Reinventing Organizations

* Book: Reinventing Organizations. A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness. Frederic Laloux.

URL = http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/

Description

"Most books on organizations are written for people hoping to find the secret key to gaining market share, beating competition and increasing profits. They offer advice on how to better play the game of success within the current management paradigm.

"Reinventing Organizations" comes from a different place. It is written as a handbook for people (founders of organizations, leaders, coaches, and advisors) who sense that something is broken in the way we run organizations today and who feel deeply that more must be possible… but wonder how to do it." (http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/)

Contents

Part I takes a sweeping evolutionary and historical view. It explains how every time humanity has shifted to a new stage of consciousness, it has also invented a radically more productive organizational model. Could we be facing today another critical juncture today? Could we be about to make such a leap again?

Part 2 serves as a practical handbook. Using stories from real-life case examples (businesses and nonprofits, schools and hospitals), this section describes in detail how this new, soulful way to run an organization works. How are these organizations structured and how do they operate on a day-to-day basis?

(Spoiler alert: it’s not the pyramid we know. There are no job descriptions, no targets, hardly any budgets. In their place come many new and soulful practices that create extraordinarily productive and purposeful organizations.)

Part 3 examines the conditions for these new organizations to thrive. What is needed to start an organization on this new model? Is it possible to transform existing organizations? And if so, how? What results can you expect at the end of the day?" (http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/)

Review

Tony Chamberlain:

"Can we create organisations free of the pathologies that show up all too often in the workplace? Free of politics, bureaucracy, and infighting; free of stress and burnout; free of resignation, resentment and apathy; free of posturing at the top and the drudgery at the bottom? Is it possible to reinvent organisations, to devise a new model that makes work productive, fulfilling and meaningful? Can we create soulful workplaces – schools, hospitals, businesses and non-profits – where our talent can bloom and our callings can be honored?’

Frederic Laloux asks these questions in his book Reinventing Organisations. The answers, he suggests, are to be found partly in our history, which tells us that ‘with every stage of human consciousness also came a breakthrough in our ability to collaborate, bringing about a new organisational model’.

Laloux traces this development from 100,000 BC to the present, observing a gradual but accelerating evolution from simple ‘family kinships’ to ever more collaborative and powerful forms of organizations. He shows how at this moment we are at another historical juncture. The current management methods start to feel outdated, exhausted. And a new organisational model is emerging, a radical new way to structure and run organizations. He calls this the Evolutionary-Teal model (ET model). The ET model’s development can be seen as a response to an expanding global consciousness – a growing awareness that ‘the ultimate goal in life is not to be successful or loved, but to become the truest expression of ourselves . . . and to be of service to humanity and our world . . . [to see life] as a journey of personal and collective unfolding towards our true nature’.

Many writers and commentators refer to this expansion of global consciousness as the ‘rise of mindfulness’. Laloux’s contribution is to have identified a dozen pioneering organizations that, responding to this shift in global consciousness, already operate on the new Evolutionary-Teal model. He has researched their ways of working, and shows how much these organizations depart from traditional management practices, and what a consistent new set of principles and practices they have developed instead For instance, the founders of these ET organisations all talk about trying to create workplaces that operate as 'living organisms' – workplaces that embrace the 'adaptive, flexible, self-renewing, resilient, learning, intelligent-attributes found only in living systems’ (Margaret Wheatley).

Laloux’s studies also revealed 'three breakthroughs' in the way that ET organisations focus on engaging their organisational community, three bold departures from management as it is told in business school today. These organizations demonstrated:

A commitment to an evolutionary purpose – collaborating with their people to unfold a future grounded in a shared purpose, Leaders in these companies assume they their organizations have 'a life and sense of direction of their own'; So rather than trying to pursue a predicted future through strategies, plans and budgets, they engage the whole organisational community to 'listening in to their organisation's deep creative potential... and understanding...the purpose it intends to serve'.

An emphasis on wholeness – an invitation for the ‘whole person’ to participate in a workplace where each person’s ‘emotional, intuitive and spiritual parts’ are welcome and respected and where the adoption of ‘social masks’ becomes irrelevant and therefore unnecessary. ET organisations create workplaces that 'support people's longing to be fully themselves at work and yet deeply involved in nourishing relationships [that build]...wholeness and community'

A preference for self-management – replacing the constraints of traditional hierarchical control systems with agile self-organising systems that are enabled by [collaborative] peer relationships. Laloux observes that 'People who are new to the idea of self-management sometimes mistakenly assume that it simply means taking the hierarchy out of an organization and running everything democratically based on consensus. There is, of course, much more to it. Self-management, just like the traditional pyramidal model it replaces, works with an interlocking set of structures and practices' to support new ways of sharing information, making decisions, and resolving conflicts.

There is much interest today in mindfulness practices in organizations. Even Wall Street banks are starting to offer their overworked bankers courses in mindfulness. Mindfulness is often used as a way to help people deal with pressure, stress and unhealthy corporate cultures. It is interesting to note that the practices for ‘evolutionary purpose, wholeness and self-management’, which characterise ET organisations, weave mindfulness deeply into the fabric of the organizations. So much so that few organizations researched by Laloux spend much time talking about the concept. Mindfulness is no longer an add-on.

The same holds true for another concept many organizations aspire to embrace: the learning organization. The evolutionary self-organising and self-managing nature of these organisations turns them into natural learning organizations. So much so that the none of these organizations spends any conscious effort to become a learning organization. This reminds us that mindfulness and learning are natural human conditions, part of our wholeness, and that organisations that evolve by listening to their communities will find these practices emerge quite naturally as part of their operating culture.

For those of us interested in how we can 'create soulful workplaces...where our talent can bloom and our callings can be honoured', Laloux's case studies provide a wealth of practical examples of how we can 'reinvent [our] organisations, to devise a new model that makes work productive, fulfilling and meaningful'.

When you read this book you will be encouraged to find that new organisations of this sort are emerging in diverse industries and across different geographies. Some organizations that Laloux researched are businesses and others are non-profits. Some are in manufacturing, others in food processing, retail, media and IT. There are hospitals, nursing organizations and schools. Some have hundreds, others thousands or even tens of thousands of employees. With all that diversity, these organizations share a great many common structures and practices, modeling new ways of engaging with their communities to unfold their future together." (http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/blog/guest-post-unfolding-the-future-together)

Discussion

Beyond Hierarchy, but not a free for all

Frederic Laloux:

"Say “no more hierarchy” and everyone gets the wrong idea. We’ve grown up believing that there are only two choices. You can have hierarchy. Or, you can have a playground, a free-for-all, where everybody just does what they want.

The problem is that the equation “no hierarchy = flatland” can be, but is not necessarily, true. Holacracy and some other pioneering organizations have developed a third way. They have taken out the hierarchy of people and power (“I’m your boss so I can tell you what to do”) but kept hierarchies of purpose, complexity, and scope (one employee’s scope might be to think about the functioning of a whole factory, while an another’s scope might be focusing on one machine only).

The pyramid as a form of coherence is out, but it is replaced with other systems and practices. In most cases, the role of the boss is replaced by clever peer-based practices that allow a group of colleagues to make decisions on topics like investments, recruitment, appointments, evaluations, and compensation. Practice shows that with the right mechanisms, peers can hold each other to account very well, thank you, probably better than a boss ever could. In a team, when someone is not pulling his or her weight, will colleagues speak up? A few simple practices can help this to happen in a timely and productive manner in a group of peers. Contrast this with a hierarchical system: in most cases, colleagues are resentful of a lazy co-worker but don’t speak up and wait for the boss to figure there is a problem and do something about it.

Here is another common misperception. For some reason, many people naturally assume that “no hierarchy = consensus decision-making.” In principle, consensus sounds appealing: give everyone an equal voice. In practice, it often degenerates into a collective tyranny of the ego. Anybody has the power to block the group if his whims and wishes are not incorporated. Now it’s not only the boss, but everybody, who has power over others (albeit only the power to paralyze). Attempting to accommodate everyone’s wishes, however trivial, often turns into an agonizing pursuit. In the end, it’s not rare that most people stop caring and start pleading for someone to please make a decision, whatever it turns out to be.

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.

There are good reasons, then, to be suspicious of consensus. The thing is, Holacracy and a number of other organizations that have gotten rid of power hierarchies don’t work with consensus. They have found a powerful alternative—a decision-making mechanism that transcends both hierarchy and consensus. These decision-making mechanisms give everyone affected by a decision a voice (the appropriate voice, not an equal voice), but not the power to block progress.

Holacracy calls this mechanism “integrated decision-making” and uses it during “governance meetings,” which are meetings where people don’t talk about business issues, but only about roles and responsibilities. Anybody who feels that a role needs to be created, amended, or discarded (called the proposer) can add it to the agenda. Each such governance item is discussed in turn and brought to resolution. Governance meetings follow a strict process to ensure that everybody’s voice is heard and that no one can dominate decision-making. " (http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/blog/-say-no-more-hierarchy-and-everything-gets-the-wrong-idea)

More Information

• the book's blog at http://www.reinventingorganizations.com/blog.html