What 15 years of ground-level observation reveals about DSO’s real trajectory

BOTTOM LINE Published metrics tell one story. Ground-level observation tells another. I’ve watched Bayer’s evolution for over 15 years—close enough to see patterns that analyst reports miss. The signals that predict transformation success or failure aren’t in quarterly earnings. They’re in who stays, who leaves, and whether capability is being built or merely performed

The Pattern

I need to declare my perspective. My wife spent 17 years at Bayer. A former President’s Award winner—top 1% of performers. She independently qualified in ICAgile Business Agility credentials at her own expense, long before Bayer officially embraced Agile, let alone Agility. She demonstrated genuine agility in practice.

She was made redundant in the restructuring.

This isn’t an argument from grievance. It’s data. The pattern matters: who is being retained, and who is being removed?

What to Observe: The Talent Paradox

Here’s what genuine agility looked like at Bayer before DSO:

A 2-hour meeting with 20+ attendees. Inefficient. Frustrating. Everyone knew it was broken. My wife transformed it using Kanban principles. Agenda items became dynamic. Attendance became relevant-only. Updates became asynchronous. The result: 30 minutes with one-third the participants. The improvement spread organically as other managers recognised the value and asked how to replicate it.

This is exactly what DSO promises to enable: front-line innovation, organic spread of better practices, customer-focused efficiency.

The person demonstrating it was removed. The pattern I’ve observed: talented individuals demonstrating genuine agility made redundant, while those less likely to challenge the status quo remain.

NOT THIS This isn’t claiming every redundancy was wrong. Restructuring involves difficult choices. The diagnostic question is different: Is the selection process retaining the people who embody what DSO requires? If the people demonstrating agility leave while those comfortable with hierarchy remain, the structural change becomes cosmetic.

The Capability-Building Gap

Observations from multiple sources reveal a concerning pattern:

• Compressed training: Business and line managers sent on a few days of Scrum training, then expected to revolutionise their teams’ ways of working
• Premature expertise: Some of these managers progressing to “Agile Coach” training and rolling out Agile as “experts”—with no prior agile experience whatsoever
• Method mismatch: Scrum positioned as “the only way” without assessing whether work complexity warranted Scrum’s overhead

This is the “surface adoption without deep integration” that CIRCA-CLEAR warns against. Teams learn the vocabulary without developing the reflexes. Genuine capability building requires 18-24 months of sustained practice, not compressed certification programmes.

CAVEAT FOR LEADERS The pattern repeats across restructuring organisations: managers attend compressed Scrum training—sometimes just a few days—then return expected to revolutionise their teams’ ways of working. Some of these newly certified “leaders” progress to “agile coach” training, emerging as designated experts to roll out Agile across entire business areas. Their LinkedIn profiles update; their experience doesn’t. They hold certifications but lack the years of practice, the pattern recognition from failed experiments, the scar tissue from transformations that went wrong. Certification creates credentials. Practice creates capability. DSO requires the latter whilst producing the former.

The Cultural Inertia Reality

My assessment after 15 years of observation: the people Bayer has retained will never challenge the status quo.

That’s not a criticism of individuals. It’s a structural observation. Self-management requires people willing to self-manage—to take initiative, challenge assumptions, propose improvements. If the restructuring systematically removes those people while retaining those comfortable with hierarchy, the structural change becomes cosmetic.

Christoph Nützel captured this precisely: “When you are not thinking from the end consumer, you’re just making bad business faster and worse… It’s always a bad sign when these programs are launched and you are not reading consumers and customers.”

The Strategic Decision Problem

Here’s what ground-level observers consistently identify: Bayer’s problems don’t originate with its talented workforce. They originate with strategic decisions at the executive level.

The Monsanto acquisition—now widely considered one of the worst corporate mergers in history—wasn’t a front-line failure. The Roundup litigation, the €38 billion debt, the 20-year stock low: these stem from boardroom decisions, not operational inefficiency.

DSO addresses operational structure. It doesn’t address the strategic decision-making that created Bayer’s crisis. The intervention targets one level while the dysfunction originates at another.

PRACTITIONER INSIGHT The Human Pulse questions that matter more than published metrics: • Are the people demonstrating agility being retained or removed? • Is capability being built through practice or through certification? • Are the retained employees willing to challenge the status quo? • Does the transformation address the level where dysfunction originates?

Three Scenarios

Based on the patterns observed:

Scenario A: Declared Victory, Underlying Fragility (45%)

Bayer achieves €2 billion savings. Headcount reductions complete. DSO declared successful. But trust remains partially repaired. Self-management exists genuinely in some pockets, performatively in others. The next shock reveals capability was built unevenly.

Scenario B: Quiet Evolution (35%)

Following Zappos’s pattern, DSO “evolves” over 2026-2027. Language shifts from “self-managed” to “empowered” to “agile.” Management layers partially re-emerge under different titles. Pragmatic success without revolutionary transformation.

Scenario C: Diagnostic Recalibration (20%)

Leadership recognises the layered conditions and adjusts. Timeline extends. Trust-building becomes explicit priority. Genuine distributed capability emerges over 4-5 years. Bayer becomes reference case for successful large-scale self-management.

The Ultimate Test

In five years, will Bayer navigate its next crisis faster because of the capability DSO built? Or will it discover that the capability was performed rather than embedded?

The financial metrics will tell you about cost savings. The Human Pulse signals will tell you about capability. Watch for:

• Are people speaking honestly in meetings?
• Are the best people staying?
• Is learning happening, or just activity?
• Are the early wins compounding into capability, or remaining isolated successes?

THE DIAGNOSTIC IMPERATIVE. DSO may be the right destination. The diagnostic concern lies in the path. Trust before agility. Clarity before empowerment. Resilience before speed. The transformation can’t be accelerated; it can only be begun with the right sequence. Bayer is conducting the largest self-management experiment in Western corporate history. The outcome will inform organisational design for decades. Whether it succeeds depends less on DSO’s principles—which are sound—and more on whether Bayer addresses the conditions that make those principles viable.

— End of Series — for now…

Introducing the series The Case Study That Didn’t Make the Book

1) The Diagnostic Question Bayer Isn’t Asking
2) What Zappos Learned That Bayer Hasn’t—Yet
3) The Human Pulse Signals Published Metrics Can’t Capture

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Some material is too good for the cutting room floor. This is that material.

Neil A. Walker is the author of Thriving in Turbulence: The CIRCA-CLEAR Framework for Navigating Organisational Change, available today on Leanpub and on Amazon on Thanksgiving Day. He has spent 30 years recovering failing transformation projects across financial services, government, and many other sectors.