The assembly, not the raid

Everyone who wants a Nordic leadership image reaches for the Viking. We inherited something better — and we run a company on it.

I live in Skjoldungernes land — the old landscape around Lejre, on the Danish island of Zealand. I wake up to fields, a village church on the ridge, and a farm that demands work from me long after the working day is over. It is a good place to think about what "Nordic" actually means — because we run a company that leans on that word, and most of what the word gets used for is wrong.

Here is the default: when a company wants Nordic imagery, it buys the warband. The longship, the raid, the storm-grey sky, a knotwork logo and a slogan about conquering markets. I understand the appeal. It is dramatic, it photographs well, and it flatters everyone in the room. It is also, as a model for how to run an organisation, a terrible inheritance — fear-based leadership with better production design. Culture is what a group repeatedly tolerates, and the warband tolerates everything as long as the raid pays.

But the Norse world left us two inheritances, and the second one is the reason we keep coming back to it.

What the þing actually was

The þing (pronounced roughly "thing" — the þ is the Old Norse "th") was the assembly. It was where free people met to make law, settle disputes, and decide together. Iceland's Alþingi, founded around 930, is the oldest surviving parliament in the world and takes its name from it. The English word "thing" descends from it too: a "thing" was originally a matter brought before the assembly — then the meeting — then, eventually, everything.

The history is interesting, but the structure is what matters. Four features, and every one of them is a live question in any modern company:

Authority was earned, not inherited. A chieftain held standing because people chose to follow — and could withdraw that following. The moment he or she stopped earning it, people aligned with someone else. Authority was contingent on respect, not title.

Open challenge was the norm. Anyone with standing could speak. Disputes were aired in the open, not settled privately by the powerful. Voice was distributed by design.

It was fierce and high-trust at the same time. Real judgments, real consequences — outlawry was a genuine outcome. And it worked because people were bound to the collective decision once it was made. Not fierce or cohesive. Both.

The decision bound everyone — including the powerful. Once the assembly ruled, you were held to it. The binding ran upward as well as down.

Two honesty notes, because romanticising this would ruin it. First: the þing world had thralls — slaves. "Free" was doing real, exclusionary work in that word, and it was no egalitarian utopia. We take the structure, not the sentiment. Second: the assembly and the warband coexisted; the same culture produced both. Which inheritance you carry forward is a choice — and it has to be actively held, because the warband is always the easier default.

Why this is how we try to run a company

At Context& we merged four companies and redesigned ourselves around AI at the same time. If you want to know what stress-tests a culture, that will do it. And somewhere in that process it became clear that the usual vocabulary — values on posters, culture decks, mission statements — was not going to hold four companies together. What holds people together is structure they can feel. So, deliberately or by instinct, we built þing structure:

Earned, not appointed. We have four Winning Behaviours, each carried for a year by an Ambassador. Nobody is appointed to this. They are recognised — chosen because people already look to them for it — and at the end of the year they pass it on by naming their successors, in person, and saying why. The role comes with no authority at all. That is the point. It is leadership the way we most respect it: by standing, not by title.

Open challenge, expected. Leadership earns followership — it cannot command it. Challenge is not tolerated in the corner; it is expected in every forum. If a strategy cannot survive being said out loud and argued with, it was not a strategy.

Fierce and high-trust. Our word for it is forpligtende fællesskab — belonging that binds. The Finns say talkoot: you show up because the work is everyone's. Both halves matter. Belonging without a standard is a social club; a standard without belonging is fear. The þing is the historical proof that binding and belonging are not opposites — that a group can hold each other to a hard standard and be bound to each other in trust, at the same time.

The binding runs upward. Trust and accountability are a pair, and power is not exempt from the standard it sets. That includes me — most of all me. A CEO exempt from the company's own bindings is running a warband with better manners.

I have been on the wrong side of that binding more than once, and the clearest case is one I would not have chosen to tell. When Projectum joined us in 2021, the plan I wanted was simple: move their Aarhus team into our larger Aarhus office straight away — one company, one roof, no half-measures. The team asked for the opposite. Give us time. It would have been easy to overrule them, and I didn't — and they were right. Given the time they asked for, that team came together far better than the faster plan would have allowed. An assembly only means anything if the person who could overrule it chooses to be bound instead — and often enough, the room is protecting something you were about to trample. The day that stops being true, the warband is back, and everyone can feel it before anyone can name it.

The assembly argues the route — then rows as one

The image I keep returning to is the same longship, two crews. The warband raids where the strongman points. The assembly argues the route — openly, fiercely, everyone with standing heard — and then rows as one, bound to the decision, including the people who argued against it. Same ship. Entirely different company.

That second crew is the one worth building. It is slower at the start — arguing the route always is — and faster everywhere that matters, because nobody is rowing half-heartedly and nobody is secretly steering elsewhere. In an era where AI makes knowledge abundant and judgment the scarce resource, the argue-then-row crew has one more advantage: judgment only surfaces where challenge is safe and decisions bind. The warband never hears its best navigator.

Every morning the fields remind me that none of this is abstract. A farm is a forpligtende fællesskab with weather. The animals do not care what your title was at five o'clock; the work belongs to everyone who lives here, and it binds you precisely because you belong. That, in the end, is the whole idea — a thousand years old, and in my experience the only version of "Nordic leadership" worth the word.