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You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
That the Dilbert cartoons could become cultural
We have turned hospitals into cold, bureaucratic institutions that dispossess doctors and nurses of their capacity to care from the
An increasing number of us yearn to create soulful organizations,
Einstein once famously said that problems couldn’t be solved with the same level of consciousness that created them in the first place.
“Never underestimate the power of a few committed people to change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Can we create organizations free of the pathologies that show up all too often in the workplace? Free of politics, bureaucracy, and infighting; free of stress and burnout; free of resignation, resentment, and apathy; free of the posturing at the top and the drudgery at the bottom? Is it possible to reinvent organizations, to devise a new model that makes work productive, fulfilling, and meaningful? Can we create soulful workplaces—schools, hospitals, businesses, and nonprofits—where our talents can blossom and our callings can be honored?
(Fowler), leadership (Cook-Greuter, Kegan, Torbert), and so on.
Impulsive-Red is highly suitable for hostile environments: combat zones, civil wars, failed states, prisons, or violent inner-city neighborhoods.
What has worked in the past will work in the future. When the context is changing, and the way we do things around here stops working, Amber Organizations find it hard to accept the need for change.
The social mask
Amber Organizations—which often come in the form of government agencies, religious organizations, public schools, and the military—still have lifetime employment as their implicit or explicit norm, and for many of their employees, social life revolves heavily around their work life.
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
It has allowed us to engage, for the first time, in the pursuit of truth regardless of religious dogma and political authority, without having to risk our lives.
Amber command and control becomes Orange predict and control.
management by objectives. Top management formulates an overall direction and cascades down objectives and milestones to reach the desired outcome. To a certain degree, the leadership doesn’t care how the objectives will be met, as long as they are met. This attitude has prompted the birth of a host of now familiar management processes to define objectives (predict) and follow up (control): strategic planning, mid-term planning, yearly budgeting cycles, key performance indicators, and balanced scorecards, to name a few. In
intentions. Take the notion that decisions need to be pushed down to foster innovation and motivation: this makes perfect sense for leaders operating from Achievement-Orange. 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.
But when year after year things boil down to targets and numbers, milestones and deadlines, and yet another change program and cross-functional initiative, some people can’t help but wonder about the meaning of it all and yearn for something more.
Pluralistic-Green strives for bottom-up processes, gathering input from all and trying to bring opposing points of view to eventual consensus.
Orange glorifies decisive leadership, while Green insists that leaders should be in service of those they lead.
Some people have become disillusioned with and scoff at the notion of shared values. This is because 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.
In Orange Organizations, strategy and execution are king. In Green Organizations, the company culture is paramount.
corporate social responsibility report.
another. At Southwest Airlines, one of the
Evolution seems to be accelerating, and accelerating ever faster.
Let Your Life Speak:
we are rich not through the things we own, but through the relationships that nourish our soul.
Taming the ego
Many of the corporate ills today can be traced to behaviors driven by fearful egos: politics, bureaucratic rules and processes, endless meetings, analysis paralysis, information hoarding and secrecy, wishful
RHD Human Services—United States—4,000 employees—Nonprofit Resources for Human Development (RHD) is a Philadelphia-based nonprofit operating in 14 states, serving people in need through a variety of homes, shelters, and programs in areas such as mental disabilities, addiction recovery, and homelessness. It was founded in 1970 by Robert Fishman.
Tower Watson,
Gary Hamel, a scholar and writer on organizations, aptly calls survey results such as these the shame of management.
“Solution-Driven Methods of Interaction,”
The organization that believes that mankind is good”).
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.
Self-management brings the principles that account for successful free-market economies inside organizations.
Alex Markels illustrates with a story how far teams at AES went with taking on responsibilities typically handled by headquarters:
This year, all students from those grades will work in an ambitious yearlong project to redesign these three grades. Experts in Design Thinking (a methodology developed by IDEO, a celebrated design firm) will help the children and faculty, in an intensive two-day design workshop, to develop an overall concept.
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.
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. The person is under no obligation to integrate every piece of advice; the point is not to achieve a watered-down compromise that accommodates everybody’s wishes.
It is actually so critical that, at AES and other self-managing organizations, colleagues know that forgetting to uphold the advice process is one of the few things that can get them fired
With the advice process, they can ask tough questions and give their opinions forcefully, but then move on to the next question; meanwhile, someone else will do the work of integrating different perspectives and advice.
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.
it’s not only the boss, but everybody, who has power over others (albeit only...
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Consensus comes with another flaw. It dilutes responsibility. In many cases, nobody feels responsible for the final decision.
If the advice process needs to be suspended in times of crisis, these two guidelines can serve to maintain trust in self-management: give full transparency about the scope and timeframe of top-down decision-making, and appoint someone to make those decisions who will not be suspected of continuing to exert such powers when the crisis is over.
In self-managing organizations there are no authorization limits and no procurement departments.
When there is value in coordination, people simply start to coordinate.
In more complex cases, when standards need to be specified, someone will step up and call together a group that will look into the matter and define the standards.
