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

by Frederic Laloux

Through distribution of power: Self-management creates enormous motivation and energy. We stop working for a boss and start working to meet our inner standards, which tend to be much higher and more demanding.

Through learning: Self-management provides a strong incentive for continuous learning. And the definition of learning is broadened to include not only skills but the whole ...

Through better use of talent: People are no longer forced to take management roles that might not fit their talents in order to make progress in their careers. The fluid arrangement of roles (instead of predefined job descript...

Less energy wasted in propping up the ego: Less time and energy goes into trying to please a boss, elbowing rivals for a promotion, defending silos, fighting turf battles, trying to be right a...

Less energy wasted in compliance: Bosses’ and staff’s uncanny ability to create po...

Less energy wasted in meetings: In a pyramid structure, meetings are needed at every level to gather, package, filter, and transmit information as it flows up and down the chain of command. In self-managing structures, the need for these meetings falls away almost entirely.

Through better sensing: With self-management, every colleague can sense the surrounding reality and act upon that knowledge. Information doesn’t get lost or filtered on its way up the hierarchy before it reaches a decision maker.

Through better decision-making: With the advice process, the right people make decisions at the right level with the input from relevant and knowledgeable colleagues. Decisions are informed not only by the rational mind, but also by the wisdom of emotions, intuition, and aesthetics.

Through more decision-making: In traditional organizations, there is a bottleneck at ...

Through timely decision-making: As the saying goes, when a fisherman senses a fish in a particular spot, by the time his boss gives his approval to cast the fly, the fish has long moved

Through alignment with evolutionary purpose: If we believe that an organization has its own sense of direction, its own evolutionary purpose, then people who align their decisions with that purpose will sail with the wind of evolution at their back.

relentless, small-scale, parallel experimentation.

Almost 20 years ago, Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers began A Simpler Way, a prophetic book about what organizations could be, with these words:

Culture 11. How would you describe the culture of the organization? 12. How homogeneous is it across the organization? And how homogeneous would you want it to be? 13. What would you say are the dominant emotions/moods in the organization? 14. Is there some specific language that has developed inside the organization? 15. What kinds of individuals tend to not fit in with your culture?

Ken Wilber and Jenny Wade have both critically reviewed and summarized the work of scholars who have written about these later stages. I invite readers who are interested in deepening their understanding beyond the few paragraphs below to read their work, referenced in the bibliography.

This model is highly suitable when work can be broken down in ways that teams have a high degree of autonomy, without too much need for coordination across teams.

RHD has units responsible for topics such as training (its “miniversity”), real estate, and payroll, that support all the units in the field.

At FAVI, for instance, there is an engineer who helps teams exchange innovations and best practices. One of the roles of founders and CEOs belongs in this category too: they offer support across teams by holding the space for Evolutionary-Teal practices.

The overall purpose of the organization might be “to help individuals and communities to live healthy lives.”

For a pharmaceutical company, you need specialization on a bigger scale. A holacratic, nested structure allows for such specialization.

there is a hierarchy of purpose, complexity, and scope.

Yet it is no hierarchy of people or power. In the holacratic system of practices, the epilepsy research team has full authority to make any decision within the scope of its specific purpose. Decisions are not sent upwards, and cannot be overturned by members of overarching circles.

A given person may show up filling roles in more than one circle throughout the organization; there is not a one-to-one relationship between people and their “place in the structure.”

A single nurse can perform all tasks—getting to know the client, reading the prescription, performing the medical intervention, and so forth—and can do it all in an hour or less. A pharmaceutical company has a very long value chain that can involve thousands of people and take several years: there is a lengthy drug research process (computer simulations, lab tests, clinical trials); molecules must receive regulatory approval; pricing strategies must be established; product launches prepared in every country; and global sales forces trained to inform doctors about the product.

When supply chains are longer, the model of parallel teams isn’t practical.

Some industries have not only long, but also deep value chains, when certain steps in the value chain involve both a large number of people and complex tasks (for instance, research in a pharmaceutical company or marketing in a large retail bank).

For these types of companies, Holacracy’s structure of nested teams might be particularly appropriate, as it allows an overall purpose to be broken down into successively less complex and more manageable pieces.

Appendix 4 OVERVIEW OF TEAL ORGANIZATIONS’ STRUCTURES, PRACTICES, AND PROCESSES

Teal Organizations case examples

Green Organizations case examples