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

by Frederic Laloux

Pluralistic-Green is the family.

At the same time, every level has its own lights and shadows, its healthy and unhealthy expressions. Orange modernity, for instance, has harmed the planet in a way previous stages never could.

According to the research, the trigger for vertical growth always comes in the form of a major life challenge that cannot be resolved from the current worldview.

new stage is a massive feat. It requires courage to let go of old certainties and experiment with a new worldview. For a while, everything can seem uncertain and confused. It might be lonely, too, as sometimes in the process we can lose close relationships with friends and family who can no longer relate to us. Growing into a new form of consciousness is always a highly personal, unique, and somewhat mysterious process. It cannot be forced onto somebody. No one can be made to evolve in consciousness, even with the best of intentions—a hard truth for coaches and consultants, who wish they could help organizational leaders adopt a more complex worldview by the power of conviction. What can be done is to create environments that are conducive to growing into later stages. When someone is surrounded by peers who already see the world from a more complex perspective, in a context safe enough to explore inner conflicts, chances are higher that the

person will make the leap19.

What determines which stage an organization operates from? It is the stage through which its leadership tends to look at the world. Consciously or unconsciously, leaders put in place organizational structures, practices, and cultures that make sense to them, that correspond to their way of dealing with the world.

This means that an organization cannot evolve beyond its leadership’s stage of development. The practice of defining a set of shared values and a mission statement provides a good illustration. Because this practice is in good currency, leaders in Orange Organizations increasingly feel obliged to have a task force come up with some values and a mission statement. But looking to values and mission statements to inform decisions only makes sense as of the Pluralistic-Green paradigm. In Orange, the yardstick for decisions is success: Let’s go with what will deliver top- or bottom-line results. In Orange Organizations, leadership might pay lip service to the values; but when the rubber hits the road and leaders have to choose between profits and values, they will predictably go for the former. They cannot uphold a practice and a culture (in this case, a values-driven culture) that stems from a later stage of development.

People transitioning to Teal can accept, for the first time, that there is an evolution in consciousness, that there is a momentum in evolution towards ever more complex and refined ways of dealing with the world

The shift to Evolutionary-Teal happens when we learn to disidentify from our own ego.

We can learn to minimize our need to control, to look good, to fit in. We are no longer fused with our ego, and we don’t let its fears reflexively control our lives.

What replaces fear? A capacity to trust the abundance of life.

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?

Recognition, success, wealth, and belonging are viewed as pleasurable experiences, but also as tempting traps for the ego. In contrast with previous stages, the order is reversed: we do not pursue recognition, success, wealth, and belonging to live a good life. We pursue a life well-lived, and the consequence might just be recognition, success, wealth, and love.

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. In Teal, life is seen as a journey of personal and collective unfolding toward our true nature.

Clare Graves’ favorite phrase to describe someone operating from Teal was “a person who has ambition, but is not ambitious.”

Life is not asking us to become anything that isn’t already seeded in us.

as human beings, we are not problems waiting to be solved, but potential waiting to unfold.

obstacles are seen as life’s way to teach us about ourselves and about the world.

In Teal, we can transcend this polarity and integrate with the higher truth of non-judgment: we can examine our belief and find it to be superior in truth and yet embrace the other as a human being of fundamentally equal value.

We can create a shared space safe from judgment, where our deep listening helps others to find their voice and their truth, just as they help us find ours.

talk about their organization as a living organism or living system.

Buurtzorg places real emphasis on patients’ autonomy. The goal is for patients to recover the ability to take care of themselves as much as possible.

Vocation is restored in its true sense: the patient’s well-being trumps the organization’s self-interest.

Buurtzorg has become very effective at giving teams the specific support (training, coaching, and tools) required for self-management to work in practice. To begin with, all newly formed teams and all new recruits to existing teams take a training course called “Solution-Driven Methods of Interaction,”31 learning a coherent set of skills and techniques for healthy and efficient group decision-making. Within the training, team members deepen their knowledge in some of the most basic (and ironically often most neglected) building blocks of human collaboration: learning different types of listening and different styles of communication, how to run meetings, how to coach one another, and other practical skills.

The group first chooses a facilitator for the meeting.

The facilitator is not to make any statements, suggestions, or decisions; she can only ask questions: “What is your proposal?” or “What is the rationale for your proposal?” All proposals are listed on a flipchart. In a second round, proposals are reviewed, improved, and refined. In a third round, proposals are put to a group decision. The basis for decision-making is not consensus. For a solution to be adopted, it is enough that nobody has a principled objection.

As long as there is no principled objection, a solution will be adopted, with the understanding that it can be revisited at any time when new information is available.

If, despite their training and meeting techniques, teams get stuck, they can ask for external facilitation at any time—either from their regional coach or from the pool of facilitators of the institute they trained with.

Nurses can’t offload these difficult decisions to a boss, and when things get tense, stressful, or unpleasant, there is no boss and no structure to blame;

the teams know they have all the power and latitude to solve their problems. Learning to live with that amount of freedom and responsibility can take some time, and there are often moments of doubt, frustration, or confusion. It’s a journey of personal unfolding, in which true professionals are born. Many nurses report their surprise at how much energy and motivation they discovered in themselves that was never evoked when they worked in a traditionally managed organization.

coaches at Buurtzorg have no decision-making power over teams. They are not responsible for team results. They have no targets to reach and no profit-and-loss responsibility. They receive no bonuses if their teams perform well.

the teams of nurses aren’t simply empowered by their hierarchy; they are truly powerful because there is no hierarchy that has decision-making power over them.

The regional coach is a precious resource to the teams; upon request she can give advice or share how other teams have solved similar problems. 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

The coach’s role is to let teams make their own choices, even if she believes she knows a better solution. The coach supports the team mostly by asking insightful questions and mirroring what she sees. She helps teams frame issues and solutions in light of Buurtzorg’s purpose and its holistic approach to care.

The starting point is always to look for enthusiasm, strengths, and existing capabilities within the team. The coach projects trust that the team has al...

Coaches shouldn’t have too much time on their hands, or they risk getting too involved with teams, and that would hurt teams’ autonomy. Now they take care of only the most important questions. We gave some of the first teams from Buurtzorg quite intensive support and attention, and today we still see that they are more dependent and less autonomous than other teams.33

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

the economies of scale and skill resulting from staff functions are often outweighed by the diseconomies of motivation produced.

when a team feels the need to expand, it does its own recruiting

Chances are that the team will co-opt somebody who will fit in well. Because the team members make the decision themselves, they are emotionally invested in making the recruit successful.

The absence of rules and procedures imposed by headquarters functions creates a huge sense of freedom and responsibility throughout the organization.

Staff functions provide economies of scale, or so goes the usual rationale. Economies of scale can easily be estimated in hard dollar figures, whereas it is virtually impossible to peg a number to the diseconomies of motivation.

Staff functions give CEOs and leaders a sense of control over employees working out in the field.

trust twice: they must trust that they can give up a sure thing (economies of scale) for something less certain but probably much more beneficial (unbridled motivation). And, after having already severed the power transmission of middle management, they must give up the illusion that staff functions can provide control over frontline staff.

Most of the teams are dedicated to a specific customer or customer type (the Volkswagen team, the Audi team, the Volvo team, the water meter team, and so forth).

teams, who do their own hiring, purchasing, planning, and scheduling. At FAVI, the sales department has been disbanded too. The sales account manager for Audi is now part of the Audi team, just as the sales account manager for Volvo is part of the Volvo team. There is no head of sales above the group of account managers.

Now, in the team setup, the process looks very different. Every week, in a short meeting, the account manager of, for example, the Volkswagen team will share with his dozen colleagues the order the German carmaker has placed. Everybody joins in the joy when the order is high or the disappointment when it is low. Planning happens on the spot, in the meeting, and the team jointly agrees on the shipment date. Account managers now have a good understanding of how their agreements with clients affect people and processes in the factory, and when they are put under pressure to reduce prices, they can enlist workers in finding solutions. Can the process be somehow improved, or productivity increased, to shave off another few cents per unit?