By Gergely Orban and originally published at the IEC blog.
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I rarely have the chance to present our three years long organizational case study towards Teal to integral people.
I have been living this story as change agent at Doctusoft – a company of 40 in Budapest – and also living the very same change within my life. This entanglement can only be understood through the AQAL framework. And our sometimes progressing, sometimes regressing storyline only gets meaning via the Reinventing Organizations framework.
Our journey at Doctusoft was mostly characterized by our commitment and efforts to adopt holacracy. But soon it turned out that we missed basics of cultural integrity. That was when the big picture of Integral and RO helped as a map to see ourselves realistically, not wishfully.
What is Teal in practice in today’s Hungarian, or Central European society? What is Teal practice when talented people who you onboard into your team are socialized in mostly Amber and sometimes Orange systems and practices?
What is Teal when you sell, when you lead, when you write code or manage a project to and with these people? What is teal when a partner tries to pull you in their office politics or practices double talk with you and your teammates? In a culture where the word ‘purpose’ is not understood by many.
Is it realistic to go for Teal when mature Green isn’t around the corner yet? Well, on bad days it seems unrealistic, but on the other hand we believe it is essential to hold that ambition. We keep Teal as a moonshot goal. We have been working for this sustainable integral system and culture for 3 years.
During these 3 years we committed several mistakes. Or in other words we met several learning opportunities. If there are a 100 proper ways to be Teal, we may already know a few of these, but we definitely know much more ways to fail. And that has almost the same importance.
All our failures, all our patterns that we have went through heal us and grow us on both a personal and a team level. I work as an organizational developer to turn our organization more and more into a feeling and living organism. My main reason and passion to do this is to experience this healthy growth and transformation with my fellows and within myself.
A change agent’s story is deeply entangled with the story of the organization it works with. In my presentation I will provide three practical insights:
- How holacracy turned out to be an integral system for us,
- How have we been identifying its missing but prerequisite intersubjective practices,
- How have I as change agent gone through the eye of the needle when it was inevitable.
If the story of Doctusoft is relevant to you, I humbly invite you to learn together!
Gergely ORBAN manages IT projects, supports organizational change and individuals at Doctusoft.
