I am a very slow reader and some months ago
when I was job-hunting, I saw this among the requirements of a company: Must
have read Reinventing Organizations.
I hadn’t read it, of course, and was instantaneously disqualified, but the book
did intrigue me: What did it talk about that made it so important as to be a
job qualification? I went straight ahead and bought it.
And, I must thank the company – Buffer – for making me discover the book.
Reinventing Organizations is that rare kind
of book that inspires and opens your mind up to seemingly impossible and new
ideas.
The subject of the book is modern
organizations, whether they be for-profit, non-profit, or even educational
institutions. I’d never have bought such a book of my own volition – am pretty
much the last person to be interested in management-speak. But right from the
start, Frederic Laloux speaks about the moving force behind each organization:
human beings.
This is how he begins:
“Can we create organizations
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 drudgery
at the bottom? Is it possible to reinvent organizations, 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 talents
can blossom and our callings can be honored?”
“Guy must be nuts,” I thought. I mean,
workplace and soulful? C’mon. Maybe for someone running a resort in the
foothills of the Himalayas, but not for someone braving the commute in
Bangalore or any other Indian city and getting to work at a place where they
didn’t feel stressed and burned out. All my managers quickly paraded through my
mind. Luckily for me, most were good, interesting human beings, but a few here
and there liked to control the hell out of me and even laughed at me or ignored
my presence totally. I’ll not get into the details for the simple reason that
there are perhaps gorier stories out there.
My point is, what was this man talking
about? Has he even worked in an office? Still, I bore with him and trudged
along.
And, I am glad I did.
As I read on, Laloux started linking the
steps in the evolution of organizations to the evolution of human consciousness
itself. I became fascinated by his mere attempt to do so, because it seemed to
be such a great mix of breakthrough intelligence and childlike simplicity.
Basically, Laloux talks of five major steps
in human consciousness and how it influenced the kind of organizations we built
at those stages. The five phases are: Red, Amber, Orange, Green, and Teal. He
does talk of two stages preceding Red, but they’re from a very long time ago,
going back to 100,000 to 50,000 BC and 15,000 years ago, when our sense of
community did not exist beyond small tribes of up to a few hundred people.
Red or Impulsive-Red is when we start
growing fiefdoms and proto-empires and it dates to about 10,000 years ago. This
stage is marked by “hostile environments, combat zones, civil wars, … or
violent inner-city neighborhoods.”
Organizations that are still at this stage
of consciousness are the street gangs and mafias.
Next, is Amber or Conformist-Amber. This is
when people started settling down, thanks to agriculture. Roles are strictly
defined and conformity is by default. There are only a handful of truths out
there and you’re expected to swallow them whole.
The Catholic Church is the best example of
an Amber organization, Laloux says. The strict stratification introduced at
this stage brings about the first true divide between planning and execution.
That is, planning happens at the top and the plan is executed at the bottom.
In Achievement-Orange, rights and wrongs
are not so absolute any more, but it doesn’t completely do away with some
beliefs held at the Amber level. It does believe that people should be free to
do as they choose, that everyone should be accountable, and that if anyone has
made it to the top, it is because of meritocracy, and as such hierarchical
structures need to be maintained.
Pluralistic-Green is not so comfortable
with power and hierarchy, and likens organizations to families.
Evolutionary Teal uses a completely new
metaphor than any other stage of human consciousness: it likens organizations
to organisms. And, this is the fascinating part of the book, where it talks of
actual companies that are operating from this paradigm. Organizations that
belong to this stage operate like, well, organisms. No one person or group
tells the other person or group how it must react in a given situation.
Instead, they self-manage, follow the
advice process, and take decisions as a group, according to their knowledge and
expertise, the data that they have at that point and trust each other to do the
right thing. There are no managers or job titles, yet it’s not anarchic.
My description of Teal is very simplistic
and short. And, to get a real understanding of what self-management is, what is
the advice process, and other processes and structures (yes, they do have
structures, just not the strait-jacketed ones we’re used to. They’re more like
networks.) of Teal organizations, you must really read the book.
What makes Teal work is that it recognizes
us as human beings and operates on basic assumptions of trust and respect. We
need to trust each other to do the right thing. Yes, people may make mistakes,
may get selfish, or try to cheat. But such acts are exceptions and such wrongdoings
are easier to catch when all of us act as colleagues rather than mere cogs in a
stratified organization, where we’re certain no one is going to listen even if
we raise the alarm.
Naturally, this way of operating organizations
demands that such beliefs actually go beyond the organization itself. That’s
when the future starts to get interesting.
I am not doing justice to this book by
ending the review here, but this is part of my weekend writing project, where I
only give as much time to writing as my daughter deems it fair. So, though
there’s much, much more that can be said about the book, it’s best that you
explore it for yourself.
