Trained in Germany as a psychiatrist and systemic therapist, Harald Schneider has been working in the Netherlands since 2004, first as a psychiatrist at Lentis and later for ten years as Medical Director, ultimately overseeing 1,400 employees. In 2018, he joined BuurtzorgT, an organization built on self-organizing teams, where he established the first team in Groningen. Since November 2024, he has been serving as Steward of BuurtzorgT.
His earlier career in the management of a traditionally hierarchical organization shaped his perspective: as Medical Director, he increasingly felt more part of the problem than of the solution. What drew him to BuurtzorgT was the high degree of autonomy and, perhaps even more, the principle of simplicity as a guiding value—after years of managing complexity that had largely been created by the system itself.