In 2016, Gallup reported that roughly 70% of people felt disengaged at work.
I've been thinking about that number for almost a decade. So I looked it up recently. Their 2024 report puts the figure at 69%.
It has barely moved.
We've had a pandemic. Remote work revolutions. Quiet quitting and return-to-office mandates and AI assistants that supposedly do half our jobs for us. And after all of that, the number is essentially the same.
Which suggests the problem isn't about the tools or the policies. It might be about the model.
A very brief history of how we got here
For most of human history, the way we organised groups of people was shaped by the problems we were trying to solve.
Tribes needed protection from threats. Power went to whoever was strongest. Agricultural societies needed stability across thousands of people, so we invented hierarchy and formal roles. Authority came from above, often from God. You didn't question it. Aristotle once claimed that men have more teeth than women, and for 2,000 years nobody checked. That's how much we trusted authority.
Then came the age of reason and the industrial revolution. Suddenly the best ideas could come from anyone. You could earn your way up. Competition became the mechanism for progress, profit became the measure of success, and hierarchy became meritocracy.
This model worked incredibly well for a long time. Medicine. Technology. Living standards. All of it improved. We owe it a lot.
But it also gave us a workplace designed for output, not for people. 40-hour (often 80-hour) weeks. Burnout. A continuous chase for status that never quite ends. And that 69% that doesn't seem to shift no matter what we try.
In the last few decades we've started seeing something new. Organisations that flatten hierarchies, share decision-making, and try to delight people rather than just extract value from them. Google, Spotify, the best startups. Collaboration over competition. Purpose over profit targets. This is progress.
And it still isn't quite enough.
Enter TEAL
In 2014, a researcher named Frederic Laloux published a book called Reinventing Organizations. He'd spent years studying a handful of companies doing something genuinely different, and trying to work out what they had in common.
He mapped the whole history of organisational thinking onto a colour spectrum, from the earliest tribal structures through to what he saw emerging. The new stage, the one these companies were reaching toward, he called Teal.
I read it in early 2016 and bought four copies. That's how strongly it landed.
The book is worth reading in full. But the heart of what Teal organisations do differently comes down to three ideas.
Self-management: anyone can make any decision
In a Teal organisation, there are no managers in the traditional sense. Nobody sits above you approving your choices.
Instead there's the advice process. If you want to make a decision, you make it. The only requirement is that you seek input from the people affected, and that you have access to the relevant information. After that, the decision is yours.
That sounds chaotic if you've only ever worked in a hierarchy. The instinct is: who's responsible? What stops someone making a bad call?
The answer is the same thing that prevents bad calls in any organisation: relationships, information, and knowing you'll live with the consequences. It turns out people make pretty decent decisions when they're treated as capable adults with full information.
Wholeness: stop wearing the work mask
Most workplaces ask you to leave part of yourself at the door. The emotional part. The uncertain part. The part that might not have the answer. You bring the professional. The professional performs.
Teal organisations actively try to undo this. Not by turning the office into a therapy session, but by treating people as whole humans rather than role-holders.
It's a subtle shift with real effects. When you don't have to manage your image, you make better decisions. When you can say "I'm not sure" without it threatening your position, you're more honest about what's actually happening. When you bring your real self to the table, the table gets smarter.
Evolutionary purpose: the organisation as a living thing
This one makes people most uncomfortable because it sounds the most abstract.
The idea is that an organisation isn't just a vehicle for its founders' goals or its shareholders' returns. It's more like a living thing with its own sense of where it wants to go. The people in it are less owners and more stewards.
In practice this means letting purpose emerge over time rather than fixing it in a mission statement. Asking not just "what do we want to build?" but "what does the world need that we're uniquely positioned to provide?"
It sounds spiritual. It is, a little. But organisations oriented toward something real turn out to be much harder to derail than those built around a number.
I said "hippie bullshit" too
The first time someone pitched me Lean and Agile, I was a management consultant in my late twenties working at GE. My exact thought: "This is hippie bullshit. It will never work in the real world."
Ten years later, I was running a startup studio having fully embraced both. I'd been wrong.
When I first encountered TEAL thinking, I had the same instinct. No hierarchy? People setting their own salaries? The organisation as a living organism? Come on.
But I'd learned something by then. Breakthrough ideas always look radical from inside the worldview they're replacing. "The world is round" was once a fringe position. What looks obviously true from one worldview looks obviously wrong from inside the next one.
I'm not saying TEAL is perfect or universal. I eventually tried it in a real company, and I'll tell you about that in the next post. It's messier than the book makes it sound.
But it asks the right questions.
What this has to do with you, personally
Most people I work with aren't running companies. They're mid-career professionals wondering why the work that used to energise them has started to feel flat.
What I've noticed is that the three Teal ideas show up in those conversations too, just reframed individually.
Self-management becomes: who's actually making the decisions in your life, and are those your decisions?
Wholeness becomes: which parts of yourself have you been hiding, and what would it cost to stop?
Evolutionary purpose becomes: what is your life actually trying to become, and are you paying attention to it?
The organisational model and the individual situation are different things. But they're asking the same questions from different angles. And both tend to produce better outcomes when people stop waiting for permission to be honest about what they actually want.
If you want to explore where you are on that map, the Life Report is a useful place to start. I also went deeper on the developmental theory behind why these stage transitions happen in this post on outgrowing a stage. And if you'd rather have a direct conversation, here's how I work.
The 69% figure will probably still be 69% in another ten years if we keep doing what we've been doing.
Something has to change. Might as well start with the questions.
