DEI cancelled. Anti-woke ascendant. Back to the office.
Woke is on the ropes.
What are you doing about it?*
If you are an organisation’s leader, a change agent (internal or consultant), or an influencer in ways of working, Better 2025 is our initiative to help you (and us) to pivot in 2025 to an approach – a strategic response – that copes with the prevailing cultural headwinds that make progressive ideas so hard to spread right now.
Our Better 2025 strategy can be summed up as “Think local, act local”. None of us can do much about the global movements taking society, culture, and work backwards right now, so let’s pivot to a narrow focus on what we can influence and control, one organisation and leader at a time. In 2025, we need to be better than what’s happening around us.
Teal Unicorn’s objective of this Better 2025 project is to create and support “islands of light”: organisations that preserve and radiate better ways of working. While the world is going backwards, you, our Teal Tribe of collaborators and followers, can provide sanctuaries for these ideas, and beacons for other organisations to see them succeeding.
* If your answer to “What are you doing about it?” is “Celebrating”, we beg you to at least be curious about something better. This one page won’t change your mind, but we will try as Better 2025 progresses.
At Teal Unicorn we are committed to creating “Better results, better lives, better society” in the workplace. Our strategy for achieving that has now pivoted to lighting up as many individual organisations as possible, to keep the flame alive in the face of the prevailing storm.
if you become such an “island of light”, the benefits for you will be many. Everyone can be proud of what they do. Expecting better of employees will deliver more. Work will be more fun, and satisfying. And you will outperform your past selves.
Teal Unicorn stands ready to help. Our motto is Make Work Better. In 2025, we will organising our messaging around We Can Be Better, to more strongly incorporate the ethical, moral, social, and political aspects of preserving islands of enlightenment in a sea of regression.
(No charge: just your time and email. We are not really selling anything – you might buy some of our inexpensive books. We have all the work we need. This is pro bono: we have proven useful answers and we want the world to know.).
We’ll be talking about work, though obviously the context is wider. We have shown multiple times that Open Management is the easiest path to better work: a synthesis of all that we have learned from global research and experience, proven by us in over 20 organisations. That is our own particular “light that we shine” for you.
Let us help you make your organisation an island of light under the darkening clouds. The sun will come again.
Get updates
Don’t miss out on future events, publications and other activity to support you in Better 2025.
Join our mailing list to get occasional updates (and our monthly newsletter).
Here is first draft of the introductory video
or if like me you are not a fan of video, here is a flipbook of the introductory presentation
Better 2025 Project
or if you have 19 minutes, here is a “radio show” generated completely by AI (Google’s NotebookLM), including the voices. It’s astonishingly good. The AI generating the audio gets just enough facts wrong so as to be completely realistic, just like a human journalist. Despite that, the depth of the reflection by the AI is astonishing. (You can see three examples along with more background information here.)
Join our meetups .
I ran three cycles of introductory meetups. I’ll do more.
if you can’t make it, hit that button below and join our mailing list for news of more activities to come. I’ll also post news of future ones here. Bookmark this page as our Better 2025 project homepage.
and join our mailing list
We won’t give your email to anyone, nor use it for anything except to know who is joining in, and to send you our newsletter and followup materials on this topic.
Why are we so evangelical about Open ways of working?
Because it works.
We have proven it consistently with our clients, in organisations from 10 to 10,000 staff, in a wide range of industries.
Mostly in Vietnam: we have a blue ocean there, we have all the work we need. But Open works everywhere, as hundreds of other organisations demonstrate.
What Better 2025 will actually do is still emerging. My New Year resolutions are:
🌸advance the Better 2025 project
🌸publish The Open Executive and its sequel
🌸support any apex execs who join in
🌸boost the Teal Tribe networking
🌸try to stay out of politics: think local
What this means in practice might include
🌸 monthly Lean Coffee webinar with guests
🌸 a book club
🌸 training courses
🌸 more meetups
🌸 media channel
We will run some experiments to see what sticks…
Supposedly, during the American War in Vietnam, a reporter asked AJ Muste, a pacifist “Do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone at night in front of the White House with a candle?” A.J. Muste replied: “Oh I don’t do this to change the country. I do this so the country won’t change me.”
(Images are by DALL-E, used via ChatGPT. It’s amazing how quickly we can generate effective and consistent illustrations.)
More posts about Better 2025
Tintin is now public domain – copyright has expired