I asked Van Beek if he would have preferred for Hsieh to wait until after Supercloud to make the Teal offer. He laughed pretty hard at that question. “Oh, absolutely. I call it executive interruption. That’s expected, especially at Zappos. But when Supercloud began, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine executive interruption at this scale, especially toward the end of what we’re trying to do. Not saying that the decision was right or wrong. Just happens to be at a time when we’re trying to finish what is probably the most complex thing we’ll ever work on.”

Van Beek told me he is confident Supercloud can be completed, but he worries the disruptions caused by the offer, as well as unforeseeable delays on the Amazon side, will slow their progress. When Zappos does complete the migration, he hopes the tech department will be able to turn its attention to innovating in the e-commerce space, tackling challenges such as the size and fit problem. If customers are more likely to arrive at a good fit before they order, eliminating returns and the associated restocking and shipping costs will improve margins.

Somehow I doubt Hsieh will be satisfied with such mundane improvements. Every few years, he decides to turn his company upside down. First it was the move to Las Vegas, then the move downtown, then the introduction of Holacracy. Now it was Teal and the offer. Hsieh said he expects the offer to be “something we’ll probably randomly end up doing in the future. Not on a set schedule, but call it every three-to-five years.” Next time around there will likely be some new theory of organizations that will motivate him. It’s a recipe for permanent revolution, a revolution that is driven, above all, by his instincts and intuitions. Maybe he just gets bored.

But the disconnections, miscommunications, and “executive interruptions” described by Murch, Coy, and Van Beek suggest that Hsieh’s relentless organizational experimentation may no longer be as sustainable as it once was, when Zappos was a much smaller company. When the CEO becomes a distant figure, sheer force of personality and charisma cease to be enough to motivate hundreds of employees as they weather wave after wave of perpetual organizational flux.

In June, I contacted Murch to see if things were beginning to settle down at work. “No one knows how to get things done anymore,” she wrote to me in an email. “It’s easy when there are bosses with budgets. Now we still don’t have any answers to how budgets are going to work, and no one is willing to make any decisions because they don’t know if they have the authority to do so. My Zappos life is not very productive right now and I hate that. Hopefully things will get better soon.”

When I followed up in September, Murch told me things were slowly improving, or at least that people were figuring out how to get their work done. When I asked if anything had been decided about how compensation was going to be set, however, she sounded less enthusiastic. In fact, she sounded pretty frustrated. Increasingly, she said, compensation at Zappos was being tied to something called “badges” and a confusing new internal currency called “People Points.” Everyone at Zappos has 100 People Points that add up, roughly, to the percentage of time they spend on all of their roles.

The badging system seems to be modeled on scouting merit badges. Employees can earn badges for attending workshops or events. These are “suit up-show up” badges, Murch said. And badges exist for a variety of accomplishments, which are created mostly by employees themselves, or perhaps by lead links in particular circles, or by Hsieh. Then there are the compensation badges, and these, she said, were getting a lot of attention right then, for obvious reasons. “People are starting to go, OK, I’m ready for a raise, what do I have to do?”

One thing Zapponians now have to do is their own research about salaries, to find out the market rate for jobs at other companies that correspond to their roles. In a normal corporation, such things are taken care of by the human resources department. Not at Zappos, not anymore. Instead, if Murch wants a raise, she has to do all the research into what she’s worth, create a badge, come up with qualifications for receiving the badge, and then design the actual look of the badge. Then it all has to be approved by the People Pool & Comp circle. And who happens to be the lead link of that circle? “Now, instead of trying to convince your boss that you deserve more money,” said Murch, incredulously, “you have to convince Tony Hsieh.”

The emphasis on badges and People Points has been building for some time, and Murch, for one, has tried to ignore it, but she knew that eventually she was going to have to get with the program, goofy as it was, if she ever wanted another raise, or even a cost-of-living increase. Murch also mentioned something new, something that seems to have been invented since the Teal offer, known as “the Beach,” which is where people “go” if they don’t have a role. If a lead link doesn’t like you, or doesn’t think you’re good at your job, that person can remove you from the role. The lead link can’t fire you anymore, so someone at Zappos came up with the fairly terrifying idea that people with no roles should be “on the Beach.”

Murch put me in touch with a former manager named Tammy Williams who has been trying to reform the Beach. Williams, who joined Zappos in October 2014 after a 30-year career in Toronto, was hired as a senior manager in HR, and relocated to Las Vegas just a few months before her job was eliminated with the advent of Teal. She chose not to take the offer, however, because she saw the changes as an opportunity. She could act almost as an independent contractor or entrepreneur within a large company. Plus she looked around and saw obvious needs that she could meet.

Zappos culture, she said, had always been one of “hire slow and fire fast.” People who were identified as bad “culture fits” were quickly weeded out. With the coming of Teal, however, and the creation of the Beach as a kind of holding pen or killing floor, the culture had taken a brutal turn. Some people who got beached found themselves being shunned as if they were contagious. These were people who, for whatever reason, were not successful at manning the phones, for example, but perhaps could make a contribution elsewhere in the company. It’s not that they were suddenly bad people. They just needed help.

So Williams rechristened the Beach as the Why Space, a kind of in-company outplacement agency. “Tony has allowed me two weeks to three months,” Williams said, for “beachgoers” to reinvent themselves. All beachgoers who enter the Why Space start off with two weeks, and Williams extends their stay a week at a time, “as long as they are doing the work,” which means keeping a journal, attending workshops, and taking personality assessments as they seek to be redeployed within the company.

Williams told me the story of one woman, named Rosemary, who had been removed from her role in CLT shortly after she completed new hire training. Her lead link didn’t think she was connecting emotionally with customers, even though the woman had 13 years of call-center experience. As it turned out, Williams said, Rosemary was simply too polite. She said, “Yes, ma’am,” and, “Yes, sir,” because that’s how she had been trained to address customers, but such old-fashioned formal manners were foreign to her lead link, who demanded a grittier personal style. Rosemary was the first beachgoer to keep a journal, which is now a requirement of the Why Space. At a recent all-hands meeting, Williams asked Rosemary to read her journal in front of the entire company, to show people how hurt she’d been when her new Zappos friends had ostracized her after she was beached. After reading the journal, Rosemary was offered a new role right there onstage.

The theme of the all-hands meeting had been “Hero’s Journey,” and was organized around the work of Joseph Campbell, whose popular writings on myth are heavily infused with Jungian psychoanalysis. Everyone was so inspired by Rosemary’s example, by the way she had “slain her dragon,” that the Why Space was rebranded as Hero’s Journey—though as often happens at Zappos, with its frequent changes of nomenclature, Zapponians will probably always use the Beach, Why Space, and Hero’s Journey interchangeably, thus giving new hires and visiting journalists even more to scratch their heads about. “Beachgoers” and “Why Spacers” are also now known as “Explorers.”

I asked Williams about the badges. “There was just an email—finally, everyone’s been waiting on it—probably 15 minutes before our call, from Tony’s circle, the People Pool & Comp circle, and they have come right out and said explicitly now that in the future they’re moving the compensation structure to badging skill sets that you bring to the workplace.” The email she mentioned, also known as a “shard” from Glass Frog, included a link to the new compensation policy, which outlined a labyrinthine process that has defeated my most strenuous attempts at comprehension. At Zappos, Williams said, the traditional HR concept of a career path is out the window. “We’re being encouraged to think in terms of a choose-your-own-career adventure.”