Hey there! We are Friederike and Christian, the founders of Nyord. We started our entrepreneurial adventure in 2022 with the mission to empower people and organizations to evolve.
The name Nyord comes from a tiny island in the Baltic Sea, for most of its area a protected habitat for seabirds.
Plus, in Swedish, nyord is all about new beginnings, pointing to meanings like "new notion", "new idea", and ultimately, “reimagined organization".
Sounds about right for what we’re aiming for, doesn’t it?
We’ve spent years of our professional lives advising companies on change. We led projects which were about forgetting the old way of doing things and adopting a new understanding of reality.
Think about introducing carbon accounting for a bank, an environmental management system for a utility company, or updating the shared brand of a major IT vendor.
The topics we covered were broad, but they all fell under the umbrella of culture, sustainability, and innovation. And they all involved some kind of “transformation”.
But let's not sugarcoat it: Sometimes what we did moved the needle, sometimes not so much. It may be a hallmark of being a consultant, but often our results changed little, and our great concepts and plans got lost in the reality of "roll-out”. Bottom line: Great ideas, but little traction.
Over time this became, well … frustrating. We often found ourselves thinking, "What else could we have done?", "How could we have spent our time better?", and eventually: "How could we have made a bigger impact?"
All concepts, plans or roll-outs, no matter how smart you do them, are useless if change doesn’t stick. For us, change is a mosaic of adoption, of many steps and tiny milestones, of letting go of what is not working any more and thus making room for what comes next.
Ever since we got this, we’ve been explorers on a mission to understand how change enter the world, what makes the first domino tip and causes a thought, idea or movement to spread irresistibly.
We have learned that we must start with people, not frameworks. People are the heart and soul of any organization. The way they work determines whether an organization soars or stumbles.
In terms of adoption, people embrace what is meaningful to them, what touches their lives in a very direct way and what they are happy to contribute to or work for. They will not change just because they are told to or because it is ‘rational’.
Any organization that - beyond any ‘logic’ of change - takes into account how to involve its people, how to activate them and how to make them the owners of its transformation, its evolution or its progress will be much better off.
Give people the opportunity to remove the barriers that prevent them from doing their best work they could possibly do and your organization’s performance will follow accordingly.
Organizations, large and small, are powerful agents of change. Whether they embrace it or not. A reality of ever-increasing complexity, uncertainty and demand asks for responses, sooner rather than later.
We believe that people want to do good work. We believe people have a natural interest in doing the best they can for themselves, their families, their communities and their societies.
We ourselves are committed to sustainable development and social progress in everything we do, both personally and in business.
With Nyord, our dream is to create not only the best workplace we could ever wish for ourselves, but also a powerful tool for our customers to build better organizations together.
We’re serious about our mission and eager to hear and learn from you. Nyord is building tech that facilitates co-creative, collaborative problem solving and decision making. So, let's just do that: Let’s tackle the challenges that matter most, together.
But software tools are just tools, they are - in a good way - dumb. Imagination, soul and humor are with humans, in people. Clearly we want to leverage that. We know that this will take time.
We are here for the long game. As a company, we're bootstrapped. We are happy to share our success, but we are not compromising our mission. Doing great work is multiple times better than aiming for a big exit event.
Friederike Gaigl
Co-Founder
Head of Product & Tech
Christian Bacher
Co-Founder
Head of Business
