Going Teal? Differentiate and Integrate Organizational and Personal Transformation
Part 1: An Introduction to Evolution at Work’s Language of Spaces
Okay, so you’ve read Frederic Laloux’s ground-breaking book, Reinventing Organizations. You’ve researched the movement to self-organization influenced by Holacracy, Responsive.org, Agile and others, and you’re super inspired to dump traditional ways of organizing and…“Go Teal!” And by doing so, your organization will be liberated and transformed into a utopian community, chock full of abudant creativity, with renewed meaning and purpose that contributes to overall human, ecological, and economic flourishing.
Awesome. Go for it!
Whether you are beginning your journey or already on your way, I’d like to offer you one very important tip from seasoned self-organizing practitioners at Evolution at Work that will help you make the ongoing shift into self-organization (i.e. Teal) less painful and more graceful.
Differentiate and integrate organizational and personal transformation.
The distinction between the personal and the organizational is paramount to self-organization success. It’s a paradigm shift that demands a new approach to development that continuously differentiates and integrates organizational and personal growth in a balanced way, enabling an overall natural evolution.
Self-organization is, essentially, the act of emulating a living organism that continuously adapts to its environment and circumstances through sensing and responding.
Nature is the metaphor. Evolution is the process.
Everything in nature inherently knows its essence and purpose and therefore behaves accordingly and evolves at the required pace. However, in an organization operating as a living organism, the parts of the organism are roles, energized by people, who, unique to everything else in nature, have a psyche that plays a very significant role in how people behave.
An important distinction here is that the organization is a requisite structure to self-organize the work in service of its purpose. People energize the roles in the structure, thus bringing life to the organization by becoming sensors for the organization.
They ARE NOT the roles. They take on these roles.
They ARE NOT the organization. They energize the organization.
This paradigm shift creates a tremendous amount of anxiety and tension within people who are energizing roles in an organization and have not yet had the necessity to fully develop capacities required to thrive in a self-organizing context. Unfortunately this, all-to-often, dismantles the journey to self-organization.
What these organizations are attempting is not to update one particular management practice, but to change the very foundation of their management. And that requires a different perspective, a different worldview. Some people are instantly turned on, but for others the organizational transformation implies a real, deep journey of personal reassessment and growth. — Frederic Laloux
Inner Challenges of Self-Organization
When organizations move from traditional ways of organizing work to self-organization, people inevitably experience new tensions that didn’t previously exist.
Self-organization is liberating for the organization and for the people, and while there are very helpful practices like Holacracy for organizations that are on this journey, the people that work within the organization are often left without the internal tools to navigate the new tensions with clarity and compassion.
This particular focus on assisting people and organizations on the journey of self-organizing is the context and purpose of Evolution at Work’s Language of Spaces framework.
Language of Spaces Framework
Evolution at Work has designed the Language of Spaces framework to help people become able for complexity within self-organization. The framework focuses on four core capacities that are essential to navigating and thriving in this new way of being:
- Differentiation and Integration —The foundational capacity of understanding the value and necessity to differentiate and integrate the organizational and the personal.
- Self Realization — Fully stepping into who you are and your authentic power and inviting others to do the same.
- Purpose Alignment — The consciousness of one’s own individual purpose in resonance and in proximity with the organizational purpose.
- Inner Leadership — Becoming aware, listening, trusting, and acting on the voice of our inner wisdom.
These capacities have been identified by Evolution at Work’s seasoned practitioners as foundational to successfully operating within self-organization. They’ve designed the Language of Spaces framework to ultimately strengthen the overall capacity to focus on both the organization and the personal in a balanced way — differentiated, to then be integrated — emulating the natural process of evolution.
I’ll be creating a series of posts going deeper into each of the capacities, so be sure to subscribe to the Evolution at Work medium publication to be notified when those are published.
Evolution at Work facilitates workshops and training on the four core capacities through one-on-one coaching, single or multi-day public or in-house workshops, and is launching a Language of Spaces Certification program in January 2019.
If you or your organization are on the journey to self-organization and would like to inquire about learning Language of Spaces, please let us know at mail@evolutionatwork.org or simply comment below.
