We are called Teal Unicorn. We say the term “teal” comes from “Laloux’s model”. What are we refering to?
Frederic Laloux wrote a great book, Reinventing Organizations, which stimulated a lot of the movement to new ways of working in the twenty-teens. I feel it has since been supplanted by Steve Denning’s Agile of Agile, and now Aaron Dignan’s Brave New Work, which is currently my recommendation for first book to read. But it is still a damn good book.
In the book, Laloux took a colour model for advancing levels of social maturity from Spiral Dynamics,
https://spiraldynamicsintegral.nl/en/theory-value-systems/
and changed it round to his own colours and slightly different definitions. Which didn’t endear him to those in that philosophical community, especially when his book was wildly successful and theirs weren’t.
We hacked the model a little ourselves, to end up with this:
The word at the bottom of each colour (gangs, corporation…) is just a stereotypical example, not a classification.
The Green level roughly corresponds to W.Edwards Deming’s Win-Win.
Since then, “teal” has entered the lexicon as a buzzword for high-functioning organisations. Teal is code for the highest form of social culture (so far), which makes three realisations or “breakthroughs”:
Self-organising. People work best in small autonomous teams with no one “in charge”. Work flows to the teams and people flow to the work. Staff have skills rather than roles. The organisational system works on peer relationships not hierarchies.
Wholeness. being true to ourselves, bringing our whole self to work (Maslow’s “self-actualisation”). We restore the unity between truth, goodness, and beauty.
Emergent purpose. The organisation is organic, it grows. We are driven by a purpose and direction that emerges from the organisation. (Laloux uses the word “Evolutionary”, but evolution is a complicated concept that often leads us astray when thinking about organisations, so we say “Emergent”).
It is part of a broader movement to new ways of thinking. Many models see a step change in culture. The philosopher Clare Graves says the red to green tiers are all at one level, and teal and above are at a second level. So we are on a cusp.
The First Tier systems were grouped by nature of their narrow perspective as “subsistence levels”, each aligns with a specific world view that rejects the prior systems and seeks to preserve its own status quo. The differences between communal/collective and individualistic value systems, and the inability of First Tier systems to recognize the strengths or pathologies of other world views, helps to explain social conflict in the world today.
According to Graves, the move to Second Tier thinking requires a “leap” in perspective. At Second Tier – the first ‘being level’, society recognizes a responsibility for facilitating the health of each value system on First Tier. The goal is not expediting emergence but the result is, when healthy, each First Tier system will naturally progress toward Second Tier. Red to Green are “first tier”. “Teal’ is the first of the second tier levels. So Teal is not trying to replace the lower levels, it is trying to help them all coexist and evolve. We track a lot of this thinking here.
There is not much about “beyond-Teal” in the workplace. It’s not in the model.
There is a bit of a backlash against teal as a fad, but we love teal.