In the midst of the excitement at Agile2015, InfoQ sat down with Sanjiv to chat. Get the inside scoop on his new book and hear how LitheSpeed is experimenting with “Teal.”
Here’s a snippet:
Craig from InfoQ: I think one of the interesting things having sort of learnt more about your organization here at the conference is you practice what you preach, I guess, or live the values. One of the interesting things we were talking about earlier, there’s a movement going around the Agile community around no-management, about reinventing organizations. That’s something that you’re experimenting with yourself?
Sanjiv: Yes. That’s one of our core principles that we never advise or propose anything that we haven’t not only done for ourselves but also done with a core customer group that we’ve worked with for a while.
So in the last year, what we’ve done, what we’ve started doing is implementing the work of Frederic Laloux and his work around Reinventing Management. For those of you who are interested out there, there’s the book, there’s the YouTube video. In particular, what Laloux has started to do is to identify some core levels. There’s a green level, there’s an amber level below that, and a red level. The most self-managing level that seems to lend itself best to us in the Agile community is something that he calls the “teal organization,” the color teal, which incidentally, it seems to line up well with our logo! We didn’t design this this way but sometimes things work out!
Craig from InfoQ: I guess it is early days but, I guess, even being a small company, what’s the reaction like from the people inside the organization? Is it positive or have there been road bumps?
Sanjiv: How honest can I be?
Craig: This is an Agile conference….
