The Invisible Infrastructure: The Work Behind Biscochito’s Harvard & Tulane Case Study
What four years inside a non-hierarchical caregiving organization taught me about nervous systems, relationships, and redefining success at work.
We tend to think of organizations in terms of what we can see: leadership structures, roles, policies, productivity, outcomes.
But beneath every organizational structure is another, less visible one.
It is made of relationships. Nervous systems. Unspoken agreements. Patterns of belonging and protection. The ways we respond to conflict, authority, uncertainty, and one another.
This is the part of organizational life that has always interested me most.
Because an organization can change its structure without changing the deeper patterns operating within it. We can remove hierarchy and still reproduce dynamics of power and control. We can speak about collaboration while remaining afraid of conflict. We can value authenticity while quietly rewarding performance and self-abandonment.
Structural change matters. But structure alone does not transform culture.
People do.
And people bring their inner lives to work.
Building from the inside
I have spent the last four years working with Biscochito, helping build the psychological and relational infrastructure of an organization transitioning away from conventional hierarchy and toward a self-governing model of care.
For much of that time, I worked full-time inside the organization, alongside its core team. I continue to work closely with Biscochito today as an organizational consultant, supporting team members through conflict and the relational complexities of working within a non-hierarchical system.
I developed an in-house framework drawing from depth psychology, polyvagal and nervous system work, and the Enneagram.
Together, these perspectives ask us to look beneath behavior.
What appears to be control may be fear. What looks like withdrawal may be protection. Over-functioning may be a deeply ingrained strategy for maintaining safety or belonging.
Rather than simply asking, How do we get people to behave differently?, we became interested in a deeper question:
What is happening underneath?
That question began to shape the culture itself.
We designed phone screenings, interviews, and orientations around values, rather than simply productivity or someone's ability to perform well in an interview.
How does this person relate to others? How do they navigate disagreement? Can they recognize their own limits? What is their relationship to responsibility, autonomy, conflict, and repair?
If an organization says it values authenticity, relationship, autonomy, and care, those values have to become more than language.
They have to become structures.
A different kind of leadership
One of the things I have come to understand through this work is that a non-hierarchical organization does not ask less of people psychologically.
It asks more.
Removing hierarchy does not remove power, conflict, projection, fear, or our desire for approval. Without a manager continually resolving tensions or making the final decision, greater responsibility moves into the relationships themselves.
People have to learn how to speak directly to one another. To tolerate disagreement. To recognize when their nervous system has moved into protection. To take responsibility for their impact. To repair when something has ruptured.
For two years, I facilitated weekly nervous system meetings with Biscochito's core team to practice exactly this.
These were not wellness meetings designed to make people calmer or more productive.
They were a practice in noticing ourselves.
What happens in me when conflict enters the room? Do I control? Accommodate? Withdraw? Become indispensable? What old strategy appears when I no longer feel secure?
Our workplaces are one of the places where our unconscious relational patterns inevitably emerge.
The goal is not to eliminate those patterns. It is to become conscious enough of them that we have more choice in what we do next.
Conflict as information
I continue this work with Biscochito today, helping team members move through conflict using depth psychology, nervous system awareness, and the Enneagram.
Conflict is particularly revealing because what appears to be happening on the surface is rarely the whole story.
A disagreement about a schedule may also contain someone's relationship to control. A difficult conversation may touch an old experience of not being heard. Withdrawal may look like indifference while the nervous system is actually moving into protection.
This does not mean every disagreement needs to become a psychological excavation.
It means behavior has context.
And when we become curious about that context, conflict can become information rather than simply something to eliminate.
The work behind the case study
Biscochito's model has now drawn the attention of Harvard Business School and Tulane University's A.B. Freeman School of Business and become the subject of academic study into what makes its approach to caregiving and organizational life different.
My work is part of that study.
I have been interviewed by professors and case study writers about my work inside Biscochito, the framework I developed, and the role that depth psychology, nervous system awareness, and the Enneagram have played in supporting a decentralized organization.
What I have emphasized in those conversations is something I believe extends far beyond Biscochito:
We need a more expansive definition of organizational success.
Financial sustainability matters. Productivity matters. The quality of the work matters.
But what about the mental health of the people doing the work?
What about the quality of their relationships?
Their ability to move through conflict and repair?
Their capacity to remain connected to themselves?
What if authenticity were not peripheral to organizational success, but one measure of it?
Redefining success
I have brought versions of this work into other organizations and teams, and I continue to encounter the same underlying tension:
We are trying to transform the way we work together without necessarily transforming the way we relate to ourselves.
We live within a culture that has taught many of us to override our bodies in the name of success. We push through exhaustion. We mistake urgency for importance. We call chronic over-functioning ambition and the ability to tolerate unsustainable conditions resilience.
I am not interested in teaching people to regulate their nervous systems so they can tolerate unhealthy systems more efficiently.
I am interested in what happens when our understanding of the nervous system asks us to reconsider the systems themselves.
Perhaps organizational success cannot only be measured by asking:
What did we accomplish?
Perhaps we also need to ask:
What did accomplishing it require of us?
Did we have to abandon ourselves to get there?
Did our relationships become stronger or more brittle?
Did we become more capable of honesty, conflict, and repair?
Could we remain connected to ourselves while belonging to something larger than ourselves?
This is what I think of as the invisible infrastructure of an organization.
It cannot always be measured neatly. But we feel its presence in the quality of our relationships, in how we move through conflict, in whether a boundary threatens belonging, and in whether we are allowed to remain human while doing meaningful work.
After four years of doing this work from inside Biscochito, I have come to believe that some of the most important organizational transformation begins here:
Not by asking people to become better at overriding themselves in service of a system, but by building systems in which they no longer have to leave themselves behind in order to belong, contribute, and succeed.
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