Listening to Purpose

As described more fully in the Background article, “Evolutionary Purpose”, one of the defining characteristics of Teal organizations is how decision-making and actions are driven by a desire to fulfill the organization’s purpose, a purpose which evolves over time and which is distinct from maximizing profits or beating the competition. If we accept that an organization has its own energy, its own sense of direction, and that its members’ roles are to align with rather than dictate that direction, the question becomes, “How do we find out where it wants to go?” As a result, a critical organizational process in Teal organizations is what is often referred to as “Listening to Purpose.”

Sensing Approaches

The simplest answer to finding out where an organization wants to go: do nothing special. Let self-management work its magic. There is a word that often comes up with Teal pioneers: sensing. We are all natural sensors; we are gifted to notice when something isn’t working as well as it could or when a new opportunity opens up. With self-management, everybody can be a sensor and initiate changes— just as in a living organism every cell senses its environment and can alert the organism to needed change. We cannot stop sensing. Sensing happens everywhere, all the time, but in traditional organizations, the information often gets filtered out. Only the signals sensed at the top are acted upon, but unfortunately these signals are often distorted and far removed from reality on the ground. Holacracy’s Brian Robertson uses a powerful analogy to talk about organizations filtering people’s ability to sense their environment:

A transformative experience [happened happened] for me when I nearly crashed an airplane. I was a student pilot, and shortly into a solo flight my “Low Voltage” light came on. Every other instrument was telling me “all is well,” so I ignored it, just like we do in organizational life all the time, when one lone “instrument” (a human) senses something that no one else does. Ignoring a key instrument proved to be a very bad decision when flying an airplane and helped catalyze my search for organizational approaches that didn’t suffer from the same blindness— how can an organization fully harness each of us [as as] human instruments, without “outvoting the low-voltage light”?^[1]

For an example of how this might work in practice, see “Concrete Examples for Inspiration - Buurtzorg” below.

Brian goes on to say, “… getting clear on purpose is more like detective work than like creative work. What you are looking for is already there, waiting to be found— it is no more a decision than your child’s purpose is. Simply ask yourself: “On the basis of our current context and the resources, talents, and capacities at our disposal, the products or services we offer, the history of the company and its market space, and so on, what’s the deepest potential it can help create or manifest in the world? Why does the world need it?”^[2]

While people are naturally gifted sensors, we can increase our capacity to sense with practice. Meditative or spiritual practices, in particular, can help us distance ourselves from self-centered needs and tap into broader sources of wisdom.^[3] For an example of how this might work in practice, see “Concrete Examples for Inspiration - Sounds True” below.

The Empty Chair

A simple, less esoteric practice to listen in to an organization’s purpose consists of allocating an empty chair at any meeting to represent the organization and its evolutionary purpose. Anybody participating in the meeting can, at any time, change seats, to listen to and become the voice of the organization. The empty chair can be used explicitly or as a guiding voice in our heads. Here are some questions one might tune into while sitting in that chair:

• Have the decisions and the discussion served you (the organization) well?

• How are you at the end of this meeting?

• What stands out to you from today’s meeting?

• In what direction do you want to go? At what speed? Are we being bold enough? Too bold?

• Is there something else that needs to be said or discussed?^[4]

Heiligenfeld, an operator of mental health facilities in Germany, uses a practice with a similar effect. As part of every meeting, someone is asked to volunteer to take possession of a pair of tingsha bells, two small hand cymbals that can make a beautiful, crystal-like sound. Whenever the person feels that ground rules are not being respected, or that the meeting is serving egos more than purpose, she can make the cymbals sing. The rule is that no one can speak until the last sound of the cymbal has died out— which takes a surprisingly long time. During the silence, participants are to reflect on the question: “Am I in service to the topic we are discussing and to the organization?” Colleagues are now so used to this practice that simply reaching out to the cymbals is all it takes to get a meeting back on track.^[5]

Large Group Processes

While the empty chair is typically used on a day-to-day basis, when an organization faces a major inflection point, there are a number of more elaborate processes that can help large groups of people to listen in jointly to their organization’s purpose and sense of direction. These processes include Otto Scharmer’s “Theory U,” David Cooperrider’s “Appreciative Inquiry,” Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff’s “Future Search,” “World Café,” "Liberating Structures" and Harrison Owen’s “Open Space.”

These processes are non-hierarchical and self-organizing. They often bring the “whole system” into the room: all colleagues of an organization, whether a few dozen, hundreds, or thousands, come together for a working session of one or several days. Clients, partners, and suppliers can be invited to join, to add their perspective to the inquiry. Each of these processes comes with its particular format, but they have one thing in common: they achieve the unlikely feat of giving everybody a voice (even when thousands of people are involved), while at the same time channeling these voices toward a valuable collective outcome.^[6]

Outside Prompting

Teal organizations seem to have found that when a company is clear about its purpose, the outside world comes knocking at its door with opportunities. Sometimes it feels as if it isn’t only people inside the organization sensing where it wants to go, but people from the outside, too. At Buurtzorg for example, by now, people from all sorts of backgrounds get in touch with Jos de Blok and others in the organization to explore ideas that could shape where Buurtzorg might go next. De Blok and his colleagues accept these meetings and listen with open minds. When the discussion seems promising, they set up experiments and see what happens. There are no committees, no stage-gate processes, no set budgets. It really is that simple: discussions take place and things evolve from there. The feeling is that what is meant to happen will happen.^[7]