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

by Frederic Laloux

But when year after year things boil down to targets and numbers, milestones and deadlines, and yet another change program and cross-functional initiative, some people can’t help but wonder about the meaning of it all and yearn for something more.

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.

The paradox is easy to grasp for breathing in and out; it is less obvious for some of the great paradoxes of life that we only start to truly understand when we reach Teal: freedom and responsibility, solitude and community, tending to the self and tending to others.

One of the core elements of Holacracy, which can be found in all Teal Organizations in this research, is to separate role from soul, to break the fusion of identity between people and their job titles. In holacratic language, people don’t have a job, but fill a number of granular roles. Where Holacracy goes further than other organizations is in the elegant process through which roles are defined.

All it takes to scare the soul away is to make a sarcastic comment or to roll the eyes in a meeting.