Laloux Culture Model
In Frederick Laloux’s book Reinventing Organisations[1] there is a culture model that helps to identify and describe an organisation’s cultural awareness, the perspectives it has and the behaviours and actions of the people within a culture.
The model helps to indicate where an organisation is in terms of it’s cultural awareness and the distance to travel when compared to the ideal culture that Agile promotes. This can lead to interesting conversations with leadership teams when challenged on why they want to adopt Agile, and what culture they would like to promote in the organisation.
The different culture types tend to be synonymous with technological advances and innovations through the ages such as using a hierarchical organisational structure for example, which allowed many people to be aligned and forming large organisations made possible.
Reactive Infra-Red
100,000 years ago the typical group of people tended to be small family units that worked the land to survive. Any awareness beyond the family unit is limited with a limited organisational culture.
Magic Magenta
50,000 years ago small groups and tribes are formed with superstition created to explain the unexplainable phenomena around them. The invention of deities and gods helps to align belief structures and provide a sense of order.
Impulsive Red
The tribes in Magic Magenta begin to form into larger tribes with chieftains and alpha leaders in charge. Status is very sensitive here as the chieftain’s rule can be challenged and dissension is not tolerated.
This culture is impulsive and reactive with little thought given to longer term strategies or goals. The term “wolf pack” with an “alpha wolf” is quoted by Laloux to describe the leadership style in this culture.
Conformist Amber
2-5,000 years ago in the timeline and the hierarchical organisation structure is the innovation that allows large numbers of people to be aligned to a single organisation, allowing large organisations to be created.
These tend to be either military or organised religion based structures. Status and a person’s level in the hierarchy are indicated by the clothes that they wear, which can be different from lower or higher status clothing. Ascending the hierarchy is normally done by influencing powerful others in the hierarchy.
Strategic goals are formed and long term objectives are possible, as the hierarchy becomes self sustaining.
Achievement Orange
This paradigm is a meritocracy, the higher your performance, the higher you ascend in the hierarchy. Processes and roles and responsibilities are clearly defined and there is a scientific approach to managing the organisation. Long term strategies are possible and there are significant organisational innovations to enhance performance.
This culture is like a defined machine with clear boundaries and expectations of the people within the organisation. The promise of ascension in the hierarchy is possible for all who work hard and produce the goods.
There is a feeling of supremacy over the natural world as plans, business requirements, skills and expectations are well defined on paper, and there is a scientific language that dehumanises people into “resources” that translate to numbers on a balance sheet.
Success seems possible in theory, but are deceptively unobtainable in most cases as the natural world comes into contact with our perfect paper plans.
Pluralistic Green
Pluralistic Green is a paradigm that focusses on people and values with self organising teams, leaders empowering the staff and developing a caring and helping culture that also translates to the improved end customer experience.
Fun at work and being productive are no longer opposing dynamics, but are encouraged to develop creative solutions to difficult problems. Leadership teams are secure in their roles as gardeners and cultivators of the ideal culture, often placing teams at the fore front of the initiatives and placing themselves as the blocker removers and servant leaders that support them.
Agile sits well here as the core values of individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration and responding to change are intrinsically embedded into the culture.
Migrating from Achievement Orange to Pluralistic Green can be a significant shift in mindset, as moving from a position of believing that the natural world can be defined on a piece of paper (Orange,) to accepting and acknowledging that there is a more complex eco-system out there, and that we should instead focus on our ability to harmonise with the system and respond to the ebbs and flows, can be like telling the Flat Earth Society that the Earth is indeed round, or at least oval shaped.
Hence, many Orange paradigm organisations struggle with the Agile notions of self-organising teams and responding to change with an emergent strategy, as it seems impossible to deliver projects without controlling people and having a fixed plan from their perspective.
Evolutionary Teale
Teale organisations have evolved beyond the need for a hierarchy or leaders for that matter. They instead, form networks of people that are not only self-organising but are also self-managing. They take full accountability for their own actions and encourage others to do the same.
Teams become unstoppable as they propel themselves forwards whilst also understanding their needs and the needs of their customers.
Agile here, seems to be more fluid and organic than in Pluralistic Green, as teams evolved beyond the need for Agile frameworks such as Scrum or Kanban for example, and instead evolve their own frameworks that tend to be based upon core principles rather than on practices.
Migrating to Teale maybe unachievable and in most cases unnecessary for the majority of organisations, however, they may need to foster some innovative or creative teams that operate within this paradigm in order to keep pace with the start-up disrupters that are evolving towards their market share.
References
- Reinventing Organizations, Laloux F, 2014