Reinventing Organizations
Kindle Highlights
Highlights
So successful were the modern sciences that the other major domains of human existence and knowledge—from artistic to moral—began to be invaded and colonized by scientism (the belief that science, and science alone, can deliver any valuable truth). The “dignity of modernity” (the differentiation of the value spheres) soon collapsed into the “disaster of modernity” (the dissociation of the value spheres), resulting in what Weber also famously called “the disenchanted universe.”
Where all the previous stages (Magic, Mythic, Rational, and Pluralistic) had operated out of a sense of lack, scarcity, and deficiency, this new level—which various researchers began calling “integrated,” “integral,” “autonomous,” “second tier,” “inclusive,” “systemic”—acted out of a sense of radical abundance, as if it were overflowing with goodness, truth, and beauty.
Where all the first-tier stages felt that their truth and values were the only real truth and values in existence—all the others were mistaken, wrong, infantile, or just goofy—this new Integral stage somehow intuited that all of the previous value structures were true and important in their own ways, that all of them had something to offer, that all of them were “true but partial.”
There are five basic dimensions in this Framework—quadrants, levels of development, lines of development, states of consciousness, and types.
“The four-quadrant model shows how deeply mindsets [Upper-Left or “I”], culture [Lower-Left or “we”], behaviors [Upper-Right or “it”], and systems [Lower-Right or “its”] are intertwined.
Postmodernists utterly fail to distinguish between dominator hierarchies, which are indeed nasty, and actualization hierarchies, which are the primary form of natural growth, development, and evolution in the world —atoms to molecules to cells to organisms, for example.
actualization hierarchies can flourish when dominator hierarchies are removed.
Although popular parlance has long used the terminology of “knowing in our hearts” and “knowing in our gut,” having three autonomous brains working side by side can’t be possible if we believe the world needs clear hierarchies to function.
Einstein once famously said that problems couldn’t be solved with the same level of consciousness that created them in the first place.
every time humanity has shifted to a new stage, it has invented a new way to collaborate, a new organizational model.
blueprint for how we can organize entities in ways that make work vastly more productive, fulfilling, and purposeful.
Seeing is not believing; believing is seeing! You see things, not as they are, but as you are. Eric Butterworth
Organizations as we know them today are simply the expression of our current worldview, our current stage of development. There
Impulsive-Red is highly suitable for hostile environments: combat zones, civil wars, failed states, prisons, or violent inner-city neighborhoods.
defining characteristics of Red Organizations? Their glue is the continuous exercise of power in interpersonal relationships.
With processes, we can replicate past experience into the future. Last year’s harvest will be our template for this year’s; next year’s classroom will be run with the same lesson plan as this year’s. With processes, critical knowledge no longer depends on a particular person; it is embedded in the organization and can be transmitted across generations.
Planning and execution are strictly separated: the thinking happens at the top, the doing at the bottom.
Amber Organizations still tend to replicate hierarchical stratification, albeit in more subtle ways.
The worldview at this stage is solidly materialistic—only what can be seen and touched is real.
In this material world, more is generally considered better.
Achievement-Orange Organizations ratcheted this up another level, achieving results on entirely new orders of magnitude, thanks to three additional breakthroughs: innovation, accountability, and meritocracy.
Amber command and control becomes Orange predict and control.
Achievement-Orange thinks of organizations as machines, a heritage from reductionist science and the industrial age. The engineering jargon we use to talk about organizations reveals how deeply (albeit often unconsciously) we hold this metaphor in the world today.
We have reached a stage where we often pursue growth for growth’s sake, a condition that in medical terminology would simply be called cancer.
Pluralistic-Green is keenly aware of Orange’s shadow over people and society: the materialistic obsession, the social inequality, the loss of community.
While Orange is predominant today in business and politics, Green is very present in postmodern academic thinking, in nonprofits, and among social workers and community activists.
Green’s relationship to rules is ambiguous and conflicted: rules always end up being arbitrary and unfair, but doing away with rules altogether proves unpractical and opens the door for abuse.
Green is powerful as a paradigm for breaking down old structures, but often less effective at formulating practical alternatives.
push a majority of decisions down to frontline workers who can make far-reaching decisions without management approval.
servant leaders, listening to their subordinates, empowering them, motivating them, developing them.
evaluated based on 360-degree feedback, to make bosses accountable to their subordinates.
Green breakthrough 2: Values-driven culture and inspirational purpose
A strong, shared culture is the glue that keeps empowered organizations from falling apart.
In Orange Organizations, strategy and execution are king. In Green Organizations, the company culture is paramount.
CEOs of Green Organizations claim that promoting the culture and shared values is their primary task. The focus on culture elevates human resources (HR) to a central role.
breakthrough 3: Multiple stakeholder perspective
the dominant metaphor of organizations in Pluralistic-Green is the family.
vertical growth always comes in the form of a major life challenge that cannot be resolved from the current worldview. When
an organization cannot evolve beyond its leadership’s stage of development.
The most exciting breakthroughs of the twenty-first century will not occur because of technology, but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human. John Naisbitt
All “first-tier” stages consider that their worldview is the only valid one, and that all other people are dangerously mistaken.22 People transitioning to Teal can accept, for the first time, that there is an evolution in consciousness, that there is a momentum in evolution towards ever more complex and refined ways of dealing with the world (hence the adjective “evolutionary” that I will use for this stage).
Each shift occurs when we are able to reach a higher vantage point from which we see the world in broader perspective. Like
The shift to Evolutionary-Teal happens when we learn to disidentify from our own ego.
By looking at our ego from a distance, we can suddenly see how its fears, ambitions, and desires often run our life.
We are no longer fused with our ego, and we don’t let its fears reflexively control our lives. In the process, we make room to listen to the wisdom of other, deeper parts of ourselves.
What replaces fear? A capacity to trust the abundance of life. All wisdom traditions posit the profound truth that there are two fundamental ways to live life: from fear and scarcity or from trust and abundance.
learn to decrease our need to control people and events.
We come to believe that even if something unexpected happens or if we make mistakes, things will turn out all right, and when they don’t, life will have given us an opportunity to learn and grow.
With fewer ego-fears, we are able to make decisions that might seem risky, where we haven’t weighed all possible outcomes, but that resonate with deep inner convictions.
Recognition, success, wealth, and belonging are viewed as pleasurable experiences, but also as tempting traps for the ego. In contrast with previous stages, the order is reversed: we do not pursue recognition, success, wealth, and belonging to live a good life. We pursue a life well-lived, and the consequence might just be recognition, success, wealth, and love.
The ultimate goal in life is not to be successful or loved, but to become the truest expression of ourselves, to live into authentic selfhood, to honor our birthright gifts and callings, and be of service to humanity and our world. In Teal, life is seen as a journey of personal and collective unfolding toward our true nature.
person who has ambition, but is not ambitious.”
Psychologists talk about a shift from a deficit to a strength-based paradigm.
In Teal, obstacles are seen as life’s way to teach us about ourselves and about the world. We are ready to let go of anger, shame, and blame, which are useful shields for the ego but poor teachers for the soul.
In previous stages, change on a personal level feels threatening; as of Evolutionary-Teal, there is often an enjoyable tension in the journey of personal growth.
rational thinking within Teal can be more accurately informed by data.
reason in paradox, transcending the simple either-or with more complex both-and thinking.
Evolutionary-Teal turns the page from the rational-reductionist worldview of Orange and the post-modern worldview of Green to a holistic approach to knowing.
Self-management:
Wholeness:
Evolutionary purpose:
giving teams the specific support (training, coaching, and tools) required for self-management
training course called “Solution-Driven Methods of Interaction,”
Because there is no hierarchy of bosses over subordinates, space becomes available for other natural and spontaneous hierarchies to spring up—fluid hierarchies of recognition, influence, and skill
“actualization hierarchies” in place of traditional “dominator hierarchies”).
coaches at Buurtzorg have no decision-making power
Teal Organizations, in contrast, keep staff functions to an absolute bare minimum.
economies of scale and skill resulting from staff functions are often outweighed by the diseconomies of motivation produced.
Trying to avoid or limit staff functions is something I encountered not only in Buurtzorg, but in all self-managing organizations in this research.
at FAVI, sales orders are always discussed in terms of employment, not in monetary terms; so there is no “we got a $1 million order,” but rather “we got an order for 10 people’s work.”36
how unusual this is—an engineer who is in service and not in command of less-educated (but highly skilled) blue-collar workers.
they are built on foundations of mutual trust.
fear is a great inhibitor. When organizations are built not on implicit mechanisms of fear but on structures and practices that breed trust and responsibility, extraordinary
people have dropped the illusion that one person, however competent, could master all the information of such a complex system and heroically, from above, make the right call for hundreds of decisions that need to be made every week.
Self-management brings the principles that account for successful free-market economies inside organizations.
There is a simple reminder mechanism: operators have asked a woman working in administration to go through the logs once in a while, and if there are items that have been open for more than three months, to remind people who had signed up to tackle the issue about their commitment.
“The more you increase individual responsibility, the better the chances for incremental improvements in operations,” argues Dennis W. Bakke, the company’s chief executive and one of its founders. … “And more importantly” he says “it makes work a lot more fun.”
using voluntary task forces instead of fixed staff functions has multiple benefits.
It’s a modern-day form of apprenticeship, scaled to a massive level.
No organization chart, no job description, no job titles
Every role people take on is a commitment they make to their peers. They are not accountable to one boss; every one of their peers is a boss in respect to the commitments they made.
anybody can put on the hat of “the boss” to bring about important decisions, launch new initiatives, hold underperforming colleagues to account, help resolve conflicts, or take over leadership if results are bad and action is needed.
With the pyramid gone, many of the most fundamental organizational processes need to be reinvented—everything from decision-making practices to information flow, from investments to performance evaluations and compensation processes.
any person in the organization can make any decision. But before doing so, that person must seek advice from all affected parties and people with expertise on the matter.
Usually, the decision maker is the person who noticed the issue or the opportunity or the person most affected by it.
forgetting to uphold the advice process is one of the few things that can get them fired (we’ll
asking for advice is an act of humility, which is one of the most important characteristics of a fun workplace.
With the advice process, they can ask tough questions and give their opinions forcefully, but then move on to the next question; meanwhile, someone else will do the work of integrating different perspectives and advice.
Consensus comes with another flaw. It dilutes responsibility. In many cases, nobody feels responsible for the final decision. The
With the advice process, the ownership for the decision stays clearly with one person: the decision maker.
Zobrist found himself on the soapbox and shared his dilemma with all employees in that shift (including the temp workers whose fate was being discussed). People in the audience shouted questions and proposals. One worker said, “This month, why don’t we all work only three weeks and get three weeks’ pay, and we keep the temp workers?
he publicly announced that top-down decision-making would be made during a limited time for a limited number of decisions, albeit critical ones. The advice process would remain in force for all other decisions.
If the advice process needs to be suspended in times of crisis, these two guidelines can serve to maintain trust in self-management: give full transparency about the scope and timeframe of top-down decision-making, and appoint someone to make those decisions who will not be suspected of continuing to exert such powers when the crisis is over.
When there is value in coordination, people simply start to coordinate.
talk often and explicitly about the assumptions underpinning self-management and to contrast them with the assumptions made by traditional hierarchies.
“no secret” approach that extends to all data, including the most sensitive. This information includes not only financial data, but also salaries or the performance of individual teams. At Buurtzorg, for instance, teams can see every month how their productivity compares to that of other teams.
In the absence of hierarchy, self-managing teams need to have all available information to make the best decisions.
suspicion is toxic for organizational trust.
Informal hierarchies reemerge when some people are in the know while others are not.
self-managing organizations use their intranet as a central repository where everybody can publish and retrieve information in real time.
All-hands meetings are another standard practice
no script to the meetings. Questions can take the meeting in any direction;
All eyes are on the people in senior roles. Will they be candid, humble, and vulnerable?
employees may feel anxious about finances more of the time, but at least everyone knows where they stand.
conflict resolution process. This process is so fundamental to collaboration without hierarchy that many self-managing organizations train every new recruit in conflict resolution.
The conflict resolution process (called “Direct Communication and Gaining Agreement”), applies to any type of disagreement. It can be a difference of opinion about a technical decision in a given situation. It can be interpersonal conflict. It can be a breach of values.
virtually identical conflict resolution mechanisms: first a one-on-one discussion, then mediation by a trusted peer, and finally mediation by a panel.
Conflict resolution is a foundational piece in the puzzle of interlocking self-management practices. It is the mechanism through which peers hold each other to account for their mutual commitments.
traditional companies, when one person doesn’t deliver, colleagues grumble and complain but leave it to the person’s boss to do something about it. In self-managing organizations, people have to step up and confront colleagues who fail to uphold their commitments.
Critical
Freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin—you can’t have one without the other (at least not for long). Holding colleagues accountable to their commitment can feel uncomfortable. A clearly outlined conflict resolution process helps people confront each other when needed.
For each role, you specify what it does, what authority you believe you should have (act, recommend, decide, or a combination thereof), what indicators will help you understand if you are doing a good job, and what improvements you hope to make on those indicators.
People don’t need approval from a boss to change roles, but consent from their peers.
The temptation to not be ourselves and look good in the eyes of a boss is much diminished, as it is hard to constantly look good to a dozen colleagues. We just give up even trying to play that game.
In Teal Organizations, people don’t compete for scarce promotions. You can broaden the scope of your work and increase your pay if your colleagues are ready to entrust you with new roles.
separate role from soul, to break the fusion of identity between people and their job titles. In
people don’t have a job, but fill a number of granular roles.
Anybody who feels a role needs to be created, amended, or discarded (called the proposer) can add it to the agenda. Each such governance item is discussed in turn and brought to resolution with to the following process:
The process might sound formal, but people who use it report they find it deeply liberating.
People who experience such a meeting for the first time are surprised at how dramatically efficient it is.
the goal is to not to aim for a perfect and definite answer, but to find a workable solution and iterate quickly if needed.
Employees who are not used to such frequent change can find it taxing at first. Over time, most end up loving it. When there is only one promotion coming around every few years, people are ready to put up a fight for it. When every month there might be some changes to roles within the team, everybody is more relaxed.
In Teal Organizations, people have roles, which come with clear areas of responsibility, but no turfs. No part of the organization belongs to anybody.
“total responsibility”: all colleagues have the obligation to do something about an issue they sense, even when it falls outside of the scope of their roles.
“Somebody should do something about this problem,” and leave it at that; if you see a problem or an opportunity, you have an obligation to do something about it,
Perhaps it boils down to this: when employees are empowered to make all the decisions they want, the urge to climb the ladder recedes.
Every five years, he asked the team leaders to organize a vote in their teams to decide if he should stay on as the CEO of the organization.
Role Market Place
Our egos may be wary of feedback, but we are relational beings that thrive on honest feedback. I’ve seen organizations where no feedback is ever exchanged “go mad” because of it.
Morning Star views a dismissal as the final step in a conflict and therefore uses its conflict resolution mechanism to deal with the situation.
Once a year, co-workers fill out a survey for all their colleagues, consisting of only two questions: “This person contributes (much) more or (much) less than me.” (On a scale of -3 to +3) “This person has a good basis to evaluate me.” (On a scale of 1 to 5)
People set their own salary, using the advice process—they had to seek advice and recommendation from their peers around them. In that way, people were made fully responsible for assessing their own contribution and validating it in the eyes of the colleagues.
How exactly the cash will be split, the partners acknowledge, is ultimately not what this conversation is about. The discussion serves a higher purpose: making sure everybody feels his or her contribution is fully valued, that the inner and outer perspectives (what I know and what others perceive) are in sync.
Almost all organizations studied here have abandoned the practice of individual incentives.
From a Teal perspective, a particular point of attention is ensuring that the lowest paid employees make enough money to cover their basic needs
The tasks of management—setting direction and objectives, planning, directing, controlling, and evaluating—haven’t disappeared. They are simply no longer concentrated in dedicated management roles.
It’s the same in Teal Organizations: the point is not to make everyone equal; it is to allow all employees to grow into the strongest, healthiest version of themselves.
hierarchies of influence, not position, and they’re built from the bottom up.
Many organizations today claim to be empowering. But note the painful irony in that statement. If employees need to be empowered, it is because the system’s very design concentrates power at the top and makes people at the lower rungs essentially powerless, unless leaders are generous enough to share
this generation has grown up in the disruptive world of the Internet, where people’s influence is based on contribution and reputation, not position.
at heart, we are all profoundly interconnected and part of a whole, but it’s a truth we have forgotten.
This spiritual insight inspires Teal Organizations’ second breakthrough: to create a space that supports us in our journey to wholeness.
In our relationships with colleagues, much of what made the workplace unpleasant and inefficient vanishes; work becomes a vehicle where we help each other reveal our inner greatness and manifest our calling.
With no scarce promotions to fight for, no bosses to please, and no adversaries to elbow aside, much of the political poison is drained out of organizations.
In self-managing organizations, the system pushes us to behave in adult-to-adult relationships, whatever our differences in education, seniority, and scope of work. In a peer-based system, if we try to behave like a parent (or like a child for that matter), our colleagues will quickly let us know they won’t have any of it.
RHD, for instance, has developed over the years a beautiful and precisely worded Bill of Rights and Responsibilities for Employees and Consumers.
As a member of the RHD community, it is important to be able to do two things: a) Separate from our own need to be “right” in order to hear and respect others’ realities and perspectives: and, b) Differentiate between thoughts (what’s going on inside your head) and behaviors (what you do or say).79
five unacceptable expressions of hostility. The first—demeaning speech and behavior—is described in the following terms: Demeaning speech and behavior involves any verbal or nonverbal
values implementation meeting, where people can bring up issues they have encountered with values in the workplace or suggest changes to the Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.
Annual survey: Many organizations cultivate discussion about values and ground rules through an annual survey.
Teal Organizations expand coaching to all colleagues, whatever their role in the organization.
more often than not, meetings in companies turn into playfields for the egos that push the souls into hiding.
almost all organizations researched for this book have instituted specific meeting practices to help participants keep their egos in check and interact with each other from a place of wholeness.
The first type of practice around conflict management helps people bring tensions to the surface.
company-wide “heat map” that reveals which teams should have a conversation to improve their collaboration.
bi-monthly “isms in the workplace meeting.”
spelling out a well-defined and thorough conflict resolution process. Such a process is needed in self-managing organizations for peers to settle issues when there is no boss to act as referee.
What is the right thing to do? Only then follows the question, How can we do it in financially acceptable ways?
multiple bottom lines may help to overcome the fixation on profits alone, but the concept is still rooted in Orange thinking, where decisions are informed only by quantitative trade-offs,
interviews aren’t handled by human resources personnel trained in interview techniques, but by future teammates who simply want to decide if they would want to work with the candidate on a daily basis.
bad hire is] someone who is a chronic complainer, who is not happy, who blames others, who doesn’t take responsibility, who’s not honest, who doesn’t trust other people. A bad hire would be someone who needs specific direction and waits to be told what to do. A poor hire would be someone who wasn’t flexible and who says, “It’s not my job.”92
spend a lot of time during the recruitment process informing candidates about the values of the organization and what it’s like to work there,
significant number of teammates interview the candidates—10 to 12 interviews is no rarity—providing
It is, in essence, a two-way discovery process to answer one fundamental question: Are we meant to journey together?
first days and weeks are critical to making someone feel that she has come into a new and different workplace.
training often touches, in one way or another, on the three breakthroughs of self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose.
central part of the onboarding revolves around the organization’s purpose: What is it and where does it come from?
At Sun Hydraulics, all new hires start with a “manufacturing tour,” no matter what their future role will be;
A self-managing environment provides opportunity to make things happen, to freely reach out to colleagues, to discuss change without going through a hierarchy of approvals. The more people you know, the more you understand the whole, the more you’ll be able to come up with new ideas and turn them into reality. At
New teammates who have gone through all the training modules of the first two months are asked to write an open letter to the group of colleagues they have joined.
two types of training rarely found in traditional organizations: training to establish a common culture, and personal development training.
follow-up training and workshops that are interwoven into daily life. At FAVI, Jean-François Zobrist used to chair a one-hour session every Friday morning, open to whoever wanted to join. The topic: An in-depth look at one of FAVI’s core organizational tools.
Teal Organizations start from the premise that even for routine work, people have a sense of pride and want to do a good job.
You have full liberty to find a solution, but until you have found one, you are bound to your previous commitments. In practice, colleagues tend to go out of their way to help you. They know that in turn, people will help them when they need flexibility.
culture where colleagues chip in for each other, and where people dare to ask for help
all too often we use feedback to try to mold other people into how we believe they should be. There is no faster way to make a soul go into hiding.
the three changes—coming from a place of love and care, speaking subjectively, and changing the questions—can come together to turn appraisal discussions into moments of true inquiry and celebration.
Self-managing organizations are exceedingly flexible and accumulate little overhead; therefore, they weather downturns much
The primacy of “winning” over purpose goes a long way in explaining why the “mission statements” that organizations define often ring so hollow.
when an organization truly lives for its purpose, there is no competition.
Anybody that can help to achieve the purpose on a wider scale or more quickly is a friend, an ally, not a competitor.
while they don’t have Orange’s obsession with growth, Buurtzorg, Patagonia, and the other organizations surveyed in this research have fantastic growth records. Teal practices unleash tremendous energies; when these energies meet a noble purpose and a deep hunger in the world, how could anything but growth ensue?
In Evolutionary-Teal, an organization is viewed as a living system, an entity with its own energy, its own identity, its own creative potential and sense of direction.
the key is about separating identity and figuring out “What is this organization’s calling?” Not “What do we want to use this organization to do, as property?” but rather “What is this life, this living system’s creative potential?” That’s what we mean by evolutionary purpose: the deepest creative potential to bring something new to life, to contribute something energetically, valuably to the world.
Buurtzorg never wrote down its purpose in the form of a mission statement. Jos de Blok and others talk about the purpose all the time. But they find that keeping it oral keeps it alive, and prevents it from becoming constraining. To use Robertson’s term, it allows the purpose to be evolutionary, to keep evolving.
the organization’s raison d’être.
Whenever a person makes the cymbals sing, people are asked to reflect on the question “Am I in service to the topic we’re discussing and to the organization?”
None of the organizations I have researched had a strategy in the form of a document that charts out a course. Instead, people in these companies have a very clear, keen sense of the organization’s purpose and a broad sense of the direction the organization might be called to go. A
In comparison, Teal Organizations’ approach to marketing is almost simplistic. The organizations simply listen in to what feels like the right offering.
Essentially, marketing boils down to this statement: This is our offer. At this moment, we feel this is the best we can possibly do. We hope you will like it.
Teal Organizations go about filling a need of the world not by tuning in to the noise of the world (the surveys, the focus groups, the customer segmentation), but by listening within. What product would we be really proud of? What product would fill a genuine need in the world?
Instead of trying to predict and control (the goal behind all planning and budgeting practices), Teal Organizations try to sense and respond.
Our underlying management paradigm today is based on trying to predict and control. And the challenge with that: it often gives us more illusion of control than real control.
Decisions are not postponed because someone thinks more data or more analysis could result in a better decision. The decision can be reviewed at any time if new data comes up or someone stumbles on a better idea.
Teal Organizations don’t set any top-down targets.
Budgets are used to make decisions, not to control performance.
Where are we still stuck in the machine paradigm? How can we help the organization express itself fully as a living system?
What aspect of the organizational purpose resonates with you? What unique talents and gifts could you contribute to the organization’s journey?
Teal Organizations report that their recruitment process and decisions can take significantly longer than usual.
we don’t “run” the organization, not even if we are the founder or legal owner. Instead, we are stewards of the organization;
organizational culture. The term is generally used to refer to the assumptions, norms, and concerns shared by the people of an organization. A simpler way to put it is: culture is how things get done, without people having to think about it.
Wilber’s insight, applied to organizations, means that we should look at 1) people’s mindsets and beliefs; 2) people’s behavior; 3) the organizational culture; and 4) the organizational structures, processes, and practices.
Green Organizations tend to focus so much on culture that they neglect to rethink structure, processes, and practices.
Self-managing structures transcend the issue of culture versus systems. Inner and outer dimensions, culture and systems, work hand in hand, not in opposite directions.
In an operating system that’s dysfunctional, you need to focus on things like values in order to make that somewhat tolerable, but if we’re all willing to pay attention to the higher purpose, and do what we do and do it well, the culture just emerges. You don’t have to force it.
Freedom and accountability are two sides of the same coin.
We believe in collective intelligence. Nobody is as smart as everybody. Therefore all decisions will be made with the advice process.
We each have full responsibility for the organization. If we sense that something needs to happen, we have a duty to address it. It’s not acceptable to limit our concern to the remit of our roles.
Everyone must be comfortable with holding others accountable to their commitments through feedback and respectful confrontation.
Every problem is an invitation to learn and grow. We will always be learners. We have never arrived.
Philosophically, Teal’s breakthrough is to give all four quadrants their due—culture, systems, mindsets, and behavior. Previous paradigms focused on the “hard” dimension at the expense of the “soft” or vice-versa.
The research behind this book suggests that there are two—and only two—necessary conditions, in the following two spheres: Top leadership: The founder or top leader (let’s call him the CEO for lack of a better term) must have integrated a worldview and psychological development consistent with the Teal developmental level. Several
I’ve never seen it work—the leaders listen with interest until they understand what practices are involved and how much control they would have to relinquish. So if the leadership isn’t ready, what can you do?
The general rule seems to be that the level of consciousness of an organization cannot exceed the level of consciousness of its leader.
major paradox: CEOs are both much less and much more important in self-managing organizations compared to traditional ones. They have given up their top-down hierarchical power. The lines of the pyramid no longer converge toward them. They can no longer make or overturn any decision. And yet, in a time when people still think about organizations in Amber, Orange, and Green ways, the CEO has an absolutely critical role in creating and holding a Teal organizational space.
most of the other responsibilities traditionally held by the CEO simply fall away—there
two new and critical roles a CEO needs to play: creating and maintaining a spacefor Teal ways of operating and role-modeling of Teal behaviors.
Beyond that, the CEO is a colleague like any other, who can sense what’s needed, get involved in a project, and make decisions using the advice process.
Over and over again, the CEO must ensure that trust prevails and that traditional management practices don’t creep in
CEOs of Teal Organizations must accept that their power is severely limited by the advice process. It doesn’t matter how strongly they are convinced about their point of view; they cannot make a decision without consulting people affected by the matter and people with relevant expertise. This is a tall order.
vulnerability and strength are not in opposition, but polarities that reinforce each other.
What seems risky when looked at through a traditional lens looks wonderfully efficient from an Evolutionary-Teal perspective. A blog post you write from the comfort of the sofa in the evening at home can turn into a decision the next afternoon, endorsed by thousands of people in the organization.
how much simpler life can be in Teal Organizations!
freedom to shape their work in the way they see fit. Many Teal Organizations insist it is critically important to recruit the right people, those who will thrive in a self-management model; and yet cases like FAVI, AES, and others show that even without prior selection, a large proportion of any group of workers will warm to self-management and often become vocal advocates.
Another, less drastic, avenue is to invite everyone in the organization to design the future of the organization together. Get the group to determine what new structure makes most sense to replace the pyramid and what new practices will be introduced (for example, the advice process, transparent information, and peer-based evaluation).
Each team is invited to define two to three initiatives that could turn the vision they had imagined the previous day into reality. Very concretely, what could be done to create a context where people can show up whole? After
they didn’t experiment with new management methods in the hopes of reaping more success. The driving force to invent a new organizational model stemmed from an inner imperative to make a difference, to work in an environment they liked, to act in accordance with their worldview. The traditional way of running organizations simply doesn’t make sense to them; it infringes on their values and their own deeply held assumptions about the purpose of work and how people can relate to each other.
All this evidence is anecdotal and doesn’t claim statistical validity; yet it shows, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Teal Organizations can achieve results that are at least on par with the best traditionally run organizations.
Liberating previously unavailable energies
Harnessing and directing energy with more clarity and wisdom
The best way to predict the future is to create it.
in two particular areas—shareholdership and boundaries—there are fairly solid grounds to suggest that the Teal organizational model will evolve beyond the way it is described in Part 2 of this book.
Many of today’s product advertisements are pitched at our ego fears: buy this product and you will become popular, successful, and good-looking. When people are driven by internal more than external motivators, it is fair to assume that many of these products will no longer have a market.
With the Evolutionary-Teal stage, fear of scarcity gives way to trust in abundance. Does this mean we might enter a world where, at an individual level, we discontinue stockpiling wealth to protect us from future misfortunes?
Can we imagine a society where we would feel safe not because of the assets we have stashed away, but because of trust in a solid tapestry of communal relations, knowing that we will look out for each other when there is a need?