Sublime

The dominant thinking in business today is Orange. To achieve results, people must be motivated by individual incentives. Orange has no problems if this results in large wage differentials, if these differentials are justified by people’s merits and contributions.

At regular intervals, a group composed of one designated person from each team comes together for a few minutes; they quickly discuss which teams are over or understaffed; back in their teams, they ask for volunteers to switch teams for a shift or two.

Incidentally, at FAVI, sales orders are always discussed in terms of employment, not in monetary terms; so there is no “we got a $1 million order,” but rather “we got an order for 10 people’s work.”

Organizations routinely talk about their values and mission; Teal Organizations talk about something even more fundamental—their basic assumptions about human nature. This has to do, I believe, with the fact that self-managing practices are still countercultural today.

The same holds true for Amber Organizations, which are exceptionally well-suited for stable contexts, where the future can be planned based on past experience. They operate on the hidden assumption that there is one right way of doing things and that the world is (or should be) immutable.

Several other organizations in this research rely on virtually identical conflict resolution mechanisms: first a one-on-one discussion, then mediation by a trusted peer, and finally mediation by a panel.

The underlying worldview is that workers are mostly lazy, dishonest, and in need of direction. They must be supervised and told what is expected of them.

Instead of asking the question What will it cost? they start with the deeper, more personal question: What is the right thing to do? Only then follows the question, How can we do it in financially acceptable ways?