How might Integral City learn from an integrally informed re-frame of Reinventing Organizations?

 

Reinventing Organizations

Reinventing Organizations

 

Frederic Laloux’s book of that title, examines the emergence of integral organizations (Teal in Wilber- Integral lexicon, Yellow in Spiral Dynamics integralese). Laloux’s exploration of Reinventing Organizations is based on research in eleven organizations who are demonstrating the qualities and capacities of second tier operations.

From the perspective of Integral City this is excellent news. Organizations are vital to recalibrating three of the four voices in the city – Civic Managers, Civil Society and Business. And if that kind of recalibration were possible, the ripple effects would necessarily engage the fourth Citizen Voice because the majority of citizens are working in one or more of the “organizing voices”.

So Reinventing Organizations offers a meso scale of impact with enormous leverage for changing the whole system of the city. It seems to me that Reinventing Organizations offers a fractal resonance to the larger scale of the city, where learning within organizations and between organizations will necessarily shift the complexity of the city upwards towards the emergence of an Integral City, operating with all its evolutionary intelligences.

Now I am curious if we change 10% of the city’s key organizations would that be the tipping point for shifting the whole city into Integral City operational territory?

 This blog marks the start of an exploration of what we can learn if we applied some of Laloux’s ideas from Reinventing Organizations to recalibrating the complexity of the city.