Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

by Frederic Laloux

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.

Einstein once famously said that problems couldn’t be solved with the same level of consciousness that created them in the first place. Perhaps we need to access a new stage of consciousness, a new worldview, to reinvent human organizations.

New stage of conaciousness

researchers have so far somewhat overlooked: every time humanity has shifted to a new stage, it has invented a new way to collaborate, a new organizational model.

developmental psychology has much to say about the next stage of human consciousness, the one we are just starting to transition into. This next stage involves taming our ego and searching for more authentic, more wholesome ways of being.

Social stability comes at the price of wearing a mask, of learning to distance ourselves from our unique nature, from our personal desires, needs, and feelings; instead, we embrace a socially acceptable self.

Chapter 1.2 ABOUT STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT There is nothing inherently “better” about being at a higher level of development, just as an adolescent is not “better” than a toddler.

According to the research, the trigger for vertical growth always comes in the form of a major life challenge that cannot be resolved from the current worldview.

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.

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.

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. In Evolutionary-Teal, we cross the chasm and 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.

We are now concerned with the question of inner rightness: does this decision seem right? Am I being true to myself? Is this in line with who I sense I’m called to become? Am I being of service to the world? 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.

We develop a sensitivity for situations that don’t quite feel right, situations that demand that we speak up and take action, even in the face of opposition or with seemingly low odds of success, out of a sense of integrity and authenticity.

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

In Teal, life is seen as a journey of personal and collective unfolding toward our true nature.

Psychologists talk about a shift from a deficit to a strength-based paradigm. Slowly, this shift is making profound inroads in different fields, from management to education, from psychology to health care—starting with the premise that, as human beings, we are not problems waiting to be solved, but potential waiting to unfold.

Will we need all the rules and policies, detailed budgets, targets, and roadmaps that give leaders today a sense of control? Perhaps there are much simpler ways to run organizations when the fears of the ego are out of the way.

With surprising frequency, they talk about their organization as a living organism or living system.

What could organizations achieve, and what would work feel like, if we treated them like living beings, if we let them be fueled by the evolutionary power of life itself?

Why do so many people work so hard so they can escape to Disneyland? Why are video games more popular than work? … Why do many workers spend years dreaming about and planning for retirement? The reason is simple and dispiriting. We have made the workplace a frustrating and joyless place where people do what they’re told and have few ways to participate in decisions or fully use their talents. As a result, they naturally gravitate to pursuits in which they can exercise a measure of control over their lives.

patients can be seen and honored in their wholeness, with attention paid not only to their physical needs, but also their emotional, relational, and spiritual ones.

fluctuate,

Job titles and descriptions hardly do justice to unique combinations of roles, and they are too static to account for the fluid nature of work in Teal Organizations. Colleagues frequently switch and trade roles according to workload and preferences.

Job descriptions

asking for advice is an act of humility, which is one of the most important characteristics of a fun workplace. The act alone says, “I need you.” The decision maker and the adviser are pushed into a closer relationship. In my experience, this makes it nearly impossible for the decision maker to simply ignore advice.

The better question, though, might be: what makes us think that

people need to be put under pressure to perform?

Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication and

Because feedback is exchanged so freely, some organizations—FAVI, for instance—don’t hold any formal appraisal discussions.

they tend to be very narrow discussions, sticking to some preformatted evaluation grid, neglecting to inquire into broader questions of the person’s selfhood—their hopes, dreams, fears, yearnings, and sense of purpose in life.

in today’s complex work settings, incentives are mostly counterproductive, reducing rather than enhancing people’s performance.

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.

Brian Robertson, the founder of Holacracy, sometimes uses another set of archetypes to talk about the power of self-management to shift relationships to a healthier level—helping us to move from Persecutor, Rescuer, Victim, to Challenger, Coach, Creator.

Chiquet, one of our licensees and Holacracy coaches, who talks about his own background with the Savior pattern. How easy it was for him in business to fall into that Savior/Rescuer pattern of trying to rescue others, and how Holacracy helps him shift to be a Coach, and say, “I’m done with rescuing,” because in this environment, there are no victims that need to be rescued anyway.72

multiple “right” ways or paths we can follow in making decisions, thus there is no one “true” or “absolute” reality. Each person in a situation holds his/her own view

of reality, and his/her own perspective about the most effective way to do things. This assumption allows us to recognize that conflict is inevitable and that people will disagree in the workplace. While conflict and difference (or disagreement) are to be expected, explosive or otherwise hostile expressions of anger are not acceptable in RHD.

A number of them go a step further: they also create collective moments for self-reflection through practices such as group coaching, team supervision, large-group reflections, and days of silence.

Ozvision, a 40-person Japanese Internet company that has experimented a good deal with innovative management approaches, has two interesting practices involving storytelling. Every morning, people get together in their teams for a quick meeting called “good or new,” a sort of check-in for the day. Within each team,

whoever has the doll can share either something new (news from something they are working on, noteworthy news they might have read in the paper when commuting, or news from their private lives) or something good, simply some moving story they want their colleagues to know about, work-related or not. It’s a beautiful practice that starts the day with a brief and joyful moment, a sort of ritual that says, “Let’s acknowledge that we are all here, as colleagues and as human beings.”

Each employee can take one extra day off each year, called a “day of thanking.” The employee receives $200 in cash from company funds that she can spend in any way she wants to thank someone special during that day.

to be a whole person. This part of you, it

To act from wholeness calls for more than rational decision-making alone; we must learn to combine the power of the rational mind with the wisdom of intuition and integrity—and dare to take the leap.

We have developed speed but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity; more than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

The practices outlined in the previous chapter—explicit ground rules, conflict resolution processes, meeting practices, reflective spaces, office buildings—are all designed to create a space that is safe enough to reveal our selfhood, to venture into individual and collective wholeness.

It starts with the fact that 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.

Roles are so fluid that it makes little sense to hire somebody for one particular box.

that when people are self-motivated, they can pick up new skills and experience in surprisingly little time.

[A 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

Instead, Teal Organizations offer two types of training rarely found in traditional organizations: training to establish a common culture, and personal development training.

for instance, on topics such as Nonviolent Communication, how to deal with conflict, and how to get things done without hierarchy.

Most people no longer have a single “job” that fits a generic description; instead, they fill a unique combination of roles.