April 2016. I closed my company, merged it with a seven-person team I'd known for about three months, and started showing up to their office every morning.
The team was called Kugghuset. They called themselves Data Wizards. They'd been experimenting with self-management for a couple of years without knowing it had a name.
I'd spent the previous six months reading about TEAL organisations, buying copies of Laloux's book, and talking to anyone who'd listen. This was my chance to actually try it.
Here's what I found.
Why I did it
The reasoning was simple once I laid it out clearly.
I knew what kind of work I wanted to do: product development, building things, startup speed. And I knew how I wanted to work: in a real team, with genuine autonomy, somewhere that took Teal seriously.
My own company, Seed Nordic, had the right what but failed the how test. It was just me.
Kugghuset had the right how but focused on data and business intelligence, not product development. So I asked: why not combine both? I'd bring the product side. They'd bring the team and the culture.
We agreed. Before signing anything, I spent a week meeting each team member individually over coffee. Those conversations were unlike any job interview I'd had. Nobody asked about my CV. Everyone talked about what they actually cared about, what they were hoping for, where they felt uncertain. One person poured their heart out to a total stranger.
Later I realised that wasn't unusual for this team. That was just the culture.
I joined.
What actually worked
The advice process was real, and it worked.
A few weeks in, I decided I wanted two things: a salary cut (I was going to work one less day, after all), and to stop coming into the office on Tuesdays. Both significant. Under the advice process, I could make both decisions myself, as long as I'd reviewed the numbers and talked to the people affected.
I reviewed everyone's salaries (all visible to the whole team). Checked the financial forecasts. Talked to four colleagues. Got a high five for the Tuesday plan. On the salary, half thought I should keep the full wage even on the shorter week; the other half thought a cut made sense. I made my call: take the cut, revisit in August.
From first idea to decision: one day.
I called them TEAL Tuesdays. The concept came from Ricardo Semler, who once described what he called "terminal days." The idea being that when people receive a serious diagnosis, they suddenly make time for the things they'd been putting off. His question: why wait for the diagnosis? I used Tuesdays for exercise, walks, reading, writing. More thinking, less performing.
The culture around wholeness was also real, more real than I expected. Kids showed up to sales meetings. A colleague's paintings went up in the conference room. People shared how they actually felt, not just what was going well. It wasn't a therapy group. It was just more honest than any workplace I'd been in.
What was hard
Two months in, we'd had three serious wellbeing incidents. One person overworked. One stressed by too many responsibilities. One feeling unappreciated and powerless.
For most organisations that would sound like a normal quarter. For us it felt like a failure, because we'd said explicitly that feeling safe, valued, and appreciated was everyone's collective responsibility. We hadn't built the early-warning systems to catch it in time.
Another problem: at nine people, no one knew what everyone else was doing. Without managers, it wasn't always obvious who was responsible for what. Things fell through gaps. Some people were overloaded, others under-stimulated. The self-management that worked at five people was starting to strain at nine.
And purpose. We'd defined ours as "a place where people can do interesting work and have fun." That was enough to attract good people. It wasn't enough to make decisions with. When harder questions came up about which direction to take the company, "have fun" didn't help us choose.
I remember a colleague crying during a difficult conversation and trying to hide it. She said work wasn't the place for that. We talked about it afterward. Why not? The whole point of wholeness is that you bring the real version. But we were so trained in the other direction that it took conscious effort every single time.
Baby steps. But I want to be honest: the gap between the book and the reality was real.
The liquidity scare
One Monday we updated our sales forecast and ran the cash flow analysis. The numbers were alarming. According to the spreadsheet, we'd be bankrupt in a matter of months.
Everyone went home sick to their stomachs.
Tuesday we looked again with fresh eyes and found the error. A simple mistake. Crisis over.
But something interesting happened in that 24-hour window. People dropped their masks. The stakes felt real, so the conversation got real. What kind of company should we actually be? What do we do if we have to cut? What are we here for?
And for the first time, the purpose conversation produced honest answers. Not mission statement language. Just people saying what they actually cared about: keep having fun, build cool things, prove that TEAL can deliver real results.
I've thought about that a lot since. The crisis didn't create the clarity. It just removed the reasons people had been holding back from honesty. The clarity was already there. It needed a reason to surface.
What it changed
I left that experiment believing in the ideas more than when I started, and also understanding them differently.
Self-management works. People can be trusted to make complex decisions about their own salaries, schedules, and priorities. But it requires transparent information, honest relationships, and a culture where people actually talk to each other before deciding. Without those, it's not self-management. It's just nobody being in charge.
Wholeness is harder than it sounds, because most of us have spent decades learning to perform instead of be. You don't undo that quickly. But the alternative is a team full of people performing at each other, and that doesn't produce much that matters.
Evolutionary purpose is the idea I keep coming back to. Not the organisational version, but the individual one. Not "what is this company for?" but: what are you for? In the practical, day-to-day sense of: what direction are you moving, and does the way you're working right now align with that?
That question started as an organisational experiment in 2016. It's now at the heart of most coaching conversations I have.
If you want to think through your own version of it, the Life Report is where I'd start. Or if you want the full TEAL framework first, the previous post explains it. And if you'd rather talk it through directly, here's how I work.
The experiment wasn't perfect. But it was worth it.
