Thanks Terry and Jim for the exciting context and expectation of what's next..... I'm reminded of the last 2 Trends articles sent out to our colleagues in Taiwan. Gail *Reinventing Organizations* - by Frederic Laloux *A guide to creating organizations inspired by the next stage of human consciousness* (Selected insightful reviews) What is a *“*Teal Organization”? *In Reinventing Organizations <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ICS9VI4/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B00ICS9VI4&linkCode=as2&tag=harojarc-20&linkId=XEQOERPYUBI3TAXG>*, Laloux uses a color scheme, based on Integral Theory <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_theory>, to describe the historical development of human organizations: Red > Orange > Green > Teal. He lists three breakthroughs of Teal organizations: · Self-management: Driven by peer relationships. Any person, in any team, can make literally any decision for the company (but with advice from others in the company who would be affected). · Wholeness: Involving the whole person at work. The point (of Team Organizations) is not to make everyone equal; it is to allow all employees to grow into the strongest, healthiest version of themselves. · Evolutionary purpose: Let the organization adapt and grow (rather than be driven). Anyone can lead. No one can dictate. You get to choose your cause. You don't have to put up with bullies and tyrants. Excellence usually wins. Great contributions get recognized and celebrated. … on the leading-edge ... his work is concerned with the extremely profound changes in consciousness, culture, and social systems that we are seeing emerge … at this point in human evolution. Frederic Laloux.. focuses specifically on the values, practices, and structures of organizations — large and small—that seem to be driven by this extraordinary transformation in consciousness occurring around the world. (Forward by Ken Wilber) ... None of the recent advances in human history would have been possible without organizations as vehicles for human collaboration. The current way we run organizations has been stretched to its limits, leaving us disillusioned by organizational life. For people at the bottom of the pyramids work is more often than not, dread and drudgery, not passion or purpose. That Dilbert cartoons have become cultural icons says much about how organizations make work miserable and pointless. Life at the top of the pyramids isn’t much more fulfilling. Powerful corporate leaders experience quiet suffering too. Their frantic activity is often a cover up for a deep inner sense of emptiness. Power games, politics, and infighting take their toll on everybody. At both the top and bottom, organizations (have become) playfields for unfulfilling pursuits of our egos. Survey after survey shows that a majority of employees feel disengaged from their companies. The epidemic of organizational disillusionment goes way beyond Corporate America; teachers, doctors, and nurses are leaving their professions in record numbers because the way we run schools and hospitals kills their vocation. Government agencies and nonprofits have a noble purpose, but working for these entities often feels soulless and lifeless just the same. All these organizations suffer from power games played at the top and powerlessness at lower levels, from infighting and bureaucracy, from endless meetings and a never-ending succession of change and cost-cutting programs. We long for soulful workplaces, for authenticity, community, passion, and purpose. Enlightened Management is not enough. In most cases, the system beats the individual. (As) managers and leaders go through an inner transformation, they often leave their organizations because they no longer will put up with a place that is inhospitable to the deeper longings of their souls. We need more enlightened leaders, but we need also enlightened organizational structures and practices. “Laloux confirms the absolutely critical role of leaders of TEAL organizations, despite these organization’s self-managing nature. Even if the management team, or the CEO are no longer the sole source of decision-making, their role is critical to create and maintain a “space of development” and to role-model the new culture and practices! In the words of Otto Scharmer (Theory U): "The quality of results produced by any system depends on the quality of awareness from which people in the system operate". Laloux confirms this statement to be valid also for organizations operating at Teal Consciousness. In this groundbreaking book, the author shows that every time humanity has shifted to a new stage of consciousness, it has invented a whole new way of structuring and running organizations, each time bringing extraordinary, breakthroughs in collaboration. A new shift in consciousness is currently underway. Could it help us invent a radically more soulful and purposeful way to run our businesses and nonprofits, schools and hospitals? The pioneering organizations researched for this book have already "cracked the code." Their founders have fundamentally questioned every aspect of management and have come up with entirely new organizational methods. Though they operate in very different industries and geographies and did not know of each other's experiments, the structures and practices they have developed are remarkably similar. It's hard not to get excited about this finding; a new organizational model seems to be emerging, and it promises a soulful revolution in the workplace. In terms of its structure, the defining characteristics of a Teal organization includes self-organized teams, no executive team meetings, radically simplified project management, most staff functions performed by team members themselves, interviews of job candidates focused on "fit" with values and purpose, significant training in relational skills and company culture, personal freedom with authority as well as responsibility, no job titles, individual purpose being compatible with organizational purpose, candid discussion of work/life issues and commitments, focus on team performance, self-set compensation with peer calibration of base pay, no promotions but fluid rearrangement of duties and responsibilities, and dismissal only as the very last step in mediated conflict resolution. Reinventing Organizations" describes in practical detail how organizations large and small can operate in this new paradigm. Leaders, founders, coaches, and consultants will find this work a joyful handbook, full of insights, examples, and inspiring stories. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ *Why Self-Management Will Soon Replace Management* Huffingtonpost.com, 7/16/2014 When I was doing the research for my book, Igniting the Invisible Tribe <http://invisibletribebook.com/>, I stumbled across an article by Gary Hamel called "First, Let's Fire All The Managers." Released by Harvard Business Review in December of 2011 about a California-based tomato processing company called Morning Star, I found the idea of an organization "self-managing" itself to be fascinating, compelling -- and frankly, confusing as hell. How in the world could an organization work without leaders!? It seemed absurd. But it clearly ... wasn't. Morning Star was apparently a very successful organization where hundreds (in peak-tomato season, thousands) of people work. They're the world's largest tomato processor; or in other words, you've almost certainly eaten their product. They claim revenues over $700 million per year. And they've been working this way for over two decades. What's going on here? Perhaps more importantly, if traditional "management" is as grossly inefficient as Hamel suggests in the above-mentioned article, why hasn't self-management caught on? Here are three reasons why "self-management" principles haven't yet taken hold as a viable organizational structure ... and why they will, (very) soon. *1) We don't think of self-management as an actual "structure."* When we think of organizational design, most of us think of top-down hierarchy. In fact, we've been so completely saturated with this idea that when it comes to organizing an organization, many of us can't begin to picture anything besides something that looks like some version of a typical pyramid structure. What we don't realize is that, for the most part, the entire universe is self-organizing. The natural world all around us reflects self-management! As Chris Rufer, the founder of Morning Star, stated in Hamel's article: "Clouds form and then go away because atmospheric conditions, temperatures, and humidity cause molecules of water to either condense or vaporize." The natural world around us constantly adapts and responds to what it needs in order to function. Why couldn't our organizations do this, too? While a self-managed organization does contain a definite structure, comparing it to a traditional organization is like comparing a tomb for ancient pharaohs with a cloud in the sky. Both entities were created by a certain set of rules, but the instruction manuals are quite different. In self-management, the "structures" are generally sets of principles that elicit (or prohibit) certain kinds of behaviors. At Morning Star, for example, the entire organization is built on two principles: 1) No one has power or coercion over anyone else, and 2) People must keep their commitments to each other. There are other rules, of course, but with very little imagination one can see how a foundational adoption of even just these two principles would drastically reshape the mindset of a traditional organization. As our companies respond to the increasing speed of the marketplace, we're finding the bureaucracy that comes with a top-down hierarchy somehow more burdensome than it used to be. Our daily work continues to expand in complexity, and in response we are asked to think more creatively in order to boost innovation, but our organizations actually seem to stifle the very behaviors we're being asked to perform! We need to find a way to get the organization out of the way of the work, and self-management principles amplify this ability dramatically. *2) We think this idea is new and hasn't been proven to work.* Thousands of years of evolutionary biology has taught us to be wary of change. We're wired to flag differences in our environment as potentially harmful and life threatening, and by default we put things like "new organizational structures" in this category. While this gut response was quite helpful to prevent us from being eaten by a saber-toothed tiger, it's not so helpful when it's actually our current environment that's killing us. Study upon study is showing how the way we're working isn't working very well <http://workrevolution.org/>, and that we need an organizational renaissance at a deep and systemic level. We may think that the principles of self-management are newfangled and untested, simply because the majority of organizations we've experienced haven't used them. In his new book, Reinventing Organizations (along with a fantastic article <http://www.self-managementinstitute.org/misperceptions-of-self-management> for the Self-Management Institute), author Frederic Laloux clearly shows how wrong this misconception is. Providing organizational examples like W. L. Gore, Whole Foods, Wikipedia, Patagonia, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and Alcoholics Anonymous, it's clear that self-organizing organizations have been practicing these approaches for decades -- and they continue to be tremendously successful to this day. Furthermore, YOU may be the best example of why this idea is actually much more proven than we think. After all, how do you know who to date or who to marry? Who tells you when to have a baby or start a family? How in the world do you function in your life without a manager? It turns out, *you've been proving self-management ideas to be quite successful for as long as you've been alive*. *3) We're terrified of the idea of an organization without managers/leaders.* This is a completely justified fear, by the way. I have been a student of leadership for many years, and decades of research have proven time and again how crucial the role of a good manager/leader is. So how do self-managed organizations function without them? Recently, I interviewed Doug Kirkpatrick from the Morning Star Self-Management Institute live on stage <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kp7N-gJ7Ab0>. In my opening, I referenced Gary Hamel's article and, to Doug, said something like, "So now in Morning Star there are no managers whatsoever; tell us how you got to this place." He immediately corrected me: "There are managers; *every single individual in the enterprise is a manager*." So, how do organizations function without leaders? The short answer: they don't. The difference is that in self-managed organizations, *people are never "made" leaders by someone else. Instead, they've simply decided to lead*. Things like credibility and influence and the ability to make a good argument -- in general, doing the things that are actually worth following -- are what leaders are made of in these companies. For our organizations to thrive in the emerging economy, a mechanism that allows the best idea to win is vital. *The political games and the posturing that happens within our current organizations aren't creating any real value -- they're not improving the customer's life in any way*. Our organizations must find ways to encourage more true leadership behaviors, and a self-managed approach is one of the most powerful ways to promote them. This post is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post and Great Work Cultures. The latter is creating a new norm of work cultures that optimize worker effectiveness and human happiness. On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 6:58 PM, James Wiegel via Dialogue < dialogue@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
What a sweet word to arrive in the early morning. And a great story, Terry. We had a chance to visit with David Zahrt as the climate march came through Arizona. He talked about always wanting to do something about what was going on in the world and being frustrated how to move. He said, when he got to Chicago, to the Institutes, he found a structure to work in. Several of us have been studying a book, REINVENTING ORGANIZATIONS, that paints a picture, based on examples from different places in the world, of how an organization / institution might be STRUCTURED (even legally) to carry out similar values and insights to those you mentioned. The lines below emphasize your concern for the institution . .
For thousands and thousands of years, people have lived on the brink of famine and in fear of plagues, always at the mercy of a drought or a simple flu. Then suddenly, almost out of nowhere, modernity has brought us unprecedented wealth and life expectancy in the last two centuries. And all this extraordinary progress has come not from individuals acting alone, but from people collaborating in organizations.
Wiegel
I feel sorry for people who don't have dogs. I hear they have to pick up their own food if they drop it on the floor. (Found on Facebook)
James F. Wiegel
401 North Beverly Way, Tolleson, Arizona 85353 Tel. 011-623-936-8671 or 011-623-363-3277 jfwiegel@yahoo.com <marilyn.oyler@gmail.com> www.partnersinparticipation.com
Upcoming public course opportunities: ToP® Facilitation Methods: Sep 9-10, Nov 18-19, 2014 Click to watch video <http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=48>. ToP® Strategic Planning: Oct 7-8, 2014 Click to learn more <http://partnersinparticipation.com/?page_id=50>. Facilitation Mastery: The Mastering the Technology of Participation program begins in Oakland on Nov 12-14, 2014 Click to watch video <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cz3mniiYCdI>. For online registration go to http://www.top-training.net The AZ ToP® Community of Practice meets the 1st Friday, 1-4 pm, starting again on Sept 5th at ACYR, 648 N. 5th Avenue, Phoenix, AZ 85003 <https://www.google.com/maps/place/648+N+5th+Ave/@33.456329,-112.080545,16z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x872b123a5312512d:0x93c9f71171108956?hl=> AICP Planners: 14.5 CM for all ToP® courses
On Aug 5, 2014, at 2:33, Terry Bergdall via Dialogue < dialogue@lists.wedgeblade.net> wrote:
At my initiative last May, I informed the ICA-USA Board of Directors that I thought it was time for them to begin the process of identifying my replacement as ICA’s executive officer. Since this listserv represents the community to which I feel accountable, it is appropriate that I share with you my thoughts about this decision. It also is my effort to answer questions that I suspect many people will have when they hear the news.
It was in early January 2007 when I was first presented with the idea of becoming Executive Director of ICA-USA. My initial response was strongly negative. I was enjoying the fruits of nearly 20 years, following the disbanding of the Order, as a successful independent consultant. I considered myself to be an eager and active player in expanding the reach and impact of the OE community, the “flowering of the Order” as some have called it, through a wide array of creative activities that were generally beyond its grasp when it was more tightly bound. Why give that up to wrestle with the problems, and potential drudgery, of institutional life?
Despite my initial “no,” a seed was planted and ideas about ICA’s future continued to grow within my imagination. The reason for embracing institutional challenges is because they have a way of outlasting us all. I wanted to ensure that the principles, perspectives, values, and wisdom that have motivated people during the past 50 years would continue to have a living home. This is manifest in new programs that give practical form to truths like: (1) everyone has gifts, assets, and capacities; (2) the external situation is never the problem; (2) people live out of images and when images change, behavior changes; (4) an emphasis on cultural dimensions of the social process is the key to addressing economic and political contradictions. My passion was, and is, to ensure these points, and others like them, are embedded in the institutional fabric of an organization that will continue beyond my lifetime. The vision, therefore, is ICA as a branded vessel for profound insights that inspire people to action.
My commitment when I took this job involved three objectives: create innovative new programs built upon the legacy of ICA’s past while addressing new realities, obtain economic stability, and to pass on the organization to new leadership looking toward the next 50 years. I feel very good these days about the dynamic programs for which ICA-USA enjoys a growing high-profile reputation -- the neighborhood work with “Accelerate 77,” the emergence of the “GreenRise Learning Laboratory” at 4750, leadership development of university students through contextual education and civic engagement, and the spreading of ToP facilitation methods throughout the country. ICA’s international connectedness is a powerful feature of its work. Economic stability remains an elusive objective requiring constant diligence but is never reason for inaction. Based on all of the above, I believe now is the right time to enable a successful transition to new leadership from among those who are attracted to ICA’s underlying purpose and in-depth programs.
To that end, I will post information very soon from the ICA-USA Board of Directors about the succession process to appoint a new CEO.
_______________________________________________ Dialogue mailing list Dialogue@lists.wedgeblade.net http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/dialogue-wedgeblade.net
_______________________________________________ Dialogue mailing list Dialogue@lists.wedgeblade.net http://lists.wedgeblade.net/listinfo.cgi/dialogue-wedgeblade.net
-- *Gail West, ICA* *3F, No. 12, Lane 5, Tien Mou W RdTaipei, Taiwan 111Ph) 8862) 2871-3150* email) icataiw@gmail.com Skype) gwestica www.icatw.com