Note Details
- Stage: soil ✨
- Type: Concept
- Topics: organization, theory
Teal organisations are based on the work of Frederic Laloux in Reinventing Organizations.
Teal organisations allow for higher employee engagement, individuality, interconnection, and authenticity—all without the need for traditional management structures. They are guided by the principles of self-management, wholeness and evolutionary purpose:
- Self-management: Distributed authority and collective intelligence instead of rigid hierarchical management structures – natural hierarchies emerge and dissipate depending on situational context.
- Wholeness: Individuals are allowed to “drop the mask,” and express all of who they are at work as and when they want to, not just those characteristics traditionally deemed to be professional.
- Evolutionary purpose: The organisation has a purpose of its own. Instead of attempting to predict and control the direction of the organisation, members strive to listen and understand where the organisation is naturally drawn to go.
A common metaphor for Teal organisations is a living organism or living system. Life, in all its evolutionary wisdom, manages ecosystems of unfathomable beauty, ever evolving toward more wholeness, complexity, and consciousness. Change in nature happens everywhere, all the time, in a self-organising urge that comes from every cell and every organism, with no need for central command and control to give orders or pull the levers.