Reinventing Organisations

Reinventing Organisations: A Guide to Creating Organisations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness is a book that explores present and future management systems within the context of human evolution. Author Frédéric Laloux is a former associate partner with McKinsey & company and holds an MBA from INSEAD. He now advocates for systems change as co-founder of The Week. Laloux’s literary release sparked a global movement of organisations adopting radically more powerful - and soulful - management practices.

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Most books on organisations 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 Organisations comes from a different place. It is written for people (founders of organisations, leaders, coaches, and advisors) who sense that something is broken in the way we run organisations today and who feel that something entirely different is called for - but wonder what that might be.

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Leading With Love

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While humanity has seemingly achieved so much in so little time, we know that there are faults and cracks in the current system that are both unsustainable and leave much to be desired. However, what makes the approach of Reinventing Organisations (RO) so refreshing is that whereas many fringe groups seek to mobilise change through fear, RO shifts the focus onto hope and innovation - recognising that we are more sustainably lead and motivated by authentic inspiration.

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The book is also highly integrative in its approach - presenting an inter-disciplinary view that weaves together foundational principles in science, politics, humanities and the arts. We know that we are moving away from a reductionist, closed systems paradigm - towards a holistic, multi-systems approach. Such a lens presents a very different picture, and an exciting new perspective on humanities role as stewards of the earth.

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One such shift is in our re-envisioning of management hierarchies. Laloux likens this to a similar subconscious shift in science. The human nervous system actually has three ‘brains’: the head, the heart and the gut. The last two are comparatively smaller, but they are equally important and fully autonomous systems. This discovery brilliantly demonstrates firstly, that things are not always as they appear on the surface - the big picture is more than the sum of its parts, and secondly that our predisposal to give more weight to the head as the main overarching controller was based on a hierarchal worldview and belief system. The notion that there must be something at the ‘top’.

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Our language of old has often hinted at the lost knowledge in our roots - even before such anatomical structures were established, we often spoke of ‘following our hearts’ and ‘going with our guts’. As chance would have it, we re-discovered our three brains working autonomously side by side with the advent of the internet. This was a technology that democratised access to information, and precipitated a new world view of distributed intelligence. It has reminded us, for better and for worse, to challenge prevailing paradigms in the search for ‘truth(s)’.

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All great truths begin as blasphemies - George Bernard Shaw

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Galileo’s contemporaries once refused to look through the telescope because it was unthinkable that our God-formed planet would be anything other than the centre of the universe - the prevailing underlying assumptions of perception prevented them from seeing things anew. We hold many similar assumptions and ‘unquestionable’ foundations today.

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A New World View

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Re-imagining the future begins with re-imagining ourselves and our organisations. The recent pandemic has arguably acted as a catalyst for setting such a trajectory in motion globally, with establishments and employees alike now revisiting more powerful, soulful and meaningful ways to work and start weaving the belief systems, and therefore realities, of tomorrow.

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We often like to demonise the role that technology plays in the modern world. But in an incredibly short space of time, it has lifted a proportion of us out of living on the brink of famine, or in fear of plagues or the flu. In its place it has provided us with unprecedented wealth and life expectancy. This progress is a result of man’s use of innovation, vision and technology - not as people acting alone, but collaborating together in organisations.

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Businesses and the way business is done has fundamentally shaped our cultures and economies through the free market - with intricate global supply chains having done more for peace between nations than any political arrangement. All around the world, the non-profit sector has grown spectacularly for several decades, creating jobs at a faster pace than for-profit companies. An ever-increasing number of people donate time, energy, and money in pursuit of purposes that matter to them and to the world.

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At the same time, many people feel that the current system has been stretched to its limits and feel increasingly disillusioned by organisational life and politics. Many still struggle with carving out time and space for more passion and purpose, and often people at both the top and bottom rungs of the ladder see their trade in life as a trade-off: simply a means to an end. Even those in vocations such as teaching and nursing are experiencing a mass exodus due to systemic failure.

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In creating more soulful organisations that draw out more of our human potential, we also need to revisit our extractive over regenerative relationship with the earth. It is possible that the survival of the species relies on our ability to move to higher forms of consciousness. Einstein once famously said that problems couldn’t be solved with the same level of consciousness that created them in the first place.

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There is already evidence that another mindset and organisational model lies just around the corner. Every time humanity has shifted a stage, it has found a new way to collaborate, and therefore new organisational models. Pioneer organisations have grasped onto this emerging field and are leading by example. What was most astonishing was the patterns and commonalities in these organisations that potentially point to a new, coherent model. Scientifically this fits in with similar patterns found in evolutionary theory and developmental psychology.

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Laloux focuses on the shift by distilling the commonalities into 3 major innovations: self-management, striving for wholeness and evolutionary purpose, calling this the ‘Teal Paradigm’. Laloux espouses that we’re about to enter the next stage of human consciousness that corresponds with the ‘self-actualising’ level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

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This means a self-management style where organisations are run based on peer relationships, instead of hierarchy or consensus. A sense of wholeness, where employees are able to bring their whole selves to work instead of putting on a professional mask, and a sense of evolutionary purpose where organisations operate as soulful entities with aspirations, and people are invited to align their personal calling with this. Teal organisations are like living organisms, constantly evolving with the wider ecosystem at large. They make decisions that feel right and are aligned with who they are, as well as seeing themselves as part of an interconnected whole.

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Amidst the often apocalyptic news of doom and gloom, Reinventing Organisations serves as a glimmer of the emerging potential within; Reminding us that often times current models have to fall apart in order to be re-birthed anew. Whats’s particularly refreshing about the book is that it also presents the process of transformation in a light that is positive and constructive. Laying out the notion that it is possible to transition from an outdated mindset of ‘no pain no gain’, to doing good and feeling better.

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