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Spring 2021 Newsletter

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Teal Meet-Up Thursday, March 25th 1-3 pm Pacific Time

• Full Teal Ahead

  • The Maturation of What May Be The World’s Only Teal Investment Firm

  • The Success of Teal-Oriented Consulting Firms

  • Big, Mainstream Companies Dipping Their Toes in Teal

  • Growing Self-Awareness as a Movement

  • New Books Building Teal Wisdom

  • Continued Momentum in Adjacent Biz / Social Trends

  • The Tealy Linings of 2020

• Teal In the Wild

• Teal Tips

• From Our Team

Teal Meet-Up Thursday, March 25th 1-3 pm Pacific Time

Earlier in March, the teal movement hit a milestone. More than 1,100 people from across the globe gathered at the Teal Around the World (TATW) virtual event. Many workplace culture conferences struggle to get to 1,000 attendees. This is a sign the appetite for teal is growing; people are eager to share and to learn about how to elevate organizations to the next level of human consciousness.

TATW was just the start.

On March 25th, The Teal Team, in partnership with The Teal Network (the group that hosts TATW), will host a meet-up for people invested in advancing this workplace revolution. Whether you call it Humanocracy, Conscious Capitalism, Teal, Agile, Rendanheyi, or by any other name, you are invited to join us in thinking about a world where everyone is powerful and can take ownership of their work. Join us for a Community Conversation to reflect and inspire each other on all things teal-ish!

Register for this free event here.*

*This meet-up is targeted for people in the Americas. To find a meetup that better fits your time zone, go here.

Full Teal Ahead

The teal movement is on the move.

That’s the high-level assessment we make as we survey the landscape of individuals and organizations dedicated to evolving purpose, holism and self-management.

Years of toiling away at teal, as well as the fertile, disruptive conditions of the past year, are yielding visible progress in terms of people and companies focused on a more conscious, soulful way of doing business.

It is a hopeful, silver lining in what has been a largely gloomy 12 months.

What are we seeing that lifts our spirits and leads us to see tealy momentum in today’s tea leaves?

For one thing, Frederic Laloux, in many ways the father of the teal movement, made a rare appearance this month at the Teal Around the World event, with an inspiring message. He spoke about the importance of seeking to live in integrity, a kind of deeper embrace of wholeness. Asking profound questions about the kind of world we are willing to accept can be a source of vitality for us individually and as a movement, he suggested.

“There’s wonderful aliveness waiting for us if we reconnect to the sources of our integrity,” Frederic said.

But true to the teal philosophy, it’s not about one person. As moving as Frederic was, the larger movement has its own flow and life now. Below are other developments that give us hope:

The Maturation of What May Be the World’s Only Teal Investment Firm

As we detail in a blog on our website, Belgium-based Pebble Wave is building on lessons learned over the past several years of investments in 12 teal organizations to launch a new 25 million EUR fund. With this chunk of money, Pebble Wave aims to back an additional 40-60 teal companies over the next three years. Pebble Wave’s founders see this new fund as the start of an ambitious plan to fund thousands of organizations around the world that practice teal management and embrace conscious leadership.

Read More on Pebble Wave

The Success of Teal-Oriented Consulting Firms

Advisory firms helping other organizations adopt teal beliefs and practices have been around for some time. HolacracyOne, for example, has been guiding clients on the principles of the self-management system of Holacracy since 2007. Percolab, with operations in North America and Europe, has been helping organizations work in more conscious, horizontal ways for 15 years, with clients including the European Commission, human resource associations, and business leader clubs. Walking the talk of equitable and inclusive ways, all Percolab offices are employee-owned cooperatives.

In addition to these veteran advisory organizations, there’s been an upswell of consulting companies in the teal arena in recent years. These include The Ready, whose client engagements have included such big names as AirBnB, Hyatt and Johnson & Johnson, and August, with a client roster that includes Pepsico, Airbus and IKEA. Another tealy consultancy is Belgium-based Hifluence. One of the portfolio companies of Pebble Wave, Hifluence has worked not only with sister companies but with other organizations including Land Rover-Jaguar and Belgium financial services firm Bank J Van Breda & Co NV.

Big, Mainstream Companies Dipping Their Toes in Teal

As the client rosters of the consulting firms above suggest, teal is making inroads with some of the world’s biggest companies. Even if they aren’t embracing the entire ethos of more conscious, soulful organizational cultures, mainstream businesses are exploring teal principles such as decentralized decision-making, employees bringing their full selves to work and a greater focus on purpose. Another sign of the teal momentum among global corporations is the speaker line up at the recent Teal Around the World conference. It included leaders from Roche, Bayer and Renault.

Growing Self-Awareness as a Movement

For a movement founded on the principle of holism and interconnectedness, many people drawn to teal ideas have not known about peers with a similar passion in more conscious approach to business. That’s changing. Events, newsletters, podcasts and the like are helping tealies learn about each other. Among the things helping the movement see itself: Enlivening Edge Magazine, the Corporate Rebels newsletter, Responsive.org events and the Teal Network, host of the recent Teal Around the World conference.

New Books Building Teal Wisdom

Many of us got hooked on Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations. And since the publication of that seminal work in 2014, we’ve seen a flurry of related books that extend the principles, offer practical applications, or dive deep into a particular dimension of teal culture. These books include:

Continued Momentum in Adjacent Biz / Social Trends

The teal organization movement has several cousins that continue to gather strength. These include the agile movement, which is expanding beyond its roots in decentralized software coding to become a broader management approach. Likewise organizations and initiatives such as Conscious Capitalism, Great Place to Work, B Corps and Sustainable Brands continue to whet appetites for still deeper explorations of organizational purpose, structure and soul.

The Tealy Linings of 2020

But perhaps the most promising developments in the teal arena are also the ones that have been the most painful. We’re speaking of the COVID pandemic, the related economic downturn and the racial reckoning of the past year. Together, these interrelated crises created a fertile environment for teal to take off.

Because of them, the world was rocked by new levels of economic volatility. There were unprecedented levels of stress and self-disclosure as masses of employees worked at home. And there were urgent calls for racial and social justice—for a reexamination of power and its distribution in organizations and society.

Thanks to a difficult 2020, it seems the world has become more receptive to an organizational philosophy and practices that are particularly suited for sensing and responding to complexity, that encourage people to bring their full selves to work and that fundamentally challenge hierarchical relationships.

So we are hopeful. For years, many of us have been itching to see the teal agenda advance. We think this is our time.

It’s teal’s time.

We’re on the move.

Teal in the Wild

Buffer

Transparency is one value that social media automation company Buffer lives by. They publish a Transparency Timeline that states their values around transparency, curates their transparency resources, and provides a mini-blog around the concept, including financial transparency around prices, revenues, and salaries.

Cooperative Pizza

For 50 years, the Cheeseboard Collective in the San Francisco Bay Area has grown their culture where decision making is a democratic process and wages were equal. Across the decades, the Cheese Board Collective has grown a vast network of cooperative bakeries and pizza shops throughout the Bay Area.

Tip 1: Ask What, Not Why. We know purpose matters. But when it comes to self-awareness, “what” questions help us stay objective, future-focused, and empowered to act on our new insights. From HBR.

Tip 2: Scan the Body, Breathe and Empty Your Headtrash. How can we know what we feel, why we feel it and how it impacts our ability to perform and relate until we take a moment to get real about what is going on in our gut, heart, and mind?

Tip 3: Just Write. The physical act of documenting thoughts and goals helps self-awareness and effectiveness. Tracking ideas and emotions teaches us about our triggers. And expressing goals in vivid detail is associated with greater success in achieving them.

Tip 4: Meditate More. The Center for Healthy Minds just released a new app focused on Awareness, Insight, Connection and Purpose: four pillars of well-being. Pod-cast style lessons or seated and active meditations.

From Our Team

First Person Plural podcast episode Purpose: A Light in the Dark (produced by Teal Team member Elizabeth Solomon)

Excerpt from Lead Together: The Bold, Brave, Intentional Path to Scaling Your Business (from Teal Team member Travis Marsh)

At a lunch before SideFX, a 100-person visual effects software company, embarked on a refresh of its vision, purpose and values, the coach to the team asked the CEO what he thought these elements should be going forward. The CEO’s answer was immediate and resolute: “I don’t know, ask the team. They are in the best position to decide.” When pushed for a sense of direction, the answer didn’t change: “Really, this isn’t up to me alone. The team knows what’s working and what isn’t.”

If answering questions about vision and purpose doesn’t have to fall to a leader, what does?

Download a free copy chapter 1 of Lead Together to see six surprising answers.

Newsletter written and edited by Ed Frauenheim, Matthew Spaur, and Elizabeth Solomon