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October 18, 2019 - January 2, 2020
Einstein once famously said that problems couldn’t be solved with the same level of consciousness that created them in the first place.
Organizations as we know them today are simply the expression of our current worldview, our current stage of development. There have been other models before, and all evidence indicates there are more to come.
Green Organizations retain the meritocratic hierarchical structure of Orange, but push a majority of decisions down to frontline workers who can make far-reaching decisions without management approval.
In some innovative companies, managers are not appointed from above, but from below: subordinates choose their boss, after interviewing prospective candidates.
A strong, shared culture is the glue that keeps empowered organizations from falling apart.
What determines which stage an organization operates from? It is the stage through which its leadership tends to look at the world.
leaders put in place organizational structures, practices, and cultures that make sense to them, that correspond to their way of dealing with the world.
an organization cannot evolve beyond its leadership’s sta...
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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 next stage in human evolution corresponds to Maslow‘s “self-actualizing” level; it has been variously labeled authentic, integral, or Teal.
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.
In Evolutionary-Teal, we shift from external to internal yardsticks in our decision-making. 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?
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.
When we see our life as a journey of unfolding toward our true nature, we can look more gently and realistically at our limitations and be at peace with what we see. Life is not asking us to become anything that isn’t already seeded in us.
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. We embrace the possibility that we played a part in creating the problem, and inquire what we can learn so as to grow from it.
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.
Paradoxically, again, the more we learn to be true to our unique self, the more it dawns on us that we are just one expression of something larger, an interconnected web of life and consciousness.
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 (sometimes referred to as “actualization hierarchies” in place of traditional “dominator hierarchies”).
Trying to avoid or limit staff functions is something I encountered not only in Buurtzorg, but in all self-managing organizations in this research.
With no middle management and little staff, Teal Organizations dispense with the usual control mechanisms; they are built on foundations of mutual trust.
When organizations are built not on implicit mechanisms of fear but on structures and practices that breed trust and responsibility, extraordinary and unexpected things start to happen.
Applied Energy Services (AES), a global energy provider with headquarters in Arlington, Virginia,
Teal Organizations reverse the premise: people are not made to fit pre-defined jobs; their job emerges from a multitude of roles and responsibilities they pick up based on their interests, talents, and the needs of the organization.
The traditional tasks of a manager—direction-setting, budgeting, analyzing, planning, organizing, measuring, controlling, recruiting, evaluating, and communicating—are now scattered among various members of a team.
From the Evolutionary-Teal perspective, job titles are like honeypots to the ego: alluring and addictive, but ultimately unhealthy.
Teal Organizations mostly do without job titles.
Self-organization is not a startling new feature of the world. It is the way the world has created itself for billions of years. In all of human activity, self-organization is how we begin. It is what we do until we interfere with the process and try to control one another.
Almost all organizations in this research use, in one form or another, a practice that AES called the “advice process.” It is very simple: in principle, 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.
We often think that decisions can be made in only two general ways: either through hierarchical authority (someone calls the shots; many people might be frustrated, but at least things get done) or through consensus (everyone gets a say, but it’s often frustratingly slow and sometimes things get bogged down because no consensus can be reached). The advice process transcends this opposition beautifully: the agony of putting all decisions to consensus is avoided, and yet everybody with a stake has been given a voice; people have the freedom to seize opportunities and make decisions and yet must
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asking for advice is an act of humility, which is one of the most important characteristics of a fun workplace.
In principle, consensus sounds appealing: give everyone an equal voice (a value particularly prized in Green). In practice, it often degenerates into a collective tyranny of the ego.
Consensus comes with another flaw. It dilutes responsibility. In many cases, nobody feels responsible for the final decision.
While consensus drains energy out of organizations, the advice process boosts motivation and initiative.
Many of us hold deeply ingrained assumptions about people and work that are based on fear, assumptions that call for hierarchy and control.
The practice of sharing all information puts everyone in the same situation as the CEO of a traditional organization. It forces people to grow up and face unpleasant realities.
In self-managing organizations, disagreements are resolved among peers using a conflict resolution process.
conflict resolution mechanisms: first a one-on-one discussion, then mediation by a trusted peer, and finally mediation by a panel.
In 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.
Actually, one could argue that every organization’s real structure looks like this: an intricate web of fluid relationships and commitments that people engage in to get their work done.
In organizations where teams are the natural unit, Holacracy provides perhaps the most elegant process to define roles and help them evolve.
In holacratic language, people don’t have a job, but fill a number of granular roles.
People don’t wait for perfect answers to try out new arrangements and see how they fare. Roles evolve organically, all the time, to adapt to changes in the environment.
“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.
if you see a problem or an opportunity, you have an obligation to do something about it, and most often that “something” is to go and talk about it with the colleague whose role relates to the topic.
intranet is a file where colleagues can “rate” every role they currently fill, using a scale of -3 to +3: If they find the role energizing (+) or draining (-) If they find their talents aligned (+) or not (-) with this role If they find their current skills and knowledge conducive to (+) or limiting in (-) this role Using the same scale of -3 to +3, people can also signal their interest in roles currently filled by other people. The market place helps people wanting to offload and people wanting to pick up roles to find each other more easily.
what prevents teams from getting complacent? The short answer: intrinsic motivation, calibrated by peer emulation and market demands.
Not surprisingly, Teal Organizations expand coaching to all colleagues, whatever their role in the organization. RHD’s coaching program goes one step further: it offers 10 free counseling sessions for employees and/or their families every year. No one else in the organization needs to be informed about the theme of the coaching and the theme must not be a professional topic. The program is built on the trust that if an employee is seeking support from an external coach, the topic must be important enough to be worth the money the company pays for it.
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. It can be a colleague, but it can also be a parent, a friend, a neighbor, or a long-lost but not forgotten primary school teacher. The only rule is that once she returns to work, she must share the story of what she gave and to whom and how the gift was received.
At Heiligenfeld, once a year colleagues in every team rate the quality of their interaction with other teams. The result is a company-wide “heat map” that reveals which teams should have a conversation to improve their collaboration.
