"Discovering the organizations of the future" Frederic Lalu. Frédéric Laloux: Discovering the Organizations of the Future

A fundamentally new look at the development of organizations that will help you move to the next level of development and build a conscious and integral company of the future.

Most books on organizational development are written for those who want to master the secrets of winning markets, getting ahead of the competition, and increasing profits. They give advice on how to play the game more successfully within the current management paradigm. But the way we are used to managing is hopelessly outdated. And this book was created as a guide for leaders who feel that something is missing in the usual style of leadership, that something needs to be changed, and they want to figure it out.

In the first part of the book, the author offers a broad historical overview of the evolution of organizational paradigms. It explains that every time humanity aspires to a new level of consciousness, it invents a fundamentally more productive organizational model. Are we witnessing this decisive phase today? Are we ready for such a leap?

The second part of the book is a guide to action. Using the example of real organizations (for-profit and non-profit, schools and hospitals), this section describes how to organize work in a new way, with attention to people. On what principles are these organizations built, and how do they work from day to day?

The third part considers the necessary conditions for the successful development of organizations. What does it take for an organization to start working on this new model? Is it possible to transform existing organizations? If so, how? And what can you ultimately expect?

From the preface

The way we try to solve the current problems of organizations often exacerbates them, not fixes them. Most organizations go through many stages of reorganization, centralization and decentralization, through the introduction of new information technologies, new tasks, and the announcement of new “missions”. However, one gets the impression that the existing way of managing organizations has practically exhausted itself, and all these traditional recipes often turn out to be part of the problem, and not its solution.

We are striving for something more, for fundamentally new and better ways of organizing people to work together. But is this really possible or is it just a pipe dream? If, after all, organizations that can more fully reveal the potential of a person can be created, then what should they look like? How to breathe life into them? These are the questions at the heart of this book.

For me, these questions are not just theoretical, but also quite practical interest. More and more people are striving to create truly spiritual organizations. The catch is that we don't quite understand how to do this. Many of us no longer need to be convinced of the urgent need to renew companies, businesses, schools and hospitals. All we need is faith that it is possible and answers to very specific questions. The hierarchical pyramid is already perceived as something outdated, but how can it be replaced? How to make decisions? It’s good to have everyone involved in making important decisions, not just the bosses, but won’t this lead to chaos? What about promotions and salary increases?

Is it possible to solve these issues without intrigues and politicking? How do you run meetings in a way that is productive and uplifts the participants? How can we ensure that we speak sincerely in meetings, and not be driven only by selfish motives? How can we be guided by the most important goal in everything that we do and at the same time not give free rein to the cynicism that the pompous "missions" of many companies often sin? We don't need some grand concept of a new kind of organization. We need concrete answers to the many questions that arise.

Who is this book for?

For business owners, executives, coaches, consultants, students and anyone interested in management and organizational development.

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Frederic Laloux

Reinventing Organizations

A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness

Scientific editor Evgeny Golub

Published with permission from Frederic Laloux and Johannes Terwitte

Legal support for the publishing house is provided by Vegas Lex law firm.

© Frederic Laloux, 2014

© Translation into Russian, edition in Russian, design. LLC "Mann, Ivanov and Ferber", 2016

* * *

This book is well complemented by:

Why some companies make breakthroughs and others don't

Jim Collins, Morten Hansen

How to effectively manage change in society, business and personal life

Itzhak Adizes

Science editor's preface

I bought Frederic Lalu's book Reinventing Organizations a little over a year ago. Downloaded to Kindle and went to the airport. The plane took off, and I leisurely began to read, not expecting any revelations from the author. After two hours, I realized that I would do everything in my power to get this book published in Russian.

For twenty years I have climbed the winding career ladder of the largest international companies. The rules of a business visit by a sales representative and the list of values ​​of the Mars company will forever remain in my memory. My immunity to corporate mythology has been tempered by my five years on the board of directors at Danone. I know hundreds of successful corporate managers from the world's most innovative companies. We've devoured tankers of coffee comparing our experiences, and this experience, alas, paints the same bleak picture.

Corporations put potential candidates through an elaborate selection process that takes weeks and months. Huge amounts of money are spent on training promising employees. As a result, these talented and well-trained people will spend most of their time simulating meaningful activities. The vast intellectual resource of nations is now busy inventing reasons why sales targets are not met (or exceeded). The geniuses of combinatorics advocate brilliant versions of budgets, fit only for virtuoso splurge in the eyes of shareholders. Born leaders expend megawatts of charisma to get their teams to believe in the reach and necessity of obvious nonsense.

Are we doomed to humbly accept this everyday mockery of common sense? How long will consumers pay for a performance in this theater of the absurd? After all, is there really no other way to organize the large-scale production and distribution of necessary goods and services?

Many researchers undertook to answer these damned questions. The books on organizational culture that I have come across so far have mostly fallen into two conventional genres:

Science fiction - a description of the structure of the "correct" corporation and a collection of magic recipes for turning any company into a "correct" one;

Satire is a mocking description of the hopelessness of life in a corporation, plus a set of myths about how to find yourself in downshifting, startup or freelancing.

In practice, magic recipes, instead of the desired increase in the "involvement" of employees, only increase the degree of their cynicism, and the authors of satirical essays offer nothing but bile.

The book you now hold in your hands belongs to a completely different genre. This is a practical guide to creating organizations of the future - organizations fed by the inexhaustible creative energy of a Human being engaged in labor filled with Meaning.

After many years as a McKinsey consultant, Frédéric Laloux decided to get serious about finding and systematically exploring alternative ways to manage companies. For three years, with all the thoroughness of a professional consultant, he studied examples of outstanding organizations of our time, analyzing their development from the standpoint of existing theories of the evolution of organizational culture.

As a result of painstaking work, Lalu, like a natural scientist, discovered a new kind of organization. He compares these organizations with “aliens from other worlds”, their culture and principles are so different from what we are used to. Over the past decades, these aliens have begun to quietly appear on different continents in a variety of industries: from engineering and food production to medical care and school education. They have managed to not only succeed in what has become Meaning for employees and founders, they achieve incredible results where, it would seem, nothing can be improved.

The founders of the organizations studied in the book did not know each other. However, their views and values ​​surprisingly coincide and can be presented as a special type of worldview. Frederic details how this worldview transforms the way we know how to manage. From a detailed description of everyday management practices and organizational processes, it becomes clear that it is impossible to enter the next round of organizational development with the help of declarations of values. Magic works only if you have managed to grow into the full height of human dignity. You can't pretend to be "different", but you can become.

The author of the book calls the special worldview of the founders of the Turquoise organizations the main component of success. These organizations, like good messengers from our future, are encouraging: humanity is able to overcome the threatening contradiction between the desperate need of modern man for Meaning and that ersatz of meanings that the dominant control systems based on the fears of the oppressed ego can offer.

This book was published in English in early 2014 as a PDF file on the website www.reinventingorganizations.com, which Frederick made up on his own. Since then, thanks to the efforts of thousands of grateful readers, it has been published in many languages ​​and has become one of the most talked about books on organizational culture around the world.

I am proud to have helped expedite the publication of this book in Russian, and I believe that Frederic will be able to inspire you as he inspired me.

Evgeny Golub

Introduction
Formation of a new organizational model

Nothing can be changed by fighting the existing reality. To change something, create a new model that will make the existing one hopelessly obsolete.

Richard Buckminster Fuller

In 350 BC. e. the great Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle, in one of his fundamental works, stated that women have fewer teeth than men. Today we know very well that this is nonsense. But for almost two thousand years the Western world considered this statement to be an unshakable truth, until one fine day someone was visited by a frankly revolutionary thought: let's count!

The scientific method of hypothesizing and then testing is so deeply rooted in modern thinking that it's hard for us to imagine how anyone could trust authority to such an extent and not test it. Weren't people in the past as intelligent as we are now? However, before we strictly condemn our ancestors, let us ask ourselves the question: will future generations not make fun of us in the same way? Haven't we also been captured by a simplified approach to understanding the world?

There is every reason to believe that this is so. For example, let me ask a simple question: how many m O zgov in a person? I guess the answer is: one (or, suspecting a trick, you will say two, meaning the right and left hemispheres). According to the available data, the correct answer is three. First, of course, a large brain, but secondly, a small brain in the heart, and thirdly, another one in the digestive tract. The last two are much smaller than the first, yet they are completely autonomous systems.

And here the most interesting begins. The brain in the heart and the brain in the gut are relatively recent discoveries, although surveillance technologies have been able to detect them much earlier. All you need to see them is a corpse, a knife and a simple microscope. Actually, the brain in the digestive system discovered quite a long time ago, in the 1860s, by the German physician Auerbach. The discovery was further confirmed by two of his English colleagues Bayliss and Starling. And then something out of the ordinary happened: in medical circles, for some reason, they forgot about the brain in the intestine. He disappeared from sight for a century! And it was rediscovered only in the late 1990s. American neurogastroenterologist Michael Gershon.

How could this be forgotten in medical circles? I believe this is due to the peculiarities of the modern worldview: in a hierarchical picture of the world, only one brain can control everything. Likewise, there should be only one boss at the head of any organization. In everyday life, the expressions “understand with the heart” and “feel with the gut” have long been used. But it is impossible to imagine the coordinated work of three autonomous O zgov, based on the need for hierarchy in the world. And it may not be a coincidence that the other two brains were (re)discovered just as the Internet became the dominant force in our lives. The age of the Internet has accelerated the emergence of a new picture of the world in which distributed control is provided instead of a top-down hierarchy. Having accepted such a picture of the world, we will also accept the idea that we have not one brain, but several, and all work together.

It is difficult for us to understand how people in the Middle Ages could believe Aristotle's claims that women have fewer teeth than men. At the same time, we ourselves can become hostages of our own ideas - just like our ancestors. Modern scientists have not looked into the microscope because "only one brain is possible"; in the same way, Galileo's contemporaries refused to look through a telescope, because it is inconceivable that our God-created planet would not be the center of the universe.

Limitations of modern organizational models

The subject of my research is organizations and teamwork, not medicine and astronomy. But the essence of the question does not fundamentally change: is it possible that our ideas about organizations are limited to the current worldview? Can we create a more productive, more meaningful, more human process of working together if we just change our mindset?

The question is rather strange. It can be perceived as a manifestation of ingratitude towards what has already been achieved. For thousands and thousands of years, people lived on the brink of starvation, in fear of epidemics, in the full power of drought and even the common cold. And then, for no apparent reason, in two centuries we gained unprecedented wealth and previously unattainable life expectancy. Exceptional progress has occurred not as a result of the efforts of individuals, but as a result of the joint work of people in organizations.

Large and small businesses in the West, in a market economy, have created previously unthinkable wealth, and now they are lifting millions of people out of poverty in India, China, Africa, everywhere in the world. We have built incredibly complex supply chains that increasingly connect everyone to everyone and thereby strengthen peace among peoples better than any political mechanism.

A dense network of organizations - research centers, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, medical schools, health insurance companies - weaves into a highly complex healthcare system, unimaginable even a hundred years ago. Over the past century, thanks to this extensive network, life expectancy in the United States has increased by almost 20 years. Child mortality has been reduced by 90% and maternal mortality by 99%. Such eternal scourges of the human race as polio, leprosy, smallpox and tuberculosis, even in the poorest countries of the world, for the most part, are found only in history books.

In education, a network of educational institutions—primary and secondary schools, colleges, graduate schools, and graduate schools—has given millions of children and young people an education that was once the privilege of a few. Never before in human history have there been free public education systems available to every child. The highest level of universal literacy today taken for granted is without precedent in history.

Over the past decades, non-profit organizations around the world have been creating jobs at an accelerated pace, far ahead of commercial enterprises in this direction. An increasing number of people are giving their time, energy and money to what is important to them personally and to the world.

The modern principle of organization has caused the sensational progress of mankind in less than two centuries - one moment in the history of the development of our biological species. None of the latest achievements in the history of mankind would be possible without organizations as forms of cooperation. However, now many feel that the current method of management has practically exhausted itself. We are becoming more and more disillusioned with the way modern organizations work and function. Numerous surveys consistently show that for those who work at the foot of the pyramid, work is more often associated with oppressive fear and dull routine than with a thirst for creativity and meaningfulness. The Dilbert comics have become a significant cultural phenomenon and can tell a lot about how far organizations go to make collective work something pathetic and pointless.

And this applies not only to the foot of the pyramid. There's a shameful secret that I've discovered in fifteen years as a consultant and coach to executives: life at the top of the pyramid is hardly more fulfilling. Behind the beautiful facade and the bravado of the leaders of powerful corporations lies the same silent suffering. Often feverish activity is an unsuccessful attempt to hide deep inner disappointment. Muscle-flexing, intrigue, and intra-corporate strife eventually take their toll on everyone. Organizations most often become arenas for the struggle of our "egos", indifferent to the deepest aspirations of humanity.

Intuitively, we feel that management is outdated. We see that its traditions and established order look ridiculous in the 21st century. Therefore, from the dense characters of the Dilbert comics or episodes from the TV series The Office, we immediately cringe.

Those who work in government agencies and non-profit organizations are also often unenthusiastic about their work. Even those who work by vocation are not immune from disappointment. Teachers, doctors and nurses are abandoning their calling en masse. Our schools, unfortunately, for the most part are soulless machines where students and teachers go for the sake of appearances. And we have turned hospitals into cold, bureaucratic institutions, where doctors and nurses are deprived of the opportunity to show their heartfelt concern for patients.

Questions that prompted the author to research

The current ways of dealing with organizations' current problems often exacerbate rather than solve them. Most organizations, blazing sophisticated ways of material incentives, go through many rounds of reorganization, centralization and decentralization, through the introduction of new information technologies, the announcement of new tasks and new systems of key indicators. But the impression that the existing way of managing has practically exhausted itself is growing, and all the traditional recipes are often part of the problem, not the solution.

We strive for something more, for fundamentally new and better ways of organizing collaboration. But is this really possible or is it a pipe dream? If organizations in which the potential of an employee will be fully revealed can still be created, then what should they look like? How to breathe life into them? These are the questions at the heart of this book.

For me, they are of not only theoretical, but also quite practical interest. More and more people are striving to create organizations based on humanity. The catch is that we don't quite understand how to do this. Many of us no longer need to be convinced of the urgent need to renew companies, businesses, schools and hospitals. All we need is faith that this is possible and answers to very specific questions. The hierarchical pyramid is already perceived as something outdated, but what can replace it? How to make decisions? It's good to have everyone involved in making important decisions, not just the bosses, but won't that lead to chaos? What about promotions and salary increases? Is it possible to solve these issues without intrigues and politicking? How do you run meetings in a way that is productive and uplifts the participants? How can we ensure that in meetings we speak sincerely, and not only guided by selfish motives? How can we be guided by the most important purpose in everything we do, and at the same time not give free rein to the cynicism that often permeates the pompous programs of many companies? We don't need some grand concept of a new kind of organization. We need concrete answers to the many questions that arise.

The greatest danger in times of instability is not instability itself, but actions in accordance with the logic of yesterday.

Peter Drucker

Such a practical approach does not at all prevent taking into account possible global social and environmental consequences. Planet Earth is no longer capable of sustaining the way we do business. Our organizations are to a large extent responsible for the depletion of natural resources, the destruction of ecosystems, climate change, the merciless exploitation of water resources and invaluable topsoil. We play dangerous and adventurous games with the future, hoping that with the help of new technologies we can heal the wounds that modernity continues to inflict on the planet. An economic model focused on unbridled growth with limited resources is fraught with disaster.

The current financial crisis may be just one of the first shocks that herald the coming powerful earthquake. It is no exaggeration to say that the very survival of many species, ecosystems, and all of humanity depends on our ability to rise to a higher form of consciousness, to learn to cooperate at a new level, to begin to improve our relations with the outside world and reduce the harm we have already caused.

The Evolution of Organizations in Historical Perspective (Part I)

Einstein owns the assertion that no problem can be solved at the level of consciousness at which it arises. Perhaps we need to reach a new level of consciousness, come to a new worldview, in order to reinvent the principles of organizing the joint work of people. For some, the idea that society can change the worldview and create a fundamentally new type of organization with the help of a new worldview will seem ridiculous. Nevertheless, in the history of mankind, everything happened just like that, and today there are all signs that another change in the way of thinking, as well as in the organizational model, is just around the corner.

Many scientists, including psychologists, philosophers and anthropologists, have analyzed the development of human consciousness. They found that in the entire history of mankind, which is approximately 100 thousand years old, we have successively passed through a series of stages. At each, we made a grand leap forward in the ability to deal with the outside world - in terms of knowledge, morality and psychology. But there is one important aspect that researchers have so far overlooked: every time humanity has risen to a new level, it has invented a new way of cooperation, a new model of organization.

The first part of the book will discuss how the consciousness of mankind has evolved and how at each stage we have invented new organizational models (these successively replacing each other models are relevant to this day, so the proposed historical overview will help to understand the various types of modern organizations and the essence of today's organization). controversy about the principles of governance).

Specialists in the field of developmental psychology have a lot to tell about the next stage in the development of human consciousness, the transition to which has just begun. At this stage, we curb selfishness and begin the search for more original, healthy and holistic forms of being. Judging by the experience of past generations, as we ascend to the next level of consciousness, we will develop an appropriate model of organization.

. “Males have more teeth than females, and in humans, and in sheep, and goats ...” (Aristotle, History of Animals, book 2, chapter 3).

The nervous system in the heart and intestines has 40 million and 100 million neurons, respectively, compared to the 85 billion (on average) neurons in the brain.

Dilbert is the protagonist of Scott Adams comics about office life, about managers and organizations. Note. ed.

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Book by coach and facilitator Frederic Lalu “Discovering the Organizations of the Future” became an obvious sensation. It is about a real tectonic shift in understanding the internal organization of business structures. From the first pages of the book, your ideas about how to properly build a corporate structure begin to be questioned. At first you are discouraged, then you protest angrily, then you doubt, and then you want to know more about this form of organizing the joint work of people. At its core, the book is a transformative practice - after reading it, your life will never be the same. Therefore, in the first lines of this article, I strongly recommend that you, if you have not read it yet, read this book.

But Lalu, unknowingly or intentionally, is being disingenuous, describing the new approach as quite open to the public. I propose to consider some features of the "turquoise" organizations in applying this model to the Russian off-road.

Let's start with the fact that when the book was published, the word “teal” was translated without agreeing with the generally accepted terminology in the Russian-speaking integral community, which caused confusion. She, this confusion is already present, since both Ken Wilber and Don Beck use different colors to indicate the stages of deployment of the complexity of human systems. The history of this confusion is not interesting. In essence, of course, it is not so important what symbol to endow with such voluminous mental constructions, if you understand and appreciate what is behind the symbol more than this symbol itself. But disagreements still arise. Here is an illustration designed to minimize semantic loss:

According to Frederic Lalu's descriptions, his "turquoise" comes after the green, i.e. he is trying to describe yellow (in terms of Spiral Dynamics) organizations. But if you are well acquainted with this evolutionary approach to the development of human systems, then when reading the book, you will often come up with the idea that the relationships described in the "turquoise" organizations are more similar to those generated by a pluralistic form of values, seeking universal agreement, creating community, striving for a high degree of involvement of everyone in the implementation of something big and meaningful. Those. Frédéric Lalu's book deals with green organizations. But this does not detract from the merits of the book, which describes a radical paradigm shift in approaches to building a business.

Frederic Lalu cites the following principles for self-governing organizations in his book, referring to Gary Hamel:

• Nobody can ruin a good idea.
• Everyone can contribute.
• Everyone can become a leader.
• No one can dictate his will to others.
• You choose your business.
• You can easily build something of your own based on what others have done.
• You don't have to put up with bullies and tyrants.
• Agitators are not isolated.
• Perfection usually wins (but mediocrity does not).
• Inciting hatred will backfire on whoever does it.
• Great contribution to the cause receives recognition and fame

Based on these principles, you can independently infer the stage of thinking that gave rise to such principles.

It is customary to scold the green stage in the integral community, ironically over the culture of the new age and wishful thinking. However, let me offer you a point of view from which what is ironically called "green" is only a superficial ripple, an initial exalted form of spiritual euphoria, which has as little to do with a truly genuine pluralistic consciousness as myths about greedy, self-serving and short-sighted orange correspond to the real strength and depth of a rational, enlightened, inventive, self-sufficient modernity, or, for example, how a judgment about a righteous, honest, decent blue world order does not fit into the Procrustean bed of religious dogmatism and bureaucracy. Each string of the Spiral Dynamics carries with it its own special sound, coloring the culture with both harmonious and overly deliberate, discordant melodies.

True green is about mature, sensitive, sincere and responsible men and women who care.

True green is about mature, sensitive, sincere and responsible men and women who care. They found each other and united to fight for what we today consider the norm - for the right of women to vote, for the abolition of slavery, for the child's right to a family, education and more. Green is much more complicated than orange, something is available to green that orange cannot even think of, drawn into the framework of its external invulnerability, its ideas about personal viability, its constant striving for elusive success. Green is directly and ordinaryly happy inside deep involvement in a common cause, the tasks of which he considers to be significantly greater and deserving of attention than personal status fuss and demonstrative gloss. Green has great luxury, which for orange is not even considered as a criterion for happiness - green highly values ​​​​his right to be real: sincere and vulnerable, he no longer compares himself with others and walks light - he has thrown off the shackles of conforming to someone else's opinion.

Today, some tasks of the green have not yet been resolved or not completed. We have not yet learned to admire the beauty of political, spiritual-religious, national and gender differences between people, countries and cultures. Green thinking, encountering a boundary that makes such a distinction, often seeks to erase it in order to realize its desire for generality. We are seeing such a crisis of multiculturalism in Europe as a consequence of an unjustifiably generalized approach to human nature. Green, like all other stages of the first order, considers only its values ​​worthy of attention, it ignores or condemns everything that is not consistent with its ideas that, for example, trusting relationships between people are significantly more effective than control and coercion.

To understand the truly epochal significance of the innovations that Frederic Laloux describes in his book, it is important to keep in mind an adequate picture of green thinking, surprisingly holistic in its inconsistency. I repeat - we are talking about adults, feeling, sincere and responsible men and women who care. They are willing to work hard towards achieving their common goal, they are respectful to each other, they care, they are responsive and they, the key point, are self-organizing.

Approaching the question of what Frederic Lalu kept silent about, let's remember how MBA training programs came to Russia. “Organizations of the Future” bring green values ​​to us just as large-scale as MBAs brought orange values. Enthusiastically accepted at the very beginning, the MBA programs were soon subjected to justified criticism as unsuitable for domestic reality. But over time, when new formal methods and forms of work were put into practice, they accepted feedback and began to be taught differently. Most likely, the “organizations of the future” will have to go through similar stages.

Criticism of the MBA was built around the difference between American and domestic cultures, although it was really about the difference between orange and red-blue thinking. Yes, the business organized in the format of the first MBA courses works in America and does not work in Russia, because American companies employ people who can extract confident music from their orange strings, and Russian companies try to play orange music on red and blue strings are doomed to fail. Two factors have contributed to the fact that the MBA remains a successful business school: firstly, we have adapted the MBA to Russian reality and secondly, our Motherland has learned to give birth to its own orange “Platons and Newtons”.

Similarly, by implementing the organizational forms described in Frederic Lalu's book, we run the risk of getting a modern crisis of European multiculturalism within the domestic company, repeated on a smaller scale. Why? Because Frédéric Laloux's companies employ people who know how to extract confident music from their brand new green strings. Yes, of course, such companies that successfully operate on the market are possible in Russia today. But they must have a powerful green filter at the entrance and understandable forms of ousting from their ranks those employees who managed to deceive such a filter. And for the construction of such companies, a personal transformation of a leader is needed, who no longer considers people as tools for manipulation to achieve his goals. Yes… just a personal transformation…

And for the construction of such companies, a personal transformation of a leader is needed, who no longer considers people as tools for manipulation to achieve his goals. Yes… just a personal transformation…

What is Frederic Lalu silent about? His "organizations of the future" look monochromatic - their employees are hardworking, caring, sociable people who solve all their problems in specially designed deliberative formats. Even being integrally informed, he does not write about the fact that this almost never happens either on a personal, let alone social level. We are different, we are influenced by a lot of psychological, everyday, cultural and political circumstances. Perhaps, in order to inspire the reader, the author needed to generalize something. This, however, is permissible, it is only important to understand that we are reading the results of the real experience of real people who have gone through a difficult path for the sake of these results. Most likely, the leaders of the companies described in the book have the music of the yellow strings in their repertoire, using them to create the most effective human systems from the high quality “human material” available in Europe and North America. But still, these results look surprisingly monochrome - they are formulated in a relatively narrow value range - from ending orange through green to the initial yellow. This may be evidence of Frederic Laloux's persistent filter of perception - we receive through the book only what the author himself could notice. The organizations themselves described in the book can and most likely are much more complex and interesting.

There is another very important circumstance here. The fact is that the evolution of human systems is an inexorable and inevitable process. Business schools at one time performed and continue to perform a missionary task, teaching local “natives” not to eat their competitors, but to make a “win-win” situation with them - creating conditions for mutually beneficial partnerships. Frederic Lalu's book is one of the first signs of a new evolutionary wave that will create its own schools and teach businessmen to see maximizing profits not as an absolute goal, but as a means to achieve more significant goals. And then, perhaps, myriads of unemployed coaches, inspired by the life-giving beauty of eco-friendly communication, will finally have something to do. Imagine that in a year or two, the majority of employees in your company, having found something to their liking, do not show off in front of others, do not pull the blanket over themselves, are able to negotiate, care about the common cause, strive to resolve conflicts quickly, soberly evaluate their contribution, be fair to to yourself and to others. In a word, every employee of your company masterfully knows how and loves to play on the green string of his soul. Then the organizational principles described by Frederic Lalu will come in handy.

Indeed, trusting relationships within the human system can work wonders. People who no longer feel the need to report their actions “to the top” get a chance to discover in themselves a responsible attitude to their work. Lalu gives the following figures: “About a third of employees (35%) are actively involved in the work process. Far more people are indifferent to what they are doing or have actively distanced themselves from their work (43%). The remaining 22% did not feel any support from the leadership.” Involvement in a common cause may be the result of a trusting attitude of the owner of the company to employees and employees to each other. This can create the conditions for the dormant green strings of their souls to wake up and start playing their better music.

The involvement of the green stage can undoubtedly enrich the organizational structure of business structures. But the very idea of ​​building organizations in monochrome strikes me as flawed. It makes the company overly dependent on the only possible format of relationships, creating, in fact, greenhouse conditions within a closed system for the same type of music with just one string. Really yellow in terms of Spiral Dynamics can be an approach to creating management by values ​​in a company, when people with different outlooks on life find acceptable forms of work for themselves. This approach is referred to as natural business design. Unfortunately, it is difficult to describe it in the format of a short article. Spiral Dynamics, as a non-linear integral model, born of more complex thinking, is actually a tool for solving problems created at the green and other stages of first-order thinking. We are introducing a hierarchy of values, we are again drawing boundaries where green thinking has tried to create a utopian realm of benevolent caring friendliness.

Frédéric Lalu describes to us innovative, successful, strong and very interesting green organizations. He, however, wants to think that he is talking about yellow organizations, calling them turquoise in Russian translation.

Frédéric Lalu describes to us innovative, successful, strong and very interesting green organizations. He, however, wants to think that he is talking about yellow organizations, calling them turquoise in Russian translation. Regardless of this confusion, what he describes is amazing. This is really a new approach, a new corporate life, a new business culture. As for yellow, yellow can be precisely the approach to creating such a self-governing, living organization. Yellow thinking is multifaceted and not tied to value paradigms, it contributes to the natural self-organization of chaotic systems. It's hard for me to imagine a monochrome yellow system, rather it is about the governing principle of coordinating multidirectional vectors towards a single goal. I don't think, frankly, that a yellow monochrome business is possible. As a social phenomenon, business starts on red, blossoms on orange, and ends on green, which no longer perceives profit as an end in itself, but as a means to something more important. Yellow forms of work organization, project activities, can be assimilated within the orange and green paradigm, but I cannot imagine yellow business as such. Yellow has different tasks and a different structure, an order of magnitude larger. I repeat, in today's complex and fast-paced cultural and technological conditions, yellow can, and probably should be the principle of managing an organization - the principle of flexible, unattached, fearless, integrating thinking.

In conclusion, I would like to say that the creation of a new type of organization in our country, which Frederic Laloux describes in his book, can bring with it qualitative cultural changes. Moreover, in a certain sense, we can say that the mentality of people living in the post-Soviet space is based on an internal craving for sociable involvement. We do not ignore deep psychological issues, we still strive to help each other, it is internally easier for us to trust than to verify, we strive to “reach the very essence” in everything. Perhaps it is the Russian-speaking people who will have to say a very significant word in this part of world history.

Now no one really knows how to create such organizations either from scratch or as a result of transformations of existing classical hierarchies. We should expect the emergence of research communities of businessmen around the topic of organizations of the future. These will be communities of interested practitioners, not consultants. Participants will be able to join forces for collective analytical work on a particular company. These communities will not be burdened with massive spiritual baggage, but its members may have experience of certain contemplative practices. Neither religious, nor political, nor ideological, nor national, nor gender restrictions will be able to interfere with these communities - they feel the Procrustean bed a mile away. These communities will be united by the issue of creating human systems in which each individual will have the opportunity to develop their talents and virtues in the most natural way. Members of these communities will create the future – literally and immediately. I would be honored to work with them.

Today, the knowledge accumulated by mankind over many thousands of years has become available at a distance of a few clicks of a computer mouse. All cultures born by people, all value orientations are equally actively present in our now common information field, generating both destructive upheavals and surprisingly beautiful new forms of humanity. In the global space of semantic chaos, new ideas are born and die with amazing speed. This is how our thinking evolves. We live in a busy time, when entire epochs have time to change during the life of one generation. Therefore, we have been able to trace the laws of evolving thinking and can apply them in practice.

Elena Brovko

Summary of "Discovering the Organizations of the Future"
Elena Brovko

Books Briefly
This text is an abridged version of Discovering the Organizations of the Future. Only the most important: ideas, techniques, key quotes.

The leaders of the "turquoise" organizations took a chance and believed that their employees were not lazy and stupid, but purposeful and smart. They have removed the function of control and created an environment for self-management in their companies. The results show that this approach works. Details in our review. Sberbank President German Gref recommends this book for mandatory reading.

We remind you that this text is a summary of the book.

"Discovering the Organizations of the Future"

"Turquoise" worldview. What will organizations look like in the future?

The French foundry FAVI has no managers, no regulations, no budgets and no sales plans. Nobody keeps track of business hours. Employees themselves decide what order to fulfill and what salary to assign to themselves. In addition, they themselves plan purchases and recruit new employees themselves.

How long do you think the plant exists in this mode? Surprisingly, the company has been operating this way for many years and shows impressive results - this applies to high quality products, high wages, and low turnover. How do they do it?

Frédéric Laloux, a McKinsey consultant, wondered if it was possible to organize a business in such a way that employees were happy at work, so that they would live, and not just serve their working hours, dreaming of the moment when they could go home. He studied the activities of successful organizations - how they build teamwork, how they make life-changing decisions, how they resolve conflicts. As a result, a new type of organization was described - the author calls them the turquoise companies of the future.

The leaders of the "turquoise" organizations took a chance and believed that their employees were not lazy and stupid, but purposeful and smart. They have removed the function of control and created an environment for self-management in their companies. The results show that this approach works.

If you feel that something is missing in your usual leadership style and are wondering how you can change it, then this book is written for you. Here you will find the principles on which the work of "teal" organizations is based, as well as examples of companies that have already managed to put these principles into practice. Look into the future now!

The book was first published in 2014 in electronic form (www.reinventingorganizations.com), but in less than two years it was published in many languages ​​thanks to thousands of grateful readers. The Russian version was edited by science editor Evgeny Golub, head of the International Association of Facilitators in Ukraine.

Curriculum vitae

Frédéric Laloux is the author of the book and is a coach and facilitator with an MBA degree. For many years he worked as a consultant to McKinsey, where he had the status of a partner. Advises companies whose leaders are ready to switch to a fundamentally new business management model.

Evgeny Golub is the scientific editor of the Russian version of the book. Certified facilitator, entrepreneur. Worked in international companies Mars Inc. and Danone; today - consultant on the development of organizational culture and operational management, head of the International Association of Facilitators IAF in Ukraine.

So let's take a look at the companies of the future. There are a lot of questions and doubts here. But the idea is certainly interesting and deserves our attention.

Today, many understand that a rigid hierarchy is an outdated organizational structure model. However, the problem is that few know how to replace it. Of course, involving all employees in decision-making is an interesting idea. But how to avoid chaos and financial miscalculations? How to achieve sincerity and involvement from employees if they are used to selling their time to the employer, which means they are only really interested in money? How to get rid of bureaucracy and intrigue without losing the reins of government?

To believe that the "turquoise" organization is not a utopia, but an efficiently working business model, only examples of real companies that have already achieved impressive results allow. If they are based on the principles of self-organization and self-government, and at the same time things are going well, then this model has the right to exist.

But let's start from the beginning. To understand how the “turquoise” organization differs from any other company, Frederic Laloux identified seven levels of development of consciousness. They apply to individuals as well as entire communities.

SEVEN LEVELS OF WORLDVIEW

Level 1. INFRARED (reactive)

cave age. People live in small groups, they are not protected, the level of violence is high, the system of division of labor is primitive. There is no organization as such.

Level 2. PURPLE (magical)

People unite in large tribes and learn to coordinate efforts to solve complex problems. The reasons for many phenomena are not clear, so they believe in magic and rituals.

Level 3. RED (impulsive)

An organization appears - the leader and the rank and file. Authority is based on strength and fear, labor is divided (the most difficult work is done by slaves). A striking example of such a group is the mafia.

Level 4. AMBER (conformist)

The group has a strict hierarchy. Think at the top, execute at the bottom. Stability is valued, and change is scary. Outside the group are enemies. Examples are the army, state institutions.

Level 5. ORANGE (competitive)

The main thing is profit. The notion of “correct” is being replaced by the notion of “effective”. Status in the group depends on abilities (courier can grow to CEO). Everyone competes with everyone. Orange thinking has paved the way for entrepreneurship and innovation, it is inherent in large international corporations.

Level 6. GREEN (pluralistic)

The main thing for the group is harmony and good neighborliness. Its members share common values, and they have their own opinion and authority to solve their problems. The green approach is incompatible with hierarchy. It is difficult to implement this model, but there are examples: Southwest Airlines, Ben & Jerry`s ice cream manufacturer, The Container Stone chain of stores.

Level 7. TURQUOISE (evolutionary)

The main thing is self-realization and integrity. Success, wealth and other attributes of happiness are no longer an end in themselves. Life is a path that is important to follow without changing your inner rightness. The ultimate goal is to become a more accurate expression of yourself. Organizations are also living organisms that also strive for integrity and harmony.

Four paradigms that business has followed so far

Most business organizations operate according to the laws of one of the four stages - "red", "amber", "orange" and "green". Each of these organizational models at one time became another innovative discovery that allowed people to solve increasingly complex tasks.

Frédéric Lalu, author of a truly revolutionary book, Discovering the Organizations of the Future. What this book is about is not hard to guess. After all, for many years Lalu researched, studied and comprehensively considered the problem. In the end, he came to the conclusion that the existing management structure was not only morally obsolete, but in modern conditions has become unacceptable in principle. The author proposes a completely new solution. Step by step, he tells his reader what new organizations will be, built on completely new models. Here Lalu is already talking about integral, self-managed and evolutionary organizations of the future. Moreover, “organizations” means any real organizational structures, commercial and non-commercial.
Discovering the Organizations of the Future offers a fundamentally new perspective on organizational development that will allow you to move to a higher level of development and build a self-managed company of the future. At the same time, the author notes that both existing and newly created organizations can function according to the new development model.
The book consists of three parts, where the first gives a brief overview of the historical formation and development of most organizational models. Here Lalu analyzes in what time periods and why the transition from one stage to another took place.
The second part is a direct practical guide. Using the example of various organizations, it is told how it is possible to build work in a new way, paying maximum attention to people.
And the third part considers the necessary conditions, tools and methods for guaranteed effective development of organizations.
The book "Discovering the Organizations of the Future" will be of interest and undoubtedly useful to any entrepreneurs, managers, business coaches and consultants, as well as anyone who studies management and organizational development.

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