By Edith Friesen for Enlivening Edge Magazine
If you are willing, come with me on a thought experiment.
For a moment contemplate the Teal organization or Next-stage movement as an element or force of Nature. What comes into your awareness? Here are some possibilities.
Perhaps it feels like the earth is moving under your feet, and the organizational landscape is shifting. As if hierarchical and flat structures are giving ground or giving way to self-managed ways of organizing. In your experience, how shallow or deep is the shaking? Where in your being do you experience it?
Perhaps it sounds like a bubbling stream of water or mighty river. It springs up from the ground in odd and predictable places, as people all over the globe find it through conferences, social media, and publications, and come together. It flows around solidified ways of organizing. It gathers momentum as more people, like drops of water, join its flow. In your experience, how narrow or wide is the flow? Where in your being do you experience it?
Perhaps it looks like a burning fire. A funeral pyre with the potential to consume threadbare work suits and identities that have defined and confined you for too long. And rocket fuel with the potential to energize new roles that are calling you from the future. It burns with passion, energy, and purpose, lighting up the night sky. In your experience, how small or big is the flame? Where in your being do you experience it?
Perhaps it smells like a fresh wind, blowing through an open window. The wind puts everything in constant flux. It ruffles your and others’ organization in a different way since each has its own dynamics and forces at play. Some open their windows wider, to better breathe the life-giving air. Others close them for fear of disruption. In your experience, how gentle or strong is the wind? Where in your being do you experience it?
Perhaps it arises like an open space with arms that can hold anything and everything that comes up. Shifting organizational structures. More potential collaborators. Enlivened evolutionary purpose. Dynamic push-pull forces. In your experience, how bounded or boundless is the space? Where in your being do you experience it?
Whatever element most closely represents your experience of the Teal organization movement, where do you see yourself in relation to it, knowing that could change in a heartbeat? Are you on the edge, unsure if you want to get any closer? Tagging along, and letting the movement carry you? Totally immersed in the chaotic-and-calm centre where it seems that both everything and nothing is happening at once? At the head of the pack, with your face pressed into the unknown? Or some other place?
Whatever your place in the Next-stage organization movement, what is your story or the story of your organization? What is your lived experience?
We’d love to hear it in living colour. So we can recognize it in ourselves and light up the hidden corners of our own stories. So we can connect with each other as whole people, and movement-build together. And, in the process, so we can become awestruck by the wave that is moving through us.
You can share your story in the comments below. Or send it to us.
As a lifelong writer, Edith has worked in diverse organizations and coached writers. She enjoys helping people write in Teal-inspired ways that touch the body, heart, soul, and mind. Send email to arcadiawilds
Featured image/graphic link photo by Ernest Karchmit on Unsplash
