The Adventure of Remaking Our World
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Tami Simon: Hello, friends, my name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original, premium, transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us. Explore, come have fun with us, and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Frederic Laloux. Frederic Laloux is someone I consider to be an inspired visionary– which is not a term I use often or lightly– an inspired visionary who applies his creative mind to helping us remake our world. In his own words, he tries to square not always easily the many projects he’s passionate about with his inner knowing that he’s meant to live a simple life, spending much time with his family and, whenever possible, in the silent presence of trees. Frederic is a celebrated business thinker and social entrepreneur, and this year marks the 10-year anniversary of his seminal book, which was self-published, called Reinventing Organizations, a book which has sold, now after 10 years, more than a million copies and is now translated in more than 20 languages. Frederic’s current focus is on something he calls The Week, and we’re going to learn more about this. It’s a powerful new approach to inspire mass mobilization to confront environmental breakdown and the climate crisis. Frederic, welcome to Insights at the Edge.
Frederic Laloux: I’m so excited to be with you again.
TS: You have a willingness to go deep into areas that cause and are the sources of so much human pain. You say that part of the reason that you think Reinventing Organizations resonated so well with so many people over the last 10 years. You write about this in the new foreword to the 10th anniversary edition is because the workplace is a source of so much pain in so many people’s lives. And now here you’re addressing at this current time the climate crisis that we’re in, and also an area that is so painful for many of us sounds true, is located in Colorado. There are four fires right now burning from extreme heat within a 45-minute drive of our offices. And I wanted to start our conversation by understanding the lens you use internally to tackle systemic change and systemic problems. I think a lot of us are like, “That’s beyond me. I don’t know, I’m going to do my part.” But you actually go into it and look at it at a systemic level and how we can be changemakers at that level. Tell me about that process for you.
FL: Yeah, at some level that’s just who I am in my makeup. Whenever I see a problem, I feel like, “Ah, I’d love to help this one person, but how can we help as many…” There’s just so much suffering in the world. So I tend to be drawn to these systemic questions, but I’ve also been obviously influenced by many people, and one of the persons that’s influenced me is Ken Wilber whom you know who lives close to Boulder. And he has, I think, a particularly potent lens to look at these systemic questions because we tend to oppose either systemic questions that feel like these big call systems that we’re trying to influence or there is the human, the relational world, the inner world, the spiritual world.
And that feels like, “Okay, that’s my small world of my own inner work and inner development, but how do I square these things?” For people who are interested in how to square those, the most potent lens I found is Wilber’s work. And we might not go into the details, but the four quadrants that every problem that’s arising in this world, you can look at it from four angles and one of them is the systemic angle. One of them is the inner angle, the mindset and beliefs that we bring to any problem. Another is the behavioral things that we do. Another is the cultural thing.
And unless we tackle things from all four perspectives, we’re probably going to fall short. So anybody who says, “Oh, the solution to all our systemic problems is just if we raise individual consciousness, then everything will be fine.” That is definitely a part of it, but it’s just one part of it, right? Other people just, “Look, let’s just change the system. Let’s change policy. Let’s change the incentive systems. Let’s change politics that’s Washington that can change.” Well, that’s one angle, but it’s only one angle. If we don’t bring this with a cultural transformation and inner transformation, it’s not going to last. So that’s how I tend to look at problems is we need to look at it from all four angles, and that’s what I’ve tried to do with both Reinventing Organizations, the organizational work and now the climate work.
TS: Originally with Reinventing Organizations, you referred to the organizations that are moving to this next level of human consciousness as Teal organizations. Can you explain that for people who are new to integral theory, what that means to be a Teal organization?
FL: So Teal comes from this color scheme that was, again, coined by Ken Wilber. And Ken Wilber, like many others, have looked at the fact that for some reason it looks like human evolution doesn’t happen linearly, but that we make these big societal leaps. We go from hunter/gatherer societies where we have small communities of 20 to 40 people to small chiefdoms, and that was a big leap and then we stayed there for a while. And then we made the leap to agrarian societies and then we made a leap to industrial societies with the industrial scientific revolution. That was a leap, and then we made a leap to the knowledge era that we’re in now postmodernism. And each of these stages comes with its own outlook, with its own worldview, with its own value system, with its own technologies, with its own governance systems,
And Wilber gives these colors stages. So the agrarian stage is amber. The scientific industrial stage is orange. The postmodern stages green, and the stage of consciousness that is emerging right now, he gives the color teal, and that’s the color I’ve used. And what I’ve done at Reinventing Organizations is use this lens to look at organizations and management, because each of these stages comes with a distinct way to think about how we should structure and run organizations. Should we structure organizations like armies? Is a good organization like a good army? Or is a good organization like a good machine or is a good organization like a family or? So there’s these distinct ways of looking at management, and I’ve been most interested in this next stage that’s emerging. So for all those people who feel something in the way we manage organizations today doesn’t feel right, doesn’t help humans in it to flourish.
There’s so much more in people than what our current systems allow, couldn’t we structure and run our organizations differently? I looked at a number of people, quite extraordinary pioneers, who had that impression and decided, “Okay, I’m not going to run my organization in the way that business schools tell us we should do it. I’m not going to run it in the way that traditional consulting firms tell us to do it. I just want to run it in a different way that allows humans to flourish.” And what was so fascinating in this research I did was that I identified a number of founders of these organizations, and even though they were often thinking that they were the only crazy fools that really dared to push the envelope and try out many new things, what they ended up with, even though they didn’t know of each other was often remarkably similar; as if there’s something that’s ready to be downloaded as if the next stage of consciousness also comes with the next stage of how we should think about organizations and collaboration.
TS: Now to understand more, Frederic, because I think you have a way of making integral theory understandable and applicable, and I really have a great respect for it. It’s one thing for an individual to go from, oh, this level of consciousness and something happens in their life and now they’re at another level. But for whole systems to move, for us to move as a society, how do you see that working for us to have a Teal worldview, not just in business, but in lots of other of the collective systems by which we organize ourselves?
FL: Others have looked at it more deeply than I have about the societal leaps. But what you see generally is that some people are precursors. Typically, artists tend to be precursors. They sense this new worldview, they put it in their art and it’s small scale. It’s the art that they do. Often organizations are the next things to follow because it’s just a small group of people. You have 10, 20, 30, 50 people, employees that organized in a different way, and that’s still relatively doable. You just need one or two leaders who really have that hope, that dream, that vision, and they hold a space that’s strong enough for this little bubble of the next consciousness to manifest in this world.
Then you start to have larger economic systems. And finally, the political system tends to be one of the last two shifts, and we’re obviously not there yet. So we’re just at this stage where we see lots of smaller organizations. Like now since the book came out, I know that there’s a few thousands of organizations that have adopted these things. There’s lots of these little bubbles and experiments. We see some larger organizations that are starting to shift there, and I don’t have a crystal ball, I think for our political and economical systems to transition maybe, hopefully, it will be in 10, 28 years. Maybe it might take 30, 40, 50 years. We will see.
TS: Okay. Here’s actually the question that’s the deepest in my heart that I want to ask you, Frederic, which is, I listened to a conversation that you had with Thomas Hübl, and he was asking you about your view of systems change at this time. And you said something to the effect of this being a great adventure and that many people experience this time as a time of dread. That’s my word, or a period of gloom, the polycrisis that we’re in. How do you maintain this perspective of being a great adventurer?
FL: When you look at history, there are these moments of confusion and possibility. For thousands of years, we had feudal systems where it was obvious that we would be ruled by a king, generally a man. And when the king dies, his eldest son will take over as intelligent or stupid as that person is, and that was just the way it was. Nobody was thinking that something else was possible, and then suddenly this idea of democracy shows up. And within just a few decades in the Western world, this idea took on, but that was a period of incredible confusion and dread and French Revolution violence. But from that emerged just a whole different way for us to think about society, think about women’s rights. I’m reading a book to my eleven-year-old daughter now in the 19th century about a clever 14-year-old girl whose interest interested in fossils and history and society. And she can never ask a question in polite society because as a girl, she has to appear silly and decorative and stupid.
Just the pain of reading that to my daughter and going, “Should I even read this? Should my daughter even integrate that a girl has to act that way?” And this is 150 years ago. So those times were confusing just as our times are now, but the possibility of reinvention that we have now is incredible. I often think we’re in this race of destruction versus consciousness, and we have no idea how this thing is going to end. Anybody who says, “It’s gloom, it’s too late for our climate,” I go, “How do you know?” And anybody who’s like this spiritual optimist and those spiritual bypassing and says, “Oh, everything will be okay because…” hasn’t looked at the science of it. And in the midst of that, if there’s any time I could choose to be alive, this for me is the moment I can have, this is just the most extraordinary playing field. Let me give you another metaphor I sometimes play with. I feel like every single system we work with is rotting and in need of reinvention.
It’s as if we’re walking on a wooden floor and every one of these planks is rotting. Our education system obviously isn’t working anymore. We get a chance to fundamentally reinvent our education system. Imagine an education system that’s infused with everything that you’re doing it sounds true. In many ways, we know how to do it. We just haven’t applied it at scale yet. The education system needs to be reinvented, the agricultural system. Our industrial agriculture, our factory farming is killing the planet. It’s no longer working, it’s depleting the soils, and we need to reinvent it. And there’s thousands of people who are doing amazing things in regenerative agriculture. Go in these circles and you’ll be incredibly hopeful. We need to reinvent our political systems. Obviously, democracy as we practice it now is exhausted, and there’s people working at the forefront of systems of sortition and participative democracy that are fascinating.
Hopefully, within 30, 40 years we’ll have cracked that. And we have to reinvent our finance systems. We have to reinvent our justice systems. We have to reinvent our production systems. The consumption, the way we consume doesn’t make anybody happy and destroys the planet. And there’s people who are venturing into ways to work in a circular economy that makes everybody way more happy. In each of these fields, there’s thousands of people who are actively working on this, who are prototyping, who are experimenting, who are bringing things to scale. If you plug into any of these groups, you can’t but be energized because it’s just amazing what’s happening. So we’re at the stage where it feels confusing, and maybe in 10 years we’ll be at the stage where we see all of these things starting to click. And I don’t know, I don’t have a crystal ball, but what an amazing time to be alive because that’s just the adventure that’s given to us.
TS: 10 years after publishing Reinventing Organizations, part of the journey was that you created several years after the book came out a 130-session video series on insights for the journey for people who are in traditional businesses who are interested in making the kinds of shifts that you describe in Reinventing Organizations. And I wonder if you can share what you’ve discovered through all the talks you’ve given, the questions you’ve been asked or some of the biggest misconceptions that people were left with when they read Reinventing Organizations like, “Frederic said YXZ, and I thought he meant this other thing. Wait a second.” ‘Cause that’s part of what you do in this video series is offer these corrections.
FL: Yeah. To start with one correction that feels important to me is, so I talked about these Teal organizations, that’s just a description. But some people have come to see this as a concept that was worthwhile on its own, and they want to become a Teal organization. And whenever people tell me, “I want to become a Teal organization,” I go, “Why? What’s your deeper longing? What’s your deeper…?” So people aspire to become a concept and nobody wants to be a concept concept. And what I noticed is people who do this transition and who throw out to all their colleagues, “We will become a Teal organization or a self-managed organization,” tend to get a lot of resistance because it’s a concept and people go, “What is a Teal organization and this sounds weird. And self-management, does that even work?” And get a lot of resistance.
Whereas when leaders speak from the heart and talk about what is it that really drives them, what is it in this book that has resonated with them so much and make an invitation based on that, they get everybody to follow. I’ll share an example that I share in one of the videos that really brought this home for me. I was talking with the CEO of a university hospital, big hospital, thousands of nurses, and she wanted to introduce self-management to the nurses. And she had thrown out the concept, “We’re going to go towards self-management,” and she got enormous pushback. “This is a hospital, self-management, are you kidding me? It’s life and death decisions, we can’t just let people do whatever they want.” So I ask her, I said, “I see you’re passionate about it, why?”
And for a long time, she threw out buzzwords, “I want them to be empowered. I want them to be motivated. I want them…” “Sure, but why you? What is it in you?” At some point, she got almost angry at me for pushing her because I was like, “I still don’t feel it.” And at some point, she was almost angry and said, “Frederic, I’ll tell you why. Six months ago, I was at one end of the hospital and I had a meeting outside and I had to go towards these endless corridors of this university hospital. And it was quarter to 4:00 in the afternoon and everywhere along that corridor, there were nurses at quarter to 4:00 waiting for it to be 4:00 so that they could clock out. I was disgusted by my own organization that had taken these talented, amazing people who chose the nursing profession not to get rich, but to serve people. And our organization, the way we treat them has turned it into people who just can’t wait to leave.”
When she told me that story, I had shivers. I was like, “Okay, I got it. If you talk about it this way, if you make this invitation, don’t talk about self-management, don’t talk about Teal organization, but say we can’t continue treating nurses the way we treat them, where we don’t trust them with anything even though they’re these incredibly accomplished individuals. And I wonder why find a way where these people can determine for themselves how they best serve their patients, everybody follows you.” So that’s one insight that I got from talking with lots of people is don’t talk about the concept. First, determine what’s in you makes you want to do this, is one example of one of these learnings and misconceptions.
TS: Right. Good. It’s important, Frederic. And I think for people who are hearing about Reinventing Organizations and Teal organizations and aren’t familiar with the framework, you mentioned self-management, and that’s one of the three cornerstone ideas that you have that characterize these Teal organizations. Another is wholeness that people feel like they can be themselves, their whole selves at work. And in that section, you actually even profile good old Sounds True.
FL: Yes, from 10 years ago.
TS: Yep, and we’re not going to spend a lot of time on wholeness. I think that’s something that our Sounds True audience and listeners to Insights at the Edge are pretty familiar with. And then the third characterization is this one of evolutionary purpose. I want to circle back to self-management and then we’ll talk some about evolutionary purpose because I think that’s the one that probably is the most triggering for people who are in business frameworks that were built on a different level of human development, on a command and control Army style, “What do you mean? There’s no general?” And I think you’ve tried to clarify, people are just like, “What does that mean? Does the C-suite get destroyed? What’s happening?”
FL: Yeah, absolutely. To be honest, when I started this research, I wasn’t expecting to find… self-management was not on my radar screen. I was schooled in the good old traditional hierarchy and pyramid, and I stumbled upon these extraordinary organizations, some of which had been around for decades, very successful and very difficult environments going through recessions and with forms of self-management. And it’s true that as soon as I talk about self-management, I wish there was a better word, people immediately have this conception of self-management means no more hierarchy, no more structures. Anybody can do whatever they want.
Often they have this 1960s counterculture image of, “We’re all going to sit in a circle and we’re going to talk till the end of the night,” or, “We’re going to talk for days until we reach consensus.” And obviously people dread that, because a lot of people have tried that and that doesn’t work. That is horrible. When that thing happens, when there’s no structure and no one knows how to make a decision and we wait for consensus, it becomes so painful that people then just beg, “Somebody, make a decision. Bring hierarchy back because this is just too painful.” And so that’s a typical misconception, so like there’s no more structure, there’s no more decisions from the top, everybody’s equal.
We won’t have the time to really go into the details, but what self-management means is that instead of having these strict formal hierarchies that you used to have in a pyramid where my boss is the boss of your boss. So I’m your boss, Tami, and which means I get to make all the decisions. I get to decide if you’re hired, fired, if you get a nice project, if you get a raise, and on every single question I have more to say than you. That’s the traditional hierarchy. What you do with self-management is that you create fluid hierarchies, meaning you still have hierarchies, but you have hierarchies of skill, of passion, of expertise. And we create structures that make that on this topic, Tami, you know so much more than I do, so obviously you’ll take the lead and I will follow. On this other topic, I have more expertise or more passion, and I will take the lead and you will follow.
And so we have these mechanisms, but they’re still clear structures accountability. We still know who’s responsible for what. We still know if something isn’t working, who should I look for? And the easiest way to explain that for people and to demystify it is to say, okay, imagine, Tami, you and I are part of a team. We’re in an organization, we’re part of a team of eight people, okay? And I used to be the boss, I used to be the team leader. And imagine we’re switching to these forms of self-management. What we would typically do is we would spend an afternoon, let’s say, four hours in a session where we list what are all the tasks of the manager? What were all of my tasks? And we start listing them, and typically, you end up with 10, 12, 15. The task is to hire people. My task is to onboard people. My task is to make sure people are happy. My task is to do performance management of the people. My task is to set a vision.
My task is to represent our group to the outside world. My task is to do conflict management if there’s… So we start listing these things. And then we say, instead of all of these tasks being with me, and to be honest, I might be good at some of them, but probably there’s some that I don’t do at all because I don’t like them. Maybe I’m really bad at conflict management and I don’t do it at all and I let conflict fester, and it makes everybody’s life miserable simply because that’s not what I like to do. So instead of giving me all of these things, let’s just spread them out. Okay, who wants to deal with conflict? If there’s conflict, who wants to be the outside phase of our group to the outside world? Who will be responsible for performance management to check if our numbers add up? Who will do the onboarding? And then we’ll just distribute these roles.
There’s still very clear accountability. People now know, Tami, that you’re responsible for performance management. If the numbers are bad, the other people in the organization will look to you. If there’s conflict and I don’t deal with it, people will look to me. And in that way, we distribute these responsibilities, and it’s not rocket science. Once you start doing it, people go, “Duh,” and it tends to work much better because people pick and choose the parts that they’re good at, that they like or that they want to learn. And suddenly we all feel responsible. Before, I was the only one really feeling responsible and I had to use carrot and sticks to get you guys to do stuff, but now suddenly we’re this team that shares this responsibility. So when you think about it, it’s not rocket science, and generally when you apply it tends to work much better than traditional forms of management.
TS: Right. Well, there’s a lot of nuance here, and you made 130-part video teaching series to answer a lot of the questions that come up in Reinventing Organizations ’cause there’s a lot there. And even as you’re describing, well, who’s best at this and who wants to do this? What I see in the room happening potentially is conflict. Four people all want to do this one thing, well, who wants to do it? They say [inaudible 00:28:02] and you have who decides?
FL: Yeah, and there’s different methods to do it. So yeah, we won’t go through the details, but there’s something called the advice process, and we can just decide, in this group, let me imagine I was the former manager, I still retain that decision power of the four I choose. Or there’s something called candidateless election, which is a very elegant, simple process where now, okay, for this particular task, there’s these four people and we do a round of elections and we just see who everybody thinks is the best person to do this. Or we do a rotating form where we do after every year we rotate this thing. So there’s just lots of mechanisms that people come up with to deal with these kinds of questions.
TS: Some people will say if you want to see a really well-run organization look to see who the leaders are, the quality of the leaders. The quality of the leaders really matter. What do you say to that in the midst of looking at self-management, like this notion that there doesn’t need to be that kind of high-quality leader?
FL: No, I absolutely believe that’s essential. So that’s another misunderstanding is we no longer need leaders. What you see in these self-managing organizations is that they tend to be very a leaderful organization. What you want is as much leadership as possible. We don’t want to suppress any leader, and so what you absolutely need is a few strong leaders who hold that vision because this is still very countercultural. And so we’ve seen a lot of organizations that worked really well in self-managing fashion, and then the one or two or three leaders who really cared for this and in the lingua that I use hold the space for self-management leave and traditional managers take over. And they go, “Okay, I don’t understand how this works. Let’s get a good old pyramid,” and then the whole thing loses its mojo. So you absolutely need some people who understand this, want this and hold the space so that other people can step up.
I’ve seen this, for example, in factories, traditional factories that move over to the system. It’s often very, very moving stories because you had people who were working on the factory floor who had often little formal education or were even broken by the school system, had little self-confidence, were at the bottom of the pyramid, weren’t trusted to make any decisions, and suddenly we create spaces where they can show up. And often these people at home are brilliant people. At home, they fix all sorts of machines, they do all sorts of things, and in the workplace show up as a small version. Suddenly, they bring all of these things into the workplace and they become these much bigger versions of themselves, but it takes time. It’s sometimes a painful process for these people to break out of this old shell and trust the system and grow, and so we need leaders on top of that that can create the space for other people to blossom.
The image that I sometimes use is often people think self-management means we want everybody to have the same power. We don’t want any strong leaders because that would be antithetical. And the image that I use is no, we want the strongest, most beautiful ecosystem that we can have. In a forest, you have tall trees and you have beautiful ferns, and you have small mushrooms. The goal is not for the mushroom to grow as tall as the tree. The goal is for the mushroom to be the biggest, most beautiful mushroom it can be, for the fern to be the most beautiful fern, and for the tree… And so we absolutely need big trees just like we need big, beautiful ferns and big beautiful mushrooms. So the idea that, oh, in these organizations leaders are no longer needed. No, they’re needed even more, but in a whole different way. And I talk about it in a video where rather than making tons of decision yourself, you create space for other people to grow and make these decisions.
TS: This could get a little abstract, Frederic, but I think you can help me keep it grounded, which is, when you were talking about integral theory and how we can grow to new levels of development, you mentioned the time that we’re in collectively right now as being this postmodern time. Some people call it the green level where everyone’s perspective matters, and we’re not that interested in hierarchy and then we’re moving to Teal. So help me understand how, quote, unquote, “self-management,” can be distinguished and is actually this next level of consciousness coming into being.
FL: Yeah, so we live in these interesting times where a number of these worldviews exist at the same time. We have the red worldview that is embodied by Trump right now, which is that only power counts. And who is more powerful, who’s less powerful, that’s the only thing that counts. We have what Wilber calls the amber worldview, so there’s this traditional worldview. The world is a God-given thing with absolute immutable laws that God has given us, and you’re on the right side of God’s law or on the wrong side of God’s law, and that’s one worldview. The one that’s maybe most dominant today is the scientific industrial worldview. The world is this complex mechanic, and we’ll investigate it, and the better you investigate it, the more money you can make. That’s the worldview that is dominant in business schools and Wall Street, that’s in science and academia.
That’s like the dominant worldview thinking, and then all of these worldviews accept hierarchy as a given. And then the next worldview which you will look to is green or postmodern, which is starting to become dominant in academia, is this worldview that’s very uncomfortable with hierarchies and for good reasons, because hierarchies have for a long time been hierarchies of oppression. And so these hierarchies have hurt tremendous numbers of people, and these hierarchies socially have put men on top of women, have put white people on top of people of color and have put cisgender people and have put heteronormative… So we have all of these systems that were baked into these hierarchies, and so postmodernism wants to do away with all of that. I imagine that in the circles of people who are listening to, a lot of people feel like that, right? A lot of us feel like that for good reasons, and we are like, “Oh, we don’t like any of this hierarchy because that hierarchy was just, came with a lot of oppression.”
So we go to the other extreme, which is this absolute relativism, which is, actually no truth is bigger than any other truth. Everything just depends on your perspective, and it tends to go with identity politics. Tami, you being a woman and I being a man, and we can never fully understand that your truth is as valid as mine, and that has a powerful role to play in breaking down these old hierarchies that have lived their day. But when we take it too far, suddenly we are only these atomized people, or at best, atomized groups of people. And, “Tami, you’re a woman, I’m a man. We can never fully understand each other.” Or, “We’re Black, you’re white, we can never fully…” and there’s never any truth that we can find.
Where Teals goes to is to say, to reestablish the notion that not everything is relative, there is ways for us to discern truth, but it doesn’t need to come in the old way with these fixed hierarchies. And that’s where all of these fluid hierarchies come into play. Where we, unlike Rean, don’t want to abolish hierarchy, we just want to make sure that the most potent person has the most power on the things that matter. And if I know about fixing a machine, I should make that decision. If you know about marketing, you should make that decision, and so that’s where we’re trying to get at. So it’s a, Wilber talks about it as actualization, hierarchies rather than domination hierarchies or growth hierarchies; hierarchies that allow us to grow to the fullest version of ourselves, rather than hierarchies of oppression that try to keep certain people from becoming their best versions.
TS: It’s helpful. One of the things I’m flashing on is how in any given job title, the title can become the trophy or the thing, but that’s not really the point. If you just take the title away and you look at all the strands that somebody does, all the different work pieces, then you can get a much more actualized description of their true talents.
FL: And you get amazing things that happen. I see this over and over again in those organizations who make this leap where suddenly instead of thinking like this box with this job description that we used to have, but now we have all these strands as you call them, or these roles, whatever we want to name this, and I can be on the shop floor and my roles include maintaining certain machines, but maybe at home I do amazing video editing. I’ve seen a person like this. I’m just passionate. I’m great. I also, as one of my roles, I actually spend a few hours doing editing for the marketing team. And that was unthinkable before because you were on the factory floor, you had that job description.
But now I can do this because I have this amazing skill that I can bring, and so we can start to create these portfolios where people grow into things. And it also allows us, “Hey, you’re going on vacation. Let me just take on your three roles for two weeks because I want to learn them,” and it makes all these things possible. “I want to grow in this area. Let me just try on this role. Let me try on this role of conflict resolution, because actually for me, it’s a growing edge. Everybody knows I’ve been conflict avoidant. Do you all trust me that for the next six months I try this out with the help of the team?” And so that’s where you get some of these actualization hierarchies happening.
TS: Okay. Now, I promised that we would talk about the third characteristic of Teal organizations, evolutionary purpose. And one of the things I wanted to draw out is that you talk about how this includes a fundamental shift from predict and control to sense and respond in terms of our putting our purpose into the five-year plan. I thought to myself, sense and respond in terms of navigating a business, an organization’s direction, of course, we have to do that. But don’t we also need to engage in some prediction and hopefully try to control even though we can’t?
FL: Yes, absolutely. That’s another misunderstanding is that we would go from one extreme to the other extreme. Right now, we come from a perspective where we tend to try to predict and control everything because that makes us feel safe. And so you have all of these organizations that spend time doing either their five-year strategic plan and then maybe their two-year midterm planning and then their yearly budgeting cycles and break it down into monthly objectives. And a lot of these organizations, people know that it makes no sense. You’ve made this yearly budget for the next year in great detail that you’ve negotiated, and people try to under-promise it that they can over-deliver. And you have all of these games in these large organizations that are incredibly painful. Everybody knows that this is just a political budget, and two months in, the world has changed. Like COVID happened or there was the war in Ukraine or the dollar has crashed or whatever it is, and yet people still cling on to that budget in ways that no longer makes sense.
So the question is not do we need budgets, but what is really the reason budgets exist? I’ve seen some organizations, the nature of their business needs them to plan ahead. I’ve seen other organizations, the nature of their business requires almost no budgeting. And so the question is, what’s the minimum amount of planning that we need given the nature of our business? So if our business, if we need to secure raw material contracts or we need to know what we sell in 12 months so that we have the production capacity for it, then we need to plan. Otherwise, can we just sense and respond into what is needed? There’s this metaphor that brought it home for me from Brian Robertson. The guy created a system called Holacracy, and he has this metaphor where he says imagine we were to be on a bike in the way we run an organization.
Before we would go on a bike, we would plan everything till the end point. And we would start by saying, “Okay, we start at this exact angle and then after 2.5 seconds we move this angle to this,” and we map out the entire terrain until we arrive. In order not to be distracted, maybe the best thing is to close our eyes while we’re driving because we don’t want to be distracted. We just want to execute our plan. And the reality of it’s, of course, something is going to happen that wasn’t expected. There’s going to be a pot hole, there’s going to be a car parked where it shouldn’t have been, and so we’re going to stumble. We’re going to fall from our bike. We might hurt ourselves.
And then typically in business, we would go, “Okay, we know what the problem is. We didn’t plan well enough. We should have planned even more with even more data, and let’s fire the person who didn’t plan well and let’s re-engineer that process.” And actually, the way we use that we go on a bike is we have an idea of the route, but we are constantly sensing with all of our senses and we’re constantly adjusting. And if we suddenly see that the road over there has less traffic, we change roads. If we see that the road there is actually much more beautiful than we ever imagined, we will change there. So that is what sense and responding is compared to predict and control. So it’s not abandoning all planning, but it’s opening up the possibility to be guided and to sense and to respond to where the purpose calls us.
TS: Now, of course, you wrote Reinventing Organizations originally 10 years ago. As I mentioned, it’s the 10-year anniversary, before the pandemic when the word pivot became the word of businesses, how are you pivoting your business? During the pandemic and then post-pandemic, and I think for a lot of people, they’ve found it extremely challenging to have to be changing roads, to use your bike metaphor, so often, so much of the time with their business and also tremendously stressful on teams and staffs. We have to change. We need different skills than the skills we had. We didn’t plan well in terms of people getting the training they needed ’cause we didn’t even know that’s what we needed. I’m curious if you can talk about that, if you see this sense of the speed of change accelerating for organizations when it comes to this sense and respond.
FL: Yeah, absolutely. Compared to 20 years ago when I first dabbled in the world of business, the speed at which things are changing, there’s this famous acronym in the business world of VUCA. There’s more volatility, uncertainty and complexity and ambiguity. It’s just exploded, and our traditional ways of dealing with it are really exhausted. Like our traditional fixed pyramid, fixed reporting lines where every change means a fundamental change of job description of role, it means I need to fire somebody, I need to rehire somebody is exhausting, and it’s painful on people, and all of these things are like big change projects. And what you see is that these organizations that function in these more nimble ways where we already work with these distributed roles tend to find this easier, not easy by any means, change is difficult.
It’s difficult for all of us, but if I already don’t have this one box from which that needs now to be redesigned from which I would be fired, but I have these seven to eight roles, and Tami, you have these seven to eight roles as well, I’ll probably keep three or four. Now with COVID, suddenly I will take on three or four others and this whole thing adjusts much more easily. And so I’ve really heard from organizations that hadn’t made this leap before that they found it much, much easier to deal with these changes because we didn’t start from this fixed position. But I think from a broader perspective, I think we lean into confusing difficult times. We talked about this earlier, I look at it from a place of adventure. But these are times I think that if we don’t have a lens of these are times that are confusing and difficult and therefore, they’re extraordinary times for us to learn and to grow as individuals.
If we don’t hold that perspective, it’s just painful. I think those of us who are lucky to hold a perspective to say, “Every time there’s pain, every time there’s confusion, while it’s an invitation for me to learn something about myself, for places in which I am stuck, for places in which I’ve inherited beliefs that no longer serve me, for places where I’ve inherited things from my lineage, from my family that no longer serves me, and wow, this is an opportunity to put a spotlight on this and to free myself from some of these constraints? And wow, I’ve become a more open person. I’ve become more free in the process.” I think if we don’t hold that perspective, then this is just an extraordinarily confusing and painful time.
TS: Frederic, I’m going to take that clip out and play it again and again for myself when I need to be reminded and inspired. Thank you. And the question it brings up for me is, how can you help people make that shift to have that kind of attitude so it’s not just an inspiring thought, but an embodied sense? What are the inner skills, if you will, or the inner orientation we need to have in your view?
FL: I’m convinced that what is most helpful in these things is for us to have collective spaces where we grapple with this. Part of what is most painful about this is that we feel lonely with this. Whatever change happens at work, COVID, et cetera, and I feel out of my depth. “I feel challenged. I feel maybe I can’t deal with this. I’m an imposter. I shouldn’t be in the place I’m in, and then I feel terribly lonely.” The truth is, everybody else is feeling pretty much the same thing. And so can we create spaces in the workplace where we collectively deal with this? And this requires good preparation. This requires good facilitation. Otherwise, this can become a terrible talking shop where everybody just goes down depressed. But if we find good spaces where we facilitate as well and we talk about our growing edges, and I get to examine what is mine to learn in this situation, where am I bumping up against my own shadows, my own inherited beliefs?
And Tami, you and I get to talk one-on-one and you tell me, and suddenly I see the full humanity in you and your disclosing helps me go deeper and helps me disclose, and I come out of it with more appreciation for yourself and with more learning for myself. And then we go back into a small group of eight where nobody needs to share, but some people want to share and they share what they’ve learned. Suddenly I come home from one hour with this group of eight and I have a spring in my step, and I feel like I can take on the next chapter that happens. There are organizations who create these spaces in very deliberate ways on a weekly, on a monthly basis for people to learn from each other and to acknowledge that we all are in similar situations where we’re all challenged and we all can grow. And rather than us being all closed down individually and in fear and trying to project this image of, “I have everything under control, I’m just a professional,” we actually get to share and learn and grow together.
TS: Very helpful. I know that principle of the power of people gathering in small groups and sharing is part of informed the creation of The Week, which is this project that you started four years ago with your wife, Helene. It’s interesting, Frederic, of course, you could have built some kind of consulting and coaching and speaking empire around Reinventing Organizations and stayed… You had so much traction with the book. You didn’t do that.
FL: No.
TS: Instead, you made this big shift yourself. Tell us a little bit about that.
FL: Yeah, so I think more than four years ago now, my wife and I had our own version of an awakening to the climate crisis of to really understand what’s at stake. We had friends visiting, and they had had the courage to really look at what’s happening. They had kids the same age as ours and they stayed with us for a week. And when they left, I realized that obviously I knew about the climate crisis, but I realized that I was still in a defensive mode. I was actually living in a massive form of cognitive dissonance that I think a lot of us live in, which is, on one hand, I knew climate crisis happening. Look at all the wildfires that you were talking about. I know it’s happening. I know it’s pretty bad. On the other hand, there was a big part of me that just didn’t want to know because it felt depressing and overwhelming, and I worry about my kids.
So I did my best to try to tune it out. Every time I would see an article come by talking about climate, I would read the first few lines and I go, “Not sure I want to deal with this because it feels overwhelming.” And I think a lot of us are in a situation where we feel like, “I should know more, like I should read more about this. I should do something about this.” On the other hand, engaging with this just feels overwhelming and so I pretend it’s not really happening. These friends helped us to snap out of it and we said like, “Hey, if they had the courage to find out what’s happening, we can do it too.” So Helene, my wife and I really looked into it and we went through what we would talk about it this U-shaped journey of we went down and there’s a lot of fear and sadness and anger and shock that came up when we realized what scientists are predicting what will happen in my lifetime, what will happen in my kid’s lifetime.
One day I calculated how old I will be and how old my kids will be in 2050 because I kept reading scientific articles, in 2050, pretty much everybody around the equator will have had to flee because it’s going to become unlivable; like 200 million to 1 billion climate refugees in 2050, and 2050 felt abstract. And then I calculate in 2050, I will be in my early 70s. Hopefully, I’ll be in great health and grandkids and travel and retire enjoying life, and my kids will be in their 30s. They might just be establishing themselves, maybe they become parents and suddenly I realized this image I had of my early retirement, this is probably going to be time of violence, of maybe famines, and it changed everything for me. So that’s a going down the U, and luckily we begin to get stuck there, nobody gets stuck there if you really look at it. You get stuck there if you stay superficial in climate anxiety. But if you really go there, you tend to jump out of it on the other side.
TS: Let me ask you a question about that. What does that mean to really go there? What does that mean? Because I think a lot of us have thought we’ve gone there and haven’t come out the other side. So maybe we didn’t really go there.
FL: For me and Helene, my wife, because it’s very much something we did together, it was a decision, “Let’s read everything we can. Let’s try to make it as tangible as we can about what’s going to happen to us? So not icebergs melting, but what’s going to happen to us? What’s going to happen to our kids?” And never shy away, never go “This is too much,” and we were in a good enough place in our lives to do that. We took it almost as a spiritual experience of saying, “Let’s do this. And at the same time observe ourselves what is happening? How are we reacting? What are the emotions that are coming up?” And then see how we can deal with it, and we’re well supported by friends and family that if we go to a dark place, we will find the support.
But if you really go, there’s something visceral, I think, in us where life takes over and says, “Okay, if this is what’s happening, this is the energy you’ll have to do something about it.” And what we experienced, millions of people have done it before. We’re quite late to this climate awakening. And there’s millions of people that are mobilizing right now who came out of it on the other side of the full of clarity and energy of, “This is obviously something that will have a big priority in my life because now that I’ve seen this, I cannot unsee it.” So when we came out of this, it was very clear to me that I was going to close the chapter on Reinventing Organizations. My wife had just published a beautiful book about perinatal loss, and she closed a chapter and we just said, “Okay, let’s do our contribution.”
And very quickly, what that contribution would be was clear to us is, “Let’s help other people who live in this cognitive dissonance go through this you and emerge on the other side full of energy and clarity and willing to roll up their sleeves.” So we created an experience that in a relatively short amount of time leads groups of people, so it’s not something you can do on your own. So The Week is something that you do with a group of friends or family or colleagues or people in your church or in your sangha or whatever it is, and you meet three times over the course of a week. That’s why we named this thing The Week.
You meet three times over the course of a week. Every time an hour and a half, you watch a one-hour film that we very lovingly scripted and produced. And then we set up a group conversation to make sense of it all and to digest the emotions that come up, and this experience leads you through that to you. And even though the beginning is kind of hard, what we hear over and over again by now, there’s 75,000 people who’ve registered and gone through it is yes, the beginning is hard, but in many ways, what a relief to leave this cognitive dissonance. What a relief to have, “Okay, now I know I can stop pushing these yous away, and now I can be at the other side and I can dedicate myself to doing something about it.”
TS: Now you mentioned you a couple of times, and just to make that clear for people, Otto Scharmer, of course, is known as the person who created Theory U, and he’s actually one of the contributors to Sounds True’s Inner MBA program. And he talks about how you can bring Theory U, at least he provides the framework for how you can bring that into your organization. Tell me how you and Helene went through Theory U in your climate awareness awakening.
FL: So this might take us longer than we have here, but there’s commonalities between the Otto Scharmer’s you that have huge amount of respect for, and there’s some differences. The you that we talk about is really an emotional you of you go down and often people experience their own version of it might be anger or shock or dread or sadness when you realize where we’re at and what is likely to happen if we don’t turn this around and then come out of it on the other side with energy and clarity and dedication to do something about this.
So we very much talk about an emotional you, but there’s a lot of points of similarities with Otto Scharmer’s you, which also ask you to go deep and not stay at the surface of problems. And which is very much what we also do in the second episode where we go into deeper questions of how did we even get into this mess and how might we get out of it? And what are the change of perspectives that are needed? What are the change of narratives that are needed? What are the changes of stories that are needed? And that is very similar to what Otto has in his Theory U.
TS: What was it like for you in your own experience at the bottom of the U where you’ve gone through your emotional experience, but your new activism and choice of how you’re to engage? It hasn’t emerged yet. It’s still to come.
FL: Yeah, it was difficult. It was difficult. It required for me to trust that something would show up. It required trust that I wouldn’t stay there and that something would call me to do something with what I was learning. Again, we chose to start this in a moment where we’re in a good enough place in our lives to engage with this. But for me, there was definitely an element of trust and there was a little bit of pride involved, I must admit, of, “Okay, you know what? I can go through this and I’m not going to shy away. I’m not going to close the book, and I’m not going to go back to pretending this doesn’t exist. I will stay in this until I come out on the other side.”
Everybody’s different, but for me, doing this with Helene was immensely helpful, not doing this alone. And that’s why we created The Week as a group experience because people in a short amount of time go through this as a group and it makes all the difference in the world. So anybody who’s going through whatever version of this, their own dark night of the soul, never stay alone in this. And there’s so many people who’ve gone through this before who will understand where you’re at and will love to hear from you and to help you because they’ve gone through it before and have lots of love and compassion to share. So the problem is always when we stay on our own, and it’s so much easier when we have the courage to share where we’re at.
TS: I haven’t gone through The Week, but I feel very inspired to do it and people can learn more at week.ooo. And in looking at the website, I saw these four, I would call them design principles that went into your creation of The Week, that we need social groups. We need each other. And I think you’ve made that very clear, and I can really feel that, Frederic, in your presentation of what we need these holding spaces for our human process. We need places where we feel safe, point number two, and where we can explore and shift our inner narratives. But then the final point, the fourth design principle is the one that I wanted you to talk about, which is that joy, pride and courage make for lasting mobilization more than fear or guilt, and I thought, “That is really true.” And I wonder if you could say more about how you discovered that.
FL: Yeah. The first time I became aware of it was when I started looking into the Civil Rights Movement. I was fascinated by the Civil Rights Movement because the question for me is, how come we have this climatevist and we don’t have millions of people who are mobilized? Then I looked at the Civil Rights Movement, and these were incredibly brave people. The people who were in the streets knew that they would have attacked dogs that might be unleashed on them, that they would be beaten, that they might die, and they were in the streets. No one, for the climate, we’re not asked to do anything nearly as brave. And so how did they manage at the time to get tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, the Freedom Riders? And when you look at it, the importance of singing in the Civil Rights Movement has often been forgotten. But the importance of singing and the joy of being together and the joy of singing together was foundational.
The sense of pride of, “We are courageous, we are at the forefront of this. We are in this historic moment,” was foundational, and so that’s just one example. If you look at the suffragettes and if you look at most of these movements, if you look at in Serbia, at Otpor, this movement that managed to topple a dictator over there. People were mischievous and there was humor, and they were just more fun than the dictator. And there was this sense of pride and courage. You could be arrested, you could be beaten up, but you’re smarter than them, and so if you look at all these historic movements, they knew this profound truth. Then when you look at the environmental movement and the climate movement, it’s really a movement that for now decades, often has been associated with guilt and fear. Fear about what’s going to happen with the planet and guilt and shame about how we’ve contributed to this. And guilt and shame can be good short-term motivator. There’s some literature and social science about this, but they are not good motivators for long term.
Nobody stays in a movement because of guilt and fear, but you stay in a movement if the movement brings you joy and energy and is built around pride and courage, and so I think it’s an important component. Some movements got that right. Sunrise in the U.S. and Extinction Rebellion at first got that right in the UK, and I think it’s really something that we need if we want people to join this. I want to be able to look at my children in 10, 20, 30… I’m convinced that our children will look at us and will ask us, “Hey daddy, mommy, what did you know and what did you do?” I’m convinced they will ask us this, and I want to look at them and be able to say, “I had the courage to look, and then I joined this mobilization and we turned this around. And boy, these were the best years of my life. Boy, this was an adventure. This was fun.” I don’t want to tell them. “I looked at it. I did some things that I feel bad about the things I didn’t do.”
TS: theweek.ooo, three 90-minute meetings with a small group of people. How many? How many does it take?
FL: We say that ideal group is four to eight. We’ve had a group of 1000 people who do it and then they watch it all together. It’s something powerful. There’s some in some organizations where you watch it with 100 colleagues or 200 colleagues, and it’s powerful to know that everybody has seen the same thing. Everybody talks about it at the water cooler. But then for the conversation part, you break into groups of four to eight because that’s the ideal group for everybody to really have time to speak and be heard. So four to eight is ideal, and if you’re more, you simply break it into subgroups.
TS: It’s amazing to me that after three meetings like that over the course of a week, that you’ve seen real powerful change happen. That’s a very small time commitment for such a big possible mobilization.
FL: Yeah, we’re ourselves a little stunned. So we have quite a solid measurement and evaluation strategy in place as these things are called, so where we survey people right after and three months later and six months later simply to see how did that experience stay with you? And people just report that this profound inner shift, but also social shift, suddenly it becomes possible to talk with your friends and family and colleagues in different ways. There’s a concept that people talk about called pluralistic ignorance, which is that when it comes to climate, a lot of people are concerned, but feel that other people aren’t concerned because they don’t talk about it. So a lot of people are concerned, but think that they’re the only ones, and so nobody talks about it.
Then The Week allows this process where suddenly say with colleagues at the workplace who suddenly realize, “Well, Tami, you’re concerned about this too, and you are already doing some things, and then like this other colleague?” And so suddenly we realized we’re not alone in this, and it’s shift to social norm where after we’ve seen this, we can now talk about this. And next time in the workplace, for example, there’s an opportunity to do something like, “Hey, let’s revisit our packaging. Let’s revisit our supply chain. Let’s design a product differently. Let’s not fly everybody into this place, but can we do it?” Because suddenly the social norm has shifted we’ve had this experience sometimes.
TS: Frederic Laloux, what an inspired and inspiring human you are. Thank you so much. Thanks for bringing your spirit of adventure and creativity and solution-oriented heart to the world, and thanks for being here. I know you’re very particular about how you spend your time and very intentional. And I’m so glad that you chose to be here on Insights at the Edge, celebrating the ten-year anniversary of Reinventing Organizations and inviting people to come join at theweek.ooo. Thank you so much.
FL: Thank you, Tami. This was a delight. Thank you.
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