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Book: Tips and techniques to reach adult learners

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Book: Tips and techniques to reach adult learners

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Praise for Powerful Techniques for Teaching Adults Stephen Brookfield has used his gifts for clear thinking and lucid writing to produce this theoretically informed, immensely practical book on how the dynamics of power and adult teaching intersect. It should be required reading for everyone who teaches adults. ??-Ronald M.

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Teach For All Insights on Learning Organizations

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Teach For All Insights on Learning Organizations

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User account | Teach For All Partner Learning Portal

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A summary of the characteristics that distinguish learning organizations.

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Article: Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations

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Article: Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations

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Excerpts from Peter Senge's book, Dance of Change, on how to maintain momentum in Learning Organizations

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A simple framework to support inclusive conversations. It affirms common but different responses to courageous (and sometimes challenging) conversations so no single mode is being privileged over others.

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Article: Harvard Business Review - Is Yours a Learning Organization?

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Article: Harvard Business Review - Is Yours a Learning Organization?

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This article is a great place to begin to learn about Learning Organizations!

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Reprint: R0803H An organization with a strong learning culture faces the unpredictable deftly. However, a concrete method for understanding precisely how an institution learns and for identifying specific steps to help it learn better has remained elusive. A new survey instrument from professors Gar…

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Book summary & tool: The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge

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Book summary & tool: The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge

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A brief summary of the book, The Fifth Discipline, which argues that there are five core disciplines/practices to harbor learning organizations: Shared vision,  Mental models, Personal mastery, Team learning, and Systems thinking.

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The Fifth Discipline - P.Senge (summary) | panview

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The title of Peter Senge´s book the Fifth Discipline cites one of the five Disciplines to create a Learning Organization. These five disciplines: A shared Vision (1), Mental Models (2), Team Learning (3), Personal Mastery (4) and System Thinking (5).The fifth Discipline, System Thinking, is the one discipline that binds the other four and therefore the discipline where the focus of Change Management should be.

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A structure for individuals and teams to facilitate creativity and change

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Editor's note: This is a guest post from Cath Duncan from Creative Grief Studio and Remembering For Good.
In my last post here and a recent post on my blog, I spoke about creative tension, and a bunch of people said they'd never heard of it and asked me to share more about what creative tension is and how to use it. So here we go...

The concept of creative tension is talked about by Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline. Robert Fritz also has some great stuff about creative tension in his book, The Path of Least Resistance.

Creative tension is essentially a structure that helps to facilitate creativity and change. ( Click to tweet - thanks!)

You create creative tension when you clearly articulate your vision and your current reality, and the gap between your vision and your current reality becomes apparent. This gap creates an emotional and energetic tension that seeks to be resolved.

Fritz calls this a tension-resolution system and he gives the example of stretching a rubber band - as you stretch it, this creates tension, and the tendency of the rubber band is to pull back to resolve the tension in the system. Imagine that your vision is represented by your right hand and your current reality is represented by your left hand and you have a rubber band around both hands. The greater the gap between your vision and your reality, the more the rubber band will stretch, the greater the tension that will develop, and the stronger the motivation and energy will be to resolve that tension.

Creative tension helps you to be more creative

Our minds don't like the cognitive dissonance in saying "this is what I want" and recognizing that we don't have it. Your mind is highly motivated to relieve that cognitive dissonance by closing the gap between your current reality and your vision, and so this allows you to release more energy and resources and creativity into finding ways to close that gap.

Another principle that's probably contributing to the usefulness of creative tension is the Zeigarnik Effect, which says that when we have an unresolved question or problem, we continue holding that problem in our minds - sometimes only unconsciously.

This also fits with the Scrooge Principle that Dan Coyle talks about in The Talent Code and the theory behind eustress. Our minds and bodies seek to preserve energy, but when we're faced with an unresolved issue, a big challenge, or the tension of the gap between our vision and our reality, this triggers us to release more energy and attention into dealing with the problem and generating solutions and we perform at our peak. Betty Edwards, in her awesome book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, talks about how we usually tackle problems with our left-brain-directed thinking first, and only if the left brain can't solve the problem, or if it's a problem that the left brain doesn't like to work with, will the left brain hand the problem over to the right brain. When we create creative tension, the left brain is more willing to hand the problem over for the right brain to get involved as well, and that's when you start to find more creative solutions.

So there are lots of different names for creative tension and lots of different models that fit with it and seem to support the idea of creative tension. At the end of the day, what these models are all saying is that creative tension is based on an understanding of how our minds control the management of our attention, energy, and creativity, and then using that understanding to create a structure that creates an energy that seeks to be resolved - what Fritz calls the "path of least resistance" - and to flick the switch so that we can apply our best thinking to the issue.

How we relieve creative tension

Creative tension can feel pretty nasty - especially if you're not well practiced in using it. It can feel a lot like anxiety and it can be easy to feed this anxiety with all your reptile fears, to start to get anxious about your anxiety, and to get wound up with so much anxiety and stress that you can't think clearly and it all just feels really bad.

Creative tension motivates us to act with urgency to reduce the tension by resolving the issue somehow. The problem is that most of us relieve creative tension by lowering our vision so that we reduce the gap between our vision and our current reality. This successfully reduces the tension, but it also reduces your motivation and creativity to make your vision a reality, and of course, you're not going to create what you really want - at best, you'll be successful in creating the "reduced" version of your vision.

What you need to do, if you want to successfully create and use creative tension, is to focus on the following three things:

1) Clearly articulate your vision in as much detail as you can.

Don't worry about using metrics and goals. Just ask yourself the question, "How will I know I have it?" It's also important that you're describing a vision, and not an anti-vision. A vision talks about what you want, while an anti-vision is focused on what you don't want. Focusing on what you don't want makes your mind associate back into your current problems, and even your past problems, so it serves to reinforce the problem and it's not effective for creating creative tension.

2) Observe your current reality honestly.

If you're trying to pretend that you're somewhere you're not, you'll reduce the creative tension and risk choosing irrelevant strategies for resolving creative tension. Watch and listen and pay attention to your present. Ask for feedback and opinions of your current reality from other people to get more angles on your understanding of your reality. Question all your stories about reality so that you can peel away the self-deception and the stuff that's interpretive and get to the core truth of what your current reality is all about.

3) Notice what next obvious steps for bridging your vision and your current reality come to mind and do those.

You won't necessarily know the full "how" at the outset, but as you keep refining and articulating your perception of reality and your vision and keep taking the next obvious step, you can trust that the creative tension will seek to resolve itself by getting you to where you want to be.

Creative tension, stress, frustration, and attachment

One of the tricky things about creative tension is that there's a sweet spot where the anxiety levels are "just right" to release your peak performance and best thinking. As some people highlighted in the comments on my last post, as with most things, there's a balanced place, a middle ground where you'll do and feel your best. Too much stress and anxiety and you'll drop into distress, and your performance and the quality of your thinking will plummet with it. So don't go pushing yourself to articulate a ridiculously huge vision in the hope that creative tension will get you there. Bigger, faster and harder is not necessarily better.

Linked to this is the problem of over-attachment and frustration. Spending a lot of time refining and focusing on your vision can lead to over-attachment and frustration when you haven't got it yet, and this frustration can cause you to be more impulsive and urgent in your decision-making and behavior, and to shut down your open-focused creativity and miss unconventional opportunities to make your vision a reality. Creative tension shouldn't make you feel frustrated. That's not useful.

Here are some ways that you can prevent creative tension from becoming over-attachment, frustration and stress:

1. Hold a playful attitude. You can be clear on what you're aiming for, but don't take yourself too seriously. Try to see obstacles and failures as being all part of the game, making the game more interesting.

2. Don't beat yourself up or dwell on mistakes or failures. Negative self-talk can quickly tip you over from eustress into distress, where your performance and the quality of your thinking drop.

3. Look after yourself and schedule time for rest and pure play. You can't be in the optimum creative zone all the time (Charlie talks about this a lot). Dan Coyle says we seem to be capable of between 60 and 180 minutes of deep practice and then we need a decent break. Make sure you eat, sleep, exercise, and rest well.

4. Notice when you're resisting reality and practice letting go of the need to force things to go your way. (Yeah, I know this is a whole post by itself!)

5. Stay open to different ways that you could close the gap between reality and your vision. Hold fast to your "what" - your vision of what you want to create - but be very loose about your "how" - how you create it. Make sure that your vision is a genuine "what" and not a "how." Check this by asking yourself, "And what will that get me?" a few times and ensuring that you've chunked up to the highest level of what you want.

6. Don't entertain feedback and anxiety from other people who are struggling to tolerate the gap between your reality and your vision. Their anxiety about the presence of that gap can make you overly anxious about it, which can tip you from eustress into stress. Hang out with people who can tolerate creative tension and who won't try to talk you into lowering your vision just so they can feel more comfortable about your choices.

7. Resist complaining about not being where you want to be - to yourself or to other people. This increases frustration and can make the creative tension unbearable.

Thanks to all of you who asked for further clarity on creative tension - I really enjoyed thinking this through and getting it down on (virtual) paper.
I'd love to hear from you... how have you used creative tension? How's it working out for you? Any other questions about creative tension?

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Editor's note: This is a guest post from Cath Duncan from Creative Grief Studio and Remembering For Good. In my last post here and a recent post on my blog, I spoke about creative tension, and a bunch of people said they'd never heard of it and asked me to share more about what creative tension is and how to use it.

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A systems thinking tool for individuals and teams to critically investigate what's causing an event. What are the behaviors, structures, and mental models that cause something to happen?

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Tool: The Ladder of Inference - How to avoid jumping to conclusions

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Tool: The Ladder of Inference - How to avoid jumping to conclusions

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A practical, useful tool to support each other in deep listening and not jumping to conclusions.

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How to Avoid Jumping to Conclusions

Have you ever been accused of "putting 2 and 2 together and making 5," meaning that the other person thinks you have jumped to the wrong conclusion?

In today's fast-moving world, we are always under pressure to act now, rather than spend time reasoning things through and thinking about the true facts.

Not only can this lead us to a wrong conclusion, but it can also cause conflict with other people, who may have drawn quite different conclusions on the same matter.

In a fast business environment, you need to make sure your actions and decisions are founded on reality. Likewise, when you accept or challenge other people's conclusions, you need be confident that their reasoning, and yours, is firmly based on the true facts. The "Ladder of Inference" helps you achieve this.

Sometimes known as the "Process of Abstraction," this tool helps you understand the thinking steps that can lead you to jump to wrong conclusions, and so helps you get back to hard reality and facts.

Find out more in this article and infographic.

The Ladder of Inference was first put forward by organizational psychologist Chris Argyris and used by Peter Senge in The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.

Understanding the Theory

The Ladder of Inference describes the thinking process that we go through, usually without realizing it, to get from a fact to a decision or action. The thinking stages can be seen as rungs on a ladder and are shown in figure 1.

Figure 1: The Ladder of Inference

From Argyris, C., 'Overcoming Organizational Defenses: Facilitating Organizational Learning,' 1st Edition, © 1990. Printed electronically and reproduced by permission of Pearson Education, Inc., Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. and Sons, Inc.

Starting at the bottom of the ladder, we have reality and facts. From there, we:

Experience these selectively based on our beliefs and prior experience.

Interpret what they mean.

Apply our existing assumptions, sometimes without considering them.

Draw conclusions based on the interpreted facts and our assumptions.

Develop beliefs based on these conclusions.

Take actions that seem "right" because they are based on what we believe.

This can create a vicious circle. Our beliefs have a big effect on how we select from reality, and can lead us to ignore the true facts altogether. Soon we are literally jumping to conclusions - by missing facts and skipping steps in the reasoning process.

By using the Ladder of Inference, you can learn to get back to the facts and use your beliefs and experiences to positive effect, rather than allowing them to narrow your field of judgment. Following this step-by-step reasoning can lead you to better results, based on reality, so avoiding unnecessary mistakes and conflict.

How to Use the Theory

The Ladder of Inference helps you draw better conclusions, or challenge other people's conclusions based on true facts and reality. It can be used to help you analyze hard data, such as a set of sales figures, or to test assertions, such as "the project will go live in April." You can also use it to help validate or challenge other people's conclusions.

The step-by-step reasoning process helps you remain objective and, when working or challenging others, reach a shared conclusion without conflict.

Tip 1:

Use the Ladder of Inference at any of stage of your thinking process. If you're asking any of the following questions, the model may prove a useful aid:

Is this the "right" conclusion?

Why am I making these assumptions?

Why do I think this is the "right" thing to do?

Is this really based on all the facts?

Why does he believe that?

Use the following steps to challenge thinking using the Ladder of Inference:

1. Stop! It's time to consider your reasoning.

2. Identify where on the ladder you are. Are you:

Selecting your data or reality?

Interpreting what it means?

Making or testing assumptions?

Forming or testing conclusions?

Deciding what to do and why?

3. From your current "rung," analyze your reasoning by working back down the ladder. This will help you trace the facts and reality that you are actually working with.

At each stage, ask yourself WHAT you are thinking and WHY. As you analyze each step, you may need to adjust your reasoning. For example, you may need to change some assumption or extend the field of data you have selected.

The following questions help you work backward (coming down the ladder, starting at the top):

Why have I chosen this course of action? Are there other actions I should have considered?

What belief lead to that action? Was it well-founded?

Why did I draw that conclusion? Is the conclusion sound?

What am I assuming, and why? Are my assumptions valid?

What data have I chosen to use and why? Have I selected data rigorously?

What are the real facts that I should be using? Are there other facts I should consider?

Tip 2:

When you are working through your reasoning, look out for rungs that you tend to jump. Do you tend to make assumptions too easily? Do you tend to select only part of the data? Note you tendencies so that you can learn to do that stage of reasoning with extra care in the future.

4. With a new sense of reasoning (and perhaps a wider field of data and more considered assumptions), you can now work forwards again - step-by-step - up the rungs of the ladder.

Tip 3:

Try explaining your reasoning to a colleague or friend. This will help you check that your argument is sound.

If you are challenging someone else's conclusions, it is especially important to be able to explain your reasoning so that you can explain it to that person in a way that helps you reach a shared conclusion and avoid conflict.

Example
The regional Sales Manager has just read the latest sales figures. Sales in Don's territory are down - again. It's simply not good enough. He needs to be fired!
Most people would agree that the Sales Manager may have just jumped to a rash conclusion. So let's see how the scenario plays using the Ladder of Inference:

The latest month's sales figures (reality) have come in, and the Sales Manager immediately focuses on Don's territory (selected reality). Sales are down on the previous months again (interpreted reality). The Sales Manager assumes that the drop in sales is entirely to do with Don's performance (assumption), and decides that Don hasn't been performing well (conclusion). So he forms the opinion that Don isn't up to the job (belief). He feels that firing Don is the best options (action).

Now let's challenge the Sales Manager's thinking using the Ladder of Inference:

The Sales Manager came to the sales figures with an existing belief that Don, a new salesmen, couldn't possibly be as good as the "old-timers" who he has trained for years. He focused on Don's territory because Don is the newest salesman, and selected facts that supported what he already believed (that Don wouldn't be doing a good job).

To get back to facts and reality, we must challenge the Sales Manager's selection of data and his assumptions about Don's likely performance.

Although the figures are down in Don's territory, they have actually dipped less than in other areas. Don is actually a great salesman, but he and his colleagues have in fact been let down by new products being delayed, and by old products running out of stock.

Once the Sales Manager changes his assumptions, he will see the need to focus on solving the production issues. He can also learn from Don - how is it that Don has performed better than other sales people in the face of stock problems? Can others learn from him?

Infographic

Click on the image below to see The Ladder of Inference represented in an infographic:

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The Ladder of InferenceHow to Avoid Jumping to Conclusions

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How to Avoid Jumping to Conclusions Have you ever been accused of "putting 2 and 2 together and making 5," meaning that the other person thinks you have jumped to the wrong conclusion? In today's fast-moving world, we are always under pressure to act now, rather than spend time reasoning things through and thinking about the true facts.

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Stages of cross-cultural competencies for individuals and teams to support working across lines of difference

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Report: Teach For India's Transformational Impact Journey, 2017 Report

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Report: Teach For India's Transformational Impact Journey, 2017 Report

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Teach For India's learning ritual, TIJ, is a collaborative experience wherein members of the TFI community learn from and with each other to improve their program, push their bar of excellence, and connect. Here is the latest report of their learnings.

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A common protocol/tool for highly interactive meetings to ensure every voice is heard and the conversation is focused on the most important topics.

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Summary of ideas & tools: System Leadership Workshop - A summary

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Summary of ideas & tools: System Leadership Workshop - A summary

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A summary from a workshop on System Leadership with Peter Senge that some from the Teach For All community attended and wrote. Includes tools like the Ladder of Inference, the Iceberg model, creative tensions, and problem-solving.

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Self-diagnostic: Harvard Business Review - Free self-diagnostic tool - is yours a learning organization?

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Self-diagnostic: Harvard Business Review - Free self-diagnostic tool - is yours a learning organization?

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A free tool you and your colleagues can take to self-assess

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Survey Software, Enterprise Survey software for enterprise feedback management and CRM solutions. Enables high-quality data collection, panel management and results analysis. Perfect for market research or CRM solution (Customer Relationship Management) integration. Free trial and consultation.

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Recommended Books from the Society for Organizational Learning

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Recommended Books from the Society for Organizational Learning

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For your reading pleasure!

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Article: The Future of Management is Teal

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Article: The Future of Management is Teal

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An article explaining "Teal" organizations, an organizational structure whose goals are to foster real learning for progress from every member of the organization.

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A version of this article appeared in the Autumn 2015 issue of strategy+business.

Illustration by Martin O'Neill

Many people sense that the way organizations are run today has been stretched to its limits. In survey after survey, businesspeople make it clear that in their view, companies are places of dread and drudgery, not passion or purpose. Organizational disillusionment afflicts government agencies, nonprofits, schools, and hospitals just as much. Further, it applies not just to the powerless at the bottom of the hierarchy. Behind a facade of success, many top leaders are tired of the power games and infighting; despite their desperately overloaded schedules, they feel a vague sense of emptiness. All of us yearn for better ways to work together - for more soulful workplaces where our talents are nurtured and our deepest aspirations are honored.

The premise of this article is that humanity is at a threshold; a new form of organization is emerging into public view. Anthropological research suggests that this is a natural next step in a process that began more than 100,000 years ago. There have been, according to this view, at least five distinct organizational paradigms in human history. Could the current organizational disillusionment be a sign that civilization is outgrowing the current model and getting ready for the next?

A number of pioneering organizations in a wide variety of sectors - profit and nonprofit - are already operating with significantly new structures and management practices. They tend to be successful and purposeful, showing the promise of this emerging organizational model. They show how we can deal with the complexity of our times in wholly new ways, and how work can become a place of personal fulfillment and growth. By contrast, they make most of today's organizations look painfully outdated.

A History of Organizational Paradigms

In describing the pattern of organizational evolution, I draw on the work of a number of thinkers in a field known as "developmental theory." One of its basic concepts is the idea that human societies, like individuals, don't grow in linear fashion, but in stages of increasing maturity, consciousness, and complexity. Various scholars have assigned different names to these stages; philosopher Ken Wilber uses colors to identify them, in a sequence that evokes the light spectrum, from infrared to ultraviolet. I borrow his color scheme as a convenient way to name the successive stages of management evolution ( see Exhibit 1).

Around 10,000 years ago, humanity started organizing itself in chiefdoms and proto-empires. With this shift away from small tribes, the meaningful division of labor came into being - a breakthrough invention for its time. With it came the first real organizations, in the form of small conquering armies. These organizations, which in integral theory are labeled Red, are crude, often violent groups. People at this stage of development tend to regard the world as a tough place where only the powerful (or those they protect) get their needs met. This was the origin of command authority. The chief, like the alpha male in a wolf pack, needs to constantly inspire fear to keep underlings in line, and often relies on family members in hopes that they can be trusted. Today's street gangs, terrorist groups, and crime syndicates are often organized along these lines.

Starting around 4000 BC in Mesopotamia, humanity entered the Amber age of agriculture, state bureaucracies, and organized religion. Psychologically, this leap was enormous: People learned to exercise self-discipline and self-control, internalizing the strong group norms of all agricultural societies. Do what's right and you will be rewarded, in this life or the next. Do or say the wrong things, and you will be excommunicated from the group.

Related Story

All agrarian societies are divided into clearly delineated castes. They thrive on order, control, and hierarchy. In organizations, the same principles characterize the Amber stage. The fluid, scheming wolf pack-like Red organizations give way to static, stratified pyramids. The Catholic Church is an archetypal Amber organization, complete with a static organization chart linking all levels of activity in lines and boxes, from the pope at the top to the cardinals below and down to the archbishops, bishops, and priests. Historically, the invention of formal roles and hierarchies was a major breakthrough. It allowed organizations to scale beyond anything Red society could have contemplated. Amber organizations produced the pyramids, irrigation systems, cathedrals, the Great Wall of China, and other structures and feats that were previously unthinkable. They also considerably reduced violence; a priest whose role is defined by a box in an organization chart doesn't scheme to backstab a bishop who shows a sign of weakness. A second breakthrough was the invention of stable, replicable processes, such as the yearly cycle of planting, growing, and harvest in agriculture.

Today, this hierarchical and process-driven model is visible in large bureaucratic enterprises, many government agencies, and most education and military organizations. In Amber organizations, thinking and execution are strictly separated. People at the bottom must be instructed through command and control. In today's fast-changing, knowledge-based economy, this static, top-down conception of management has proven to be inefficient; it wastes the talent, creativity, and energy of most people in these organizations.

Starting with the Renaissance, and gaining steam with the Enlightenment and the early Industrial Revolution, a new management concept emerged that challenged its agrarian predecessor. In the Orange paradigm, the world is no longer governed by absolute, God-given rules; it is a complex mechanism that can be understood and exploited through scientific and empirical investigation. Effectiveness replaces morality as the yardstick for decision making: The best decision is the one that begets the highest reward. The goal in an Orange organization is to get ahead, to succeed in socially acceptable ways, and to best play the cards one is dealt. This is arguably the predominant perspective of most leaders in business and politics today.

The leap to Orange coincided with three significant management breakthroughs that gave us the modern corporation. First was the concept of innovation, which brought with it new departments such as R&D, product management, and marketing, as well as project teams and cross-functional initiatives. Second was accountability, which provided leaders with an alternative to commanding people: Give people targets to reach, using freedom and rewards to motivate them. This breakthrough, sometimes called management by objectives, led to the creation of modern HR practices, budgets, KPIs, yearly evaluations, bonus systems, and stock options. Third was meritocracy, the idea that anyone could rise to any position based on his or her qualifications and skills - a radical concept when it appeared.

The transition to Orange brought a new prevailing metaphor. A good organization is not a wolf pack or army, but a machine. Corporate leaders adopted engineering terms to describe their work: they designed the company, using inputs and outputs, information flows, and bottlenecks; they downsized the staff and reengineered their companies. Most large, mainstream publicly listed companies operate with Orange management practices.

In just two and a half centuries, these breakthroughs have generated unprecedented levels of prosperity, added decades to human life expectancy, and dramatically reduced famine and plague in the industrialized world. But as the Orange paradigm grew dominant, it also encouraged short-term thinking, corporate greed, overconsumption, and the reckless exploitation of the planet's resources and ecosystems. Increasingly, whether we are powerful leaders or low-ranking employees, we feel that this paradigm isn't sustainable. The heartless and soulless rat race of Orange organizations has us yearning for more.

Postmodernity brought us another world view. The Green stage stresses cooperation over competition and strives for equality, solidarity, and tolerance. Historically, this perspective inspired the fights for the abolition of slavery, and for gender equality, and today it helps combat racism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination. Green organizations, which include many nonprofits as well as companies such as Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, and the Container Store, consider social responsibility the core of their mission. They serve not just shareholders but all stakeholders, knowing that this often results in higher costs in the short term, but better returns in the end.

Green leaders have championed the soft aspects of business - investing in organizational culture and values, coaching, mentoring, and teamwork - over the hard aspects of strategy and budgeting so prized in Orange. Family is their metaphor; everyone's voice should be heard and respected. You can't treat knowledge workers like cogs in a machine. Empowerment and egalitarian management are among the breakthroughs they introduced.

Practice shows, alas, that empowerment and egalitarian management are hard to sustain. Efforts to make everyone equal often lead to hidden power struggles, dominant actors who coopt the system, and organizational gridlock. Green companies, universities, and organizations that take egalitarianism too far have tended to bog down in debate and factionalism. Successful Green companies maintain a careful balance: taming the traditional hierarchy through constant investment in training and culture; reminding leaders and managers to wield their power carefully; and raising the skills of people on the front lines.

All of these organizational paradigms coexist today. In any major city one can find Red organizations (entities at the fringes of the law), Amber organizations (public schools and other government entities), Orange organizations (Wall Street and Main Street companies), and Green organizations (values-driven businesses and many nonprofits). Look closely at how an organization operates - its structure, leadership style, or any core management process - and you can quickly guess the dominant paradigm. Take compensation, for example: How are people rewarded? In a Red company, the boss shares the spoils as he or she pleases, buying allegiance through reward and punishment. In Amber organizations, salaries are tightly linked to a person's level in the hierarchy ("same rank, same pay") and there are no incentives or bonuses. Orange companies offer individual incentives to reward star performers, while Green companies generally award team bonuses to encourage cooperation.

Today, in small but increasing numbers, leaders are growing into the next stage of consciousness, beyond Green. They are mindful, taming the needs and impulses of their ego. They are suspicious of their own desires - to control their environment, to be successful, to look good, or even to accomplish good works. Rejecting fear, they listen to the wisdom of other, deeper parts of themselves. They develop an ethic of mutual trust and assumed abundance. They ground their decision making in an inner measure of integrity. They are ready for the next organizational paradigm. Its color is Teal.

The Nature of Teal

In 2012, I set out to find some examples of Teal organizations and describe the factors that set them apart. To qualify, an organization had to employ a minimum of 100 people and had to have been operating for a minimum of five years in ways that were consistent with the characteristics of a Teal stage of human development.

After screening a great number of organizations, I focused on 12, selecting those that were most advanced in reinventing management structures and practices. (See "Examples of Teal Management," where ten are listed; the other two, AES and BSO/Origin, reverted back to more traditional management practices after a change of CEO or ownership). I was struck by the diversity of these organizations. They include publicly held and privately held for-profit corporations along with nonprofits in the consumer products, industrial, healthcare, retail, and education industries. Typically, the leaders of these companies didn't know about one another. They often thought they were the only ones to be so foolhardy as to rethink their management practices in fundamental ways. Yet, after much trial and error, they came up with strikingly similar approaches to management. It seems that a coherent new organizational model is emerging.

Examples of Teal Management

Buurtzorg: a Netherlands-based healthcare nonprofit, profiled in this article.

ESBZ: a publicly financed school in Berlin, covering grades seven to 12, which has attracted international attention for its innovative curriculum and organizational model.

FAVI: a brass foundry in France, which produces (among other things) gearbox forks for the automotive industry, and has about 500 employees.

Heiligenfeld: a 600-employee mental health hospital system, based in central Germany, which applies a holistic approach to patient care.

Morning Star: a U.S.-based tomato processing company with 400 to 2,400 employees (depending on the season) and a 30 to 40 percent share of the North American market. (If you have eaten pizza or spaghetti sauce in the U.S., you have probably tasted a Morning Star product).

Patagonia: a US$540 million manufacturer of climbing gear and outdoor apparel; based in California and employing 1,300 people, it is dedicated to being a positive influence on the natural environment.

Resources for Human Development (RHD): a 4,000-employee nonprofit social services agency operating in 14 states in the U.S., providing services related to addiction recovery, homelessness, and mental disabilities.

Sounds True: a publisher of multimedia offerings related to spirituality and personal development, with 90 employees in the United States.

Sun Hydraulics: a maker of hydraulic cartridge valves and manifolds, with factories in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and Korea employing about 900 people.

Holacracy: a management system first developed at the Philadelphia-based software company Ternary, which has been adopted by a few hundred profit- and not-for-profit organizations around the world, most famously by Zappos.

Like previous leaps to new stages of management, the new model comes with a number of important breakthroughs:

* Self-management. Teal organizations operate effectively, even at a large scale, with a system based on peer relationships. They set up structures and practices in which people have high autonomy in their domain, and are accountable for coordinating with others. Power and control are deeply embedded throughout the organizations, no longer tied to the specific positions of a few top leaders.

* 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.

* Evolutionary purpose. Teal organizations base their strategies on what they sense the world is asking from them. Agile practices that sense and respond replace the machinery of plans, budgets, targets, and incentives. Paradoxically, by focusing less on the bottom line and shareholder value, they generate financial results that outpace those of competitors.

Changing Paradigms at Buurtzorg

Buurtzorg, a large Dutch nursing care provider, is a good example of an organization running with Teal management structures and practices. Since the 19th century, every neighborhood in the Netherlands has had a local nurse who makes home visits to care for the sick and the elderly. These nurses operated largely autonomously until the early 1990s. Then, to maximize efficiency and reduce costs, the government created incentives for care-giving agencies to merge into larger enterprises.

The new agencies, most of which were private companies, gravitated toward an Orange paradigm. Seeking to minimize downtime and allocate staff flexibly, they set up centralized call centers; instead of calling their nurse personally, clients now had to dial the center. Planners were hired to devise daily visiting schedules that minimized travel times. The agencies instituted time standards: 10 minutes for intravenous injections, 15 minutes for bathing, and 2.5 minutes for changing a compression stocking. Barcode stickers, placed on patients' front doors, tracked the nurses' progress so central managers could analyze their efficiency. As these organizations consolidated, they added more layers of management, all with the intention of increasing efficiencies and squeezing out costs.

The outcome has been distressing to patients and nurses alike. Clients, who are often elderly, have to cope with new faces in their home at every visit. They must repeat their medical histories to hurried nurses who have no time allotted for listening. The nurses, for their part, find these working conditions degrading. They know they should spend more time trying to understand the changing conditions of their patients, but they simply can't. The whole system is prone to errors, conflicts, and complaints.

Buurtzorg's purpose is not to give shots and change bandages efficiently but to help elderly patients live a rich and autonomous life.

Buurtzorg (the name means neighborhood care in Dutch) was founded in 2006 by Jos de Blok, who had experienced these problems firsthand, as a nurse for 10 years and then as a manager. His new organization is extraordinarily successful, having grown from four to 9,000 nurses in its first eight years and achieving outstanding levels of care. He set up the company as a self-managing enterprise. Nurses work in teams of 10 to 12, each team serving around 50 patients in a small, well-defined neighborhood.

Buurtzorg has a distinctive outlook on the nature of care. Its purpose is not to give shots and change bandages as efficiently as they can, but to help its patients live, as much as possible, a rich and autonomous life. Nurses regularly sit down for coffee with their patients. They help them structure their own support networks and reach out to families and neighbors. Patients see the same one or two nurses all the time, and often form deep bonds of trust and intimacy with them.

Clients and nurses love Buurtzorg. Only eight years after its founding, its market share has reached 60 percent. Financially, the results are stellar, too. One 2009 study found that Buurtzorg requires, on average, only 40 percent of the care hours needed by a more conventional approach, because patients become self-sufficient much faster. Emergency hospital admissions have been cut by a third, and the average hospital stay of a Buurtzorg patient is shorter. It's estimated that the Dutch social security system would save $2 billion per year if the entire home-care industry adopted Buurtzorg's operations model.

Self-Management and Its Misconceptions

Buurtzorg's 9,000 employees operate entirely with self-managing practices. Local teams of 10 to 12 nurses decide which patients to serve, how to allocate tasks, where to rent offices, how to integrate with the local communities, which doctors and pharmacies to work with, and how to collaborate with nearby hospitals. They monitor their own performance and take corrective action if productivity drops. Teams don't have team leaders; management tasks are spread across the members, all of whom are nurses.

One common misconception about self-management is that everyone is equal and decisions are made by consensus, which requires endless meetings. The truth is very different. Self-management requires a whole set of interlocking structures and practices, so that decision rights and power flow to any individual who has the expertise, interest, or willingness to step in to oversee a situation. Fluid, natural hierarchies replace the fixed power hierarchies of the pyramid. This requires explicit training. At Buurtzorg, all new team members take a course called Solution-Driven Methods of Interaction, learning sophisticated listening and communication skills, techniques for running meetings and making decisions, and methods of coaching one another and providing perspective.

You might assume that all this is managed through staff functions - the source of capability and power in many Orange and Green organizations. But Buurtzorg's 9,000 nurses are supported by fewer than 50 staff people. The nurses do their own recruiting and purchasing, contracting for specialized medical or legal expertise when needed. They align with the larger organization not through rules and procedures, but through the collaboration methods they learned. A powerful internal social network allows them to draw on guidance and medical expertise from fellow nurses in other parts of the country, many of whom they've never met.

The Embrace of Wholeness

In Amber, Orange, and Green organizations, people typically show up wearing a mask: the bishop's robe, the doctor's white coat, and the executive's suit all embody subtle, but real, expectations. Leaders fear that if people brought all of themselves to work - their moods, quirks, deepest aspirations, and uncertainties - things would quickly fall into disorder. Most people adopt an air of resolution and determination, favoring their masculine, rational selves. It feels unsafe to reveal the caring, inquiring, intuitive, and spiritual aspects of the self, or to express a desire for meaning. Many of us end up disowning some fundamental aspects of our selves. When an organization feels lifeless, is it because we bring so little life to work?

Teal organizations start from the premise, resonant with many wisdom traditions, that a person's deepest calling is to achieve wholeness. These organizations engender vibrant workspaces and practices where trust flourishes. People feel they can truly be themselves. Simple management practices foster a sense of personal connection. At Patagonia's headquarters in Ventura, Calif., for example, the company maintains a child development center for employees' preschoolers. Children's laughter and chatter are regularly heard; kids visit their parents' desks, join adults for lunch at the cafeteria, and run around in the playground outside. One sometimes sees a mother nursing her child during a meeting. At another Teal company, Sounds True, people regularly bring their dogs to work. Meetings often take place with two or three dogs lying at people's feet. Having children and animals present tends to reconnect people with deeper parts of themselves; they see one another not only as colleagues, but as part of a common humanity.

One harbinger of the rise of consciousness in the business world is the support given to contemplative practices. It's becoming fashionable, even in Wall Street banks, to offer meditation classes. But these are often treated as add-ons, separate from the real work. At the Heiligenfeld hospital chain inner work is woven deeply into daily life. Every week, colleagues from their five hospitals come together for 75 minutes of intensive, reflective dialogue about a theme such as dealing with risks or learning from mistakes. Heiligenfeld also devotes four days per year to silence. The staff speaks only when needed, in whispers; patients engage in forms of therapy that require no words, such as walks in the woods or painting sessions. People learn to interact from a deep place when words are not at hand.

The quest for wholeness can also be seen on the factory floor. At FAVI, a French automotive supplier, all engineers and administrative workers are trained to operate at least one assembly-line machine. When orders must be rushed out, white-collar workers come in to run the machines for a few hours. It's a wonderful community-building practice. People in engineering and administrative roles work under the guidance of the machine operators. They see for themselves how hard the work on the machines can be and how much skill it involves.

FAVI also has an in-depth onboarding process that ends with new teammates writing an open letter to the colleagues they have joined. The letters often describe how, perhaps for the first time in their career as a machine operator, their voice counts at work and they are considered worthy of trust and appreciation.

Evolutionary Purpose

Most organizations define a purpose for themselves in the form of a mission statement, which is typically engraved on a plaque in the headquarters lobby. Most of these statements, of course, sound hollow. The espoused purpose can't compete with the pursuit of profits or competitive advantage.

Buurtzorg's purpose, as discussed above, is to help sick and elderly patients live a rich and autonomous life. Its competitive advantage is the way it fulfills that purpose, with self-organization and wholeness. If it were a more traditional organization, it would try to keep this competitive advantage secret, and gain market share accordingly. Founder de Blok did the opposite. He wrote a book ( Buurtzorg: Menselijkheid Boven Bureaucratie, [Boom Lemma uitgevers, 2010], coauthored with Aart Pool, whose title translates as "Humanity above Bureaucracy") in which he documented Buurtzorg's revolutionary ways of operating in great detail. He accepts all invitations from competitors to explain his methods, and acts as an advisor for two direct competitors without compensation.

"The whole notion of competition makes no sense," says de Blok. "If you share knowledge and information, things will change more quickly."

Making purpose the cornerstone of an organization has profound consequences for leadership. In today's dominant management paradigm (Orange), leaders are supposed to define a winning strategy and then marshal the organization to execute it, like the human programmer of a machine who controls what it will do. In the Teal paradigm, founders and leaders view the organization as a living entity, with its own energy, sense of direction, and calling to manifest something in the world. They don't force a course of action; they try to listen to where the organization is naturally called to go. None of the organizations I researched has a strategy document. Gone are the often dreaded strategy formulation exercises, and much of the machinery of midterm plans, yearly budgets, cascaded KPIs, and individual targets. Instead of trying to predict and control, they aim to sense and respond.

FAVI uses a metaphor to explain this. Other companies look five years ahead and make plans for the next year. They prefer to think like farmers: Look 20 years ahead, and plan only for the next day. A farmer must look far out when deciding which fruit trees to plant or which crops to grow. But it makes no sense to plan a precise date for the harvest. One cannot control the weather, the crops, the soil; they all have a life of their own. Sticking rigidly to plan, instead of sensing and adjusting to reality, leads to having the harvest go to waste, which too often happens in organizations.

Practices based on sensing and responding, combined with self-management, lead to high levels of innovation. Two nurses on a Buurtzorg team found themselves pondering the fact that elderly people, when they fall, often break their hips. Could Buurtzorg help prevent this? Their team created a partnership with a physiotherapist and an occupational therapist from their neighborhood. They advised patients on small changes they could bring to their home interiors, and changes of habit that would minimize the risk of falling. Happy with their success, they approached de Blok to suggest turning "Buurtzorg+" (Buurtzorg + prevention) into a national program.

Had de Blok been a traditional CEO, he might have analyzed the idea and, if he approved it, assigned a team in headquarters to develop a comprehensive implementation plan. His actual answer was much humbler: Why should he, rather than the system itself, decide if this was a wise thing to do? He suggested that the same team of nurses package their approach and disseminate the idea on the company's internal social network. Hundreds of teams showed interest and the idea quickly caught on. Within a year, almost all teams had incorporated prevention into their work using that model.

In a self-managing, purpose-driven organization, change can come from any person who senses that change is needed. This is how change has occurred in nature for millions of years. Innovation doesn't happen centrally, according to plan, but at the edges, when some organism senses a change in the environment and experiments to find an appropriate response. Some attempts fail to catch on; others rapidly spread to all corners of the ecosystem.

Becoming a Teal Organization

Some companies, like Buurtzorg, are advanced on all three Teal breakthroughs: self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose. Others are more advanced in one area than others - FAVI in self-management, Heiligenfeld in wholeness. None of the Teal companies I have identified have the scale of the largest Orange companies (such as Walmart) or Green ones (such as Southwest Airlines). This is still the dawn of the Teal paradigm. However, its promise is suggested by the success these organizations are having.

Every stage of organizational evolution is more mature and effective than the previous stage, because of the inherent attitude toward power. A Red leader asks, How can I use my power to dominate? An Amber leader asks, How can I use it to enforce the status quo? An Orange leader asks, How can we win? A Green leader asks, How can we empower more people? A Teal leader asks, How can everyone most powerfully pursue a purpose that transcends us all?

Research suggests that there are two - and only two - necessary conditions for developing a Teal organization.

1. Top leadership. The chief executive must have an integrated world view and psychological development consistent with the Teal paradigm. It is helpful if a few close colleagues share this perspective.

2. Ownership. Owners of the organization must also understand and embrace Teal world views. Board members who don't get it, experience shows, can temporarily give a Teal leader free rein. But when the organization hits a rough patch or faces a critical choice, owners will want to regain control in the only way that makes sense to them: appointing a CEO who exerts top-down, hierarchical authority.

What about businesses, nonprofits, schools, hospitals, government agencies, and other institutions where these conditions are not in place? Can a middle manager hope to influence an entire enterprise by showcasing Teal practices locally? As much as I would like to believe this is possible, my hopes are not high. Experience shows that it takes more than a successful local example to catalyze this sort of system-wide change.

However, as a middle or senior manager, you can introduce some elements of the new paradigm for your own benefit and that of your colleagues. Practices that encourage people to show more of their true selves might come across as unusual, but are unlikely to raise red flags with top leadership. Some elements of self-management can be introduced; for example, instead of imposing new targets, ask team members to determine, in a peer-based process, which targets could be changed. If the team functions well, don't attend the meeting. Let them come up with the best solution on their own so the targets will be theirs. Or when it's time to appoint someone to report to you, don't do it yourself. Let the team one level below write up the job description, interview candidates, and select their boss. Executives who have tried this find that subordinates take choosing their boss very seriously, and the process gives the boss a much stronger working relationship with the team.

The full benefit, of course, accrues to those organizations that fully embrace the new paradigm. When I spent a day with de Blok in the small headquarters of Buurtzorg, I was struck by how much simpler work life could be. Buurtzorg is a 9,000-person organization growing at breakneck speed. But after several hours of conversation, I realized we hadn't been interrupted once. No urgent phone calls; no assistant coming in to whisper in the CEO's ear that something had come up. Work in Teal organizations seems to unfold so easily it sometimes verges on the magical. Control and self-correction is embedded in the system, and no longer requires leaders to be on top of everything at all times.

In the past, with every change in consciousness (from Red to Amber to Orange and to Green), more powerful and life-enhancing forms of management have emerged. After the full emergence of the Teal paradigm, we will probably look back and find the organizational forms and practices of the late 20th and early 21st century alienating and unfulfilling. Already, it's clear that we can create radically more productive, soulful, and purposeful businesses and nonprofits, schools, and hospitals. We are at an inflection point: a moment in history where it's time to stop trying to fix the old model and instead make the leap to the next one. It will be better suited to the complexity and challenges of our times, and to the yearning in our hearts.

The story line of evolution in this article, and the use of colors to describe stages, draws on the work of several thinkers, including Clare Graves, Ken Wilber, Jenny Wade, Don Beck, Robert Kegan, and Jane Loevenger.

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Author Profile:

Frederic Laloux is the author of Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness (Nelson Parker, 2014), from which this article is adapted with permission. A former associate partner with McKinsey & Company, he is now an independent scholar and advisor to organizational leaders.

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A version of this article appeared in the Autumn 2015 issue of strategy+business. Illustration by Martin O'Neill Many people sense that the way organizations are run today has been stretched to its limits. In survey after survey, businesspeople make it clear that in their view, companies are places of dread and drudgery, not passion or purpose.

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Toolkit: Jim Collins' tools to foster learning and leadership

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Toolkit: Jim Collins' tools to foster learning and leadership

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A collection of tools from the Jim Collins, a learning organizations leader in the US

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Reflecting on the nine classics on the list, I noticed three dominant themes. First, the path to progress often involves doing less, not more: getting out of the way and letting people work; eliminating barriers; managing better, not more; removing the need for control.