Useful highlights from

Reinventing Organizations: 

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

by Frédéric Laloux  

Part 1 - Historical and Developmental Perspective

1.1 - Changing paradigms: past and present organizational models

• 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.

• While Orange is predominant today in business and politics, Green is very present in postmodern academic thinking, in nonprofits, and among social workers and community activists.

• Where Achievement-Orange seeks to make decisions top-down, based on objective facts, expert input, and simulations, Pluralistic-Green strives for bottom-up processes, gathering input from all and trying to bring opposing points of view to eventual consensus.

• Green’s brotherly outreach is only rarely returned in kind by Red egocentricity, Amber certainty, and Orange contempt for what it sees as Green idealism.

• Green’s relationship to rules is ambiguous and conflicted: rules always end up being arbitrary and unfair, but doing away with rules altogether proves unpractical and opens the door for abuse. Green is powerful as a paradigm for breaking down old structures, but often less effective at formulating practical alternatives.

• Green leaders should not merely be dispassionate problem solvers (like in Orange); they should be servant leaders, listening to their subordinates, empowering them, motivating them, developing them.

• 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 Organizations insist that there should be no such hierarchy among stakeholders.

• Businesses have a responsibility not only to investors, but also to management, employees, customers, suppliers, local communities, society at large, and the environment.

1.2 - About stages of development

• Leaders in Green Organizations maintain that the “stakeholder perspective” might come with higher costs in the short term, but it will deliver better returns in the long run for all parties, including shareholders.

• As a human race, we have done much harm to each other by means of colonialism, slavery, racism, and sexism, in the name of one group being “better” than other groups.

• Cognitively, psychologically, and morally, moving on to a 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.

• What can be done is to create environments that are conducive to growing into later stages.

• 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.

• Looking to values and mission statements to inform decisions only makes sense as of the Pluralistic-Green paradigm.

1.3 - Evolutionary-Teal

• The most exciting breakthroughs of the twenty-first century will not occur because of technology, but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human.

• The shift to Evolutionary-Teal happens when we learn to disidentify from our own [fear and control-driven] ego.

• We make room to listen to the wisdom of other, deeper parts of ourselves.

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

• In Evolutionary-Teal, we cross the chasm and learn to decrease our need to control people and events. We come to believe that even if something unexpected happens or if we make mistakes, things will turn out all right, and when they don’t, life will have given us an opportunity to learn and grow.

• 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.

• Put this all together—a fearless rationality and the wisdom that can be found in emotions, intuition, events, and paradoxes—and Evolutionary-Teal turns the page from the rational-reductionist worldview of Orange and the post-modern worldview of Green to a holistic approach to knowing.

• With this stage comes a deep yearning for wholeness—bringing together the ego and the deeper parts of the self; integrating mind, body, and soul; cultivating both the feminine and masculine parts within; being whole in relation to others; and repairing our broken relationship with life and nature.

• This longing for wholeness is at odds with the separation that most existing workplaces foster, albeit unconsciously—overemphasizing the ego and the rational while negating the spiritual and emotional; separating people based on the departments they work in, their rank, background, or level of performance; separating the professional from the personal; separating the organization from its competitors and the ecosystem it is embedded in.

• Leaders operating from Evolutionary-Teal were by far the most successful.

• The [Teals] find unbelievably more solutions than all the others put together.

• I found that the average time it took the [Teal] group to arrive at a solution was amazingly shorter than it took any of the other groups.

• The more complex our worldview and cognition, the more effectively we can deal with problems we face.

• 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 thinking, ignoring problems away, lack of authenticity, silos and infighting, decision-making concentrated at the top of organizations, and so forth.

Part 2 - The Structures, Practices, and Cultures of Teal Organizations

2.1 - Three breakthroughs and a metaphor

• 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.

• Teal Organizations have developed a consistent set of practices that invite us to reclaim our inner wholeness and bring all of who we are to work.

• 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.

• In every team context: they set direction and priorities, analyze problems, make plans, evaluate people’s performance, and make the occasional tough decisions.

• Team members distribute these management tasks among themselves.

• Because there is no hierarchy of bosses over subordinates, space becomes available for other natural and spontaneous hierarchies to spring up—fluid hierarchies of recognition, influence, and skill (sometimes referred to as “actualization hierarchies” in place of traditional “dominator hierarchies”).

• Teal Organizations…keep staff functions to an absolute bare minimum. They understand that the economies of scale and skill resulting from staff functions are often outweighed by the diseconomies of motivation produced.

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

• 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.

• To align and make decisions; beyond that, there tend to be no regularly scheduled meetings at all. Meetings are planned only ad hoc, when a topic demands attention, with the relevant people around the table. It’s an organic way of running an organization, where structure follows emerging needs and not the other way around.

• Coordination across teams: form follows function.

• Meetings and roles in self-managing structures emerge spontaneously; they subsist as long as they add value to the ecosystem.

• When trust is extended, it breeds responsibility in return. Emulation and peer pressure regulates the system better than hierarchy ever could.

• Teams set their own objectives, and they take pride in achieving them.

• 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.

• 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.

• Trust the collective intelligence of the system.

• Self-management brings the principles that account for successful free-market economies inside organizations.

• Valve, employees have desks on wheels…Because people move around so often, the company has created an app on its intranet [intranets are a BIG deal within Teal orgs] to locate colleagues. It renders a map of the office in real-time, showing the spots where people have plugged their computers into the wall.

• Teal Organizations reverse the premise: 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.

• The traditional tasks of a manager—direction-setting, budgeting, analyzing, planning, organizing, measuring, controlling, recruiting, evaluating, and communicating—are now scattered among various members of a team.

2.2 - Self-management (structures)

• Job titles and descriptions hardly do justice to unique combinations of roles, and they are too static to account for the fluid nature of work in Teal Organizations.

• People can give up one role and take up another without needing to go through the cumbersome and often political processes of appointment, promotion, and salary negotiation.

• From the Evolutionary-Teal perspective, job titles are like honeypots to the ego: alluring and addictive, but ultimately unhealthy.

• The organizations I researched didn’t only drop job titles; almost all of them also decided to drop words like employee, worker, or manager, and replace them with something else—most often simply colleague.

• Anybody can put on the hat of “the boss” to bring about important decisions, launch new initiatives, hold underperforming colleagues to account, help resolve conflicts, or take over leadership if results are bad and action is needed.

2.3 - Self-management (processes)

• 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.

• In principle, 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 [this is the invaluable Advice Process].

• Yet everybody with a stake has been given a voice; people have the freedom to seize opportunities and make decisions and yet must take into account other people’s voices.

• The advice practice: in his experience, it creates community, humility, learning, better decisions, and fun (notice how these align with values that are important at the Evolutionary-Teal stage).

• The sharing of information reinforces the feeling of community. Each person whose advice is sought feels honored and needed.

• 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.

• Consensus comes with another flaw. It dilutes responsibility. In many cases, nobody feels responsible for the final decision. The original proposer is often frustrated that the group watered down her idea beyond recognition; she might well be the last one to champion the decision made by the group. For that reason, many decisions never get implemented, or are done so only half-heartedly. If things don’t work out as planned, it’s unclear who is responsible for stepping in.

• While consensus drains energy out of organizations, the advice process boosts motivation and initiative.

• The larger the purchase, the more people are typically involved in the advice process.

• When there is value in coordination, people simply start to coordinate.

• Choice between trust and control is seldom debated on a rational level.

• It’s a choice that gets made based on deeply held, often unconscious assumptions we hold about people and their motivations.

• [Colleagues in a Teal org] Are creative, thoughtful, trustworthy adults, capable of making important decisions; Are accountable and responsible for their decisions and actions; Are fallible. We make mistakes, sometimes on purpose; Are unique; and Want to use our talents and skills to make a positive contribution to the organization and the world. 46

• Control mechanisms and hierarchy are needless and demoralizing distractions.

• People are systematically considered to be good. (Reliable, self-motivated, trustworthy, intelligent) There is no performance without happiness. (To be happy, we need to be motivated. To be motivated, we need to be responsible. To be responsible we must understand why and for whom we work, and be free to decide how) Value is created on the shop floor. (Shop floor operators craft the products; the CEO and staff at best serve to support them, at worst are costly distractions).

• At the core, this comes down to the fundamental spiritual truth that we reap what we sow: fear breeds fear and trust breeds trust.

• 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. It’s a “no secret” approach that extends to all data, including the most sensitive.

• In the absence of hierarchy, self-managing teams need to have all available information to make the best decisions. Any information that isn’t public will cause suspicion (why else would someone go through the trouble to keep it secret?), and suspicion is toxic for organizational trust. Informal hierarchies reemerge when some people are in the know while others are not.

• Intranet as a central repository where everybody can publish and retrieve information in real time.

• In self-managing organizations, disagreements are resolved among peers using a conflict resolution process. This process is so fundamental to collaboration without hierarchy that many self-managing organizations train every new recruit in conflict resolution.

• People simply follow the advice process: they bounce the idea off the relevant people that a role must be created (or modified or scrapped). Or they simply discuss it in a team meeting.

• For each role, you specify what it does, what authority you believe you should have (act, recommend, decide, or a combination thereof), what indicators will help you understand if you are doing a good job, and what improvements you hope to make on those indicators.

• In Teal Organizations, people don’t compete for scarce promotions. You can broaden the scope of your work and increase your pay if your colleagues are ready to entrust you with new roles.

• In Teal Organizations, people have roles, which come with clear areas of responsibility, but no turfs. No part of the organization belongs to anybody.

• People who have freedom in their work are eager learners; they can be trusted to shape their own journeys. Careers in self-managing organizations emerge organically from people’s interests, callings, and the opportunities that keep coming around in a liberated workplace.

• Teal Organizations measure indicators like team results, productivity, and profit, just like other organizations—except that they mostly tend to do so at the level of teams or process steps, and they don’t bother to measure individual performance (contrary to Orange Organizations that believe in individual incentives and therefore need individual metrics).

• At AES, Dennis Bakke installed a beautiful practice of team appraisal with his closest peers. They got together once a year, often over dinner in one of their homes to make for a relaxed, informal setting. Every person in turn shared his or her self-evaluation. Other team members commented, questioned, or encouraged each other to reach a deeper understanding of their potential and performance.

• A few simple questions can turn appraisal conversations into moments of joyful and soulful introspection.

• A person with “performance issues” might shed one or several roles in which she fails to deliver and take up other roles that better match her skills, interests, and talents.

• What about compensation and incentives in Teal Organizations? Here again, they deeply question standard management practices and come up with different methods; these include the process to decide who deserves how much pay (people set their own salaries, with guidance from their peers), how people are incentivized (incentives distract people from their inner motivation, so we are better off without them), and what type of salary differences are deemed acceptable (people at the lower end of the scale should make enough to have their basic needs met).

• People set their own salary, using the advice process—they had to seek advice and recommendation from their peers around them. In that way, people were made fully responsible for assessing their own contribution and validating it in the eyes of the colleagues.

• Another perspective is that all colleagues are fundamentally of equal worth and that all work done with love and dedication is to be honored equally, be it strategic thinking or scrubbing the floors. 67

• They are complex, participatory, interconnected, interdependent, and continually evolving systems, like ecosystems in nature. Form follows need. Roles are picked up, discarded, and exchanged fluidly. Power is distributed. Decisions are made at the point of origin. Innovations can spring up from all quarters. Meetings are held when they are needed. Temporary task forces are created spontaneously and quickly disbanded again.

2.4 - Striving for wholeness (general practices)

• Lots of natural, evolving, overlapping hierarchies can emerge—hierarchies of development, skill, talent, expertise, and recognition, for example.

• At ESBZ, all teachers are trained in Nonviolent Communication, and so are the students.

• People have to be okay with having a conversation about how they are feeling, what they need, and listening to what the other person needs.

• Why don’t we strive for offices that celebrate life, that are warm and full of textures, cherished objects, and comfortable sofas?

• The absence of real kitchens in our organizations is a powerful revealer of how we think about our workplaces. They are transient and somewhat lifeless places, where we rent out our labor for a few hours, but not places we invest in, in the way we invest in our homes.

• Nature is a great healer of the soul. When we are immersed in nature, we tend to slow down and find a deeper connection with ourselves and the world around us.

2.5 - Striving for wholeness (HR processes)

• On a deeper level, the matter of windows opening or not is revealing about our relationship at work with nature and with ourselves. How far have we taken the madness of control when we seal ourselves off from even a breath of fresh air?

• Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical, our cleverness hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity; more than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

• Of course, skills and experience matter, but generally they take second place. Roles are so fluid that it makes little sense to hire somebody for one particular box. Organizations in this research have also found that when people are self-motivated, they can pick up new skills and experience in surprisingly little time.

• New colleagues are also trained in the assumptions, ground rules, and values that allow people to show up more authentically. The initial Buurtzorg training also includes techniques for conflict resolution and Nonviolent Communication. All new hires at Heiligenfeld go through six training modules that include topics like “self-mastery” and “dealing with failure.”

• Teal Organizations offer two types of training rarely found in traditional organizations: training to establish a common culture, and personal development training. Skill training programs are still around, but are delivered with a twist—they are often led by colleagues rather than external trainers and are deeply infused with the company’s values and culture.

• Nonviolent Communication, how to deal with conflict, and how to get things done without hierarchy.

• Typically, the courses go from the inside out: they help people connect with and discover who they are, and then find authentic ways to express their selfhood about the subject matter.

• With no job description, with no one telling us how to do a particular job, we might as well do it from our own selfhood, and infuse it with our unique personality and talents.

• We work in corporate cultures that invite us to disown some of the things we care most about.

• We can approach the world from one of two sides: from a place of fear, judgment, and separation; or from one of love, acceptance, and connection.

• [The Center for Courage & Renewal] shunned the usual practice of assessing people with a rating scale on some performance criteria. Instead, the center simply framed a few questions that turned the appraisal into a moment of joint exploration:

• [At the hydraulic parts company Sun]
  
  1. State an admirable feature about the employee.
  2. Ask what contributions they have made to Sun.
  3. Ask what contributions they would like to make at Sun.
  4. Ask how Sun can help them.

• Feedback should be given on the spot, all year round, and not left unsaid, waiting for the appraisal discussion at the end of the year.

• Not a single organization in this research has laid people off during times of downturn. Self-managing organizations are exceedingly flexible and accumulate little overhead;

• The right size of a workforce is equal to the number of people needed to make the workplace fun. Having too many employees demoralizes colleagues and causes turf battles.

2.6 - Listening to evolutionary purpose

• Workplaces where we feel we can show up with all of who we are unleash unprecedented energy and creativity.

• When an organization truly lives for its purpose, there is no competition. Anybody that can help to achieve the purpose on a wider scale or more quickly is a friend, an ally, not a competitor.

• But even when I [de Blok] take the perspective of Buurtzorg as an organization, I believe very strongly the more open you are about what you do, the more advantages come back to you. If you are open, people will receive you in friendlier ways.

• The organization evolves, morphs, expands, or contracts, in response to a process of collective intelligence. Reality is the great referee, not the CEO, the board or a committee. What works gathers momentum and energy within the organization; other ideas fail to catch on and wither.

• Teal Organizations’ approach to marketing is almost simplistic. The organizations simply listen in to what feels like the right offering. There are no customer surveys and no focus groups. Essentially, marketing boils down to this statement: This is our offer. At this moment, we feel this is the best we can possibly do. We hope you will like it.

• What product would fill a genuine need in the world?

• Evolutionary-Teal also invites the intuitive power of the right brain.

• Instead of trying to predict and control (the goal behind all planning and budgeting practices), Teal Organizations try to sense and respond.

• The deep challenge here: it requires letting go of our beautiful illusion of control, our comforting illusion of control. The illusion that we’ve done our job as leaders: we’ve done all the analysis, we’ve got the plan, things are going to go according to plan, we are in control. It’s a much higher bar, and a much scarier standard to let go of those illusions, to get clear on purpose and to stay conscious and present in every moment.

• In such [complex] systems, it becomes meaningless to predict the future, and then analyze our way into the best decision. When we do, out of habit, we only waste energy and time producing an illusion of control and perfection.

• Shoot explicitly not for the best possible decision, but for a workable solution that can be implemented quickly. Based on new information, the decision can be revisited and improved at any point.

• From an Evolutionary-Teal perspective, targets are problematic for at least three reasons: they rest on the assumption that we can predict the future, they skew our behavior away from inner motivation, and they tend to narrow our capacity to sense new possibilities.

• FAVI captures the thinking about budgets in a provocative statement: “In the new way of thinking, we aim to make money without knowing how we do it, as opposed to the old way of losing money knowing exactly how we lose it.”

• In a world where organizations are self-managing, living systems, we don’t need to impose change from the outside. Living systems have the innate capacity to sense changes in their environment and to adapt from within.

• Where are we still stuck in the machine paradigm? How can we help the organization express itself fully as a living system?

• Moods determine what is possible: every mood predisposes us to a particular course of action, and closes us to many others.

• What is the mood that would best serve the organization at this moment in time so as to achieve its purpose? It might well be playfulness or concentration, but perhaps it is something else altogether—a mood of prudence, joy, pride, care, gratitude, wonder, curiosity, or determination.

• Theologian Frederick Buechner described [it] as “the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger”—we often feel overcome with grace. It feels like we have grown wings. Working from our strengths, everything feels effortless and we feel productive like rarely before.

• What is your sense of your life trajectory? How could working here fit with what you sense you are called to be and to do in the world? What aspect of the organizational purpose resonates with you? What unique talents and gifts could you contribute to the organization’s journey?

• Questions about our purpose and calling are simple to ask but can be difficult to answer.

• The more clarity there is around what the organization is called to do, the more people can enter into resonance with it.

• The (Pluralistic-Green) stakeholder model organization is still viewed as an entity that we humans need to steer, so that it can serve all stakeholders.

• The Evolutionary-Teal perspective—views the organization no longer as property, not even shared property in service of its different stakeholders. The organization is viewed as an energy field, emerging potential, a form of life that transcends its stakeholders, pursuing its own unique evolutionary purpose.

• We don’t need to foresee the future to devise a perfect strategy, we don’t need to force change to happen, we don’t need to make detailed budgets and kick ourselves when we don’t meet the numbers.

2.7 - Common cultural traits

• The world knows how to create itself. We are its good partners in this process. Or we can be.

• Culture is how things get done, without people having to think about it.

• In a hierarchical structure that gives managers power over their subordinates, a constant investment of energy is required to keep managers from using that power in hierarchical ways. Stop investing in culture, and the structurally embedded hierarchy is likely to take the upper hand.

• Context and purpose drive the culture that is called for in an organization.

• We relate to one another with an assumption of positive intent. Until we are proven wrong, trusting co-workers is our default means of engagement. Freedom and accountability are two sides of the same coin.

• All business information is open to all. Every one of us is able to handle difficult and sensitive news. We believe in collective intelligence. Nobody is as smart as everybody. Therefore all decisions will be made with the advice process.

• We each have full responsibility for the organization. If we sense that something needs to happen, we have a duty to address it. It’s not acceptable to limit our concern to the remit of our roles. Everyone must be comfortable with holding others accountable to their commitments through feedback and respectful confrontation.

• We choose love and connection.

• We strive to create emotionally and spiritually safe environments, where each of us can behave authentically.

• We honor the moods of…[love, care, recognition, gratitude, curiosity, fun, playfulness…]. We are comfortable with vocabulary like care, love, service, purpose, soul…in the workplace.

• In the long run, there are no trade-offs between purpose and profits. If we focus on purpose, profits will follow.

Part 3 - The Emergence of Teal Organizations

3.1 - Necessary conditions

• Experience shows that efforts to bring Teal practices into subsets of organizations bear fruit, at best, only for a short while.

• Ultimately, the pyramid will get its way and reassert control.

• The level of consciousness of an organization cannot exceed the level of consciousness of its leader. The CEO must look at the world through an Evolutionary-Teal lens for Teal practices to flourish.

• One role remains the same: the CEO is often the public face of the company to the outside world. Suppliers, big clients, and regulators often want to deal with the “head” of the organization, and the CEO often (but not necessarily) takes on that role. But as for the rest, most of the other responsibilities traditionally held by the CEO simply fall away—there are, for example, no targets to set, no budgets to approve, no executive team to run, no top-down strategies to devise, no disputes to settle, no promotions to decide on.

• Avoiding rules and policies is no easy feat.

• Trust is so countercultural that it needs to be defended and reaffirmed every time a problem arises.

• Based on our belief in the worth, dignity, and honesty of each employee.

• Founders and CEOs will not role-model the new paradigm faultlessly, all the time. But paradoxically, the occasional mistake can reinforce rather than undermine self-management.

• Fighting the inner urge to control is probably the hardest challenge for founders and CEOs in self-managing organizations. Over and over again, they must remember to trust.

• In a subtle but very real way, teams’ psychological ownership is undermined when they know the CEO can look over their shoulder in real time to monitor their performance.

• The most subtle, and perhaps most demanding, change for a founder or CEO in a Teal Organization is to leave behind the sometimes addictive sense that others need you to make things happen.

• Another beautiful Teal paradox: vulnerability and strength are not in opposition, but polarities that reinforce each other.

• Every decision offers the opportunity to ask the question: What decision will best serve the organization’s purpose? When a change of role is discussed, it begs the question: How will this role serve the organization’s purpose? A new client or supplier can trigger the question: Will working with this client/this supplier further the organization’s purpose?

• Context in turn is the energy of meaning and purpose, of connection with a larger whole.

• When the energy field of Context is healthy and powerful, Relationships are healthy and powerful too. And then, what in other circumstances causes time and energy to be wasted in the field of Activity simply disappears.

• With the right Context and Relationships, there really is a much simpler way to run organizations.

3.2 - Starting up a Teal Organization

• Having a CEO and a board that “get it” are necessary, but not sufficient, conditions.

• Experience also shows that it is easier to start out from Teal, rather than transforming an existing structure with its history and baggage from previous paradigms.

• If for a moment you try to take yourself (your wishes, your dreams) out of the equation and listen to the budding organization, what is the purpose that it wants to serve? What shape does the organization want to take? At what pace does the organization want to grow? Is the organization best served by you being a single founder or by several co-founders? Which other co-founders are meant to join you?

• If you want the organization to run on Evolutionary-Teal principles, the degree to which its purpose resonates with them and their readiness to embrace Teal ways of operating are two additional critical factors to add to the list. Be ready to spend significant time discussing these topics. The depth at which you explore these questions will set a standard for the type of conversations you will henceforward consider normal in the organization.

• You will probably make your life much easier if you articulate the assumptions you hold about people and about work.

• The assumptions can serve as touchstones for every new practice or process you consider introducing; they will make it easier for anybody in the organization, even the most junior colleague, to speak up and say, “I wonder if what we are doing is in line with our basic assumptions?”

• The advice process:

• A conflict resolution mechanism:

• Peer-based evaluation and salary processes:

• The more you self-disclose, the more authentic, the more vulnerable, the more honest you are about your strengths and weaknesses, the safer others will feel to do the same.

• Ground rules for safe space…stems from a collective effort

• Integrate a meeting practice that invites people into wholeness. It can be as simple as starting with a minute of silence or a round of thanking…

• Recruitment…can be wonderfully deep, sometimes moving conversations.

3.3 - Transforming an existing organization

• Does the CEO “get it?” Does she see the world through Teal lenses? Is he personally excited about the idea of running the organization based on Teal principles?

• Do the members of the board “get it” and support it?

• Worldviews will collide.

• People at lower levels in the hierarchy warm to self-management quickly. Most of those who had previously been given very little power and room for decision-making will relish the freedom to shape their work in the way they see fit.

• Most people will flourish in a liberated workplace. Age, sex, educational background, political inclination, union membership, color or ethnic background, and even IQ have little effect on whether someone will come to love and succeed in this kind of workplace.
  

• Middle and senior management…expect their resistance to be the hardest nut to crack in your organization’s transition.

• There is, of course, an irony in the CEO imposing self-management in a last act of top-down decision-making.

• [CEO Zobrist from Teal org FAVI] didn’t define and impose a reorganization plan. He didn’t decide how managers and staff functions would be reappointed. Neither did he decide who would stay and who would leave. Within the constraints he set (there would be no more management roles), he let people find the best path forward for themselves and for the factory.

• Through the power of self-organizing, everyone gets involved, everyone’s voice counts, and yet very tangible outcomes are produced.

• From an Evolutionary-Teal perspective, it’s not about what you think the organization should be or should do (this is how we are used to thinking about it in the machine paradigm, because a machine must be instructed what to do). Instead, it’s all about you and your colleagues getting a sense of the unique purpose your organization wants to manifest in the world. It’s about looking at your company as a living organism with a soul and a purpose of its own.

• Deep inside, everyone longs for work that is purposeful and meaningful, so most people are likely to join in with their heart and soul.

• What is it that others will consciously or unconsciously pick up from your presence? What fears, what desires, what needs drive you?
  

• The more trusting, loving, caring, but also the more clear-minded and determined you come across, the easier the transition will come about.

3.4 - Results

• The pioneer organizations in this research reveal that with a different context, work can come to feel as fluid, joyful, and effortless as life in the water for penguins.

• For Teal, the interesting question is: To what extent do the organization’s accomplishments manifest its purpose?

• Puzzled client who saw a helicopter land on its premises called Jean-François Zobrist, FAVI’s CEO, to tell him that there were still items in stock, and the helicopter really wasn’t needed. Zobrist answered that the helicopter might look like an extravagant expense, but it was a statement members of the team made for themselves, about the commitment and the pride they place in their work. That was worth every penny of it.

• These companies seem to fire on all cylinders at the same time. They provide a space in which employees thrive; they pay salaries above market rates; they grow year in and year out, and achieve remarkable profit margins; in downturns, they prove resilient even though they choose not to fire workers; and, perhaps most importantly, they are vehicles that help a noble purpose manifest itself in the world.

• Breakthroughs of Teal Organizations: 1) Power is multiplied when everybody gets to be powerful, rather than just a few at the top (self-management); 2) Power is used with more wisdom, as people bring in more of themselves to work (wholeness); and 3) Somehow things just fall into place when people align their power and wisdom with the life force of the organization (evolutionary purpose).

+ Through purpose:
+ Through distribution of power:
+ Through learning…broadened to include not only skills but the whole realm of inner development and personal growth.

+ Through better use of talent:
+ Less energy wasted in propping up the ego:
+ Less energy wasted in compliance:
+ Less energy wasted in meetings:

3.5 - Teal Organizations and Teal Society

• Through more decision-making: In traditional organizations, there is a bottleneck at the top to make decisions. In self-managing structures, thousands of decisions are made everywhere, all the time.

• The ideal of a closed-loop economy with zero waste, zero toxicity, and 100 percent recycling.

• And we are likely to witness the emergence of growth in other domains of activity, such as in the “high touch” services tending to our physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

• What about the judiciary and the prison system, currently still very much stuck in Amber, when not in Red? What would a Teal justice system look like, where failure does not call for punishment, but for reparation and an invitation to grow? [Politics and law as a system of domination (demands, threats, coercion, and punishment) would disappear, so needs for respect and restorative justice can finally get met. W.B.]

• With the Evolutionary-Teal stage, fear of scarcity gives way to trust in abundance.

• For the first time in history, we can contemplate a future where all people, not just a happy few, are free to follow their calling, to live a life of creative self-expression.

• In Teal, people are satisfied neither with religious dogma (Amber) nor with the exclusively materialistic outlook of modernity (Orange). They seek unity and transcendence through personal experience and practices.

• With Teal, serving the purpose becomes more important than serving the organization, opening up new possibilities for collaboration across organizational boundaries.

• Purpose clearly comes before consideration of power and governance.

• [from _A Simpler Way_ by Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers:] This simpler way summons forth what is best about us. It asks us to understand human nature differently, more optimistically. It identifies us as creative. It acknowledges that we seek after meaning. It asks us to be less serious, yet more purposeful, about our work and our lives. It does not separate play from the nature of being...If we can be in the world in the fullness of our humanity, what are we capable of? If we are free to play, to experiment and discover, if we are free to fail, what might we create? What could we accomplish if we stopped trying to structure the world into existence? What could we accomplish if we worked with life’s natural tendency to organize? Who could we be if we found a simpler way?

• Bring to life truly soulful organizations.

• And yet it isn’t meant to be read in a prescriptive way, as a list of structures and practices that must be rigidly implemented. I no longer believe that we need to design and shape organizations in the way we design machines and buildings—objectively, from the outside.

• If we can be in the world in the fullness of our humanity, what are we capable of?

Appendices

3 - Structures of Teal Organizations

• There is a hierarchy of purpose, complexity, and scope.

• Yet it is no hierarchy of people or power.

• The size and type of activity the organization engages in will naturally call for one type of structure, just like surrounding terrain determines the shape of a lake.