Book Review, Frederick Laloux, Rethinking Orginsations

Ever since I was a teenager, and all through my university years, I knew that I didn’t want to end up like my parents working a 9-to-5 job punching my timecard like a schmo and being bossed around by some dumb boss. My mum brought me up as a communist, so I knew that it was “because of Capitalism” that pretty much all jobs are soulless and dehumanised (I still believe this). But growing up in the neo-liberalism of the 90s and 2000s, I had no sense of imagination that things could ever be any different. I read David Graeber’s books a few years ago and got a little interested in Anarchism as an alternative way of working in teams. But the idea of the endless meetings and consensus processes sounded dreadful and was a big turnoff.

Rethinking Orginisations book partly put that in context for me. The consensus way of operating is only one way of operating; sure it’s more soulful than the mainstream command-and-control style of top-down orgainsations, but it can also be a drain of energy and ultimatley be disempowering due to the fact that things can take so long to get done. But rather there are other more vital ways of doing things, using more fluid forms of self-management, and several companies are already doing things this way. Frederick Laloux calls these organisations “teal” (maybe this is a more common colour in France? Actually I found this book after someone joked on LinkedIn that they were hanging out for Teal, and I had to google it because I had no idea what they were talking about.)

This is a book I’ve been waiting for in a lot of ways. Sure the author gets pretty carried away in unnecessarily trying too hard to create a grand theory of universal human evolution; nonetheless the case studies speak for themselves in terms of the real possibility of creating soulful, empowered self-managing workplaces, something that I’ve often dreamed of but never imagined were currently existing.

Wholeness

Since leaving academia and starting work in a corporate environment, I’m even more convinced that there’s something not right about the current management paradigm. SEEK is a pretty great place to work, but there’s just something draining and grinding about the inherent lack of trust and responsibility in a hierarchically structured orgainisation, where decisions and authorisations have to come from the top down. Also there is starting to be more research coming out that people and businesses actually work more effectively with privacy (instead of open plan panopticoffices) autonomy (instead of middle management) and intrinsic motivation (instead of performance bonuses/performance reviews). Daniel Pink’s book Drive is a good intro to these changes. (Agile software development goes some way towards granting some autonomy to developers regarding implementation details, however it’s still designed to give the hierarchical management structure a sense of control - imposed through Product Managers - and this is a major limitation in terms of unlocking creative energy.) Worse and more insidious is the sense that I can’t be myself at work, something which I really think is taking a toll on me. I thought it was just me being a weirdo because of having thoughts and feelings … and (shock horror) not being busy all the time?! But Laloux explains really clearly that this is actually a pervasive issue in modern orginsations.

People tend to wear a professional mask. One must always look the part: be busy but composed, competent, and in control of the situation. Rationality is valued above all else; emotions, doubts, and dreams are best kept behind a mask, so that we do not make ourselves vulnerable…. This longing for wholeness is at odds with the separation that most existing workplaces foster, albeit unconsciously—overemphasizing the ego and the rational while negating the spiritual and emotional; separating people based on the departments they work in, their rank, background, or level of performance; separating the professional from the personal; separating the organization from its competitors and the ecosystem it is embedded in. Vocabulary we use is often revealing: in organizations, we often speak about “work-life balance” — a notion that shows how little life is left in work when we have separated ourselves from so much that truly matters. For people transitioning to Teal, these separations in the workplace often become so painful that they choose to leave organizational life for some form of self-employment, a more accommodating context to find wholeness with themselves and with others.

This passage certainly sums up how I’m feeling about my life and work at the moment, and I’m excited to hear about some case studies of what corporations are doing with this. Issues that are holding me back at work to do with unrealistic expectations on myself or worries about not contributing enough value, are taboo even though I suspect they are near universal; I think everyone’s mental health would benefit by being able to talk more openly about these things at work. Personally, repressing these feelings like these led to years of chronic back pain and sciatica, before I was able to come to terms with the anxiety and fear that was beneath.

Actually the tone of this book reminds me of the self-actualisation movement of the 80s and 90s, as well as writers like Robert Bly, who are influenced by the self-actualisation movement, although taking it to a deeper psychological level, blending the ideas with the psychoanalysis of Jung and Joseph Campbell.

Self management

Self-management is the idea that there be no formalised hierarchy of decision-making power. This isn’t the same as having no one in charge, or requiring consensus on all decisions. Rather teams must learn to step up and share the managerial tasks amongst themselves. Teams do their own recruitment, budgeting, and agree on their own process for performance review. Decisions are made not by consensus but under the understanding that a solution will only be vetoed due to a principled objection, and that decisions can always be revisited. They are often supported by internal or external coaches, although the coaches understand the need to let the groups learn on their own so they don’t become dependent. Further, there must be some form of an expectation of advice seeking - the idea that before making a decision, I will seek advice from anyone who will be affected, or who has relevant knowledge. I don’t have to try and please everyone, but the larger the decicion, the more people I will have to consult.

This kind of organisation really requires people to step up, and is certainly not easy, especially for people used to giving or following orders. But I can feel that the payoff in myself would be worth it, and I’m happy to hear that other people think similarly.

But won’t the trust implicit in self-management be abused? This is certainly a worry I would have about self management, and one that I have heard raised as an objection when I’ve talked about this with others. I guess an important thing to remember about self-management is that it’s not a permissive soft trust, it comes with expectations of a higher level of behaviour.

When trust is extended, it breeds responsibility in return. Emulation and peer pressure regulates the system better than hierarchy ever could. Teams set their own objectives, and they take pride in achieving them. When a person tries to take advantage of the system, such as by not pulling his weight and slacking off, his team members will be quick to let him know their feelings. At FAVI [one of the major case studies in this book, a French auto-parts manufacturer which has been running under practices of self-management for over 30 years], workers are well aware, from their weekly meetings with the sales account manager, what sharp competition they are up against from China. Nurses at Buurtzorg [A Dutch self-managed home-nursing non-profit] know their patients intimately and care deeply for their well-being…

Ultimately, it comes down to this—fear is a great inhibitor. When organizations are built not on implicit mechanisms of fear but on structures and practices that breed trust and responsibility, extraordinary and unexpected things start to happen.

This is the type of leadership that I want contribute to the world, not a leadership of control and micro/middle management and monitoring but a leadership of blessing, coaching and trust. Laloux puts the role of the leader like this: “The founders and CEOs of self-managing organizations don’t have hierarchical power, but they often carry much moral authority.”

What about the issue of setting salaries? How does this work in the absence of the power, secrecy and control that almost always surrounds these discussions in a traditional corporation? Here is the way one of the case studies of the book, AES a multinational electical services company, addresses this:

To decide on people’s salaries, it asks each employee to rank, once a year, the colleagues they have worked with…. The more experienced, knowledgeable, and hard-working people land in the higher buckets that earn bigger salaries; the more junior, less experienced colleagues naturally gravitate toward buckets with lower salaries.

Many of the other organisations in the book go a step further: they allow people to set their own salary, however with the expectation that advice will be sought, and that all salary information would be freely available.

One thing that was really interesting and counter-intuitive to me is that none of the case studies are actually employee owned. This is very interesting to me given the old-school communist ideas that were drummed into me as a kid - the idea that worker-ownership is the main solution to capitalism’s problems. Actually for a long time I have had a sense that this is not the case, since coming to understand that Communism comes from the same ideas as Capitalism, and is just as obsessed with growth and efficiency, and turning people into cogs in a machine.

That said, all of the case studies are either family or individually owned, or are not-for-profit. Laloux makes it pretty clear that despite the energy that is unlocked by self-management, it is too easily sabotaged by owners or board-members who are not on board, and who will seek to reassert standard practices of control:

I regularly come across coaches and consultants who try to prove with hard numbers that adopting Green [Laloux’s word for consensus-based ideals] or Teal practices will deliver a good return on investment—effectively using Achievement-Orange[Laloux’s word for neo-liberal] language to sell Green or Teal. I’ve never seen it work—the leaders listen with interest until they understand what practices are involved and how much control they would have to relinquish.

Evolutionary purpose

I love this one. Laloux clearly calls bullshit on a top-down imposed “mission statement”. Rather “Teal Organizations go about filling a need of the world not by tuning in to the noise of the world (the surveys, the focus groups, the customer segmentation), but by listening within.” This is also a reminder for me of something I’ve been feeling for a while since starting work in analytics. It is often very soulless work, reducing people to cogs in a machine or farm animals to be exploited. How can machine learning and AI serve humanity? I know it’s possible, but it’s not immediately clear to me. It think it will have something to do with sharing the wealth generated by AI automating mundane tasks. Then people can do more soulful work: counselling, mentoring, healing, artisanship. Another part might be by using AI to help people do their jobs better rather than simply replacing them.

One criticism of the book – and it’s related to the problem of trying to make a universal theory – is the assumption that these practices are all new. For example in the discussions of Buurtzorg, the Dutch neibourhood nursing organisation, the comparison is always with the hell of the hyper-rationalised system in the 80s that it replaced rather than with the older system of just having a single nurse per neighbourhood, a more old fashioned and humane system. Also surely the idea of soulful self-managing teams have existed - and still exist - in plenty of places around the world where the influences of Western culture are not so strongly in effect. And soulful practices are part of many cultures. The only problem here is Western society’s emphasis on the rationality and efficiency means it has lost its soul, and the message is only weakened by trying to cast it more broadly by trying to apply it to cultures the author knows little or nothing about.

That said, I was deeply moved by reading about the soulful practices of the organisations studied in the book. They remind me of the men’s circles I am part of and I was very surprised to hear them used in corporate environments. For example, “check-ins” of emotions before starting a meeting. A kitchen with a stove to cook shared meals. Gratitude and appreciations and sharing personal stories. The emptiness of workplace interactions are something that needs to be healed, not something that I need to learn to do.