Companies without a hierarchical structure with the lyrical name "turquoise" are not a managerial utopia and not socialism in a single office. This is a new trend.

“I can come to work at any time, we don’t have bosses, only mentors. Therefore, it is convenient to combine work with your favorite hobby. It turns out that you are your own boss. Comfortable. I like it,” says Svetlana, field specialist of Tinkoff Bank. She moved to Tinkoff after office work and believes that she will not be able to return to the “classic” working atmosphere. “It seems to be fashionable now, but it doesn’t matter to me. As long as I feel comfortable, I work here,” she says. She has 12 more clients in the same area today.

4 eras of business management

The term "turquoise company" itself became popular after the publication of Federic Lalu's book "Discovering the Organizations of the Future". In it, Lalu divides existing business management systems into 4 "epochs":

• "Red" - a conservative management system, which rests on one leader, dictating the rules of work.

• "Orange" - a system common in corporations built on the principles of competition, reward and punishment. The strict hierarchy of the system does not cancel mobility up the career ladder and ideas from below.

• "Green" - a system in which the emphasis is not on the result and benefits, but on personal relationships within the group, which are more valuable than the result.

• "Turquoise" - a system that emerged from a mix of successful "orange" and failed "green" systems. Self-management, integrity and evolutionary purpose are the three main pillars of turquoise companies.

Your own boss

In Russia, the “turquoise” direction gained popularity after the idea of ​​such management was voiced by the head of Sberbank German Gref and even tried to introduce “turquoise” principles in several branches of the bank. However, the bank is in no hurry to share the results of such implementation.

Some companies built their business on "turquoise" principles even before the introduction of the term "turquoise" into the mass consciousness. For example, the network of children's developing centers "Baby Club" initially had a horizontal structure.

“Just when it became fashionable to be called “turquoise”, it turned out that we already are,” says Yuri Belonoshchenko, founder and head of the Baby Club. - Relationships were built according to the scheme not “manager - subordinate”, but “one team”, where everyone has their own areas of responsibility, and the rest support you in this. There are common goals and plans. There are strategic sessions where all employees discuss the plans and goals of the company, as well as each team player individually. Any member of the team can influence the decision. Everyone's opinion matters."

For other companies, "turquoise" management has become a convenient tool for solving problems with a decrease in the efficiency of employees with a concomitant increase in staff. For example, the Vkusvill company officially chose the “turquoise” path (the principles themselves, according to the leaders, were introduced from the very foundation of the company), when, against the backdrop of rapid business growth, it faced the problem of “blurring” job duties and responsibility for them. “When the management of a company realizes that their offspring has already grown out of a micro and perhaps even a small business, it suddenly turns out that profits have stopped growing at the same pace, or even started to decline altogether. By this time, the number of employees usually exceeds a hundred, and top management does not always know exactly what each of them is doing, ”recalls Valery Razgulyaev, information manager at Izbenka - Vkusvill.

If consultants are invited at this moment, they will offer to describe all job responsibilities, prescribe rules of interaction and monitor their implementation, Valery Razgulyaev is sure. “Unfortunately, formalization kills the last initiative of employees and often contributes to the dismissal of the best of them,” he said.

In the case of the Izbenka-Vkusvill company, the tool for solving this problem was the formation of promises from all employees of the company. “First, you need to get together with the core of the company and understand what the initial success and growth of the company was based on. And here it is very important to understand that all this was due to the fact that you were able to give your customers something that they really wanted to receive. And the best way to express it is in a promise you made to the client and then delivered on. Most likely it will turn out that the promise was a composite one, and it contains both adequate cost, and speed of response to requests, and pleasant interaction with employees ... ”explains Valery Razgulyaev. As a result of the restructuring on full-fledged “turquoise rails”, the company has neither a rigid schedule (many office employees appear in the office 1-2 days a week, and store employees make their own schedule), nor a dress code, nor fines and regulations. Moreover, Vkusvill does not have a single budget, despite a developed network of more than 450 stores.

"Turquoise" companies versus Russian realities

The theory of "turquoise" management is new, and it is just beginning to be introduced in the Russian market. “At the moment, there is an active “rake collection,” says business psychologist Lyudmila Boldyreva.

According to the expert, there are several main points where “a plug appears”:

• Self management. One of the principles of "turquoise" organizations is self-management (there is no need for a hierarchy). Not in all areas of business and not for all people, this principle is suitable. So far, most people are accustomed to the fact that there is a boss, and he sets tasks. The boss is responsible for systemic vision.

• The level of psychological maturity of workers. To follow the principle of self-management, people must have a very high level of psychological maturity, awareness, the ability to communicate well, negotiate, etc. And, most importantly, everyone must have a common understanding of where the company is “going” and how.

• The number of employees. If with 5 employees it is still possible to move towards a “single goal” in a single sense, then with 500 it is already more difficult to do. Either way, control is needed. Otherwise it's anarchy.

• Various incentives to work. Everyone comes to work with their own values, it is important for someone to fulfill themselves and be a good professional, he loves his job, and someone just goes there to earn money and that's it.

According to the HR manager of a Russian IT company, being "turquoise" is a sign of progressive thinking, which is fashionable to brag about. “In fact, Russian workers, due to their mentality, cannot yet adjust to a work format with blurred lines of responsibility. Whatever one may say, most cadres, especially outside Moscow, still need a “stick.”

“Three pillars of “turquoise” organizations: responsibility, trust and motivation. Until each employee learns to take full, 100 percent responsibility for the work done, until he learns to trust a colleague, and not be afraid that someone will set him up or appropriate his ideas for himself, until there is some kind of motivation for the idea, and not for the sake of money, companies cannot become “turquoise”, - says Lyudmila Boldyreva.

However, in companies that have already been given the “turquoise light”, they believe that the difficulties are general, not related to Russian realities. “Rather, in Russia it is even easier to bypass them, since we are used to yielding even in our personal ambitions for the sake of justice. And these difficulties are connected with the “reverse side of the coin”, which is not even familiar to most managers, when many employees “burn” with all their heart for the cause. No matter how great it sounds, but it often causes serious conflicts, when the opinion of the “burning” employees on the correctness of a particular decision turns out to be different. And in a “teal” organization, one cannot dismiss the alternative vision within the framework of the hierarchical paradigm “who is higher is right.” That is why many "turquoise" organizations are considering specific mechanisms for resolving disputes that would allow moving forward without destroying the common field of interaction, ”explains Valery Razgulyaev.

There are chances for the "turquoise business" to spread widely in Russia, Yuri Belonoshchenko believes. “The current generation of managers and entrepreneurs with a different way of thinking. They do not think in terms of ambition, not in terms of the “leader-subordinate” principle. They think in terms of goals, objectives, build processes in a different way. The ideology of agile management, Scrum, flexible management is coming,” he recalls. In addition, the problems are not in Russian realities, but in a person's head. Indeed, in the "turquoise" management there is a very important component: you are responsible for what you do. There are no loopholes, there is no work “from 10 to 19”, but there are tasks and goals and how you achieve them and how you work in a team. Complexity is precisely the presence of such thinking, the thinking of a responsible person. Then we get "turquoise management" and "turquoise company". If a person thinks differently, there is a shifting of responsibility, then nothing will work.

Utopia or new reality?

“The roots of Federic Lalu's book lie in the theory of "spiral dynamics", which is based on a system of values ​​that is reflected in the behavior of people and in the principles of management. When it comes to business, the emphasis is on self-managed systems—small teams that solve problems. Unlike Lalu's "turquoise" approach, which is presented in an interesting and simple language in the book, spiral dynamics is a deeper and more thoughtful theory, ”says Peter Strohm, vice president of development in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean of the Adizes Institute.

The Adizes methodology is based on a basic principle: organizations, like living organisms, have their own life cycle and exhibit predictable and repetitive behavioral manifestations in the process of growth and aging. At each stage of organizational development, a company faces a specific set of problems. How well a company's management copes with them, how successfully it implements the changes necessary for a healthy transition from stage to stage, determines the ultimate success or failure of that organization.

According to Peter Strohm, the principles of self-management work well in those organizations whose success is directly related to innovative developments, that is, in high-tech companies. The approach itself is good for project management. At the same time, many questions arise about how it can be applied in companies engaged in operational activities.

Problems can also arise in the process of implementing the developed solutions. “According to the Adizes methodology, in order to make a good decision, you need to be a democrat. To successfully implement the decision - a dictator. This approach to making and implementing decisions is called “democracy”. Thus, self-managed teams are able to make decisions based on democratic principles. However, as regards the preservation of dictatorship in the process of implementation, it is hierarchical systems that cope much better with this,” Peter Strom believes.

If the company was dominated by authoritarian management, it will not be easy for it to immediately and completely become “turquoise”. It's the same as jumping a level. Perhaps such changes are possible in a particular division, but in general it will be difficult to make this in a company. If, nevertheless, the organization decided to go in this direction, it can change by taking certain steps. For example, those that the Adizes methodology suggests, the expert is sure.

Text: Anastasia Litvinova

The book of the coach and stimulator 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 in Russia.

A Brief Introduction to Spiral Dynamics

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:

As Frédéric Laloux describes his turquoise comes after green, that is, he tries to describe the "yellows" in terms of the spiral dynamics of the organization. But if you are familiar with this evolutionary approach to the development of human systems, then when reading the book, you will often come to the conclusion that the relationships described in turquoise organizations are more similar to those generated by a pluralistic form of values, seeking universal agreement, creating communities, striving for a high degree of involvement of everyone in the implementation of something big and meaningful. That is, in the book of Frederic Lalu, we are talking about green organizations. But this does not detract from the merits of the book, which describes a radical paradigm shift in approaches to building a case.

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.
• A 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 era and wishful thinking. However, let me offer you a point of view from which what is called green in this ironic vein 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, selfish and short-sighted oranges 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 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.

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 right of the child to a family and education. 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 worthy of attention than personal status fuss and showy 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 green remained unresolved or unfinished yet. 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 Laloux kept silent about, let's remember how Master's degree programs in business administration came to Russia. “Organizations of the Future” brings green values ​​to us in the same way that the MBA brought orange values. Enthusiastically received at the very beginning, the Master of Business Administration programs soon came under 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 case, organized in the format of the first courses of the Master of Business Administration, 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 strings. 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 it 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…

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 the persistent filter of perception of Frederic Laloux - 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 complicated 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 continue to fulfill the missionary task of teaching local "natives" not to eat their competitors, but to make a win-win situation with them, creating conditions for mutually beneficial partnerships. Frederic Laloux's book is one of the first swallows of a new evolutionary wave that will create its own schools and teach business people to see profit maximization not as an absolute goal, but as a means to achieve more significant goals. And then, perhaps, myriads of unemployed trainers, 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 your employees, 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 a 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 cites 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 the natural project of the case. 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 in 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.

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 the "yellow", the "yellow" may 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. The “yellow” forms of labor organization, project activities can be assimilated within the orange and green paradigms, but I cannot imagine a “yellow” business as such. "Yellow" has other 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 organization management - the principle of flexible, detached, fearless, integrating thinking. Frederic Lalu 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 “get to the very essence” in everything. Perhaps it is the Russian 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 business people 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 sexual 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, giving rise to 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.

March 9, 2017 at 02:02 pm

Teal Organizations: Examples and Common Answers

• Research and forecasts in IT,
• Finance in IT

I live and work mainly in Irkutsk: in two organizations that can hardly be called classic. One is relatively large: approximately, because there are incoming freelancers, 20 people have a turnover of several tens of millions of rubles a month, and the second is a hobby that we are trying to monetize with two comrades in the shop.

There are articles on Habré devoted to the so-called turquoise (there are disputes about the color: someone develops the idea to emerald, someone stops at yellow, but all this is particular, and the article is not about that) organizations. They are also called: synergistic, holacratic (not to be confused with ochlocratic). There are also posts. But still…

Here are a few (for those who don't quite know what I'm talking about):

1. Actually, about F. Lalu
2. About the world in colors
3. People and organizations
4. organizations
5. There are others...

For a quick introduction, you can also see video: the most frequent question that gives rise to many others sounds something like this: “where are the working examples ?!”.

Well, here they are:

• http://www.sunhydraulics.com : "There is no organizational chart or formal job descriptions here"
• http://www.valvesoftware.com : “When you give smart talented people the freedom to create without fear of failure, amazing things happen. We see it every day at Valve.
• http://www.favi.com : "FAVI offers each employee the opportunity to be responsible for his/her own progress and success"

The second of the listed should be known to many residents of Habr, because she did a lot for the it-world; and then there's Patagonia, Zappos, HolacracyOne, Glassfrog...

And here are the areas that F. Lalu himself studied:

1. Medicine
2. Metallurgy
3. Energy
4. IT (consulting, development, etc.)
5. Religious associations
6. food industry
7. industrial production

I deliberately did not indicate everything, because it is better to read this book before starting to build a BO: in practice, there are really a lot of questions.

In Russia, for example, they are trying to apply this experience:

1. Sberbank under the leadership of G. Gref
2. (in their own opinion)
3. Industrial sales - organizers of turquoise organizations in Irkutsk
4. Adventum - performance agency
5. Expedition - "niche sales of a wide profile"
6. Vkusvill - retail chain
7. - SaaS solutions for online stores
8. And again, others...

If someone wants to delve into the topic and study the experience more closely, then here is the list, which is literally called "holacracy-cases" (there are, unfortunately, a number of already disabled sites).

For example, here's what a scheme of such an organization might look like:

Very often, such organizations receive criticism of the following content: “Teal organizations are a purely speculative model... the types of business listed in the article are not a business, but a kind of “pastime” - consulting, esotericism and all sorts of garbage, ”but if you look at the list above, you can see that this is far from the case.

The second antithesis is always the following (quotes are taken from discussions of publications on the topic on the Web): “Unfortunately, this is not very applicable in Russia! The deepest roots of our bureaucratic machine cannot be torn out! An inspector will certainly come to such a “turquoise company” and demand reports, certificates, etc. And then they will punish you!..”

But, firstly, if you are familiar with the current legislation of the Russian Federation, you probably know that today even officially it is possible to describe the rights and obligations in the Charter in a completely different way than before (I think this should be discussed separately another time). Yes, the CEO is still an important person, but that's all. Secondly, the BO model does not require violation of the law: it only calls for reducing bureaucratic costs, moreover, within the company. For example, where there is a quality control manager or even a sales manager, he is not needed if the company structure allows you not to create such links (an excellent guide on the topic is “Customers for Life”, although this is not entirely about BO).

I will give two simplest examples that were encountered in labor reality, when the “turquoise approach” was born by itself:

1. Let's say that reporting is usually handed over by an accountant, but the founders themselves (or even other members of the association) can hand over exactly the same. It's all about standardization and responsibility. But it is possible, because has already.
2. Education: let's say programmers develop in different directions and sometimes they need the help of "senior comrades", but every time they are different people: let's say someone knows github chips better, and someone is well versed with unit testing. The issue of “training” can be solved in at least two ways: a) create a separate work unit that will play the role of a teacher (it can be field courses, a separate consultant, etc.) or b) do everything with the help of mutual learning. Again - it works. There are difficulties in this process, but I will give a general answer to this and other questions: where are they not?

In general, one of the most common questions that arise for those who are just getting acquainted with BO is something like this: “Lalu talks a lot about the signs of a teal organization, but does not offer a single standard or checklist,” or from the same author: “ the chances that the plans will coincide so much that you will turn turquoise together and merge in spiritual ecstasy are not as high in real life as they write about it in smart books.” And further: “after all, even in turquoise organizations, someone has to wash the floor, change napkins in the toilet and serve tea to guests.”

In short, the point is that there should not be uniform standards: principles, yes, but not standards. In fact, however strange it may sound, these standards are not present in companies that are called “orange” in the same classification. For example, Coca-Cola and IP Ivanov I.I. operate like orange organizations, but will their models overlap when it comes to standards? Based on experience, no. But the principles are undeniable.

In order to better understand the value of BO, you need to understand how the following differ:

1. role from position (more on that next time)
2. liability from punishment
3. strict hierarchy from "possible decentralized models"
4. association from the company

And this is of course not all.

But for today I will finish by identifying another obvious question: “why publish this on Habré?”.

1. In my deep conviction, BO in the IT sector, especially where a lot of people work remotely, should take root and have already taken root quite well, and IT and Habr are interdependent things;
2. Judging by the initial analysis of the comments to the articles, there is interest in BO, but there is also a clear misunderstanding of many points, so I would like to answer some questions now, and leave some for further publications;
3. Habr, among other things, gives excellent feedback and helps to find like-minded people, and this is not as little as it might seem to someone;
4. There are really a lot of questions, but most of them can be put together, which means that at least extremely general answers can be given in areas of interest;
5. Finally, I would like to show that BO is not an abstraction at all, but a model tested by many years (at least 60 years) of practice, which allows not only more efficient, in terms of, say, profit, but also more interesting work for all participants.

I hope that the topic will be interesting and new questions and comments will appear under the article, allowing you to expand the range of problems under study.

P.S. Where did the points of view come from?

1. Habr (comments)
2. Organizations

Practice unambiguously shows that the most successful companies in Russia are those that were still in the 1990s. adopted traditional Western management approaches. They have rigidly defined business processes, regulations and procedures. They work like a coherent mechanism and thrive. To verify this, consider the following facts.

Think about how any successful restaurant or food chain operates. In any restaurant of the network, you will get your favorite burger of the usual quality. In order for this burger to be cooked uniformly, a specially trained controller monitors the process, there is a control procedure and a technological map. That is why you get the predictable quality in Arkady Novikov's Minced meat and Burger King. A culture of invention and relative freedom to make decisions would kill this model.

Business owners are often oppressed by the “big unknown”: how to grow, how to develop, how to deal with competitors. Therefore, they are easily led to fashionable concepts like "turquoise" companies. They have a desire to involve all their employees in the decision-making process and encourage them to non-standard ways of solving work issues.

But in every company there is an established backbone of managers, on whom one should bet. This is the owner himself, the general director and 5-6 other people on whom the efficiency of the business directly depends. All of them are eager to move the business forward. They are diversified, experienced and work with full dedication.

Don't forget that people are not stupid. The idea promoted by the "turquoise" consultants is captivating. It sounds like this: “Imagine a world in which not just a bunch of top managers, but absolutely all employees of the company will sincerely root for its development. Give them the freedom to make decisions and the choice to go to work or work from home. The result will be increased creativity, increased interest and greater returns.”

But we must understand that most people do not want to reveal their creative potential. They come to the office to do what they are supposed to do and get paid. And the idea of ​​"turquoise" they meet with enthusiasm, because everyone likes when control disappears, you can endlessly splurge and work carelessly. Maybe that's harsh. But most companies, especially those operating in areas such as sales, logistics, etc., will soon be convinced of the veracity of these words.

Those companies are successful in the market, where "turquoise" is only a way of forming an image, and all processes are still strictly controlled. For example, the owner of one fairly large company canceled any control whatsoever - he didn’t care if employees go to work, how they dress for meetings with clients, how long they work. Each sales manager was asked to bring a certain amount to the company for a certain period. And it does not matter how he will achieve this. Even within certain limits, an employee could put forward commercial conditions at his own discretion. Two months later, it became clear: the results of the experiment were null. Total sales fell by half, new customers did not appear. And only by returning to the traditional structure and principles of work, the company was able to win back the losses.

Turquoise companies are not the first idea that many had high hopes for. For example, Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer put forward the idea of ​​a “home office” and began to massively transfer her subordinates to remote work. It quickly turned into a fashion trend in many countries, including Russia. But it soon became clear that when a person works next to a refrigerator and a bed, then super-expectations from his work become a reality only in a small number of cases. The same Mayer, a few years later, curtailed her initiative and called employees back to the offices. IBM recently behaved similarly in America, which at one time was one of the first to adopt the concept of remote work and, according to The Wall Street Journal, brought the share of employees working at home to 40%.

A company without a hierarchy, intermediate KPIs, and clear job descriptions is like an army without a general. The analogy with the army, by the way, is most true in any business, especially in sales. Everyone must act together, in a single strategy, which is required in the battle for customers, and it is the leadership that ensures movement in one direction. If everyone has complete freedom, then the situation will resemble a fable about a swan, cancer and a pike.

The current crisis is shaking everyone, not only in business, but also on a personal level, so many are thinking about change. The fact that the time has come to move to a qualitatively new level, both for yourself and for your company. It seems like the old matrix refuses to work, you need a new breath, thinking and behavior. On this wave, business forums are increasingly talking about the “turquoise companies” trend. The term was coined by Frederic Laloux in his book Discovering the Organizations of the Future. The essence of turquoise is that people no longer want to work from morning to evening five times a week. The leaders, in turn, also do not want the army command. This means that the time has come for "living" - or so-called turquoise - companies, working as a single organism for the benefit of society. But whether this is really salvation or another fashionable utopia, we discuss this further.

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New times, new companies
Frederic Laloux, a former McKensey employee, said old company models do not meet the aspirations of modern people. If twenty years ago it was important for a person to find a permanent job for the rest of his life, today this thought is scary, because a person now needs self-realization and freedom. A modern employee does not hold on to his familiar place and is not afraid to go forward - to create his own projects. So, Lalu identified seven stages that organizations around the world have gone through: infrared, purple, red, amber, orange, green and teal.
Most companies in our country are at the orange stage, where the most important thing is competition. Here it is important to win the competition: both internal between employees and external. A clear hierarchy reigns in the structure of orange companies - everything is like in the animal kingdom. Planning is at the top, execution is at the bottom. Late for work - a fine, again - dismissal. Here is an approximate mechanism of work of large companies, the work of which is studied by students of management faculties around the world, in order to become the same later.

If the red company is the Army, then the turquoise one is a living organism.

In new turquoise companies, people don't want to make reports, read protocols ten times a day. The main thing here is to do the maximum at the limit of possibilities for the sake of the common goal of the company.

Turquoise companies are the latest in the chain of evolution
In turquoise companies, strategy emerges naturally, not imposed by superiors. Each employee understands what he is doing and why. But this, as we all understand, is an idealistic view of life and people.
Julia Belyak - Creator of the LoDi mobile application and founder of the startup studio Jubel (jubel.ru) says: “Turquoise companies originated in the west, where I lived and worked for the last 16 years, and, therefore, I was able to fully experience it for myself, and now I successfully apply it in Russia. In such a company, it is not the title and position that play an important role, but leadership qualities. It is important to be not just a manager, but a person who is trusted and followed.”

Of the benefits - that you do not need to rely only on your knowledge and experience. Of the minuses - the manager does not always know what is really happening, and therefore it is important to use the metric of key performance indicators.

“I have several ways in which I select people who fit this style of business culture,” Belyak (LoDi) admits. “During the interview, I ask the candidate to criticize me or the business to see if he can think critically or just wants to be liked. Or I also like to give trial assignments after the interview. My tactic is not to give tasks, but to describe the problem, thereby checking how a person thinks, how independently he can come to its solution.

In Russia, according to the "turquoise" principles - trust, responsibility and motivation - Artem Agabekov builds his Adventum company (Agabekov is also the founder of the Window Factory company), to some extent the Anderson cafe chain can be attributed to the turquoise company, even Herman Gref is trying to move Sberbank in this direction. In the West, of course, there are already hundreds of them: Costco, UPS, Zappos, Southwest Airlines, Whole Foods Market and others.

An effective company or a utopia with a beautiful name?
The first rule of any manager is not to look either at the market or at his employees through rose-colored glasses. No matter how great the company is, it must be admitted that most subordinates solve their life problems for work, not yours. Even if you find a team of like-minded people, then, as a rule, they will work for the sake of their tasks - for the sake of their personal growth. Sooner or later, they, as “living organisms”, will want to do something of their own. Are you lucky and your "living organisms" do not want to leave you?! So they just like to be subordinate.

The point is that the problem with turquoise companies is not that too many people want to be bosses, but that too many people want to be subordinates.

This passivity is observed not only in Russia. Few people want to take on extra responsibility. In addition to the fact that people do not want to be leaders, they do not want to be freelancers either. They want to complete the tasks that are given to them, and not invent something themselves. Such employees put work out of their heads as soon as the clock shows 18.00 - the end of the working day! And, it's not just about business. If you analyze narrow-minded tendencies, you will see that fewer people want to start a family and take responsibility for someone other than themselves. Not to mention being the boss and being responsible for the workforce.
Agabekov himself writes that on average one out of 32 candidates gets into his company! And this is quite logical - the remaining 31 want to work in more familiar and irresponsible conditions. But let's not fall into conservatism - society is really changing. It is really difficult for people today to sit in the office from 9 to 18. But this does not yet lead to the conclusion that the new “freedom-loving” employees are ready and able to work in a free mode. Whoever says what, but the majority can work effectively only under the close supervision of the authorities and with a strict schedule.
It is also important to consider that any turquoise organization is based on the personality of the leader. Agabekov has a high moral standard (no one argues with this), but this also does not mean that his employees have the same.

Conclusion:
On the one hand, Lalu's theory is more relevant for Russia than ever. Our country has always been "red", which brought many problems to everyone living here. Now is the time for change, the time for new formations. German Gref said that if the organizations and state institutions in Russia do not change, the situation will only get worse. On the other hand, you need to understand that a "turquoise" company is a kind of utopia - human nature changes extremely slowly. And on the part of the manager, it is reckless to hope for a high level of awareness of employees if they developed in completely different “non-free” conditions than he himself. However, the "turquoise" trend is an occasion to think about how to create a balance between managers and subordinates and make sure that someday "turquoise" companies in our country will become the majority.

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