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

by Frederic Laloux

every time humanity has shifted to a new stage, it has invented a new way to collaborate, a new organizational model.

Every time that we, as a species, have changed the way we think about the world, we have come up with more powerful types of organizations.

The Catholic Church, the military, and the public school system are archetypes of Amber Organizations. Modern global corporations are the embodiment of Orange Organizations.

Achievement-Orange thinks of organizations as machines, a heritage from reductionist science and the industrial age.

Pluralistic-Green is highly sensitive to people’s feelings. It insists that all perspectives deserve equal respect. It seeks fairness, equality, harmony, community, cooperation, and consensus. The self operating from this perspective strives to belong, to foster close and harmonious bonds with everyone.

Agile

Orange glorifies decisive leadership, while Green insists that leaders should be in service of those they lead.

What determines which stage an organization operates from? It is the stage through which its leadership tends to look at the world.

an organization cannot evolve beyond its leadership’s stage of development.

As people in Teal are busy exploring the calling in their lives, they are likely to affiliate only with organizations that have a clear and noble purpose of their own.

Teal Organizations have found the key to operate effectively, even at a large scale, with a system based on peer relationships, without the need for either hierarchy or consensus.

For a few lucky people, work is a place of joyful self-expression, a place of camaraderie with colleagues in pursuit of a meaningful purpose.

What if power weren’t a zero-sum game? What if we could create organizational structures and practices that didn’t need empowerment because, by design, everybody was powerful and no one powerless?

This is the first major breakthrough of Teal Organizations: transcending the age-old problem of power inequality through structures and practices where no one holds power over anyone else, and yet, paradoxically, the organization as a whole ends up being considerably more powerful.

Self-management is no walk in the park. Newer teams in particular face a steep learning curve. They are effectively in charge of all the aspects of creating and running a small organization

at the same time they are learning to manage interpersonal dynamics within a self-organizing, boss-less team.

Mostly, though, the coach’s role is to ask the insightful questions that help teams find their own solutions. Coaches mirror to teams unhelpful behavior and can at critical moments raise the flag and suggest that a team pause to deal with a serious problem.

It’s okay for teams to struggle. From struggle comes learning. And teams that have gone through difficult moments build resilience and a deep sense of community. The coach’s role therefore is not to prevent foreseeable problems, but to support teams in solving them

teams have incredible latitude to come up with their own solutions. Very little is mandated from the top.

Team members must appraise each other every year, based on competency models they can devise themselves.

Teal Organizations, in contrast, keep staff functions to an absolute bare minimum.

there are very, very few people working in staff functions in Teal Organizations. And those that do typically have no decision-making authority.

At Buurtzorg, for example, the 7,000 nurses are supported by only 30 people

like many other Teal Organizations, it has no human resources department.

workers who have tasted FAVI’s ways of working can’t see themselves going back to traditionally run factories.

Each team self-organizes; there is no middle management, and there are virtually no rules or procedures other than those that the teams decide upon themselves.

The weekly meetings that used to bring together the heads of sales, production, maintenance, finance, HR, and other departments are now held at the level of every team.

Meeting overload in traditional organizations is particularly acute the higher you go up the hierarchy.

Teams are trusted to do the right thing;

workers self-nominate to create a temporary project team.

FAST Agile!

Trust versus control

The energy of trust When people work in small teams of trusted colleagues, when they have all the resources and power to make the decisions they feel are needed, extraordinary things begin to happen.

Projects happen organically and informally. Engineers are typically working on several projects in parallel.

They constantly rearrange their priorities, based on what they sense is the most important, most urgent, or most fun to do.

“Things have a natural way of taking priority,”

AES found out that using voluntary task forces instead of fixed staff functions has multiple benefits.

Employees find avenues to express talents and gifts that their primary role might not call for. They develop a true sense of ownership and responsibility when they see they have real power to shape their company.

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.

Colleagues frequently switch and trade roles according to workload and preferences.

Teal Organizations mostly do without job titles. Again, we have to be careful: it does not mean that everyone is equal, that all jobs are the same.

Does this mean there are no bosses in a self-managing organization? Quite the contrary. 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.

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. Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers

asking for advice is an act of humility, which is one of the most important characteristics of a fun workplace.

fear breeds fear and trust breeds trust.

Traditional hierarchies and their plethora of built-in control systems are, at their core, formidable machines that breed fear and distrust. Self-managing structures and the advice process build up over time a vast, collective reservoir of trust among colleagues.

self-managing practices are still countercultural today. Many of us hold deeply ingrained assumptions about people and work that are based on fear, assumptions that call for hierarchy and control. Only by shining light on these fear-based beliefs can we decide to choose a different set of assumptions.

In Teal Organizations, there are no unimportant people. Everybody expects to have access to all information at the same time.

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.

The process is effective to the degree that there is a culture within the workplace where people feel safe and encouraged to hold each other to account, and people have the skills and processes to work through disagreements with maturity and grace.

Freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin—you

Teal Organizations have done away with rigid job descriptions and job titles.