I thought i'd go through the book and write notes as I do to help encourage conversation when we do the book review
How can Yearn act with a sense of radical abundance, as if Yearn were overflowing with goodness, truth, and beauty?
Aim for contributors to be truly inclusive with a non-marginalizing level of human consciousness
Integral stage is where we are at now, its pioneering
Mindsets, culture, behaviours and systems are intertwined. A change in any one dimension will ripple through all the others. So this could mean how do Yearn contributors approach their work, do they enjoy it? For culture, this refers to how well individuals feel they fit in, and get along with each other. For behaviours, how much work do people do, are their contributions recognised? For systems, this includes how work and individuals are organised. For example, the onboarding process.
Laloux's book shows that organisations operating at the integral or teal stage no longer work with dominator hierarchies, the boss-subordinate relationships that are pervasive in organisations today
In teal organisations, any person in any team can make literally any decision for the company. This makes each team, and each person in the team, much more integral - they can operate on any level in the hierarchy they are capable of, as long as they consult with those who will be affected by the decision.
The power games, the politics, and the infighting end up taking their toll on everybody - at the top and bottom of traditional hierarchial pyramid organisations.
Lots of organisations do teal, non-profits, profits, those with hundreds of staff, and those with thousands
Impulsive-Red organisations people fight for survival (i.e. street gangs and mafias), conformist-Amber organisations are hierarchial with workers in need of direction and judged to be lazy. Workers in orange stay in their defined roles (i.e. Catholic church and military). Achievement orange is modern global corporations (i.e. walmart, Nike or Coca Cola) where more is considered better and we effectively live in the future consumed my mental chatter about things we need to do to reach goals set. Where Amber relied only on sticks, Orange came up with carrots. ...
Pluralistic-Green strives for bottom-up processes, gathering input from all and trying to bring opposing points of view to eventual consensus. Green leaders should be servant leaders, listening to their subordinates, empowering them, motivating them, developing them. In green organisations promoting the culture and shared values is of primary importance. ...
Should Yearn do 360-feedback? A green initiative.
If we look at an organisations structure, its practices, processes and its cultural elements we can generally discern what worldview they stem from (i.e. orange/green/teal for example?)
Should Yearn have a simplified mission statement? Beyond what's in the blue pill. Does Yearn have one already that I can't recall? Could this be summarised in a couple of sentences perhaps? https://gov.yearn.finance/t/how-we-think-about-yearn/7137
Could Yearn donate X of profit to charity? via Givewell?
The shift to evolutionary-Teal happens when we learn to disidentify from our own ego. By looking at our ego from a distance, we can suddenly see how its fears, ambitions and desires often run our life. If we go Teal, then instead of setting goals for our life, dictating what direction it should take, we learn to let go and listen to the life that wants to be lived through us. As human beings, we are not problems waiting to be solved, but potential waiting to unfold.
Corporate ills affecting Yearn: information hoarding and secrecy (maybe there should be a place where all contributors/doers share what they are working on so the rest of the organisation has visibility), ignoring problems away (does Yearn need to do more to help the DeFi industry grow? especially if we are in a bear market), silos (not all teams share progress/have visibility with other teams)
Important to remember that Yearn moves at the speed of trust
As people in Teal are busy exploring the calling in their lives, they are likely to affiliate only with organisations that have a clear and noble purpose of their own. Does Yearn? Is the aspiration to grow the DeFi industry and help people go bankless strong enough to attract Teal people?
Purpose is the guiding principle for teal organisational decision making. Also teal organisations will strive for wholeness and community, and will be places that support people's longing to be fully themselves at work, and yet be deeply involved in nourishing relationships.
Teal organisations talk about their org as a living organism or living system. Change in nature happens everywhere, all the time, in a self-organising urge that comes from every cell and every organism, with no need for central command and control to give orders or pull the levers
Teal organisations operate with a system of peer relationships, without the need for either hierarchy or consensus. Individuals have self-management
Teal organisations have developed a consistent set of practices that invite us to reclaim our inner wholeness and bring all of who we are to work (warts and all)
Teal orgs have an evolutionary purpose. They have a. life and a sense of direction of their own. Members listen in annd understand what the organisation wants to become, what purpose it wants to serve. (Advice for new Yearn contributors: spend time in the various groupchats listening, on calls listening, and then find a task/issue you can work on using your skillset)
Meetings at Yearn when decisions are to be made have a facilitator who helps group decision making. Every voice heard and collective intelligence informs decision making. Like the Product calls on a Monday
In Teal, learning to lie with the amount of freedom and responsibility can take some times, and there are often moments of doubt, frustration, or confusion.
Because there are no hierarchy of bosses over subordinates, space becomes available for other natural and spontaneous hierarchies to spring up
There are fluid hierarchies of recognition, influence, and skill. Some relationships may rely on one individual sharing their expertise and the other following the instructions. Another may rely on an inexperienced member expressing a clearer way of doing something (i.e. how to onboard new contributors), that isn't as apparent to the more experienced employee
At Yearn, onboarding team play a role of coaching self-management amongst new employees. What about existing employees too that may need/request it?
Regional coach can give advice or shared how other teams have solved similar problems. The coaches role is to ask insightful questions that help teams find their own solutions
At Yearn, a regular task could be checking in on different teams asking how its going with project X, what do you think about Y, etc, perhaps every 2 weeks for each team
In Teal, the absence of rules and procedures imposed by headquarters, and lack of centralised staff functions (such as HR, strategy, legal etc), creates a huge sense of freedom and responsibility throughout the organisation. Although there is less economies of scale because small teams each carry out their own recruitment, solve problems etc, there isn't the diseconomies of motivation when many tasks are centralised and controlled. Economies of scale is given up for unbridled motivation.
Teal organisations built on foundation of mutual trust. Workers seen as reasonable people that can be trusted to do the right thing. With that premise, very few rules and control mechanisms are needed. People work with their natural rhythm.
When organisations are built on structures and practices that breed trust and responsibility, extraordinary and unexpected things start to happen. (Example given is a operator on a assembly line seeing a defective piece, owning the problem, driving 8 hours to Volkswagen to inspect all other shipped pieces)
In teal orgs, project teams form organically and disband again when work is done. A huge amount of time freed by dropping formalities of project planning - writing plan, getting approval, reporting on progress, explaining variations, rescheduling, and re-estimating, and politics.
Self-management brings the principles that account for successful free-market economies inside organisations.
In Teal orgs the job emerges from a multitude of roles and responsibilities an individual picks up based on their interests, talents, and the needs of the organisation.
In teal orgs anybody can put on the hat of the boss to bring about important decisions, launch new initiatives, hold underperforming colleagues to account, help resolve conflicts, or take over leadership if results are bad and action is needed
Rather than decisionns through hierarchial authority (someone calls the shots, but many people frustrated) or consensus (slow) the advice process works better. Everybody with a stake has a voice and people have freedom to seize opportunities and make decisions (while taking into account other peoples voices). Advice process helps create community, humility, learning, better decisions, and fun.
People at Yearn should feel empowered to ask colleagues for advice and then get started on a project that is interesting to them that adds value
^ Can think the same for contributors of Yearn. We're not going to have managers setting tasks and goals for contributors, instead contributors thought of as adults who can do this themselves
Shop floor is considered the strategists, everyone else serves to support them perhaps? Or does Yearn have another purpose?
Self-managing structures and the advice process build up over time a vast, collective reservoir of trust among colleagues
How can information flow be improved at Yearn? Easy access to team group chats for new contributors / people who want to join. Stewards creating a summary every week/month on work being done / opportunities for contributors to help with / problems being faced
Would a survey sent out to contributors at Yearn every few months help with direction we're heading?
Do contributors feel confident enough to hold fellow contributors to account if they disagree with something, or a colleague isn't carrying their weight? How can this be encouraged?
Morning Star encourages colleagued to write a personal mission statement and spell out all of the roles you commit to in a document called Colleague Letter of Understanding. Perhaps this is something Yearn could do to increase transparency across the organisation about who is doing what? For each role, you specify what it does , what authority you believe you should have, what indicators will help you understand if you are doing a good job, and what improvements you hope to make on those indicators.
In Teal orgs, people don't compete for scarce promotions. You can broaden the scope of your work and increase your pay if your colleagues are ready to entrust you with new roles.
At Yearn if you see a problem or an opportunity, you have an obligation to do something about it, and most often "something" is to go and talk about it with the colleague whose role relates to the topic
New people at Yearn encouraged to be proactive, show initiative, and be trusted to shape their own journeys
What prevents teams from getting complacent if no boss setting targets, pressuring to cut costs/do quicker? Intrinsic motivation, calibrated by peer emulation and market demands
In teal orgs, all employees are powerful - not just the bosses in trad orgs. Employees encouraged to grow into the strongest, healthiest version of themselves.
Next reading? Lands of Lorecraft https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/lands-of-lorecraft?s=r. Zemm shared on the 13th March in the marketing and growth chat
