client FLUPA role Licensees Coordinator scope governance · operating model years 2025, present location Brussels · francophone Europe
Designing the operating model
of a sixteen-chapter design network..
FLUPA is francophone Europe's largest UX/design network. The board-level work isn't running events, it's designing the system that lets sixteen volunteer-led chapters across four countries align without homogenizing, share without flattening, and keep going when leadership rotates.
What was actually broken.
Every chapter ran its own way. Some had recurring formats, some didn't. Some had a real local network, some were a mailing list. Knowledge stayed where it was made: a Brussels meet-up format that worked beautifully never made it to Geneva, even when Geneva was looking for exactly that. At board level, there was no instrumentation, no view of which chapters were healthy, which were quiet, where to invest activation effort.
The risk wasn't visible because the network is volunteer-led. Volunteer networks rarely collapse, they erode. The job was to build the operating model before the erosion became structural.
What made it hard.
Four moves.
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Mapped each chapter's actual model. One-on-one interviews with current and previous chapter leads. Document audit. The map showed what each chapter actually did, not what the website said.
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Designed a minimum operating model. The small set of practices every chapter does the same way, and an explicit margin for local adaptation. The principle: standardize the interfaces, not the content.
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Built the activation kit. Event format library, partnership patterns, comms cadence templates, performance metrics. Material a new chapter lead can pick up in an hour and not be lost.
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Set up board-level instrumentation. A quarterly dashboard the board reads in five minutes. Network health at a glance, plus the leading indicators that flag erosion before it shows in event attendance.
Three pieces from the work.
Visual assets land here once cleared. For now, the captions describe the artifacts themselves.
What each of the sixteen chapters actually runs, who leads it, when it last met. The first artifact the board sees in onboarding.
What every chapter does the same way, what's local. The center of the conversation with new leads.
The five indicators the board now reads quarterly. Two of them are leading; the rest are lagging on purpose.
What changed.
- alignment Chapter leads now share format playbooks. The Brussels salon format ran in Lausanne three months later, with adaptations, not a copy-paste, a transfer.
- visibility The board sees network state in five minutes. Decision-making at quarterly meetings shifted from anecdotal to instrumented.
- continuity Two chapters changed leadership without losing their cadence. The operating model survived the rotation, which was the actual test.
- cross-border Two events co-organized across countries in 2025. Before, this didn't happen, not because it wasn't wanted, because the seams to make it happen weren't designed.
What I'd do differently.
If I started this again, I'd interview the former chapter leads first, the people who burned out or stepped down. They know the operating-model failures more precisely than anyone currently running a chapter. I came to that conversation late. It changed the shape of the dashboard.
Working on a similar coordination problem?
Let's talk it through.
No quote, no calendar, no sales cadence. A real conversation about whether and how we'd work.