human beings — and why culture can't be designed directly but emerges from the micro-moments of how people actually work together.
What if we stopped trying to control organizations and started hacking them instead? That’s the question at the heart of this conversation with Priel Korenfeld — a self-described organizational hacker and partner at Milan-based consulting firm Copernicana. Priel has spent a decade helping organizations become more flexible, more human, and more alive. His journey from a democratic school in Israel to compulsory military service to the world of organizational design gives him a rare perspective on what rigidity costs us — and what becomes possible when we let go of it.
Flexible and Habitable: The Two Things Every Organization Needs
Priel boils down what a thriving, future-proof organization needs into two core qualities: flexibility and habitability. Flexibility means being able to change when change is needed — not through massive transformation projects, but through small, continuous adjustments, much like nature evolves. Habitability means the organization is actually a good place for human beings to exist. It sounds obvious, but as organizations grow, they tend to become both more rigid and less livable. Bureaucracy piles up. Ten approvals for toilet paper. People stop feeling like they belong.
This is where the love vs. fear lens becomes so relevant. Rigidity is almost always rooted in fear — fear of losing control, fear of making mistakes, fear of trusting people. When we design organizations from that place, we create systems that slowly squeeze the life out of the people inside them.
You Can’t Design Culture Directly — But You Can Shape the Conditions
One of the most powerful insights Priel shares is that culture is an emergent property. You can’t install it like software. Nobody designed German culture or Italian culture — they emerged from centuries of interaction, environment, and shared experience. The same is true in organizations. You can describe the culture you want. You can articulate values and vision. But those are maps, not territory.
What you can do is work on the conditions: how people meet, how they communicate, how decisions get made, how budgets are set. Change those practices, and the culture shifts. It’s indirect work — and it requires patience. But it’s the only kind that actually sticks.
The Monoculture Trap
Priel draws a brilliant parallel from agriculture: we know monocultures are devastating for the land. They require enormous effort — chemicals, machinery, constant intervention — just to maintain. And they destroy the soil. Yet in organizations, we don’t just try to create a single culture — we try to enforce a monoculture. One set of values. One way of being. One personality type that fits.
A healthy organization, like a healthy forest, needs diversity. Different organisms, different strengths, different perspectives — all connected in an ecosystem that finds its own balance. The work isn’t to eliminate diversity. It’s to nurture the connections between diverse parts.
Micro-Moments Are Where Culture Actually Lives
Forget the grand strategy decks. Culture lives in the micro-moments. A checkout round at the end of a meeting where everyone shares how it went. A message to a colleague who didn’t speak up: “Hey, what’s going on?” These small acts of noticing create feedback loops that compound over time. They build agency, accountability, and trust — not because someone mandated it, but because people practiced it.
Priel emphasizes that measurement matters, but it needs to include the subjective alongside the objective. How many meetings happened is data. How people felt leaving those meetings is culture.
The Sacred Boundary Between the Individual and the Organization
Perhaps the most important thread in this conversation is where the organization’s reach should stop and the individual’s sovereignty begins. Priel is clear: the community can help you notice something about yourself. It can even help you find resources to work on it. But it should never cross into telling you who to be or demanding you change on a personal level.
Tine shares her own experience of working in a Holacracy-driven culture where the collective’s focus on personal development eventually crossed that line — eroding individuality, creating group pressure around vulnerability, and blurring the boundary between role and soul. The takeaway? Agency starts with yourself. True power isn’t power over others. It’s the courage to own your own space while staying in honest relationship with the people around you.
Listen and Connect
This episode is a rich exploration of what it means to create organizations that are truly alive — flexible enough to evolve and human enough to sustain the people inside them. Connect with Priel Korenfeld on LinkedIn or visit copernicana.com to learn more about his work.
For more conversations like this, visit lovenotfear.com and subscribe to the Love Not Fear Podcast wherever you listen.