One of the fundamental ideas of “Reinventing Organizations”, a favorite reference at Connection Leadership, is that humans have historically progressed via sudden stages of transformation rather than in a fluid fashion. The book illustrates this with examples from the history of human evolution (from foraging, to horticulture, to agriculture, to industrialization). Frédéric Laloux begins by explaining how our lack of imagination for what is possible dissuades us from creating the organizations we seek to create. We continue to base our analysis on obsolete logic, blinded by our tendency to perpetuate the same systems we’ve always known.
Organizations represent our level of consciousness
In his book, Frédéric Laloux attempts to summarize these different stages of consciousness and illustrates them with the reality of existing organizations. The idea is to help the reader broaden his or her vision by seeing what other levels of organization look like, and how they feel and are structured. All these levels coexist simultaneously within the same economic ecosystem. Frédéric Laloux demonstrates how human evolution is constantly accelerating. The most recent stages are not presented as better, but as more sophisticated and complex.
The different stages described by Frédéric Laloux
Impulsivity / Red
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- Organizations: mafia, gangs
- Leadership: predator
- Characteristics: short-term objectives, reactivity, and the authority of a powerful leader, based on fear, is necessary.
- Innovative ideas: division of labor, power through command
Conformism / Amber
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- Organizations: Catholic church, army
- Leadership : paternaliste
- Characteristics: pyramidal hierarchy with formalized roles, top-down, few changes
- Innovative ideas: long-term perspectives, formal roles
Success/Orange
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- Organizations: multinational companies
- Leadership: decisive, goal- and task-oriented
- Features: profit and growth, beating the competition, staying ahead through innovation
- Innovative ideas: innovation, responsibility, meritocracy
Pluralism / Green
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- Organizations: culture-oriented (Southwest, Ben Jerry’s)
- Leadership: participative, service-oriented
- Features: Pyramidal structure but with a focus on culture and empowerment, employee motivation
- Innovative ideas: empowerment, values-based culture, shareholder capitalism
Organizational /Blue
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- Organizations: evolutionary, organic (Patagonia, Buurtzorg)
- Leadership: distributed, with emphasis on internal awareness
- Features: self-management, organization seen as a living, evolving organism
- Innovative ideas: self-management, global, goal-driven
Why this book?
At Connection Leadership, our coaches use the book “Reinventing Organizations” to create a fertile discussion with leaders, to determine what stage they think their organization is at, and whether they recognize their leadership culture within those described here. This can be a starting point for discussion and reflection on the company’s transformation objectives. One of the difficulties with this model is the idea that the blue organization is an ideal towards which we should try to evolve quickly, whereas the Connection Leadership approach is to create organic growth through coaching, mindfulness and collective work, while co-constructing effective business solutions. When people are ready to evolve, they find themselves very interested in the next steps and begin to measure their level of comfort and mastery of the next stage. They are then willing to share what they learn.
