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Newsletter Nr. 712
Amsterdam, May 10th, 2018


IS TEAL THE NEW BLACK? PROBABLY NOT - A review of Federic Laloux's Reinventing Organizations - ZAID HASSAN

The question that this book explores is “What would healthy and soulful organizations look like?” Laloux’s direct answer to the question is “Teal Organizations&rdquo. The book articulates what Teal organizations are, their practices and detailed guidance for how to become a Teal Organization. [Frederic] Laloux makes the case for the suitability of Teal Organizations for the times we live in.

So what do I make of all this? Unfortunately, this is a deeply problematic and flawed book.

The book is littered with instances where it contradicts itself, its contradictory stance on leadership being just one case. Take the metaphors used to describe each “stage of consciousness”—Red, with the example of the Mafia as Red organization, is “the wolf pack” and Green, with the example of Ben & Jerry’s is “the family.” It behooves me to point out that the Mafia is an organizational structure with family at its core, that wolf-packs are examples of a “self-organizing” “living system,” that are valorized in the book and that hierarchies exist in nature (ever heard the phrase “apex predator”?).
While these problems are tedious in the extreme, they are distractions from three more profound problems with the book, these are the problems of science, context and ethnocentricity.

Read more:
http://www.integralworld.net/hassan1.html