Understanding Teal Organizations


Article The Future of Management is Teal – (Good summary of book) by Frederic Laloux

YouTube video Re-Inventing Organisations – Talk (1½ hours) by Frederic Laloux

Podcast What Teal Means to Me – Conversation (1 hour) with Charlie Efford

Book Reinventing Organisations the illustrated version – A shorter read

Book Reinventing Organisations – The original book

Wiki Reinventing Organizations wiki – The book’s ideas elaborated in wiki format

Article What is a Teal Organization? – A simple introduction with links to more.

Articles tagged “Teal” in Enlivening Edge Magazine – explore and expand your understanding at your leisure

This article cautions that Teal is a whole worldview, not a set of concepts, principles, processes or practices. People with the worldview find Teal organizations natural; others do not.

This article indicates that people have to be ready to develop into Teal and that trying to jump from typical organizations into Teal skips acquiring a whole set of skills and capacities without which Teal organizations cannot function. Teal is not a cafeteria choice but a maturational stage of consciousness.

 

The original inspiration for Enlivening Edge was Frederic Laloux’s book Reinventing Organizations. He explores how organisational structures and processes have evolved over centuries, reflecting the increasing maturity of humanity’s consciousness. The original frameworks of color-coding the stages of consciousness were developed in Spiral Dynamics and elaborated by Ken Wilber.

Laloux researched current organizations based in each of the stages of development of consciousness, especially a small but significant emerging wave of organisations at the stage labelled Teal.

Teal has become a shorthand term for some of the “next-stage” structures and processes emerging in the world of organizations and businesses. These emerge from the Teal way of being or stage of consciousness. In this way of being, Teal ways of operating organizations make perfect sense. Purpose-driven, self-managed, and people-oriented is a very different paradigm from most organizations and businesses today.

If you are keen to support or work with Enlivening Edge, then you probably already have a good understanding of what Teal means.

If you aren’t sure, then the links above will give you food for thought. And the Teal assumptions below will inspire you as they do us, every day as we work toward our Evolutionary Purpose:

Catalyzing relationships among innovators
who are accelerating the evolution of organizations and social systems
toward human and environmental thriving.

Fundamental assumptions of the Teal worldview, the Teal stage of development of consciousness

Human beings and organizations are complex adaptive living systems.

Living systems evolve, and organizations with an Evolutionary Purpose foster the flow of evolution.

Synergistic relationships among all living things, including human organizations, can result in life-enhancing natural and social ecosystems. Diversity, including among stages of consciousness, can become the source of synergies, from a Teal perspective.

Teal consciousness understands that developing oneself is fundamental to being of service to the world, with a scope of care and concern that goes beyond the scope of “sustainability.”

Teal consciousness enables us to embody a fine-tuned balance between wholes and parts, within ourselves, among ourselves, and among our organizations. Individual and group are neither separate nor fused.

In Teal consciousness, we navigate into the future by sensing into the moment in as deep and large a way as possible, and responding from all our sources of wisdom, rather than seeking to move forward by predicting, planning, and controlling.

Teal consciousness in organizations requires willingness to experiment, learn, adapt, and grow, in many scales of context.

Teal consciousness tends to live life from possibilities, rather than fears, and to value co-creativity, which requires personal autonomy and personal responsibility—hence “self-managed organizations” are an expression of Teal consciousness.

Teal worldview recognizes that consciousness matures, which is a natural process based on experience, rather than a paradigm anyone can choose at any time.

Instead of right and wrong, Teal seeks the evoke and use the gifts and value in every perspective, every person, every previous worldview. Teal is capable of designing a system to weave all these gifts together to express a shared purpose.

The Teal worldview naturally holds the view of power and leadership as situational, emergent, and in service to the larger purpose, rather than based on titles or status or clout.

Leaf border Image by Hannah Edgman from Pixabay