Journey to Teal

Fostering self-organization for the emergent future by unleashing leadership potential in everyone.

Imagine a world

I’d like to offer you a vision. Imagine your days at work being filled with laughter and passion, you and your co-workers imbued with a feeling of camaraderie, dwelling in a climate of excitement, purpose and hope, spending your time in an environment that fosters listening, open communication and fast collaboration. Imagine a workplace that harks back to playgrounds of childhood where invention and innovation were a natural part of everyday interaction.
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--Tobias Mayer, The People’s Scrum

“Imagine being responsible for your own physical space, your own workload, your own pace. Imagine delivering high-quality work, frequently, to delighted relaxed customers!”

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laughter and passion

My journey of Teal

My journey started from my OD practices in a Tayloristic organization, and deepened when I along with colleagues who share the same vision started experimenting on new ways of organizing. In order to truly embrace a sense and response culture for the coaching network I help started in the UK, we initiated new experiments of agile and Teal self-organization.

Keeping that vision in mind, I realize that we can turn it into reality by embracing wholeness of ourselves and of the culture around us. The “Agile Manifesto” first laid its foundation stating “the best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self-organizing teams”. To truly unleash the creative power of everyone, we need to create an environment where power is evenly distributed. Not centralized and delegated. The “Agile Manifesto” is radically non-hierarchical.

I often have the discussions with leaders around how we could foster a truly agile organization, so that innovations can flourish. What I love about Teal self-organization, it that it creates an environment so that people in it can all be leaders, and bring their wholeness to work. Imagine a world with that level of authenticity! Efficiency and profit are just by-products.

Reading “Reinventing Organizations”, I was deeply inspired by the Teal organizations. I thrive to be a grain of sand in paving the way for such a soulful organizational consciousness.

“Life, in all its evolutionary wisdom, manages ecosystems of unfathomable beauty, ever evolving toward more wholeness, complexity, and consciousness.”

― Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

Creating the bridge

The majority of our organizations today is of the kind with clear power structure and based on Taylor’s scientific management system. These approaches are there for a reason, and they are successful dealing with the challenges we faced in the 20th Century. However, with the paradigm shifts and exponential growth of technology, it has become impossible to predict, or even to effectively plan for future strategy in the 21st century. And yet, most companies in today’s world are still working around planning and predictability. While in essence, agility has become crucial for the future success.

I’ve worked with senior leaders and grow to see their reality facing today’s exponential changes. What I’ve witnessed, is that many leaders may perceive themselves as making big progress, but in fact they maybe only making baby steps in creating a truly responsive organization.

Einstein famously said, you cannot solve the problem from the mentality that created it in the first place. I therefore embrace an open minded experiment approach. Adopting Theory U and other OD interventions, to create space for innovative experiments.

My aim of this work is to create the bridge of today’s leaders to see the value of Teal. Feel the benefit of responsive organization by unleashing everyone’s potential, so that collectively we transform the way we work.

My style

  • Human centric
  • Purpose-driven
  • Mindful approach
  • Safe enough to try
  • Network connected
  • Iterative change

I offer

  • Transformational coaching
  • Agile and digital transformation
  • Leadership and change advisory
  • Organizational development
  • Leadership development
  • Transformation journey applying Theory U

I had the pleasure of working with Breeze for the past months at ABB and she shows true systemic leadership in everything she does. Bringing her trues Self in the projects she is working with, she builds an inclusive environment and challenges the status quo to unveal the collective awareness. With an agile, flexible and down to earth approach, she is always delivering on her promises. Thank you very much Breeze for your great contribution to us during these months!

Luis

Corporate Leadership Learning

The journey to Teal organization requires a broad evolutionary perspective, including both people and organizational development skills. Having worked with Chunfeng in Grow2Glow initiative, I have witnessed this rare combination of talent that she has, bringing people together around a common vision, with grace and deep understanding.

Together with her colleagues, Chunfeng initiated various experiments of innovative organizational design. To encourage the awareness of self-organization, she created learning platforms of spiral dynamics, Holacracy and knowledge exchange activities. Such exchange together with on the ground experiments paved way for a responsive organizational structure for grow2glow and allows it to expand globally.

Vitaly

CEO-Executive Advisor, OD practitioner

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Collaborative Overload – tackling it with systemic interventions

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Essentialism and Effortless

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As I’m very much involved in transformation work that is promoting Teal self-organization in a large organizational setting, today it occurred to me that my on-going volunteer experience perhaps could trigger some wisdom from the naturally evolving Teal-like...

Learning nuggets from complex system transformation work (No. 1)

I really like the word learning nuggets, after all, what’s better than learning from all the interactions and drawing sparks of insights? I’ll pick up this blog seris, which will also serve as my own learning journal.  During the recent transformation work that...

Here’s to the crazy ones

Today I experienced an emotionally intense retro with one of the pioneering agile teams in China. What I experienced in the retro reminds me once again about this phrase “touch base”, especially during challenging times, for me it is so important to touch base, to...

Elements of neuroscience in organizational transformation

Today I joined a webinar by Mingyur Rinpoche and Dr. Richard Davidson on Meditation and the Science of Human Flourishing. Aside from many mindfulness elements that will benefit my personal practice, the insights also sparked some connections for the work in...