Starting a Teal Meetup

 

Originally posted Dori Rutkevitz here  

(Pullout quotes added by EE)

In June the first meeting of the (SF) Bay Area Reinventing Organizations Group was held. While I have my own hopes and dreams for what contributions this group can make to our wider community, the fact that it’s a meet up for folks interested in a new form of collaboration means the group may need to explore new ways of being a “meet up”. We’re experimenting together.

I imagine that, with the growing popularity of Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations, and with the ever increasing hunger people have for more meaningful work, many such groups are forming or will form around the globe. Others might find notes and reflections from our meetup useful in structuring their own: therefore, I plan to post after each meeting with some notes from the event as well as reflections.

About Teal and “Reinventing Organizations”

This post assumes that you’ve read RO. The book has been a tremendous inspiration for me and has offered a language to articulate both what I’ve found lacking in my work experiences in the past, and what I see is possible when human beings find better ways to collaborate.

The book has been a tremendous inspiration for me and has offered a language to articulate both what I’ve found lacking in my work experiences in the past, and what I see is possible when human beings find better ways to collaborate.

A longer post is needed to intro the book, but for now here are some resources that serve as good introductions.

A call for B Corps to take on the breakthroughs of RO, along with a short intro
A thorough deck of slides
A video of the author describing the book
An amazing community generated wiki
More

How to start a meetup

My co-organizer (Ryan) and I set up the group using meetup.com. It costs $15 US to create a meetup with a limit of 50 members. I’m paying for this myself now, but I imagine that if we find this to be a useful group for people we can figure out a way to distribute the cost.
I posted about the meetup on the RO Discourse platform, which along with the FB page is the most active RO online community I know about.
Those posts were enough to get a small number of members, at which point I created a Doodle to find a meeting time that worked for everyone.
Mosaic, the company I work with, was generous enough to host our first meetup in our office after-hours. I imagine you could meet anywhere (e.g. a pub), but I recommend somewhere quiet. For us, we didn’t know each other yet and we didn’t really know what we wanted our meetup to be, so a good space for conversation was critical.

As an organizer I was faced with an interesting first decision. What does facilitation look like for a Teal meet up? I have desires for what the group will be like, but others will have their own visions. How do we self-organize, and at the same time how do I provide enough structure within which we can self-organize well?

I decided to take a note from how Holocracy holds meetings. These seem to be highly structured, yet provide the space for everyone’s voice to be heard. I made a google doc with a proposed agenda and posted it on the group’s discussion board, while also making it clear that we could drop this structure if needed. This way we would have something to work with but everyone would also know that there was space for them to shape the group.

The notes

We met on a Wednesday evening in Oakland while the Warriors played the final game of the NBA championships (poor planning on my part). 8 people came together, and in general I thought it was a lovely night. Fortunately, Ryan took amazing notes and we’re making them available online. You can check out the notes yourself, so I’ll just highlight a couple of items:

The values of Transparency and Sharing came up a number of times in the group. This is a big part of why I’m writing this post and sharing our notes.

Many of us are not only personally interested in working in a Teal environment, we’re interested in the Teal movement. The idea of such an emergent movement is super exciting to me,

Many of us are not only personally interested in working in a Teal environment, we’re interested in the Teal movement. The idea of such an emergent movement is super exciting to me,and when I meet others who’ve read RO I can sense it happening. So many of us are dissatisfied with the status quo of how we work. Even those of us fortunate enough to be in innovated industries or purpose-driven organizations with more space for “wholeness” know that there is a better way to do business. This meet up (and groups like it) can be a node in the wider network of the movement towards more soulful work.

We saw that the group could take on a number of shapes: a place to build community, a place to find collaborators in your projects, a place to learn from each other and experts. There was an interesting tension in the group between wanting a space to talk, share and learn on one hand, and a space to start Teal projects and take action on the other. I’m personally imagining the meet up as a community gathering space where such projects can spin off from.

We saw that the group could take on a number of shapes: a place to build community, a place to find collaborators in your projects, a place to learn from each other and experts. There was an interesting tension in the group between wanting a space to talk, share and learn on one hand, and a space to start Teal projects and take action on the other. I’m personally imagining the meet up as a community gathering space where such projects can spin off from.
One such project I day dream about is a Teal conference. Picture a one day (or more!) event where folks can sign up to host talks about their Teal journey, to facilitate experiments in self-organization, and to share best practices. I’m so excited to get involved in this when the time is right.

That’s all for now. I’ll be posting again in a week or two with notes from our second meetup, which we are hosting with the Zappos crew! If anyone is organizing a meet up out there and wants to share their insights or ask a question, post below or email me.