In 2006, Dutch home-care nursing was drowning in bureaucracy. Nurses spent more time on paperwork than with patients, and some agencies logged barely half their billable hours at the bedside. Jos de Blok and three frustrated colleagues launched Buurtzorg with just €8,000 in personal savings and a radical proposition: self-managing teams of nurses with minimal bureaucracy and maximum trust.

Today, Buurtzorg counts over 14,000 nurses across 900 autonomous teams. Each group manages its own caseload, budgets, and hiring—with just 50 staff at headquarters. Overhead costs sit at 8% compared to a sector average of 25%. Patients require around 40% of the care hours authorized elsewhere. Client and nurse satisfaction scores consistently rank among the highest in Dutch healthcare.

Buurtzorg’s model illustrates a simple idea with far-reaching implications: give front-line professionals real control—and systems built on trust, not command—and both quality and cost can improve dramatically. That insight lies at the heart of Teal organizations.

What is a Teal organization?

Coined by Frederic Laloux in Reinventing Organizations (2014), the Teal model is part of a broader theory that maps organizational structure to human developmental stages. Teal organizations behave like living organisms: adaptive, decentralized, and guided by a shared sense of purpose. They emphasize:

• Self-management: Teams govern themselves without supervisory ranks
• Wholeness: Individuals show up with their full selves—judgment, values, and emotional range
• Evolutionary purpose: Strategy emerges through collective sensing, not top-down plans

These principles build on, rather than replace, previous organizational models. Here’s how Laloux frames the evolution of organizational paradigms:

Remember, Teal does not reject earlier advances. It adds adaptability on top of scale, strategy, and performance.

Watch on GLOBIS Unlimited: Learn what a TEAL Organization is and the key benefits this model can offer your organization

From theory to practice: Lessons from the vanguard

The implementation of Teal principles varies, but key patterns emerge across industries and contexts.

• Morning Star Company: The world’s largest tomato processor (≈40% U.S. market share) operates with no managers. Over 500 full-time and 2,000+ seasonal workers coordinate via peer-written “Colleague Letters of Understanding” (CLOUs). Voluntary turnover is under 2%.
• Haier Group: China’s largest appliance maker transformed its 80,000 workers itself into a network of 4,000+ autonomous micro-enterprises, each with P&L responsibility. The move turned a struggling state-run factory into the world’s #1 appliance brand by revenue.
• Patagonia: With the mission “We’re in business to save our home planet,” Patagonia embeds evolutionary purpose into its operations. Its 2011 “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign encouraged conscious consumption—and despite the negative messaging, led to a sales increase and the creation of a devoted customer base.
• W.L. Gore & Associates has operated without formal bosses since 1958 through a “lattice” structure, cutting out intermediaries and fermenting an internal culture of freedom and responsibility.
• Handelsbanken, a Swedish bank, has run on radical decentralization since the 1970s, consistently outperforming its peers and navigating the 2008 financial crisis without needing a bailout.
• Zappos: The online retailer adopted Holacracy in 2013, replacing traditional hierarchy with self-organizing “circles” and roles. While aiming for agility, the top-down rollout led to challenges: voluntary turnover spiked to 30% in 2015 (up from a pre-Holacracy average of ~20%), with 18% of staff (about 260 employees) accepting buyouts amid role ambiguity and inadequate transition support.
• Valve Corporation: The video game developer operates a flat structure where employees are given wheeled desks to easily move between self-chosen projects and teams, powering innovations like the Steam platform (over $10.8 billion in revenue as of June 2025). Legend has it co-founder Gabe Newell once personally carried the desk of a new hire who balked at moving it himself. While this boss-less freedom fosters creativity, it can create informal power cliques and stall initiatives, such as the indefinite delay of the much-anticipated Half-Life 3.

These examples show that success in Teal hinges on clear rules, transparent data, and robust peer feedback mechanisms. Without these, efforts can drift into confusion or dysfunction.

As The Nation of Plants argues, nature itself offers a model: resilience and intelligence emerge from decentralized networks, not centralized control. Teal taps into this logic for human systems.

The transition challenge

Teal requires more than flattening a chart. Most failed transitions fall into three traps:

• Mandated autonomy: Leadership removes managers but retains centralized budgeting and career paths. This creates a mismatch between rhetoric and reality.
• Foggy accountability: Without defined peer agreements, decision rights blur, and informal hierarchies take root.
• Framework dogma: Adopting systems like Holacracy wholesale, without tailoring to context, leads to rigidity rather than agility.

Mitigation strategies:

• Start small: Pilot Teal in one adaptive value stream where agility is already essential.
• Make data visible: Share cost, quality, and customer metrics at the team level to enable self-correction.
• Train for feedback: Before removing managers, invest in peer coaching and conflict resolution skills.

Ask the right question

Teal is neither a silver bullet nor a fringe experiment. It is a tested design choice for work that rewards judgment, speed, and local knowledge—qualities increasingly vital in today’s dynamic business environment.

The practical question for executives is not a large-scale, all-or-nothing commitment, but a more focused one: Where in your organization could a shift from control to trust produce better results?

Pick that specific arena, run a contained experiment, and let real data decide the next move. Agility follows trust—and trust follows evidence.