Orange organizations are the majority of the current modern corporates. If we choose from any of the current brands, we can be sure we have a great chance to find an organization from the orange bucket: Walmart, Nike, Coca-cola.
These organizations inspired by result-oriented orange ideology. This operating form overtakes the previous evolution levels, helped to three breakthrough innovations:
Innovation, accountability, and meritocracy which depends on the performance of the employees. While amber organizations completely process controlled, then orange organizations under entirely project control. Leaders are continuously repeating: change and innovations, not a danger, more a possibility.
The pyramid structure of the amber organization drilled with holes of the orange project, cross-functional, and virtual teams, which accelerate the communication, and helps the innovations.
The organization in this form use the collective intelligence, and give space, and ownership for innovations, and thinking. Management defines the basic principles, and the organization works out how it will implement. For the management irrelevant how they execute. More relevant the results. This attitude is the base for the control principles, like strategic planning, and mid-term plans, strategic KPI, yearly budget, just to talk about a few. While amber organizations have the penalty as a majority control function, orange organizations have the bonus.
These organizations created motivation processes to motivate the employees to reach the dreamed results (a few examples: Bonus performance analysis, bonus system, a quality measure, stock options) Based on experience, with the best efforts, these don't help the management expectations. EGO is more considerable than best effort.
In practice, we need to move the decisions to lower levels, to help the innovation, and motivation, but the current leaders fear to let the control out from their hands, so the decisions made on their levels. Another great example is the yearly budget planning!
The management asks the departments, to plan their yearly budget. They did the planning based on their best knowledge, but with less effort. When the numbers did not meet the expectation of the managenóment, the management creates an alternative budget based on their expectation, which matches the stock owners expectations and reaches their bonus criteria. Finally, the employees need to accept the higher numbers. Instead of honest talks, they start to create fictive excel sheets. With this process, we miss the primary goal, the accountability of the individual persons, and vocation to the targets.
Meritocracy is a significant advantage. With this, anyone whose performance meets the criteria can fill any position. Even from the post-delivery boy, we can make the CEO. This organization removed the symbols of the different layers as formal clothes replace with business clothes. With the more modern operation, it outperforms the previous operating model. But together with this, we indicated two big issues: One the people go behind a mask, and continuously show the success for the position, and for promotion.
The second is a more significant problem when we have unleashed innovations: After we served all of our needs, we need to generate new ones, which accelerate the feeling for more joy and performance. Like latest fashion, or young body. We need to see this artificial need generation is no longer acceptable for the economy, or from ecology.
In surgery, they call this synthom: Cancer.