How to Become a Teal Mentor (IEC 2016 Preview)

By Jackie Thoms and George Pór for Enlivening Edge

Check here for other Integral European Conference previews from Enlivening Edge and visit the official IEC website here.

The most momentous shift in human history, after discovering the use of fire, is the going-mainstream of organising ourselves without bosses. Taming and making the fire useful, we unleashed a force of nature for the benefit of warming ourselves in icy weathers, preparing food, and lighting up the night. That first “technological” innovation led to an array of changes in cultural habits.

Large-scale self-management in the production of goods and services, enabled by the ubiquitous collaboration technologies of the Internet, is unleashing a force of our own nature—our capacity to use our collective intelligence for manifesting our collective will. The birth of this new era in the evolution of organisations needs midwives; it needs you. “How to Become a Teal Mentor”, the workshop that will be presented at the 2^nd Integral European Conference, on 4 May 2016, is an invitation to learn the arts of that evolutionary midwifery and become a competent midwife of that epic birth.

“Teal” is the color code for an Integral, “beyond-ego” consciousness-stage, which was introduced by Ken Wilber. It became a popular abbreviation for organisations inspired by the next stage of human consciousness, thanks to Reinventing Organizations, by Frederic Laloux.

Here’s our simple, 10-word definition of what Teal is: sensing, thinking, acting, beyond the small self, with increasing frequency.

Don’t take us wrong; we don’t claim to have all the answers to how to facilitate the transition to Teal. In spite of working with 4 organisations as Teal mentor, we are still only in our baby steps. So, this is an invitation to a learning journey, to learning by doing. The journey needs a map, and we’ll introduce a very sketchy Map of Teal Competences, to develop it jointly with you and make it open source.

We hope the mapping of the competences we need to have will, over time, become more and more accurate as we go through a discovery journey personally and collectively. Then, working with systems in transformation, we can refine and expand what we are sensing to customise the map of competences that their change facilitators would need to master to support them. In that way, the map can take on a life of its own, and be applied in myriad ways which support our transition into next stages of consciousness, capabilities and impact on organisations and the world.

Teal, as a stage of development, can be appreciated and expanded more deeply by using a fully-AQAL Integral framework of understanding and practice. For Integral practitioners, the synergy between a fully Integral AQAL approach and the more focused perspective of the three Teal organizational breakthroughs can offer and shape new pathways to work with client systems and organisations to journey further on the path to next stages of consciousness.

The workshop can also serve shaping new pathways for Integral practitioners to align the quality of their work with their intellectual understanding of what Teal is.

In the workshop you’ll be able to experience the principles and practices for building Teal mentoring relationships and doing the work, extracted from our own.

There will be paired practices, storytelling, graphic facilitation, and exercises that will let you experience “being Teal”.

You will learn how to discover and embody evolutionary purpose, wholeness and self-management, and how you can support them in your own life.

If you will be at IEC 2016 and are interested in becoming Teal mentor, join us in this workshop, where you’ll also learn about possibilities that the fledgling Teal Academy will offer to budding Teal mentors. To find out more about the workshop, visit our conversation about it on Facebook. If you live in London, you can also join the Teal Competences working group at a meet-up of the Teal Practice Group. Another resource worth looking up is the blog on Reinventing Leadership Development.

If you got this far in reading this article, we hope to connect with you in person, or online, or both.

 

Jackie Thoms is a coach and facilitator working with leaders to raise consciousness and positive impact on society and the planet. She founded WorldChangers in 2012 to bring cross-sector visionaries together to create breakthrough models and frameworks, is an Associate at Future Considerations and co-hosts the Teal Practice Group, London.

 

 

George Pór is an evolutionary thinker and a strategic learning partner to visionary leaders in business, government, and civil society. He is the originator of Enlivening Edge, and has been publishing the Blog of Collective Intelligence since 2003. A select list of his articles and book chapters on the fields of collective intelligence, organizational and social renewal can be found here.  More about George’s work on the enlivening edge of planetary transformation is here.