What product would we be really proud of? What product would fill a genuine need in the world? These are the kinds of questions people turn to in Teal Organizations to define new products.

The international core group of the MAP has three legs: IMU Augsburg, Roundtable Budapest and Sunny Connection Switzerland. Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers, A Simpler Way (Berrett-Koehler, 1996): What organizations could be like if we sought inspiration from life and nature, rather than thinking about them as machines.Another perspective is that all colleagues are fundamentally of equal worth and that all work done with love and dedication is to be honored equally, be it strategic thinking or scrubbing the floors. Four times a year, Heiligenfeld organizes a “mindfulness day”---a day that patients and staff spend in silence. Patients are invited to remain entirely silent (they wear a tag with the word “silence” to remind each other), while the staff speaks only when needed, in whispers (staff wear a tag with the word “mindfulness”). There are no talking therapy sessions that day. Instead, other forms of therapy take place—walks in the woods, painting, or creative activities, for instance. Information sessions help patients prepare for the day, and there are “emergency talking places” for patients who feel overwhelmed by the silence. To thrive in our increasingly complex world, companies must move beyond digitization and reimagine what they do to create value. But most leadership teams aren’t set up to transform their organizations and position them for success in the future. The Way Forward We do not pursue recognition, success, wealth, and belonging to live a good life. We pursue a life well-lived, and the consequence might just be recognition, success, wealth, and love. Heiligenfeld: a 600-employee mental health hospital system, based in central Germany, which applies a holistic approach to patient care.

Basically, self-managing teams are like mini-organizations, covering all vital roles in an organization. They have no bosses, no top-down targets or budgets, no fixed job titles or job descriptions; instead, they make their own sales, hiring, purchasing and operational decisions. Feel free to get our full Reinventing Organizations summary to learn how this works. STRIVING FOR WHOLENESS I agree with Laloux that we need to take a hard look at the idea of professionalism and revise it for the 21st century. People should feel relaxed enough to be themselves at work, and I fully support many of Laloux’s proposed methods for conflict resolution and inclusion. But I’m also skeptical of the idea that my job should be responsible for nurturing my “soul”––something I don’t even believe in. I, like everyone else, crave work that is meaningful, but I also don’t want my job to be my sole, or even primary, source of meaning. That may seem like a merely semantic distinction, but to me it’s a critical one. While this organisational model is mostly a relic in today’s corporate world, it does live on in mafia-style organisations, street gangs and tribal or religious movements. ‘Amber’ organisations (marked by a clear hierarchical structure, duties divided based on highly formal roles within a hierarchical pyramid, top-down authority and control, and with a great emphasis on stability) are also a dying breed within corporations, but are alive and well in the military, education and numerous government agencies and institutions. 3. What is currently the dominant organisational model? Frederic Laloux discovered several pioneer organizations that have already started applying Teal principles, some for as long as 30-40 years. They range from schools to family-owned businesses and public-listed companies. Laloux researched 12 organizations in detail: AES, BOS/Origin, Buurtzorg, ESBZ, FAVI, Heiligenfeld, Holacracy, Morning Star, Patagonia, RHD, Sounds True, and Sun Hydraulics. None of the Teal Organizations knew that others existed, but they shared several similarities. In traditional pyramid structures, people at the bottom tend to feel powerless, resigned and resentful, while those at the top are plagued by stress, politics and mistrust. Teal Organizations make everyone more powerful by replacing the pyramid with self-managing teams.

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Wholeness. Whereas Orange and Green organizations encourage people to show only their narrow “professional” selves, Teal organizations invite people to reclaim their inner wholeness. They create an environment wherein people feel free to fully express themselves, bringing unprecedented levels of energy, passion, and creativity to work. They decided that two principles, two basic social values, should inspire every management practice at Morning Star: individuals should never use force against other people and they should honor their commitments. For people transitioning to Teal, these separations in the workplace often become so painful that they choose to leave organizational life for some form of self-employment, a more accommodating context to find wholeness with themselves and with others. Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness is a book written by Frédéric Laloux and published in 2014. It lists the different paradigms of the human organizations through the ages and proposes a new one: Teal organisation. The latter is built on three pillars related to wholeness, self-management, and evolutionary purpose.