Inside Chorus, Australia's Most Human-Centric Care Organization

Specifically, on the campus of Rutgers University, attending the annual Kelso Workshop.

For those unfamiliar, the Kelso Workshop is a small but intense gathering of scholars and practitioners interested in different forms of employee ownership.

The workshop is also the home base of the Bill Nobles Fellowship, a program that supports researchers working on alternatives to hierarchical organizing in corporations.

Being part of this fellowship has been a privilege, especially being among other Nobles Fellows whose work I deeply admire, such Mike Lee (INSEAD), Ethan Bernstein (HBS), Bex Hewitt (RSM), and Judy Lundy (ECU).

Down under

This week, however, I’m not in the US.

I’m in Australia.

And that turns out to be a rather fitting coincidence.

Because one of the most recent outcomes of my Nobles Fellowship work is a teaching case about an Australian care organization I’ve come to know well over the years: Chorus.

Together with Judy Lundy and Rahatulaain Ahmad, I worked on this case that captures how Chorus is trying to revolutionise the Australian care industry through more human ways of organizing.

I want to use this newsletter to tell that story.

Not as a “dilemma case” for the classroom.

But as a living example of what a progressive organization can look like in practice.

Meeting Chorus

We’ve been in touch with Chorus (including CEO Dan Minchin and Ryan Chapman) for many years now.

We visited them in Perth multiple times, worked with their leadership, facilitated varies sessions with frontline teams, and watched their human-centric model evolve in real time.

What always struck me was this: Chorus is never trying to be radical for the sake of it.

They are trying to solve very practical problems.

That is, Australia’s care sectors are under immense pressure for many reasons.

Traditional care providers typically respond to these pressures by adding layers of management, compliance officers, and reporting structures.

That also means that they are typically pulling autonomy away from the people closest to the work.

Chorus went the opposite way.

They asked:

"What if the people closest to the work were trusted to make most decisions themselves?"

That question led them down a path that few care organizations dare to take.

Purpose first: enabling local communities to thrive

Chorus was formed in 2017 through the merger of three established Western Australian care organizations.

By 2025, Chorus had grown into a multi-service provider with over 700 staff and volunteers, serving thousands of customers across Western Australia.

But instead of using the merger to centralize power, the leadership team saw it as an opportunity to rethink their entire operating model.

They began by articulating a clear purpose:

“Enabling local communities to thrive.”

This wasn’t a marketing slogan.

It became the organizing principle for everything else.

The onion, not the pyramid

One of the most visible results of following their purpose is their operating model: what they call the onion-ring model (inspired by Buurtzorg).

Instead of an org chart with boxes and reporting lines, Chorus depicts itself as a set of concentric circles.

At the center of the onion are the local communities: the people the organization serves (customers, families, volunteers, partners).

Around the center are the locals: small, autonomous Chorus teams, typically 10–20 frontline employees serving a specific geographic area (their community).

Around the locals there are the enablers: Chorus employees who provide back-office support (finance, people & culture, IT, compliance) to the locals. Their role is not to decide, but to support and coach.

The leadership team and the board sit outside both locals and enablers, not above them. They act as stewards of purpose and legitimacy, not as a command center.

In theory, every ring exists to support the one closer to the center.

In practice, this inversion requires constant discipline.

Life inside a local

The heart of Chorus is the local.

A local is not a “team” in the traditional sense.

Locals act as small autonomous groups of employees that explicitly agree through team agreements on:

• how they will work together,
• what behaviors they expect from one another,
• and how they will handle broken agreements.

Moreover, locals recruit their own colleagues, schedule their own work, manage their own budgets, maintain compliance documentation, and, perhaps most important, build relationships with customers and community partners.

That all sounds liberating. And it is.

But it is also demanding.

Locals rely on peer accountability to uphold their agreements.

And holding a peer to account (without hiding behind hierarchy) requires skill, courage, and trust.

That's why every radically decentralized organization should invest heavily in developing those capabilities.

No managers, but plenty of leadership

One of the most persistent misconceptions about radically decentralized organizations is that they are “leaderless.”

Chorus proves the opposite.

Because, in radically decentralized organizations, leadership is everywhere.

But it looks different.

Leadership is distributed through roles. Some people take on "local lead roles." Others focus on customer partnerships, quality, or coordination.

These roles come with accountabilities, not privileges. And are all documented in job canvases.

Yes, roles like "local leads", "strategic coaches," and "enabling leads," carry leadership responsibilities. But none of them have more formal authority than anyone else.

Even CEO Dan Minchin describes his own role not as making decisions, but as holding the space for good conversations.

Formally he has veto power. But in practice, he has never used it.

Decision-making without managers

At Chorus, there are no managers to approve decisions.

So how are decisions actually made?

Chorus uses a mix of consent-based and advice-based decision-making, supported by a clear decision-making matrix.

So, decisions are not made by majority vote, nor by consensus in the sense that “everyone must agree.”

Instead, proposals move forward unless there is a paramount objection: a reason why proceeding would cause harm.

This allows Chorus to move without waiting for universal buy-in, while still protecting against reckless action.

It also forces people to step up.

Because, you can’t hide behind “management decided.”

If you care, you speak up.

Transparency as infrastructure

None of this would work without radical transparency.

That's why Chorus uses a suite of digital tools that make roles, accountabilities, decisions, and work visible across the entire organization.

For example, instead of an org chart, they use a relational mapping tool (Peerdom) that shows who does what and how roles connect.

Moreover, work is tracked openly, budgets are visible, and decisions are documented.

As such, peer accountability through radical transparency replaces top-down supervision.

For many, this is deeply empowering.

For some, it is overwhelming.

Working in a regulated world

What makes the Chorus case particularly interesting is not that it is radically decentralized.

It’s that it is radically decentralized in one of the most regulated environments imaginable.

Aged care, disability support, and mental health services come with audits, compliance standards, named “responsible persons,” and intense public scrutiny.

Regulators often ask: "Who is the manager here?"

Chorus’s answer (“the team is accountable”) doesn’t always fit the norms.

So Chorus has had to become bilingual.

Internally, they speak the language of relationships, agreements, and autonomy.

Externally, they translate that into terms regulators can understand, without giving up their core principles.

That translation work is constant.

And exhausting.

Strengths, tensions, and honest trade-offs

The results speak for themselves.

Employee turnover at Chorus sits around 20%, far below industry averages that exceed 35%.

Employee surveys consistently show high scores on meaning, belonging, and trust.

Customers report responsiveness and continuity that hierarchical providers struggle to deliver.

But Chorus is also honest about the downsides.

Not everyone thrives in a high-autonomy environment.

Some people want clearer direction.

Some struggle with peer accountability.

And some find the work emotionally demanding, because freedom comes with responsibility.

A never-ending journey of beauty and friction

Chorus illustrates something I see across many progressive organizations:

Radical decentralization is not about removing managers.

It’s about continuously redesigning relationships.

And doing so in a way that is deeply contextual, deeply human, and never perfect, nor finished.

It's a never-ending journey of beauty and friction.

Thank you

I want to end with gratitude.

To Bill Nobles and Joseph Blasi for their generous support.

To Judy Lundy and Rahatulaain Ahmad for the incredible work they put into the full teaching case (Unleashing Freedom in Chorus).

And to the entire Chorus organization for the openness, honesty, and access they granted us.

Last but not least, if this story resonates, and you want to go deeper into progressive organizational design, consider joining our Winter cohort of our ​Corporate Rebels Masterclass​.

We explore cases like Chorus not as ideals, but as real, living systems; with all their beauty and friction.