Cultural paradigms
Paradigms describe not only the historical past but also the forms of organization that coexist today in companies, public administrations, and institutions. Understanding which paradigm an organization operates in is key to understanding why some agile adoptions succeed and others fail.
Types of paradigms
Red or impulsive paradigm
About 10,000 years ago, the first forms of organization emerged, with a cultural paradigm that we can refer to as "impulsive" or "red."
Characteristics
- Strength is the most valuable thing. The powerful demand, and the less powerful submit in exchange for security.
- Present in tribal societies and marginal sectors of present-day society (street gangs or mafias).
- Authority is maintained by displaying absolute power.
- Emotional relationships between people are very crude, and empathy is scarce or nonexistent.
- It produces organizations that are highly reactive to new opportunities and threats, but at the same time very short-termist. In other words, they adapt well to chaotic, catastrophic environments but are not useful for achieving complex results in stable environments.
Amber or Conformist Paradigm
About 5,000 years ago, we began to understand causality and to plan for the future. Agriculture emerged, which requires anticipation and process: gathering and storing seeds to secure the next harvest. Chiefdoms gradually gave way to a class-based society, rigidly stratified into rulers, officials, priests, warriors, and artisans.
Characteristics
- They are suited to stable contexts in which the future can be planned on the basis of past experience.
- They can plan and launch medium- and long-term projects, such as building cathedrals or creating extensive and complex trade networks.
- Everything revolves around immobilism: change is not accepted because the world is immutable and there is only one right way to do things: the way they were done in the past. In other words, what worked well in the past will also work in the future.
- Weight is given to values such as order and predictability, which creates a false sense of security.
- Power is hierarchical, set in rigid pyramidal organizational charts with layers of bosses and subordinates.
- Layers and castes with formal titles encourage the adoption of social masks.
- Ranks and uniforms are created to institutionalize and mark the different functions. People's appearance and attire reflect their functional identity within the organization, and along the same lines, people adopt and display behaviors appropriate to their caste.
Achievement or orange paradigm
The orange paradigm emerged when we began to consider that we were not in a fixed universe ordered by immutable laws, but in a system that works like a complex mechanism, whose inner workings can be studied and understood.
By better understanding how things work, more can be achieved.
This paradigm has given rise to scientific research, innovation, and entrepreneurship. It is currently the most widespread among business leaders and politicians. Over the last two centuries, it has extended life expectancy and produced levels of prosperity never seen before.
Characteristics
- These organizations have made three important advances: innovation, accountability, and meritocracy.
- These advances come alongside more negative aspects, such as corporate greed, strategic and political short-termism, overconsumption, indebtedness, and overexploitation of resources.
Pluralistic or Green paradigm
The pluralistic (green) paradigm emerges as an antithesis to the shadows of the achievement (orange) paradigm: social inequality, materialistic obsession, and the loss of a sense of community.
Today the orange paradigm is the one that predominates in politics and business. Green is making its way in nonprofit organizations, among activists and social workers, and more generally in organizations of people who operate by valuing relationships over results.
Characteristics
- It offers alternatives to orange organizational models, such as decentralization, empowerment, values-driven culture, and a focus on multiple stakeholders: in addition to shareholders, also suppliers, customers, local communities, the environment, and so on.
- In its early days, what stood out about this paradigm was its groundbreaking nature. In practice, authors such as Laloux consider that these organizations are unsuccessful because of the difficulties involved in trying to reach consensus among a large group of people.
In hindsight, we know that these extreme forms of egalitarian organization have not succeeded at any significant scale or for any significant length of time. Reaching consensus among a large group of people is inherently difficult. The initiative often ends in exhausting talking sessions and a possible stalemate. In response, power games creep in as people try to get things moving again. — Laloux, Reinventar las organizaciones [Reinventing Organizations, in Spanish] (2016)
- This type of paradigm tends to use frameworks of technical agility such as Scrum or of organizational agility such as dynamic governance or sociocracy. In some cases, they are also used to drive the evolution toward the teal paradigm.
Evolutionary or teal paradigm
The evolution to a teal culture (also called "emerald") involves disidentifying from our own ego. Success, recognition, or wealth are traps for the ego. In teal culture, success or recognition is not the goal. The goal is a life well lived, and its consequence may well be success, recognition, wealth, and love.
Characteristics
The three contributions of evolutionary – teal organizations are:
- Self-management: Green culture brings empowerment, but empowerment implies that a higher-ranking manager delegates part of their power, whereas for teal authority is not part of a zero-sum system. In the structures of teal organizations, there are no members with decision-making power and members who simply execute. By nature, and not by delegation, everyone has decision-making power, and the organization's structure includes holacratic processes to regulate the flow of information and decisions.
Every decision made at headquarters takes responsibility away from people in other parts of the organization and reduces the number of people who feel they are making a real contribution to the organization. — Dennis Bakke
- Wholeness: in teal organizations there are no promotions to fight over and no bosses to please. People show up fully, being themselves. These organizations invest a great deal of time in hiring, informing candidates about their values and ways of working so they can decide whether or not they want to be part of the organization. A well-known example is Zappos.com, which offers new hires a $3,000 check if they have second thoughts during the probation period and prefer to leave the company.
- Evolutionary purpose: for teal organizations, profit is a by-product of work well done. The organization's purpose is neither shareholder value nor profit maximization, but its evolutionary purpose. Brian Robertson, founder of Holacracy, uses the parent-child metaphor to explain the concept:
What is the organization's identity? And what does it want? [...] The metaphor is like the parent-child journey: we recognize that our child has their own identity, path, and purpose. And if I'm really excited about them becoming a doctor, I don't program them. If I do, a harmful, codependent process takes place. [...] But the key has to do with separating identities and discovering what the organization's calling is. Not what we want to use the organization for as its owners, but rather: what is the creative potential of this life, of this living system?
Common mistake
Believing that the teal paradigm is the "correct" one and that the others are outdated. Laloux's model describes an evolution, not a hierarchy of absolute value. An amber organization may be perfectly suited to its circumstances (an army, a church, a standardized manufacturing process). Adopting agility in an organization without the corresponding culture produces what Laloux calls "orange disguised as green": the rituals change, the values do not.
Resources
🌐 AgiLevel — Official websiteDocumentation and resources for the model
📄AgiLevel v.5.0Free download · Scrum Manager
🔧 AgiLevel Radar — Assessment toolScrum Manager · Free online assessment
🔧 AgiLevel CanvasScrum Manager · Tool
References
- AgiLevel.
- Laloux, Frederic. (2016). Reinventar las organizaciones [Reinventing Organizations, in Spanish]. ARPA Editores.
See also
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