The ENZIDIA Way: ENZIDIA Operational Principles & Guidelines, 2025S

Enzidia’s core values: Truth, Mission, Learning.

Truth?is the ground we operate on.

Truth is singular, independent of the perceptions in people’s brains about it at any given moment.

Truth is facts, not ego, not anyone’s opinions, not preconceptions.

Truth is possessed by no one. It can only be approached by actively seeking it.

Truth provides the most solid ground for everything, including how we set our mission and design our path.

Mission?is what guides us.

Enzidia, as great as it is and will be, was created and built as a tool, for the mission of the sustainability transition of our shared world.

Profit and financial incentives are very important for Enzidia, not as goals, but as tools. Without profit, a company can’t be self-sustainable, and can’t grow to as big as it needs to in order to create the impact it was built for. But it is a tool nonetheless.

Financial incentives are an important tool in aligning and motivating the team, and it’s OK to be any individual person’s goal, but it’s not the goal of Enzidia as a company.

Mission guides our short-term and long-term action plans.

Learning?is the path.

Learning is the path for how we find truth, and how we achieve our mission.

Incorporated in the learning principle is the appreciation of the growth mindset.

Learning is the way. We actively gather information, strengthen our capabilities, grow ourselves, update our thinking, adapt our plans.

Learning as a principle means, no matter how good and successful we get, there is always room to learn and get better. And when we encounter failures along the way, we “keep the lessons, and forget the pain”.

We learn from everyone. We follow no one, including our past selves.

We learn the facts and perspectives from everyone, but we don't take the conclusions without examinations. We make our own decisions based on the entirety of facts and first principles.

Continuous learning is the best policy to face the unknowns of the future.

Having these three principles as core, - Truth, Mission, Learning, is clarifying. When we are faced with choices in any situation, we use them to guide our decision, distinguishing what’s most important and what’s not.

A. How we learn

Bayesian learning, or probabilistic thinking, for absorbing and processing information.

• We don't reject any information just because they don’t fit our existing models or preconceptions.
• We assign (often qualitative) probabilities to each potential scenario based on the strength of the evidence and logic.

How we receive a new idea

• When presented with an idea, we examine first how it does make sense. - Without this as the first step, we may never receive the idea in our brains.
• THEN, we examine what the idea may be missing. - Except for logic flaws, most theories are internally coherent, based on its own assumptions, and it is often the assumptions that may not be rock-solid, and the factors not considered, that make the theories defective.
• The sequence of the two steps above should be noted.
• Our confidence in an idea should be proportional to the efforts put in to find flaws with it.

B. How we make decisions:

Markov process, also known as “day 1 thinking”, for how we make decisions for the future.

• Our plans and mental positions yesterday have no say in how we may change our plans or positions today. We make the best decisions for the course of action based on what we know now.?(Note that “mental position” is not the same thing as “promise”, though often confused in other contexts. We don’t promise lightly, and spare no effort in keeping our promise made to others.)

Matter-specific Central Processing Brain

• For any task, project, or decision, there is one Central Processing Brain, held by one responsible person, based on who has the fullest picture for the specific matter.
• For example, the CEO/CSO is the responsible person to determine research project priorities, based on input from inside and outside the company. The engineer leading a project is the responsible person to determine the genetic designs or algorithms, based on input from their colleagues, and their best knowledge.?
• The central processing brain for a matter is required to listen well, think clearly, and question themselves vigorously. They need to take in input from as many relevant sources as meaningful, and process the input according to one's best judgment to arrive at optimal decisions given the circumstances.?

C. What guides our decision making

• We choose substance over style.
• We choose things working well over things looking good.
• We choose doing the right things over doing the easy or popular.
• We choose long-term over short-term.

D. How we plan and execute:

• We always make plans. We make lots of plans. – Long-term, current phase, monthly, daily, but with vastly different resolutions. We don't waste time in achieving unrealistic resolution.
• Plans are a map to guide us, not a fence to constrain us. Plans involve assumptions about things we don’t know yet, and assumptions about the future. No one knows everything, and no one can predict the future. Thus it’s foolish to stick to plans with any holiness. And thus we reexamine our plans and adjust them all the time.
• So we have: flexi-planing, conditional plans, a lot of “if-then”s, with information gathering as part of the plan.
• Like sailing a ship, we perform constant reassessments and adjustments of the course in comparison with the direction. This also frees our mind to push ahead as fast as we can when we execute, knowing that we are on the right course.
• The most important thing is to know what the most important thing is. We don’t allow drowning ourselves in tasks. We strive to always know what we are doing, - and the tasks should not be the end of the answer to that question.

E. How we nurture innovation:

• We see creativity and innovation as our blood for growth, and make 100% sure our way of operation doesn’t stifle it.
• Rather than relying on being lucky and striking gold, we strive to create a system prone to generating creativity.
• Innovation is embedded in our core principles (truth, mission, learning). Being problem-driven, and having a learning mindset, surprisingly or not, are some of the best sources of creativity: 1) To solve a problem is greatly inspiring for innovation. 2) Nearly all innovations in the human history came from recombinations of what we already had in the collective knowledge, - thus learning is one of the best foundations for creativity.

Efficiency vs innovation

• We recognize that driving for efficiency and driving for innovation inherently don't fully overlap.
• Where efficiency and innovation do overlap: mandate for high efficiency can spur innovation.
• Where efficiency and innovation don’t overlap: Innovation involves unknowns, and thus higher chances of failure. It takes time to try new things, to fail, to learn from failures, and to iterate. This is inconvenient when efficiency is the top priority. So:
• We don't set efficiency as the top priority when it does not need to be.
• We find fast and low-cost ways to iterate, fail, and learn. We test hypotheses in a way that results can be seen sooner rather than later.

F. How we work effectively

• Enzidia's success depends on its people. Especially in this creativity business, people contribute most effectively and creatively when they are healthy, well-slept, calm, motivated, and cared for with personal social connections.

Mental clarity

• Our work style: calm, highly effective, and highly focused. When we are working, we are fully there.
• We strive to maintain sufficient mental space and maximal mental clarify, such that problems can be thought through, and creative solutions can bubble up.

Behavioral guidelines

• If we are not fully there: take an electronics-free break to defocus, get sufficient sleep (we encourage short naps), resolve any deeper issues taking up working memory, such that we are highly effective the vast majority of the time.
• We are strongly encouraged to take walks, ranging from several times a week to everyday, whether during or off work time.?
• We strongly discourage working while being sleep deprived. One is strongly encouraged to catch up sufficient sleep before working in the lab or on mentally demanding tasks.
• We free up the working memory by writing/drawing things down: ideas, to-do's, workflows, big pictures.
• (Compared with the field of "coding", biotech research has much longer feedback loops. A mistake, or a suboptimal research direction chosen, can mean weeks to months of time wasted with limited useful learning. Thus a clear and functional brain is especially necessary.)

Hours

• We don't count or monitor work hours, except for the purpose of adhering to Danish laws.

G. How we work together as a team:

• We strive to operate clean from the interference of ego, bureaucracy, and hierarchy.
• We create psychological safety with our daily actions: trust, openness, equal dignity.
• The learning mindset is part of how we work together. Everyone can get better at what they are doing. Everyone has things they are not an expert in. Everyone has blind spots they are not even aware of.
• We provide, welcome, and actively seek out room for improvement.
• We take turns in being each other's teachers and students.
• We are prohibited from holding off disagreements.?This does not mean that a different opinion will have to be followed if they are presented. This does mean that they have to be expressed clearly and sufficiently.?
• We treat each other as intelligent, capable, responsible, and self-motivated adults by default.

H. How we motivate and measure:

• We measure performance by contribution and impact to our long-term success, not by short-term, simplistic metrics even if they are more convenient.
• We see ourselves as the owners of Enzidia. We derive our motivation and sense of responsibility from our shared sense of ownership for Enzidia. We qualify for Enzidia's ownership by our contributions to it.
• We strive to design and refine our system, especially the incentive structure, - so that the right thing is the natural and convenient thing to do.