Now this is one of those books that you read when all the pieces start to fall into place and then you realise that being an inbetweener is not such a bad place to be
Birth of the Chaordic Age
Chaordic [kay'ordic] adj. fr. chaos and order: 1. the behaviour of any self-governing organism, organization or system which harmoniously blends characteristics of order and chaos. 2. patterned in a way dominated by neither chaos or order. 3. characteristic of the fundamental prganizing principles of evolution and nature. We share here two books and a web site on different ways of hosting meetings, processes and project work.
"We must seriously question the concepts underlying the current structure of organization and whether they are suitable to the management of accelerating societal and environmental problems - and, even beyond that, we must seriously consider whether they are the primary cause of those problems."
- Dee Hock
In Birth of the Chaordic Age, Dee Hock does an outstanding job of:
* shedding light on how many archaic ideas, concepts and beliefs about the world, and how things work, still reside in our minds, of which we are not even aware,
* bringing credibility to new and life-affirming ways of organising through his story of how he shaped Visa as a chaordic organisation
* inspiring those of us who often find ourselves compelled to go down paths other than what society, family and friends want us to.
Birth of the Chaordic Age is the story of a man who could not keep quiet, who could not stop questioning, and who would not accept the bureaucracy, the waste of human energy and passion inside many of our organisations, and the inability of those same organisations to solve many of the social and environmental problems of which they themselves have been the cause.
The questions that have been guiding Dee through his life, and through this book, are as follows:
* Why are organisations, everywhere, whether political, commercial, or social, increasingly unable to manage their affairs?
* Why are individuals, everywhere, increasingly in conflict with and alienated from the organisations of which they are a part?
* Why are society and the biosphere increasingly in disarray?
Birth of the Chaordic Age is the journey of the young Dee Hock setting out into the corporate world with these questions, and leaving many years later from the position as the CEO of Visa, whose creation he had been instrumental in. His story is one in which we follow the questions, the doubts, but also the breakthroughs, the budding ideas, and are witness to the courage it must have required to plunge into something never done before, with no assurance of success, choosing to believe in the ability of ordinary, but committed, people, and the self-organising nature of the universe.
Dee does not feel that Visa was a resounding success, nor the ultimate model for a Chaordic Organisation. But it is an example of the potential of some of Dee's ideas, that in my view are a strong reflection of our time, and of the change that we are in the midst of.
The book, as our time, speaks to letting go of the mechanistic, stiff structures of the machine age, and to learning to organise in tune with the flow of life; being comfortable with chaos and uncertainty, and having a few core guiding organising principles and beliefs together with a strong purpose as our main guides.
While the book is written as a story, Dee includes many points of reflection at a more philosophical level that I found to be very enriching to my own thinking about organisational dillemmas, but also opportunities. Also, he does not externalise the blame, and put it all out there, on the systems, which we are a part of. Instead he makes a point of sharing how he gradually became aware of the detrimental role he himself - through his consciousness, his ideas, his concepts, his mind - was playing in exacerbating the problems that he was so frustrated with, and subsequently how our collective consciousness, and flawed and outmoded thinking, is the biggest challenge - or opportunity - humanity faces.
"When that consciousness begins to understand and grapple with the false Industrial Age concepts of organization to which it clings; when it is willing to risk loosening the hold of those concepts and embrace new possibilities; when those possibilities engage enough minds, new patterns will emerge and we will find ourselves on the frontier of institutional alternatives ripe with hope and rich with possibilities."
Let me close by sharing a couple of key points that I took with me from reading this book:
* we live in such a complex world, that our relationships, too, will be too complex to allow agreement much beyond intent. Thus the need for self-governance, and self-organising around basic agreed upon purpose and principles.
* the solutions our world needs cannot be solved by the organisations in existence today. Visa emerged because no single bank could fulfil satisfactorily the global credit card transactions "No bank could do it, no hierarchical stock corporation could do it. No nation-state could do it." Visa was a collaborative solution. What might this mean for the pressing challenges of our time and how we deal with them?
* to effect change we need to learn to look at things: * as they were,
o as they are,
o as they might become, and
o as they ought to be - in the inductive sense of a preferred, ethically better condition ("The future is not about logic and reason. It's about imagination, hope, and belief." Dee).
* Because our ability to think of the future is clouded by the programming from our past, we need to work very carefully with becoming aware of those assumptions and beliefs that may no longer be true, or that may not serve us.
* "What gets measured is what gets done - perhaps that's precisely the problem." The way we have structured society leaves us operating on a much narrower bandwidth than life itself, expressing progress mainly in financial figures - thus also focusing our future goals in the same limited terms.
I will end with including a quote (somewhat long) from Birth of the Chaordic Age. It does not give answers, but poses important questions that may give direction to conversation, practice and experimentation for how things might become and how they ought to be:
"In the years ahead we must get beyond numbers and the language of mathematics to understand, evaluate, and account for such intangibles as learning, intellectual capital, community, beliefs, and principles, or the stories we tell of our tribe's value and prospects will be increasingly false.
We must understand, evaluate, and account for wholly new, nonmonetary forms of ownership, assets, and liabilities of great value that have extraordinary effect but no tangible market price or mathematical means of measurement, such as participatory rights, alliances, systemic interdependence, and defined relationships, or the stories we tell of our tribe will be increasingly archaic and misleading.
We must understand, evaluate and account for the full cost of everything removed from or returned to the earth, the biosphere, or the atmosphere, including reversion to natural elements in the original proportions and balance, or our stories will result in increasing environmental catastrophe.
We must conceive of and help implement wholly new forms of ownership, financial systems, and measurements free of the attempt to monetize all values which bind tribes to next quarter's bottom line, gross maldistribution of wealth and power, degradation of people, and desolation of the ecosphere, or our stories will be increasingly immoral and destructive.
And we must interconnect our stories with those of all other tribal storytellers in order to integrate them into a new, intelligible, larger story to inform the global community now emerging, or our stories will continue to set tribe against tribe in ever accelerating economic, social and physical combat."
And while this may sound like a tall order, I think that there are some simple ideas in Birth of the Chaordic Age that make for a good starting point. Not the only one, but a good one.
