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.

Richard Buckminster Fuller

astronomy. But the conceptual question is the same: could it be that our current worldview limits the way we think about organizations?

Could we invent a more powerful, more soulful, more meaningful way to work together, if only we change our belief system?

At both the top and bottom, organizations are more often than not playfields for unfulfilling pursuits of our egos, inhospitable to the deeper yearnings of our souls.

Most organizations have gone through many rounds of change programs, mergers, centralizations and decentralizations, new IT systems, new mission statements, new scorecards, or new incentive systems. It feels like we have stretched the current way we run organizations to its limits, and these traditional recipes often seem part of the problem, not the solution.

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

we hold a blueprint for how we can organize entities in ways that make work vastly more productive, fulfilling, and purposeful.

throughout history, the types of organizations we have invented were tied to the prevailing worldview and consciousness.

Organizations as we know them today are simply the expression of our current worldview, our current stage of development.

Impulsive-Red is highly suitable for hostile environments: combat zones, civil wars, failed states, prisons, or violent inner-city neighborhoods.

Impulsive-Red Organizations don’t scale well for those reasons—they rarely manage to keep in line people who are separated from the chief by more than three or four degrees.

they are inherently fragile, due to the impulsive nature of people’s way of operating (I want it so I take it). The chief must regularly resort to public displays of cruelty and punishment, as only fear and submission keep the organization from disintegrating.

Present-centeredness makes Red Organizations poor at planning and strategizing but highly reactive to new threats and opportunities that they can pursue ruthlessly.

Amber societies have simple morals based on one accepted, right way of doing things.

To feel safe in a world of causality, linear time, and awareness of other people’s perspectives, the Amber ego seeks for order, stability, and predictability.

Effectiveness replaces morals as a yardstick for decision-making: the better I understand the way the world operates, the more I can achieve; the best decision is the one that begets the highest outcome.

“What if” and “as if” can be grasped for the first time.

With this cognitive capacity one can question authority, group norms, and the inherited status quo.

Today, Orange is arguably the dominating worldview of most leaders in business and politics.

The dark side of the Achievement-Orange paradigm is hard to ignore these days: corporate greed, political short-termism, overleverage, overconsumption, and the reckless exploitation of the planet’s resources and ecosystems. But this shouldn’t eclipse the enormous liberation this stage has brought us. It has moved us away from the idea that authority has the right answer (instead, it relies on expert advice to give insight into the complex mechanics of the world) and brings a healthy dose of skepticism regarding revealed truth.

In Orange, we effectively live in the future, consumed by mental chatter about the things we need to do so as to reach the goals we have set for ourselves. We hardly ever make it back to the present moment, where we can appreciate the gifts and freedom the shift to Orange has brought us.

Achievement-Orange Organizations ratcheted this up another level, achieving results on entirely new orders of magnitude, thanks to three additional breakthroughs: innovation, accountability, and meritocracy.

Orange predict and control.

management by objectives.

the leadership doesn’t care how the objectives will be met, as long as they are met.

To put it simply, where Amber relied only on sticks, Orange came up with carrots.

But in practice, leaders’ fear to give up control trumps their ability to trust, and they keep making decisions high up that would be better left in the hands of people lower in the hierarchy.

When top management asks departments to make their budgets, people play a game called sandbagging—they push for the lowest possible expectation to make sure they will achieve the targets and collect their bonuses.

When the numbers don’t add up, top management arbitrarily imposes higher targets (which they make sure exceed what they promised to shareholders, to ensure they will make their bonuses

too), which people lower down have no choice but to accept. Instead of frank discussions about what’s feasible and what’s not, people exchange spreadsheets with fictive forecasts driven by fear of not making the numbers. In the process, budgets fail to deliver on one of their key o...

Conformist-Amber fusion of identity with one’s rank and position in the pyramid is weakened. Instead, people tend to wear a professional mask. One must always look the part: be busy but composed, competent, and in control of the situation. Rationality is valued above all else; emotions, doubts, and dreams are best kept behind a mask, so that we do not make ourselves vulnerable. Our identity is no longer fused with our rank and title; instead it is fused with our need to be seen as competent and successful, ready for the next promotion.

Achievement-Orange thinks of organizations as machines, a heritage from reductionist science and the industrial age. The engineering jargon we use to talk about organizations reveals how deeply (albeit often unconsciously) we hold this metaphor in the world today.

the metaphor of the machine indicates that these organizations, however much they brim with activity, can still feel lifeless and soulless.

Every paradigm has its leadership style that suits its worldview. Impulsive-Red calls for predatory leaders; Conformist-Amber for paternalistic authoritarianism. In keeping with the machine metaphor, Achievement-Orange leadership tends to look at management through an engineering perspective. Leadership at this stage is typically goal-oriented, focused on solving tangible problems, putting tasks over relationships. It values dispassionate rationality and is wary of emotions; questions of meaning and purpose feel out of place.

With most of our basic needs taken care of, businesses increasingly try to create needs, feeding the illusion that more stuff we don’t really need—more possessions, the latest fashion, a more youthful body—will make us happy and whole.

We increasingly come to see that much of this economy based on fabricated needs is unsustainable from a financial and ecological perspective.

We have reached a stage where we often pursue growth for growth’s sake, a condition that in medical terminolog...

the most obvious shadow of the modern organization is individual and collective greed.

Green insists that leaders should be in service of those they lead. Its stance is noble—it is generous, empathetic, and attentive to others. It insists that in light of the continuing inequality, poverty, and discrimination in our world, there must be more to life than a self-centered pursuit of career and success.

Some of the most celebrated and successful companies of the last decades—companies like Southwest Airlines, Ben & Jerry’s, and The Container Store, to name only few, are run on Green practices and culture.

Green breakthrough 1: Empowerment

Green Organizations often invest a disproportionate share of their training budget in courses for newly promoted managers, to teach them the mindset and skills of servant leaders.

Green breakthrough 2: Values-driven culture and inspirational purpose

Orange Organizations increasingly feel obliged to follow the fad: they define a set of values, post them on office walls and the company web site, and then ignore them whenever that is more convenient for the bottom line.

Research seems to show that values-driven organizations can outperform their peers by wide margins.

In Orange Organizations, strategy and execution are king. In Green Organizations, the company culture is paramount. CEOs of Green Organizations claim that promoting the culture and shared values is their primary task. The focus on culture elevates human resources (HR) to a central role. The HR director is often an influential member of the executive team and a counselor to the CEO. He heads a large staff that orchestrates substantial investments into employee-centric processes like training, culture initiatives, 360-degree feedback, succession planning and staff morale surveys.

Green breakthrough 3: Multiple stakeholder perspective

Green Organizations consider their social responsibility an integral part of how they do business, contrary to their Orange counterparts who often deem such reports a distracting obligation.

Where Achievement-Orange views organizations as machines, the dominant metaphor of organizations in