From Ambition to Action: Ocean Recognized for Advancing Organizational Transformation

When Ocean received the Emergent Excellence Award at the RenDanHeYi Forum in Beijing last year, the recognition reflected where we were at the time.

We had chosen a direction. We were questioning some of the assumptions behind traditional organizational structures, experimenting with new ways of working and beginning the long process of turning Ocean into a more decentralized, entrepreneurial ecosystem.

A year later, the conversation looks different.

At the 10th RenDanHeYi Model Leading Forum and the 3rd ZeroDX Awards, held in Qingdao from 20–22 September 2026, Ocean Investments received a Transformational ZeroDX Award.

The category recognizes organizations making deeper changes to the culture, behaviors and systems that shape how work happens.

And that change in category reflects how much the work itself has moved on. Ocean Evolution is still very much a work in progress, but a lot has happened between Beijing and Qingdao.

What changed between the two awards?

Over the past year, Ocean Evolution has moved further from discussing what a different organization could look like to testing what it actually requires in practice.

The first transformation wave launched at the beginning of 2026, bringing together autonomous teams from across the ecosystem. Sixteen teams entered the process, with thirteen completing the initial three-month program.

They worked on questions that are easy to describe and much harder to answer inside a real business: Who is the customer? What does the market actually need? What value is the team responsible for creating? And what changes when people move from executing tasks to owning outcomes?

The work included customer discovery, market analysis, distribution of traditional managerial positions into flexible team roles and new decision-making practices. By the time the teams reached the first Ocean Evolution Pitch Day in April, they were not presenting task reports. They were pitching opportunities, business models and ideas shaped much closer to the market.

Other waves have followed, and the model continues to evolve with them.

That shift from concept to operating reality is probably the clearest difference between the Ocean that travelled to Beijing in 2025 and the one that arrived in Qingdao this September.

From ambition to action is where transformation becomes real

Our founder and CEO, Atanas Simeonov, also joined the Transformational roundtable at this year’s forum, moderated by Umberto Lago.

Its title could hardly have been more relevant to the stage we are in:

From Ambition to Action: Making Transformation Work.

The conversation was structured around the questions that appear once the excitement of announcing a transformation wears off.

Why change the way a company operates in the first place? What actually changes for the people inside it? Where does resistance emerge? What gets underestimated? Which parts of the original approach need to be reconsidered once theory meets everyday work?

These are familiar questions at Ocean.

Ocean Evolution was never meant to run alongside the business as a temporary initiative. The ambition is much larger: to change where decisions happen, how responsibility is distributed and how quickly the people closest to a customer or market opportunity can act on what they know.

Because talking about autonomy is easy. The harder part is building an environment where people actually have the context, authority and support to use it.

Autonomy needs more than permission

One discussion in Qingdao reduced that challenge to something surprisingly practical.

For autonomous teams to make good decisions, they need access to information. They need sufficient resources and capacity to act. They need real decision-making authority rather than another approval chain hidden behind new terminology. They also need trust, support and the critical thinking required to carry the responsibility that comes with greater freedom.

This aligns closely with what we have been learning through Ocean Evolution.

Moving a decision closer to the customer makes little difference if the team still lacks the financial context behind it. Giving people ownership does not work if every meaningful move eventually travels upwards for approval. And asking teams to think entrepreneurially while withholding the information normally available to an entrepreneur creates an impossible contradiction.

That is why decentralization is not simply about removing hierarchy.

It requires building a different operating environment around the people who are expected to make decisions.

And as teams gain more autonomy, another question becomes increasingly important: how do you stop decentralization from turning into fragmentation?

An ecosystem cannot become a collection of islands

Another one of the discussions at the forum focused on a problem that can emerge as autonomous teams optimize their own results.

Within the RenDanHeYi model, teams can operate as micro-enterprises with responsibility for their own results. But when each unit naturally starts optimizing its own performance, it can lose sight of something larger: the customer experience created across several teams together.

One response discussed at the forum is the Ecosystem Micro-Community, or EMC – a way of dynamically bringing different teams together around a shared customer need rather than forcing coordination through another layer of hierarchy.

The individual teams remain autonomous. The connection between them becomes stronger.

For Ocean, that raises an important question for the next phase of our own transformation.

We often describe what we are building as a decentralized ecosystem, and that word carries a responsibility of its own. Autonomy cannot mean building a collection of highly effective islands. Teams still need ways to find one another, combine capabilities and solve problems that do not fit neatly inside the boundaries of a single company, function or P&L.

Zero distance, in other words, cannot exist only between one team and one customer.

Sometimes removing the distance between teams is what allows the customer to experience zero distance in the first place.

AI makes the organizational question even bigger

And of course, AI was impossible to separate from the broader conversation in Qingdao this year.

One of the more interesting findings, however, had less to do with the sophistication of the technology itself and more with the organization around it.

Research presented during the forum highlighted a familiar pattern: individuals can achieve dramatic productivity gains with AI without the organization seeing anything close to the same improvement. An employee may reduce a task that once required weeks to a matter of hours, but if the surrounding processes and silos remain unchanged, much of that gain can simply disappear into the system.

The teams showing stronger results were doing more than using AI to complete existing tasks faster. They were redesigning the work itself – deciding which activities could be automated, where AI could augment human work, where human judgement remained essential and who continued to own the final outcome.

That idea felt particularly relevant to Ocean because it connects with a problem we had already identified ourselves.

Earlier this year, we launched Ocean AI Academy after seeing how easily useful individual experiments could remain just that: individual. The goal was to create shared capability across the ecosystem, helping teams move from scattered use of AI tools towards workflows, knowledge and solutions that can compound across companies.

Qingdao pushed that thinking one step further. Building organizational AI capability is not only about getting more people comfortable with the tools. It also means becoming more deliberate about how work itself is divided between people and agents – and redesigning processes around that new reality.

One practical idea our team brought home was equally simple: do more learning by building. Rather than relying only on presentations or knowledge-sharing sessions, bring real problems into the room, experiment alongside each other and leave with something that works.

For Ocean AI Academy, that could be a natural next step in the same direction: moving further from learning about AI towards redesigning work with it.

The org chart was never the hardest part

Another idea from the forum offered a useful reminder about the order in which organizational transformation happens.

The newly introduced Zero Guide, designed as a practical framework for organizations exploring RenDanHeYi principles, proposes a sequence:

culture → people → organization.

The warning behind it is simple. Companies often begin transformation by redesigning the structure because structure is visible. Boxes can be moved. Reporting lines can be changed. New roles can be announced.

The deeper work is less visible.

People have to become comfortable making decisions they previously escalated. Leaders have to become comfortable not making decisions they previously owned. Teams need to learn how to disagree directly, understand the economics of their work, speak to customers without intermediaries and take responsibility for outcomes rather than activities.

Without that shift, a new structure can easily reproduce the behavior of the old one.

This is also why Ocean Evolution has been unfolding in waves rather than through one large organizational redesign. Each wave gives us another opportunity to test assumptions, see where the model creates friction and change the approach before taking it further.

Some things have worked quickly.

Others have required more iteration than expected.

That is part of the transformation too.

Recognition in the middle of the work

All of those conversations at the forum also gave us a different lens through which to look at the recognition we received in Qingdao.

A category called Transformational can sound like a destination. For us, it feels more like a marker along the way.

The 2026 ZeroDX Award gives us a reason to look back at how much has changed since the first recognition in Beijing. At the same time, the conversations in Qingdao made the work ahead even clearer.

How do we give teams more autonomy without isolating them from one another?

How do we create enough transparency for decisions to happen where the real context lives?

How do we keep evolving the way work is designed as AI becomes part of how teams operate?

And how do we keep reducing the distance between the people creating value and the people they create it for?

There is no finished blueprint for those questions.

That is precisely why Ocean Evolution continues as an experiment in practice rather than a management model we can simply install.

One year ago, the recognition was for taking the first steps toward a different way of working.

This year, it reflects something harder: starting to make that way of working real.

And there is still plenty left to build.