Commitment to turquoise. What are turquoise organizations and why every businessman should know about it. If you showed bad taste and made a non-identical choice

How Russian companies work without bosses

A minimum of bosses, a maximum of freedom - "turquoise" organizations are built on these principles. Self-government, following Western ones, is also introduced by Russian companies, but employees are often dissatisfied with this

“If it were not for the “turquoise” strategy, the company most likely would not exist at all,” says Andrey Krivenko, founder of the VkusVill and Izbenka retail chains. For seven years, he created a network from scratch, which brought in 5.6 billion rubles last year. revenue and 278 million rubles. arrived, according to SPARK.

Andrey introduced the principle of self-government back in 2013. Today, out of more than two thousand employees, only eight people hold managerial positions, salespeople's income is entirely dependent on store sales, and office employees come to work when they want. According to Krivenko, it was the self-management system that allowed him to gain a foothold in the market and open six new stores a week.

Another example. Boris Dyakonov, while still the chairman of the board at Bank24.ru, tried to introduce the principles of holacracy in his team - decentralization, in which each employee has the right to make important decisions.

In autumn 2014, the Central Bank revoked the license from Bank24.ru. According to the regulator, “the bank’s system of organizing internal control in the field of combating the legalization (laundering) of proceeds from crime and the financing of terrorism did not prevent the credit institution from being involved in servicing the shadow sector of the economy.”

However, this did not prevent Boris Dyakonov from becoming the “Banker of the Year” according to Banki.ru. “After the license is revoked, the owners and top management of the bank usually leave the ruined credit institution, from which billions were withdrawn. All this was not in Bank 24.ru. On the contrary, at the time the license was revoked from the credit institution, the amount of assets exceeded the liabilities to creditors by 1 billion rubles,” Natalia Romanova, editor-in-chief of Banki.ru, explained the choice then.

Now Dyakonov, together with his team and the Otkritie Corporation, is developing new project, a bank for entrepreneurs "Tochka" (it employs more than 600 people). According to Boris, the benefits of holacracy were best manifested precisely in hard times: employees stayed late despite salary delays; threw off personal money to organize SMS mailing to customers, etc.

Dyakonov immediately began to build work at Tochka according to the "turquoise" rules. “We have everything mixed up - people, horses,” smiles Boris. - Imagine classic bank managers - these are serious uncles in strict suits who give out orders and ruin the lives of others. We lowered them to the ground and put them next to the programmers and support operators.” About 20% of managers did not accept this approach and left.

One of the founders of the Baby Club network, Yuri Belonoshchenko (Photo: Ekaterina Kuzmina / RBC)

“Zhenya has always been for openness. She would not have been able to create in other conditions, ”says Ekaterina Fedorova, the company's marketer, about the head of the Baby Club network. There are more than 200 franchise clubs in the network for developing the talents of preschoolers. AT management company 40 people work and there is no clearly built hierarchy. 80% of employees communicate directly with the founders of the company Evgeniya and Yury Belonoshchenko. “We don’t have the concept of “the leader said so, so it’s necessary,” if one of the team members is uncomfortable with any decision, he can approach Yura or Zhenya and talk about the situation,” Fedorova assures.

Yuri Belonoshchenko says that the company has 67 new projects in development - any employee can take on their implementation. “Success can be achieved only if you treat the company from the position of the owner,” says Yuri.

Company color

The term "turquoise" organization was coined by former McKinsey partner Frederic Lalu. The head of Sberbank German Gref called his book "Discovering Organizations of the Future" one of the three most important books on business. Some "turquoise" principles are already being introduced in several branches of Sberbank.

According to Lal, the most conservative of the existing systems - "red" - rests on one leader who dictates the rules of the game.

Orange corporations are built on competition, rewards and punishments. Despite a rigid hierarchy, ideas from below and movement along career ladder. The majority of large Western companies operate according to the "orange" principle.

In "green" organizations, relationships within the group are more valuable than the result, and the benefit to humanity is more important than the benefit. The "green" strategy claimed to be the system of the future, but failed: such companies were not able to defeat competitors. This is how the synthesis of "green" and "orange" strategies appeared - evolutionary, or "turquoise" organizations.

The Turquoise strategy stands on three pillars: self-management, integrity, and evolutionary purpose. In such companies, managers work together with employees, divided into teams.

In the West, there are already quite a few “turquoise” companies: for example, the Dutch company Buurtzorg, which provides home care services for the sick, and a clothing manufacturer for active rest Patagonia.

Deceitful freedom

VkusVill has never had the usual “boss-subordinate” hierarchy, and in recent years this pyramid has completely turned upside down. “We work for the sake of the buyer, and the person behind the counter is closest to the buyer,” says Andrey Krivenko. Key decisions in the company are made on the basis of advice from salespeople.

Office staff at VkusVill are freer than many freelancers: there is no work schedule as such, employees come to the office and leave it when it suits them. “Someone is used to working from early morning, and someone likes to sleep – why rape people?” Andrey says. Shop assistants, of course, cannot afford a free schedule - they themselves agree with colleagues who and when starts working. The main thing is to fulfill corporate promises, an analogue of the usual KPIs, but the employees themselves set them for each other. Each employee makes promises to his “customer” within the company: the storekeeper and the loader promise the sellers to deliver a certain amount of goods to the store, the delivery service promises the distribution center to deliver all orders on time, etc. Natural selection operates in the company: those who systematically do not fulfill promises lose "Customer" - the store may refuse to work with this particular loader. Having lost all the "customers", the employee loses income and place in the company.

The employee's income depends on the quality of the fulfillment of promises. “Every employee is an entrepreneur within one big company. If he does his job poorly, he does not make a profit, ”explains Andrey. So, for example, sellers do not have a fixed rate at all: their entire income depends on the volume of sales. If the store, for objective reasons, does not show the required results (for example, an unsuccessful place), a small fix is ​​set.

Andrey Krivenko, founder of the VkusVill and Izbenka retail chains (Photo: Yury Chichkov for RBC)

This approach does not suit everyone. “They will tell you that everything depends only on you, raise your revenue and get a good salary. Only managers do not want to admit the fact of patency. In their concept, it is possible to make the same revenue with a cross-country capacity of 100-120 people, as with a cross-country capacity of 200-230 people,” Alena, a former employee of VkusVill, complains on the website pravda-sotrudnikov.ru. “No salary, bare deal. You will hunchback for 12-13 hours, but it is not a fact that you will receive at least a thousand rubles a day. It's all hell and no rewards." “The minimum wage was canceled - I used to know that you would definitely receive 1500, but now only 5% of the proceeds. There are places where they get less than 1000 per shift, and this is for 12 hours of hellish labor! - network sellers complain on the sites otrude.net and orabote.xyz. At the same time, they admit that the company pays “white” salaries on time, and in successful stores, sellers’ incomes reach 70-90 thousand rubles.

The exchange of promises, the discussion of problems and conflicts takes place on e-mail, in messenger chats or on general meetings. However, you can not go to the latter either. “We have a technologist who, on principle, does not come to meetings - he simply understands that he will spend this time more efficiently, performing his direct duties,” says Krivenko. General gatherings, even on a voluntary basis, are still held not for all employees, but for the central office, say the sellers of Izbenka and VkusVill. When a company employs more than two thousand people, organizing democratic institutions is not an easy task.

At Tochka, there is an analogue of Vkusvilov's promises - intra-corporate expectations. So, in the customer support department, for example, they canceled the usual plans for the number of calls received. “All this is easily simulated: in order to gain more accepted requests, the operator can constantly switch the client to his colleagues,” says Dyakonov.​

Related departments at general meetings tell what they expect from colleagues: for example, in order for the sales department to work effectively, programmers must “finish” before the end of the month new version Internet banking. “It’s like in a family: the wife thinks that her husband should cook breakfast every morning, but doesn’t tell him about it: like he has to guess himself. The husband, of course, does nothing, the wife is offended. If this issue is brought up for discussion, life becomes easier and more pleasant,” says Dyakonov.

Ex-Chairman of the Board of Bank24.ru Boris Dyakonov (Photo: Zurab Javakhadze/TASS)

Having received freedom from orders from above, employees often begin to work more efficiently. “Lawyers are traditionally the most bureaucratic people in the company: they will force the client to come to the office again and again to sign a ton of documents, even if they know that some people may not stand it and go to another bank. But if lawyers work in conjunction with salespeople, they are really trying to reduce the pain of the client, ”says the head of Tochka.

No corporate culture

If in the "orange" organizations they try to rally employees with the help of a prescribed corporate culture, dress code and team building, then in the "turquoise" employees themselves choose how to work and relax. Once, in VkusVill, they tried to raft in kayaks with the whole team, but only three people signed up for the idea. More mass events Krivenko did not try to arrange.

The atmosphere in the Baby Club really resembles a family circle, network employees admit. But that also has its downsides. “Friendly team and flexible schedule. But a small salary, a lot of additional work that takes a lot of time and is not paid, there is no sick leave, if you need a replacement, you look for it yourself, ”Elena wrote in the summer of 2016 on pravda-sotrudnikov.ru. “I lived there - you come in the morning and leave late at night, there is no strength left for anything, at home I practically didn’t talk to anyone. I was very exhausted, ”Marina complains on the same resource.

Paradise for lazy people

The system is not ideal, admits Andrei Krivenko: “It is very difficult to work honestly with dishonest people: they often play on trust.” So, once a partner delivery service, which was supposed to transfer the payment received from customers to the company's current account, began to work with delays. When the amount of the debt grew to 5 million rubles, the company stopped answering calls, and Krivenko realized that the company had been scammed. “This situation taught us to select partners more carefully, but it didn’t take away our faith in the system,” Andrey says.

According to the laws of holacracy, not all companies can live, Boris Dyakonov is sure, self-government is poorly implemented on the initiative from above. The “turquoise” system should be implemented at the very start, says Oleg Laguta, co-owner and managing director of Modulbank. “The owner of the company must tell employees about the advantages of the scheme and adhere to it from the very beginning - for example, we at Modulbank never sat in separate offices, we always worked next to employees,” he says. In Modulbank, only a part of the employees work as private entrepreneurs within the company - they enjoy unlimited rights, flexible schedules and generate their own income. Most of the employees still remain in the positions of subordinates and performers, creating a "turquoise" organization in its pure form is not only impossible, but also pointless, Laguta believes. “In a bank, for example, there are departments that must work from call to call - otherwise they simply will not be able to perform their functions. To introduce a free schedule for them is at least strange,” says Oleg. But self-management works well in creative areas: in a bank, for example, it is suitable for teams that create new services, IT developers.

Turquoise companies are a model of the future, says Andrey Krivenko: in 15-20 years, all companies in advanced economies will switch to such a management system. For Russia, it is generally very characteristic. “Russian culture is built precisely on conscience, and not on compliance with laws, so the “turquoise” theory should work perfectly in our conditions,” Krivenko is convinced.

If the founder or head of the company is not a turquoise supporter at heart, it is almost impossible for the organization to reorganize.

When experimenting with the turquoise method, you will need to rework business processes and additional training. Managers who are accustomed to unconditional power may leave. This is a normal transition process. But a top manager who does not profess "turquoise" will be afraid of difficulties and will return the old management system.

Are the size, scope and geography of the company important?

They don't really matter. There are successful turquoise innovators in medicine, industry, commerce, the service sector, IT, the non-profit sector and other areas.

The organizations cited as examples in Lalu's book have hundreds to tens of thousands of employees and are located in various parts of the world: from the evangelical school ESBZ (1,500 students and teachers) to the energy company AES (19,000 professionals).

How to hire new employees

It is better to hire new colleagues to people who will work with them.

You should not just “push” this task to HR: involve future colleagues in developing a test task for a new employee, invite them to attend the interview.

A good option is when a candidate is interviewed by several people at once and then a closed vote is held.

How to teach employees to take responsibility for their actions

Teal organizations aim to make every employee involved in the decision-making phase feel like an entrepreneur. This helps to build a strong team, improve information exchange and involve employees. When a person is involved in decision-making, interested in his opinion and his personal goals, he stops sitting at work.

The company creates conditions in which smart and responsible people reveal their potential, and whiners and lazy people are naturally weeded out.

And without a "great evolutionary goal"

Can. But it is worth thinking about what employees at the cooler are talking about and what values ​​they are broadcasting.

Frédéric Laloux gives an example in the book that Buurtzorg never fixed its purpose in a written document, a statement of the company's mission. But at the same time, all Buurtzorg employees talk about it all the time. They find that in oral form the meaning of the company's activities remains alive, does not freeze in established formulations. This makes the purpose of the company evolutionary and suggests its ability to evolve.

And it seems to me that your "turquoise" is just a temporary fashionable insanity.

Lalu's theory has critics who look for flaws in the system. For example, in heated discussions on Habré it is called"utopian communism". Users periodically criticize the turquoise company Valve, which has not updated the site for a long time, and some options in the world-famous online game Dota 2, because the company's employees themselves choose which projects to work on.

At the same time, the above large companies become successful thanks to the daily implementation of turquoise practices. The turquoise management style is not about chaos and lack of regulations. This is a rejection of the stereotype that every person is necessarily lazy and incapable of doing good things without constant supervision. Well, you can “try on” this idea for a workflow in different ways.

During a #VKLIVE live broadcast, German Gref said that several branches of Sberbank are already working according to the Turquoise organization model described in the book Discovering Organizations of the Future, without bosses and KPIs, but with customer care.

How the experiment works in real conditions, what a company of the 21st century should look like, and why companies in the evolutionary (or turquoise) stage are good - we will tell in this article.

Turquoise experiment of Sberbank

According to Gref, it is too early to talk about how quickly and massively it will be implemented, but the results are already very good.

He recently met with the coaches of the Turquoise Offices in Balashikha, who, using the example of specific cases, told how employees learn to work in new paradigm. For example, a client contacted a bank branch with a request to change the code word on the card. According to the standards, the employee had to change the word, give the documents and let the client go. In a Teal organization, an employee was wondering what was the reason for replacing important information. It turned out that the swindler needed the code word - this is how the crime was prevented. And this is a clear example of working in the Teal Organization, when people care.

In the new Turquoise paradigm, the team is changing from within: employees learn to be independent and take responsibility for their decisions, and leaders become coaches. This is noticeable not only to the employees themselves, but also to customers: they began to thank employees more often for their responsiveness.

Natalya Kuznetsova, coach, says: “Our department works on the first goal - customer satisfaction. We are changing the mindset of employees. Employees began to think more not about plans that we don’t have now, but about what the client wants from us. The slogan was born: “We used to think that we could take from the client. Now we think that we can give the client“. Oksana, the office manager, also shares her impressions: “Earlier, our managers and deputies solved problems for us. Now we solve problems of any complexity as a team and a team. And it's more efficient."

German Gref notes: “In this sense, everything here is completely different from what we usually do in a bank. Wonderful coaches in the departments, and very interesting results of the first months of work. And I think it the right way with which we will move on. The whole team has a sense of ownership: they feel responsible for building long-term relationships with clients, and this greatly increases the involvement and satisfaction of people with their work. A lot of processes are being transformed. We see the most important thing - the burning eyes of customers. For this, it is worth conducting such experiments. ”

Why are Turquoise companies so efficient and productive? There are several basic ideas.

Organizations of the future

You can't change anything by fighting the existing
reality. To change something, create a new one
a model that will make the existing hopelessly obsolete.
Richard Buckminster Fuller

Throughout its history, including today, mankind has mastered four ways of cooperation in organizations based on four different worldview paradigms: Impulsive Red, Conformist Amber, Competitive Orange and Pluralistic Green. Each of these organizational models became another groundbreaking discovery that allowed people to solve increasingly complex problems and achieve previously unthinkable results. And this is how Lalu reveals the essence of the turquoise organizations.

A New Metaphor: Organizations as Living Organisms

In the Competitive Orange paradigm, organizations are described as machines. Pluralist Green organizations use a different metaphor - the family. The founders of the Teal Organizations do not want to play the role of the chief executive. The approach to the organization as a machine already seems soulless and restrictive. The founders of the Teal Organizations use a different metaphor to describe their aspirations. With surprising frequency, they speak of organizations as living organisms or living systems.

Imagine what organizations might look like and change if we stopped designing them as soulless, rumbling machines?

Self-Government - Priority #1

Turquoise organizations effectively solve problems of any level of complexity, using a system based on the interaction of peers. There is no need for hierarchy or consensus in this system.

The widespread lack of motivation seen in many organizations is a detrimental side effect of the unequal distribution of power. The first major discovery of the Teal Organizations is the opportunity to overcome the age-old problem of unequal distribution of power.

Integrity in focus

Traditionally, organizations have always encouraged employees to show only professional qualities at work, and leave other personality traits at the door. We are required to demonstrate courageous determination, self-confidence, strength, and hide doubts and weaknesses. Rationalism reigns, and emotions, intuition and the expression of spiritual needs are undesirable and inappropriate.

In contrast, the Teal Organizations have developed a set of agreed practices that encourage us to reconnect with our inner integrity and be who we really are at work.

evolutionary purpose

Teal Organizations are considered to have a life of their own and have their own idea of ​​where to go next. Members of the organization are encouraged not to try to anticipate change and control the future, but to listen and understand what the organization wants to become, what purpose it wants to serve.

Trust instead of control

When you change your perspective, you see change.
Wayne Dyer

What seems most incomprehensible to many is the absence of superiors. But it is important that with no middle management and with a minimum of administrative leadership, Teal organizations do without the usual control mechanisms. These companies are built on a foundation of mutual trust.

The motives are transparent. Workers and other employees of the organization are reasonable people who can be trusted to do everything right. With this setting of rules and control mechanisms, very little is required.

As trust grows, so does responsibility. Healthy imitation and the opinion of colleagues regulate the system better than hierarchy. Teams, setting their own goals, take pride in achieving them. If someone tries to use the system to not do their part in good faith or slow down, his team members will quickly let him know how they feel about it.

At all times there are people who act on the basis of a worldview, which, according to the stage of development of consciousness, is higher than the worldview of the majority. The book includes reflections on the possibilities that open up to us if we choose to build organizations not according to the model of a mechanism, but drawing inspiration from nature and life. And the more people and more organizations follow the example of these innovators, the more they will enrich and refine our understanding of the new model, pushing the boundaries of this understanding a little further, inventing new methods and experimenting in new directions.

As the Navajo healers said, "We are the people we have been waiting for."

Valery Razgulyaev

To bookmarks

Turquoise organizations have become a trend in transformation modern systems management. At the last festival "Practices of Development" only they were discussed. And still there are many ambiguities on the most basic issues, both for beginners and for those who have already studied turquoise organizations in depth. True, theorists argue most of all. Practitioners are simply starting to implement changes in their companies and departments as they understand them. And often achieve excellent results. Even if initially they did not fully understand something, the movement corrects their understanding. After all, it is flexibility, speed and economy that are most valued in a turquoise control system.

Is it turquoise?

Disputes of theorists begin to unfold around the very first term "turquoise". It all started back in 1960 when Claire William Graves, an American psychologist, developed the concept of Spiral Dynamics. It considers a person and the development of his worldview in a spiral manner - in the process of change, people and society go through stages that have common properties. Each next stage to a certain extent includes the features of the previous one. For clarity, each stage of development was assigned a specific color. In the 1990s, Professor Graves' students Don Beck and Chris Cowan adapted this theory for managers and strategists in their book Spiral Dynamics. And in 2014, Frederic Lalu, in his book Discovering the Organizations of the Future, by analogy conditionally “colored” organizations so that the dynamics of the development of the company’s organizational system fell on the spectrum of the rainbow: from infrared, corresponding to the most primitive forms of organization, to ultraviolet, which he He never even mentions it in his book. Since different authors have different colors from each other, there is confusion in terms. As a result, Lalu's turquoise turned out to correspond to the "yellow" from spiral dynamics. There are other color schemes for control systems, even I have my own. Tip: before you name a color, say what color scheme you are talking about.

In this article, I propose to agree to use the term "turquoise" as it is understood in the book "Discovering the Organizations of the Future", because we are indebted to Frederic Lalu for popularizing this topic in Russia. The head of Sberbank German Gref noted this book as one of the three most important books about business.

Three pillars of turquoise organizations

The next terminological stopper is the three pillars on which any turquoise organization according to Frederic Lal rests - evolutionary purpose, integrity and self-government. Let's take a look at each of them.

- Evolutionary goal

The evolutionary goal is often confused with the mission. The difference appears at the moment when companies make decisions, when the mission or evolutionary goal diverges from the opportunity to make money. An honest company with a mission rewrites it to extend to the rest of the world. the new kind earnings. A dishonest company makes money without changing its mission. A company with an evolutionary goal does not do what is not necessary to achieve the goal, even if it can bring income. The company writes the mission for its own needs, but in the case of an evolutionary goal, the company is created for it. It turns out that the evolutionary goal is more important than the company. That is why a company with an evolutionary goal does not have competitors, since they all help to fulfill it and transform into associates! Once again, the evolutionary goal is not a “candy wrapper” that draws attention to it. And not something that makes anyone inspired by it and give the company more of their resource. And not even a motivator. The evolutionary goal is a flag that is raised by someone and gathers around him those who coincide in values. Are there opportunists among these gathered, mimicking and speaking in color? Of course there is. But the task of the evolutionary goal is not to get rid of them, but to fill the environment with those who really share it and set a clear benchmark for resolving any possible disputes in terms of achieving the common good.

- Integrity

The next term is integrity. We call a person whole who is honest with others and with himself. It is always a person, not a mask, form or role. This is the most difficult of the three pillars of the teal organization, as it is the most difficult to teach through heart-rending conversations in the human resources department. Integrity is when we stop perceiving employees as human resources and begin to perceive them and ourselves as living people with all needs and emotions, even if they are not really needed for work. It is well known that dress codes, work schedules, and overhead plans interfere with integrity and are therefore not welcome in turquoise organizations. Also, turquoise organizations do not separate personal life and work, because they are all parts of one whole. Therefore, in such companies, no one will ask you to leave your personal life behind the office door and be just a good cog in the system.

- Self management

Self-management is the most familiar term of the three constituent turquoise organizations. Therefore, practitioners most often begin with it. But in teal and non-teal organizations, self-management is very different. I know a leader who considers the situation “we discussed and I decided” to be self-government and is sincerely surprised when his subordinates call him authoritarian, because he found out their opinion and, simply being more competent, made the only right decision. He does not even think about who determines whose competence in this wonderful hierarchy of abilities. True turquoise self-management is when employees have the right to make a decision themselves without coordinating it, including the full right not to provide a service to an internal client if they believe that they cannot or do not want to do this. Yes, they are responsible for this, but there can be no talk of any punishments or fines - this is prohibited in any turquoise organizations.

These three whales are very dependent on each other, which you begin to feel as soon as you try to move to one of them in practice. At the same time, there are "turquoise" organizations that do not have one of them. I’ll talk about such examples in detail in the next article “Almost Turquoise Organizations: Three Examples from Russia.”

I am planning a series of articles for VC that talks about the features of turquoise companies. What else would you like to know?

In the meantime, here's a useful reading list on the topic:

"Leadership and Self-Deception" Arbinger Institute

Debt: The First 5,000 Years of History by David Graeber

"Parkinson's Law" Cyril Northcote Parkinson

"Leader and Tribe" by Dave Logan, John King and Haley Fisher-Wright

"Discovering the Organizations of the Future" Frederic Laloux

"Maverick" by Ricardo Semler

"Weekend all week" Ricardo Semler

The book of the coach and stimulator Frederic Lalu "Discovering the Organizations of the Future" became an obvious sensation. It is about a real tectonic shift in understanding internal organization business structures. From the first pages of the book, your ideas about how to properly build a corporate structure begin to be questioned. At first you are discouraged, then you protest angrily, then you doubt, and then you want to know more about this form of organizing the joint work of people. At its core, the book is a transformative practice - after reading it, your life will never be the same. Therefore, in the first lines of this article, I strongly recommend that you, if you have not read it yet, read this book.

But Lalu, unknowingly or intentionally, is being disingenuous, describing the new approach as quite open to the public. I propose to consider some features of the "turquoise" organizations in applying this model in Russia.

A Brief Introduction to Spiral Dynamics

Let's start with the fact that when the book was published, the word "teal" was translated without agreeing with the generally accepted terminology in the Russian-speaking integral community, which caused confusion. She, this confusion is already present, since both Ken Wilber and Don Beck use different colors to indicate the stages of deployment of the complexity of human systems. The history of this confusion is not interesting. In essence, of course, it is not so important what kind of symbol to endow such voluminous mental constructions, if you understand and appreciate what is behind the symbol more than this symbol itself. But disagreements still arise. Here is an illustration designed to minimize semantic loss:

As Frédéric Laloux describes his turquoise comes after green, that is, he tries to describe the "yellows" in terms of the spiral dynamics of the organization. But if you are familiar with this evolutionary approach to the development of human systems, then when reading the book you will often come to the conclusion that the relationships described in turquoise organizations are more similar to those generated by a pluralistic form of values, seeking universal agreement, creating communities, striving for a high degree of involvement of everyone in the implementation of something big and meaningful. That is, in the book of Frederic Lalu, we are talking about green organizations. But this does not detract from the merits of the book, which describes a radical paradigm shift in approaches to building a case.

Frederic Lalu cites the following principles for self-governing organizations in his book, referring to Gary Hamel:

• Nobody can ruin a good idea.
• Everyone can contribute.
• Everyone can become a leader.
• No one can dictate his will to others.
• You choose your business.
• You can easily build something of your own based on what others have done.
• You don't have to put up with bullies and tyrants.
• Agitators are not isolated.
• Perfection usually wins, but mediocrity does not.
• Inciting hatred will backfire on whoever does it.
• A great contribution to the cause receives recognition and fame.

Based on these principles, you can independently infer the stage of thinking that gave rise to such principles.

It is customary to scold the green stage in the integral community, ironically over the culture of the new era and wishful thinking. However, let me offer you a point of view from which what is called green in this ironic vein is only a superficial ripple, an initial exalted form of spiritual euphoria, which has as little to do with a truly genuine pluralistic consciousness as myths about greedy, selfish and short-sighted orange correspond to the real strength and depth of a rational, enlightened, inventive, self-sufficient modernity, or, for example, as a judgment about a righteous, honest, decent “blue” world order does not fit into the Procrustean bed of religious dogmatism and bureaucracy. Each string of spiral dynamics carries with it its own special sound, coloring the culture with both harmonious and overly deliberate, discordant melodies.

True green is about mature, sensitive, sincere and responsible men and women who care.

They found each other and united to fight for what we today consider the norm - for the right of women to vote, for the abolition of slavery, for the right of the child to a family and education. Green is much more complicated than orange, something is available to green that orange cannot even think of, drawn into the framework of its external invulnerability, its ideas about personal viability, its constant striving for elusive success. Green is directly and ordinaryly happy inside deep involvement in a common cause, the tasks of which he considers to be significantly greater and worthy of attention than personal status fuss and showy gloss. Green has great luxury, which for orange is not even considered as a criterion for happiness - green highly values ​​​​his right to be real: sincere and vulnerable, he no longer compares himself with others and walks light - he has thrown off the shackles of conforming to someone else's opinion. Today, some tasks green remained unresolved or unfinished yet. We have not yet learned to admire the beauty of political, spiritual-religious, national and gender differences between people, countries and cultures. Green thinking, encountering a boundary that makes such a distinction, often seeks to erase it in order to realize its desire for generality. We are seeing such a crisis of multiculturalism in Europe as a consequence of an unjustifiably generalized approach to human nature. Green, like all other stages of the first order, considers only its own values ​​worthy of attention, it ignores or condemns everything that is not consistent with its ideas that, for example, trusting relationships between people are significantly more effective than control and coercion.

To understand the truly epochal significance of the innovations that Frederic Laloux describes in his book, it is important to keep in mind an adequate picture of green thinking, surprisingly holistic in its inconsistency. I repeat, we are talking about adults, feeling, sincere and responsible men and women who care. They are willing to work hard towards achieving their common goal, they are respectful to each other, they care, they are responsive and they, the key point, are self-organizing.

Approaching the question of what Frederic Laloux kept silent about, let's remember how Master's degree programs in business administration came to Russia. “Organizations of the Future” brings green values ​​to us in the same way that the MBA brought orange values. Enthusiastically received at the very beginning, the Master of Business Administration programs soon came under justified criticism as unsuitable for domestic reality. But over time, when new formal methods and forms of work were put into practice, they adopted feedback and began to teach differently. Most likely, the “organizations of the future” will have to go through similar stages.

Criticism of the MA in Business Administration has been built around the difference between American and domestic cultures, although it was really about the difference between orange and red-blue thinking. Yes, the case, organized in the format of the first courses in the MBA, works in America and does not work in Russia, because American companies employ people who can extract confident music from their orange strings, and in Russian companies trying to play orange music on red and blue strings is doomed to failure. Two factors have contributed to the fact that the Master of Business Administration remains a successful business school: firstly, we have adapted it to Russian reality and secondly, our Motherland has learned to give birth to its own orange “Platons and Newtons”.

Likewise, introducing organizational forms, described in the book by Frederic Lalu, we run the risk of getting a modern crisis of European multiculturalism within a domestic company, repeated on a smaller scale. Why? Because Frédéric Laloux's companies employ people who know how to extract confident music from their brand new green strings. Yes, of course, such companies that successfully operate on the market are possible in Russia today. But they must have a powerful green filter at the entrance and understandable forms of ousting from their ranks those employees who managed to deceive such a filter.

And for the construction of such companies, a personal transformation of a leader is needed, who no longer considers people as tools for manipulation to achieve his goals. Yes… just a personal transformation…

What is Frederic Lalu silent about? His "organizations of the future" look monochrome - their employees are hardworking, caring, sociable people who solve all their problems in specially designed deliberative formats. Even being integrally informed, he does not write about the fact that this almost never happens either on a personal level, let alone on a personal level. social level. We are different, we are influenced by a lot of psychological, everyday, cultural and political circumstances. Perhaps, in order to inspire the reader, the author needed to generalize something. This, however, is permissible, it is only important to understand that we are reading reduced to brief description the results of the real experience of real people who have gone through a difficult path for the sake of these results. Most likely, the leaders of the companies described in the book have the music of the yellow strings in their repertoire, using them to create the most effective human systems from the available high-quality "human material" in Europe and North America. But still, these results look surprisingly monochrome - they are formulated in a relatively narrow value range - from ending orange through green to the initial yellow. This may be evidence of the persistent filter of perception of Frederic Laloux - we receive through the book only what the author himself could notice. The organizations themselves described in the book can and most likely are much more complicated and interesting. There is another very important circumstance here. The fact is that the evolution of human systems is an inexorable and inevitable process. Business schools continue to fulfill the missionary task of teaching local "natives" not to eat their competitors, but to make a win-win situation with them, creating conditions for mutually beneficial partnerships. Frederic Lalu's book is one of the first swallows of a new evolutionary wave that will create its own schools and teach business people to see in the extraction of maximum profit not an absolute goal, but a means for the implementation of more significant tasks. And then, perhaps, myriads of unemployed trainers, inspired by the life-giving beauty of eco-friendly communication, will finally have something to do. Imagine that in a year or two, the majority of employees in your company, having found something to their liking, do not show off in front of others, do not pull the blanket over themselves, are able to negotiate, care about the common cause, strive to resolve conflicts quickly, soberly evaluate their contribution, be fair to to yourself and to others. In a word, every employee of your company masterfully knows how and loves to play on the green string of his soul. Then the organizational principles described by Frederic Lalu will come in handy.

Indeed, trusting relationships within the human system can work wonders. People who no longer feel the need to report their actions "to the top" get a chance to discover in themselves a responsible attitude to their work. Lalu cites the following figures: “About a third of employees (35%) are actively involved in the work process. Far more people are indifferent to what they are doing or have actively distanced themselves from their work (43%). The remaining 22% did not feel any support from the management.” Involvement in a common cause may be the result of a trusting attitude of the owner of the company to employees and employees to each other. This can create the conditions for the dormant green strings of their souls to wake up and start playing their better music.

The involvement of the green stage can undoubtedly enrich the organizational structure of business structures. But the very idea of ​​building organizations in monochrome strikes me as flawed. It makes the company overly dependent on the only possible format of relationships, creating, in fact, greenhouse conditions within a closed system for the same type of music with just one string. Really “yellow” in terms of spiral dynamics can be an approach to creating management by values ​​in a company, when people with different outlooks on life find acceptable forms of work for themselves. This approach is referred to as the natural project of the case. Unfortunately, it is difficult to describe it in the format of a short article. Spiral dynamics, as a non-linear integral model, born of more complex thinking, is actually a tool for solving problems created at the green and other stages of first-order thinking. We are introducing a hierarchy of values, we are again drawing boundaries where green thinking has tried to create a utopian realm of benevolent caring friendliness.

Frédéric Lalu describes to us innovative, successful, strong and very interesting green organizations. He, however, wants to think that he is talking about "yellow" organizations, calling them turquoise in Russian translation.

Regardless of this confusion, what he describes is amazing. This is really a new approach, a new corporate life, a new business culture. As for the “yellow”, the approach to creating such a self-governing, living organization can be “yellow”. "Yellow" thinking is multifaceted and not tied to value paradigms, it contributes to the natural self-organization of chaotic systems. It’s hard for me to imagine a monochrome “yellow” system; rather, we are talking about the governing principle of coordinating multidirectional vectors towards a single goal. I don't think, frankly, that a "yellow" monochrome business is possible. How social phenomenon business starts on red, blossoms on orange, and ends on green, which no longer perceives profit as an end in itself, but as a means to something more important. "Yellow" forms of labor organization, project activities can be assimilated within the orange and green paradigm, but I can't imagine a "yellow" case as such. "Yellow" has other tasks and a different structure, an order of magnitude larger. I repeat, in today's complex and fast-paced cultural and technological conditions"yellow" can, and probably should be the principle of managing an organization - the principle of flexible, detached, fearless, integrating thinking. qualitative cultural change. Moreover, in a certain sense, we can say that the mentality of people living in the post-Soviet space is based on an internal craving for sociable involvement. We do not ignore deep psychological issues, we still strive to help each other, it is internally easier for us to trust than to verify, we strive to “get to the very essence” in everything. Perhaps it is the Russian people who will have to say a very significant word in this part of world history.

Now no one really knows how to create such organizations either from scratch or as a result of transformations of existing classical hierarchies. We should expect the emergence of research communities of business people around the topic of organizations of the future. These will be communities of interested practitioners, not consultants. Participants will be able to join forces for collective analytical work on a particular company. These communities will not be burdened with massive spiritual baggage, but its members may have experience of certain contemplative practices. Neither religious, nor political, nor ideological, nor national, nor sexual restrictions will be able to interfere with these communities - they feel the Procrustean bed a mile away. These communities will be united by the issue of creating human systems in which each individual will have the opportunity to develop their talents and virtues in the most natural way. Members of these communities will create the future, literally and immediately. I would be honored to work with them.

Today, the knowledge accumulated by mankind over many thousands of years has become available at a distance of a few clicks of a computer mouse. All cultures born by people, all value orientations are equally actively present in our now common information field, giving rise to both destructive upheavals and surprisingly beautiful new forms of humanity. In the global space of semantic chaos, new ideas are born and die with amazing speed. This is how our thinking evolves. We live in a busy time, when entire epochs have time to change during the life of one generation. Therefore, we have been able to trace the laws of evolving thinking and can apply them in practice.