With every new stage in human consciousness also came a breakthrough in our ability to collaborate, bringing about a new organizational model. Organizations as we know them today are simply the expression of our current worldview, our current stage of development. Every time that we, as a species, have changed the way we think about the world, we have come up with more powerful types of organizations...

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….The tasks of management--setting direction and objectives, planning, directing, controlling, and evaluating--haven’t disappeared.  They are simply no longer concentrated in dedicated management roles.  Because they are spread widely, not narrowly, it can be argued that there is more management….

REINVENTING ORGANIZATIONS - Frederic Laloux

…The right question is not: how can everyone have equal power? It is rather: how can everyone be powerful?  Power is not viewed as a zero-sum game, where the power I have is necessarily power taken away from you.  Instead, if we acknowledge that we are all interconnected, the more powerful you are, the more powerful I can become.  The more powerfully you advance the organization’s purpose, the more opportunities will open up for me to make contributions of my own.  Here we stumble upon a beautiful paradox: people can hold different levels of power, and yet everyone can be powerful….This paradox cannot be understood with the unspoken metaphor we hold today of organizations as machines.  In a machine, a small turn of the big cog at the top can send lots of little cogs spinning….The metaphor of nature as a complex, self-organizing system can much better accommodate this paradox.  In an ecosystem, interconnected organisms thrive without one holding power over another.  A fern or a mushroom can express its full selfhood without ever reaching out as far into the sky as the tree next to which it grows.  Through a complex collaboration involving exchanges of nutrients, moisture, and shade, the mushroom, fern, and tree don’t compete but cooperate to grow into the biggest and healthiest version of themselves.

REINVENTING ORGANIZATIONS - Frederic Laloux

Many organizations today claim to be empowering.  But note the painful irony in that statement.  If employees need to be empowered, it is because the system’s very design concentrates power at the top and makes people at the lower rungs essentially powerless, unless leaders are generous enough to share some of their power.  In Teal Organizations, people are not empowered by the good graces of other people.  Empowerment is baked into the very fabric of the organization, into its very structure, processes, and practices.  Individuals need not fight for power.  They simply have it.

REINVENTING ORGANIZATIONS - Frederic Laloux

That is no longer true; self-management has proven its worth time and again, on both small and large scales and in various types of industry.  W. L. Gore, a chemical manufacturing company best known for its Gore-Tex fabrics, has been operating on self-organizing principle since its founding in the 1950s.  Whole Foods, with its 60,000 employees and $9 billion in revenue, operated its more than 300 stores with self-governing units (the rest of the organization has more traditional hierarchical structures).  Each store consists of roughly eight self-managing units, such as produce, seafood, and check-out….

REINVENTING ORGANIZATIONS - Frederic Laloux

• Living systems are interdependent with their context.  There are no isolated systems.  However, many people in Western cultures have been conditioned to think individualistically, as if we were separate from our context and could ignore our impact on the world around us.

• Within a system, parts are interdependent, which means they rely on each other to meet their needs.  This is both true for the parts of a cell and it is true for a society.

• Living systems are dynamic, not static.  They change over time as they adapt and change constantly.  Living systems can learn and heal.  They are resilient.

• Living systems are inherently ordered, in their own way.  A forest, for example, has an order.  So does an organization -- living systems are defined by the fact that they create more order than is present in the entropy of their surroundings.  Organizations do exactly that: organize to exchange information and resources.

  
  

MANY VOICES, ONE SONG - Ted Rau & Jerry Koch-Gonzales

Like resilience, self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability.  Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes.  Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants.  Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of knowledge that treat people as if they were only numbers.

Self-organization produces heterogeneity and unpredictability.  It is likely to come up with whole new structures, whole new ways of doing things.  It requires freedom and experimentation, and a certain amount of disorder.  These conditions that encourage self-organization often can be scary to individuals and threatening to power structures.  As a consequence, education systems may restrict the creative powers of children instead of stimulating those powers.  Economic policies may lean toward supporting established, powerful enterprises rather than upstart, new ones.  And many governments prefer their people not to be too self-organizing.

THINKING IN SYSTEMS -- Donella Meadows