Realness

Or how totaalvoetbal changed the world of football <but there’s no World Cup winners medal, so it’s not real>.

This isn’t totally a post about football, so please don’t turn away if that’s not your game or bag.

It is about what we refer to as “real” so this post might be a little mix of sport/existentialism, but please, read on.

As a 7 year old boy, watching the 1974 World Cup finals in West Germany was my first real adventure in the world of football beyond ATV’s The Big Match robustly commentated on by Hugh Johns.

I was amazed that England were knocked out by Poland in the qualifying stages. Scotland made it and were in a group with Brazil, Zaire and Yugoslavia. How intrigued I was about this match up of world footballing teams.

I hadn’t though, prepared myself for something I hope to still see more of in the world — total football or in Dutch totaalvoetbal.

The Netherlands 1974 World Cup Squad played their football in this way.

I didn’t even know what it was until some time later in my life — probably around the 1978 World Cup in Argentina or even later.

The concept that players weren’t necessarily allocated positions like right-back, centre-half, winger, holding-midfielder role and that anyone could and did play anywhere except the goalkeeper (pretty much the rules dictated that). So Jan Jongbloed was the Goalkeeper and wore shirt number 8 (because the whole team was numbered alphabetically and not 2–5 defenders, 6–8 midfielders, and 9–11 strikers). I even liked this aspect of it — eschewing conventional numbering methods. Even in this different system, they allowed for one to choose their number. Johann Cruyff wore 14 because he loved that number.

An interesting tournament saw the Dutch team advance to the final itself against hosts West Germany, only to lose 2–1 to a Gerd Mueller goal.

The experiment had not worked.

West German orthodoxy won and totaalvoetbal was a failure

Or was it?

Total football has been around since the early part of the 20th century. The 1930’s Austrian national team used this method, it was then successful in the English league with Burnley winning the title in 1959–60, and experimented with in Hungary’s national side in the 1950's and 60's.

OK almost enough football.

So this failed experiment then, means totaalvoetbal / total football is a nonsense, a brief fad. A trend. An unsuccessful period in trophy capture but a fun time to be watching such pioneering moves. We should be cautious if not hugely sceptical about aspiring to be a total football team. It’s a paradigm of fancy.

Except we may never really, truly know how much totaalvoetbal has inspired others.

Sure teams line up 4–4–2, or 3–5–1–1 or whatever.

Football now has a myriad of formations and options to play in certain styles. Spain’s tiqui-taca; the French youth policy that resulted in the winning team of 1998.

So it would seem total football isn’t real, and shouldn’t really be even trialled by anyone else. It was about that 1974 squad and may never be repeated.

As a footballing concept though, it’s still something I love and see aspects of so it is very much real to me.

That people aren’t confined to a role by a number on a shirt or a certain skillset. That people are allowed to be their best self on a football pitch irrespective of an orthodox, positional-based mindset.

Yet, I’m also not a successful football manager. Or even a decent footballer.

Now the pivot. To the world of work.

I’ve been around that for not quite as long as football. I entered the workplace in the mid-1980s. I learned a lot. I saw a lot of things I guessed were the “rules of the game” and the “tactics and formations”.

As I developed more maturity and experience, I felt an unease. That how I was “told” to operate wasn’t how I felt or wanted to be. So I did some outward compliance to those who were telling me, and worked quietly and a little subversively I guess with others in my team to get it done ‘our way’.

I was told 4–4–2. I longed for more totaalvoetbal.

So, around the mid-early 2000’s I discovered some outliers. Some challengers and pioneers. Semco. Morning Star. W.L. Gore — now legendary names in the annals of alternative business history. And suddenly it was like I was a football manager and had the option to create my version of totaalvoetbal.

So I set about it. Doing tiny experiments and challenging traditions. Finding people with similar interests and experiences to learn from. Being drawn to the newly lauded start-up world. Discovering concepts like self-managed teams and systems thinking. I was awash with enthusiasm for what I could do for the world that I felt like I’d found my purpose. To always be what I felt I was — a bit different — in pursuit of something I later came to understand as “unf*cking work”.

Since then my discovery has led me beyond the job I was in at the time; beyond the other organisation I was part of afterwards and into my own one-person business. And yet I’ve always held those principles as my reason to be: Be different and thereby, shift those orthodoxies for and with others who similarly wanted and felt they needed to be different.

On this basis, transformation was important for me and so it was that People and Transformational HR became my company name as well as my thing. For a while, I was working on Hackathons, use of Social Technologies for work, self-organising concepts and some (yes I am braced for it) disruptive thinking in HR.

A very warm and wise chap called Colin Smith met me in 2014, and mentioned this book he was reading by a Belgian guy, Frederic Laloux, called “Reinventing Organisations”. And a book has never had the impact on me like this book did. It was like I outwardly cheered at the turning of the pages on my real / e-book version.

I’d found something that set my soul alight. Companies I had heard of and some new ones I hadn’t

All of a sudden it was 1974 was here and I’d just seen Cruyff do “that” turn in the left corner of the pitch, Ruud Kroll’s statuesque “bring the ball out from the back” play and Rob Resenbrink prove to be un-markable by defenders.

I suddenly had a hat stand to hang my hat on. Only a couple of years before that I’d come across Spiral Dynamics and so it felt like this was something I’d been waiting for to make sense of this “next stage” organisations I so longed to part of creating.

My mission to be different wasn’t just that, it was to help create the next stage, the new, the metamorphosis in work that I think we as human beings all deserve.

It gave my work new meaning, new sense of convincing narrative and a vibrant sense of possibility. I was bought in.

In the book, author Laloux talks to much of his own and others ailments about work. It’s control by others, it vacuous nature of constant demand for (only) financial gain and of how we’ve somehow lost ourselves in being part of this way of working. That’s a very over-simplified version of it, but the general thrust is there is that demon to exorcise, that battle to fight, that adversary to overcome with some new thinking and enlightened business people doing so.

Teal is the concept in the book (if you don’t know about it there’s lot of web content on it so I won’t need to repeat it in here) and based on Spiral Dynamics gives us codification of something to help us understand a from-to; a difference; a framework and a concept.

And in typical “new to business” style, it’s been avidly taken on by some, shot down by others and picked apart, adapted, challenged, built on you name it. I even have a sticker on my laptop with the book cover on it, in case people say “what’s that all about?” and I can enlighten them. I’ve advocated buying the book in literally every keynote I’ve given to about 6–8,000 people over the last 3 years.

This post isn’t purely about the book though: It’s about the realness of the concept of teal in the book.

It was challenged by the Corporate Rebels in their post Bursting the Bubble — Teal Ain’t Real.

This post caused a reaction in me and I’ve been mulling over thoughts on and off about it for a while.

I’ve been lucky enough to meet and talk with Fred. I’ve found people who know the content of the book and understand teal far better than I do.

I’d describe myself as a believer in the concept and an activist towards promoting more awareness of this concept; and active experimentation with many of the things associated with teal. Including the book itself and learning from organisations who are proving the alternative ways of working aren’t just workable, they’re much needed for the working people of the world.

I believe in better I guess you’d say. Not that I want to create better for me and mine and tough on everyone else. But we all deserve the chance to know about, understand, learn and then do stuff in a better way for ourselves, each other and the world.

In the Corporate Rebels the reality of teal is challenged. The authors of the post says this:

Because we have seen organizations and people who blindly believe everything in the book. Even worse, some take the books ideals more literally than even Laloux himself.

I’m sure that’s the case. We might get over zealous about blueberries being a super food, about Iron Man training or about Montessori education. Yet these aren’t for everyone.

The post continues to (helpfully) make the point thus:

Many readers of the book assume that because they are offered as case studies of the “teal paradigm”, they must have all the three breakthroughs in place (evolutionary purpose, self-management and wholeness). This is far from the truth.

The post goes on to say that “copy and paste” isn’t going to cut it, that Laloux as an author could’ve been more obvious in disclaimers about being a teal pure breed; and to not take this all too serious.

Fair enough right?

There’s then a mention of the superiority of teal being top of some hierarchical development model; that it’s perhaps overly spiritual, it’s about Fred as creator being spiritual in his lens on the world; and not to take things too literally.

So maybe my experiences of the working world are different.

There’s still a HUGE part of the business world who’ve never heard of Fred, the book and are oblivious to Spiral Dynamics and teal. There’s equally still people who read it now and are inspired and enlightened and motivated to want to see more changes like the ones illustrated in the book. So I don’t think it’s even widespread enough that we can tell how good, bad or right or wrong it is.

Is the book flawed? Aren’t they all.

Is teal something I slavishly believe in? No.

Then what’s my issue?

Well teal is real.

Just like total football is real.

It may not be obvious, it may not be called that, it may not be a complete systems approach to the philosophies.

I see total football in some of the best squads in the footballing world. My own team <Northampton Town> had a banner year in 2015–16 and won English League 2 on 99 points and a 30+ game unbeaten year.

Were they a total football squad? In many respects no. They had a lot of positional play but a mix of clearly totaalvoetbal principles. It’s how they overturned deficits on the pitch; coped with financial challenges off the pitch; how they came together; worked with individual moments of maestro like performance; collective efforts and cover and a squad principle.

So for me, total football was real, then.

We lost our manager to his boyhood team in a higher league; we had a new one, then another, then another (we’re now with Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink) so it’s all gone a bit pear shaped.

But for a while totaalvoetbal was real even at lower league level for me.

Teal is just as real as people want or need it to be.

That it’s wrapped in a complex social system used to describe work is merely a label, but that proves it’s real in some form of researched, psychological and occupational sense.

So teal is real to me and always will be I’ve deduced. Flawed interpretation and all. I’m not obsessed about it, I’m not dogmatic about it, I’m not blind to it’s shortfalls.

What is also real to me is that a lot of the working world is in some state of a quagmire of dark, toxic and unfulfilling ways of being. I see too many people who have none at all or at best a really low level of joy from their work. When we spend so much of lives earning a living that seems wrong.

Is teal the answer? On its own of course not.

There’s no one answer, and so for me, teal (and the book Reinventing Organisations) forms a part of a stirring of the mind and soul that along with other energies, concepts and evidence could shift our way of working to being one of more joy, fulfilment and satisfaction.

That is very very real to me and maybe to others.

So let’s not throw out the champagne with the cork.

We’ve a lot of work to do and teal may form a big part of this.

As the Corporate Rebels say in their final words

Use the theories, models, case studies and best practices as sources of inspiration, but don’t forget to critically assess them. The danger is that you try to become more teal than real.

I’d say rather than the danger of more teal than real, let’s crack open the champagne when your version of teal becomes real.

When you recognise you might not have won the business world’s Cup Final, but you do a great service to the aesthetic, technical and artistic needs of people who really do want something better.

Your version of better, belief and belonging.

That’s more real than any theory or challenge to it.