CONCEPT
The Empty Chair
The Teal decision-making practice of designating a chair in significant meetings to represent the organization's purpose — ensuring that someone speaks for what the organization exists to serve, distinct from management, shareholders, or the people in the room.
The empty chair is a decision-making practice developed in some Teal organizations to make evolutionary purpose operationally present in significant meetings. A chair is placed at the table — literally or figuratively — to represent the organization's purpose. Someone in the room takes responsibility for speaking from that chair, for asking what the purpose would want, what the purpose requires, what decision would serve what the organization exists to serve. The practice forces a question that Orange organizations rarely ask and Green organizations ask too diffusely: What would our purpose want us to do here? The AI age makes this question urgent, because abundant capability allows appetite to drive output in ways that diverge from purpose without discipline.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The empty chair practice sounds mystical to Orange ears; it is rigorously practical. Every organization has multiple interests represented in its decisions: shareholders, executives, employees, customers, suppliers. Each interest advocates