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

by Frederic Laloux

The same holds true for social concerns: when we come from a place of wholeness, we feel compelled to do our share to heal our broken relationship with life in all its forms.

reflect on their personal calling and how it resonates with the broader organizational purpose.

Teal Organizations offer two types of training rarely found in traditional organizations: training to establish a common culture, and personal development training. Skill training programs are still around, but are delivered with a twist—they are often led by colleagues rather than external trainers and are deeply infused with the company’s values and culture.

Teal Organizations also do away with job descriptions, and that comes with a side benefit too: we can’t turn to the job description to tell us how we ought to work.

RHD consciously does not use [job descriptions]. Instead, the assumption that people are essentially good leads us to believe that, once an employee has a general sense of the job, he or she will want to shape the way it is done. …

The absence of a job title and job description forces us to search within ourselves for a personal, meaningful way to define who we are and what we can contribute.

If we want to be authentic and whole at work, we must learn to speak up about other important commitments in our lives. We must stop pretending that work will always trump them in all circumstances. A simple practice can help: at regular intervals, have a meeting where colleagues discuss how much time and energy, at that moment in their lives, they want to commit to the organization’s purpose.

without prejudice, we look at each individual colleague and ask: “How much focused time and energy are you bringing to this endeavor?”97

we have seen that Teal Organizations put the responsibility of performance management foremost at the team level. Individual feedback and appraisals are given not by a boss, but by peers.

Feedback given that way is not an objective evaluation, but a joint inquiry. We offer a peek into our own inner world so as to help the other person better understand the impact of their behavior.

Lauds: What has gone really well this year that we might celebrate? Learning: What has been learned in the process? What didn’t go as well or might have been done differently? How do we “take stock” of where things are now compared to where we thought they might be? Looking forward: What are you most excited about in this next year? What concerns you most? What changes, if any, would you suggest in your functions? What ongoing professional development will help you to grow in your current job and for your future? How can I be of most help to you and your work? Setting goals: When you think about your work in the year ahead, what specific goals will guide you?98

State an admirable feature about the employee. Ask what contributions they have made to Sun. Ask what contributions they would like to make at Sun. Ask how Sun can help them.99

You might have noticed that in this four-question framework there is no place allotted for negative feedback, for telling a person what they could do better. Does this mean that colleagues should pretend that everybody is perfect, that no one needs to be told what they could improve in? Of course not. But such feedback should be given on the spot, all year round, and not left unsaid, waiting for the appraisal discussion at the end of the year.

Colleagues add to that picture by giving you feedback. This wonderful team-based practice starts with a minute of silence during which your colleagues close their eyes and try to hold you in their heart, to let go of any form of judgment and offer feedback from a place of love and connection.

One after the other, each colleague (typically six to 12 people, including people from other teams who work closely with you) takes the seat in front of you and gives you the gift of answering two questions: “What is the one thing I most value about working with you?” and “What is one area where I sense you could change and grow”?

In a third phase, you reflect on the input and deepen your thinking in discussion with a colleague. (At Sounds True, which still has a hierarchical structure, this colleague is your manager, but in a self-managing structure it can take place with a trusted peer.) “What do you take away from the discussions? What did you learn? What do you want to pay attention to in the future? Where do you feel called to go?”

Philosopher Viktor Frankl perhaps captured it best: “Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.”

On what basis do Teal Organizations make important decisions, if not based on trade-offs related to profit and market share? By listening in to the organization’s purpose. This is new vocabulary in an organizational setting. Achievement-Orange thinks of organizations as machines, and machines have no soul, no direction of their own. In that perspective, it’s the role of the CEO and his leadership team to decide what the machine must do. 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. We don’t need to tell it what to do; we just need to listen, partner with it, join it in its dance, and discover where it will take us.

If we accept that an organization has its own energy, its own sense of direction, and that our role is to align with it rather than direct it, how do we find out where it wants to go? Sensing The simplest answer: do nothing special. Let self-management work its magic.

In a self-managing organization, change can come from any person who senses that change is needed. This is how nature has worked for millions of years. Innovation doesn’t happen centrally, according to plan, but at the edges, all the time, when some organism senses a change in the environment and experiments to find an appropriate response. Some attempts fail to catch on; others rapidly spread to all corners of the ecosystem.

A simple, less esoteric practice to listen in to an organization’s purpose consists of allocating an empty chair at every meeting to represent the organization and its evolutionary purpose.

Here are some questions one might tune into while sitting in that chair: Have the decisions and the discussion served you (the organization) well? How are you at the end of this meeting? What stands out to you from today’s meeting? In what direction do you want to go? At what speed? Are we being bold enough? Too bold? Is there something else that needs to be said or discussed?

Instead of trying to predict and control (the goal behind all planning and budgeting practices), Teal Organizations try to sense and respond.

BerylHealth, a Texas-based company that provides call center and other services to hospitals, has come up with a variation of the school’s practice. Instead of physically coming together, a mass email chain always erupts at some point on Friday afternoon (hence the name the practice has taken: “Good Stuff Friday”). One colleague sends an email to the entire workforce recognizing and thanking a colleague or another department for something that happened that week, or simply to share some good news. The first email invariably triggers a whole avalanche of thanking and recognition. The practice builds community and closes the week in a spirit of appreciation and gratitude.119

When work meets vocation—an encounter that theologian Frederick Buechner described as “the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger”—we often feel overcome with grace.

What is your sense of your life trajectory? How could working here fit with what you sense you are called to be and to do in the world? What aspect of the organizational purpose resonates with you? What unique talents and gifts could you contribute to the organization’s journey?

Heiligenfeld, the German network of mental health hospitals, includes two wonderfully simple questions to

prompt such a discussion in the yearly appraisal process: Is my heart at work? Do I sense that I am at the right place?

shareholder model: the manager’s duty is not to serve some purpose in the world, but to maximize shareholder value. More recently, we’ve seen the emergence of a new perspective, the stakeholder model, which insists that companies have to answer not only to investors, but also to customers, employees, suppliers, the local community, the environment, and others. An

Culture is a little like dropping an Alka-Seltzer into a glass. You don’t see it, but somehow it does something. Hans Magnus Enzensberger

The healthy relationship is one where as a founder you see, from the start, the organization as having a life and purpose of its own, distinct from your own wishes and desires.

Empty chair meeting practice: The “empty chair” is a simple practice you can introduce from day one. At the end of every meeting (or at any moment during the meeting), someone from the team can sit in the empty chair that represents the organization’s purpose and listen in, for instance, to the question: Has this meeting served the organization well?

When the time of the year for performance evaluations comes up, you can suggest changing the format to turn the discussions into more of a personal inquiry into one’s learning journey and calling.

Remember a time where you felt you could really be yourself at work, where you didn’t need to act or look the part in any way. Tell me about it. How did you feel at the time? At that time, did you sense a difference in your relationships with your colleagues (and possibly with your clients, your wife or husband, your children)? What was the atmosphere like? Did being fully yourself change anything about your work? Did you feel more productive, more innovative, more …? Tell me about it. Can you think back and try to remember what conditions were in place that helped you to be fully yourself at work?

modern organizations have provided us with over the