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7.

Chaordic

Order is traditionally seen as the key to knowledge, and the basis of power in organisations. However, there is a raising interest in chaos mathematics, physics and biology but also organisation theory started to study chaos. Self-organisation, the behaviour of ants, developments at the stock exchange, and the weather might be explained by chaos and complexity theory. Various organisations have subscribed to the idea of the combination of chaos and order: VISA International being the most high profile example, Chaordic Commons or the Danish business school KaosPilot and the affiliated consultancy KaosManagement.

Chaordic

Chaordic

Chaordic Wherever it takes you... Dee Hock is the founder and CEO emeritus of VISA. He was the first to establish a global system for the electronic payment scheme. And he is the author of Birth of the Chaordic Age, a story of a personal odyssey and a manifesto for the future a future of transformed organisations, of the belief that the chaos of competition and the order of cooperation can and will coexist. Hock criticises today's culture of commandand-control in institutions: Organisations are falling apart, failing to achieve their own purpose, failing address the diversity and complexity of society as a whole. Hock claims that VISA International is an organisation formed on chaordic principles. Today, VISA links in more than 20,000 financial institutions, 14 million merchants and 600 million consumers across 220 countries. Hock describes how ingenuity and effort are wasted on circumventing the rules and regulations of hierarchical bureaucracies. He examines how this situation is ruining our potential as individuals and communities and contemplates what can be changed. All organizations are merely conceptual embodiments of a very old, very basic idea -- the idea of community. They can be no more or less than the sum of the beliefs of the people drawn to them; of their character, judgments, acts, and efforts. An organization's success has enormously more to do with clarity of a shared purpose, common principles and strength of belief in them than to assets, expertise, operating ability, or management competence, important as they may be. Hocks style is certainly a bit too New Age, too spiritual. However, his conclusions are clear and provoking. In the chaordic age success will depend less on rote and more on reason; less on the authority of the few and more on the judgment of many; less on compulsion and more on motivation; less on external control of people and more on internal discipline (Hock).

Chaord (kay'ord): any autocatalytic, self-regulating, adaptive, nonlinear, complex organism, organization, or system, whether physical, biological or social, the behavior of which harmoniously exhibits characteristics of both order and chaos. 2: an entity whose behavior exhibits patterns and probabilities not governed or explained by the behavior of its parts. 3: the fundamental organizing principle of nature and evolution. Chaordic (kay'ordic): anything simultaneously orderly and chaotic. 2: patterned in a way dominated neither by order nor chaos. 3: existing in the phase between order and chaos. "Chaord" and "Chaordic" are registered trademarks of the Chaordic Alliance.

Chaordic The organisation that promotes the idea of chaordic is the Chaordic Commons. The ideas of Chaordic Commons derive from chaos theory, and this organisation is striving to create conditions for practical, innovative organisations which address societys major issues. The project is using the action research methodology of Appreciative Inquiry to simultaneously raise awareness of and grow chaordic activity while searching for examples of it. The goal is to learn about the underlying principles, processes, and practices that help human systems adapt for success in the contemporary world. A list of past projects includes Sol (Society for Organizational Learning), Appleseed Foundation and The Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance. Chaordic Commons holds events in the USA and it is possible to participate virtually.

Some Hockian principles on management (from www.fastcompany.com)

PhD in Leadership, Short Course: Make a careful list of all things done to you that you abhorred. Don't do them to others, ever. Make another list of things done for you that you loved. Do them for others, always. Associates: Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities. Employing Yourself: Never hire or promote in your own image. It is foolish to replicate your strength. It is idiotic to replicate your weakness. It is essential to employ, trust, and reward those whose perspective, ability, and judgment are radically different from yours. It is also rare, for it requires uncommon humility, tolerance, and wisdom. Compensation: Money motivates neither the best people, nor the best in people. It can move the body and influence the mind, but it cannot touch the heart or move the spirit; that is reserved for belief, principle, and morality. As Napoleon observed, "No amount of money will induce someone to lay down their life, but they will gladly do so for a bit of yellow ribbon."

Some Hockian Principles on organisations (from www.fastcompany.com)

Form and Substance: Substance is enduring, form is ephemeral. Failure to distinguish clearly between the two is ruinous. Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past by clothing it in the forms of the future. Preserve substance; modify form; know the

Chaordic
difference. The closest thing to a law of nature in business is that form has an affinity for expense, while substance has an affinity for income. Creativity: The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a room packed with archaic furniture. You must get the old furniture of what you know, think, and believe out before anything new can get in. Make an empty space in any corner of your mind, and creativity will instantly fill it. Leadership: Here is the very heart and soul of the matter. If you look to lead, invest at least 40% of your time managing yourself -- your ethics, character, principles, purpose, motivation, and conduct. Invest at least 30% managing those with authority over you, and 15% managing your peers. Use the remainder to induce those you "work for" to understand and practice the theory. I use the terms "work for" advisedly, for if you don't understand that you should be working for your mislabeled "subordinates," you haven't understood anything. Lead yourself, lead your superiors, lead your peers, and free your people to do the same. All else is trivia. The organization must be adaptable and responsive to changing conditions, while preserving overall cohesion and unity of purpose. This is the fundamental paradox facing businesses, governments, and societies alike, says Hock -- not to mention living cells, brains, immune systems, ant colonies, and most of the rest of the natural world. Adaptability requires that the individual components of the system be in competition. And yet cohesion requires that those same individuals cooperate with each other, thereby giving up at least some of their freedom to compete. The trick is to find the delicate balance that allows the system to avoid turf fights and back-stabbing on the one hand, and authoritarian micromanagement on the other. "Neither competition nor cooperation can rise to its highest potential unless both are seamlessly blended," says Hock. "Either without the other swiftly becomes dangerous and destructive." The organization must cultivate equity, autonomy, and individual opportunity. "Given the right circumstances," says Hock, "from no more than dreams, determination, and the liberty to try, quite ordinary people consistently do extraordinary things." The organization's governing structure must distribute power and function to the lowest level possible. "No function should be performed by any part of the whole that could reasonably be done by any more peripheral part," says Hock, "and no power should be vested in any part that might reasonably be exercised by any lesser part." The governing structure must not be a chain of command, but rather a framework for dialogue, deliberation, and coordination among equals. Authority, in other words, comes from the bottom up, not the top down. The U. S. federal system is designed so authority rises from the people to local, state, and federal governments; in Visa, which contains elements of the federal system, the member banks send representatives to a system of national, regional, and international boards. While the system appears to be hierarchical, the Visa hierarchy is not a chain of command. Instead, each board is supposed to serve as a forum for members to raise common issues, debate them, and reach some kind of consensus and resolution.

Chaordic Dear reader,


(from http://www.kaospilot.dk/docs/showArticle.asp?id=65)

Imagine that you graduated from the KaosPilots today. In your hand you are holding the proof that you can rule chaos. You have just finished your last examen, where you were examined by Uffe Elbk and two very competent external examiners. They have been hard on you, but your examen has gone fantastically well and you have done a fabulous project. Imagine that you are part of a team of KaosPilots who have spent three years together, exploring the world, doing projects in South Africa and USA. Together you have been through an education - at times euforic, at other times deeply frustrating. No doubt, you will remember that you have been asked the qusetion - Why? - over and over again, by fellow students, by coaches and your principal. You have answered every single time, even though sometimes you almost reflected yourself to death. Why this and why that? However, this constant pressure to take a stand on things most definitely has had influence on your final project, as well as on the project manager you have become today. If you look back, you will surely remember that one of the skills you have learnt is about vizualizing, create visions or draw ideas. Maybe in one of your projects, you have kick-started the dreams of a group of South Africans - other times you have been more down to earth, when you had to use your KaosPilots skills in a last effort to make the dream come true. You have led yourself and taken part in leading others. Well, but now you have finished - and apart from people, questions and parties in good style, you now have a huge amount of experience from projects in Denmark, Norway, Africa and America in you luggage. To refresh your memory and extract the last to be learnt, we will now take you through the projects at home and abroad during the last three years - once more. Have a nice flight and a good landing! N.B: When you have opened the download file, activate the zoom function, a little magnifying glass at the top the page, pull it down to the project and click until you have found a size that suits your eyes.

The KaosPilots is another Danish project, another project that MMMMM. The KaosPilots is today a modern, value-based and internationally oriented education program that focuses on entrepreneurship and leadership. When founded in 1991 it was a visionary, far-sighted but possibly airy educational concept, hatched and developed by a small group drawn from the cultural grass roots of Aarhus, people who preferred techno raves to golf. In their quest for new ways of organising life and development, the KaosPilots have built an organization where performance, commitment, learning and daily development form the cornerstones of the program.

Chaordic KaosManagement is an independent consultancy company. Former students of the KaosPilots program started the company in 1993. KaosManagement is built on the believe that the vast majority of companies and organizations have all the human and physical resources they need, and that solutions to problems often involve creating better conditions and strategies to allow existing resources to develop and flourish. Approximately half of KaosManagements current clients come from Norway, Sweden and Germany, the other half from the domestic Danish market.

The aim of the KaosPilots is to train entrepreneurial and internationally oriented students in creative process, project and business design The objectives of the KaosPilots are that the student acquires the practical and theoretical skills and knowledge to carry out process, project and business design in the arena between arts and business the student acquires practical experience from working in an international context the student develops his or her own social responsibility in relation to society as a whole

The KaosPilots is built on six core values Playful... it must be a commitment to joy, creativity and curiosity to study and work at the KaosPilots Real World... projects or task-solving are always real, i.e. no cases but real projects for real clients to help them meet their needs and solve their problems Streetwise... at the KaosPilots we need to always know what moves in society, business and the arts because we have no doubt where all new thinking comes from. It comes from the bottom Risk-Taking... No courage no innovation. With no courage to experiment and take the risk of failing there will be no innovation Balance... the KaosPilots is a living and moving organism that always strives for connection and balance between body and mind, the individual member of the community and the community seen as a whole, between local and global Compassion... our ambition is not to be the best school in the world, but to be the best school for the world.

Chaordic
One says that a system is complex if it consists of many interacting and if it exhibits behaviour that is interesting but at the same time not an obvious consequence of the known interaction among the sub-units: dynamical systems that are (generally) out-ofequilibrium and thus highly non-linear. Such systems actually form the bulk of natural phenomena but for which the theoretical tools are as yet poorly developed. Some examples of such complex systems or phenomena are: The economy, the stock-market, the weather, ant colonies, earthquakes, traffic jams, living organisms, ecosystems, turbulence, epidemics, the immune system, river networks, land-slides, zebra stripes, sea-shell patterns, and heartbeats. There is no single Theory of Complexity, and it is unlikely that there will ever be one. Rather one hopes that apparently different complex systems can be grouped according to some common features that they have, so that intuition and insight gained in studying one can be transferred to another. Complexity studies aim to develop concepts, principles and tools that allow one to describe features common to varied complex systems. One concept is that of emergence, which refers to the appearance of laws, patterns or order through the cooperative effects of the sub-units of a complex system. Thus the emergent phenomena or laws are not an intrinsic property of the sub-units but rather something that is a property of the system as a whole. Sometimes one sees the phrase the whole is more than the sum of its parts, as a definition of emergence. This again reflects the non-linearity of the system, whereby the output is not proportional to the input; small changes can give rise to large effects, and the nonobvious results that can be produced in a large system. Another concept is fractal geometry: shapes that are self-similar over a wide range of scales, thus implying scale-invariance. Ant-colonies are classic examples of self-organisation. Without a leader (the queen is actually an egg-laying machine) orchestrating everything, and without any of the ants having taken a course in engineering or social science, each ant seems to do its own thing, following a few simple rules that determines its interaction with its environment or its ant-mates. Yet, an incredibly complex and organised society emerges from such an interaction of the many ants. Ant-colonies display remarkable adaptation to changing circumstances, using both feedback mechanisms and parallel analysis of options. In recent years social and computer scientists have taken a keen interest in studying ant colony behaviour in order to help solve problems in their own fields. Chaos refers to the property of some non-linear dynamical systems whereby they become extremely sensitive to initial conditions and display long-term aperiodic behaviour that seems unpredictable. Though chaotic behaviour might appear essentially random, there is actually hidden order. Furthermore, many chaotic systems show universality in their approach to chaos, giving one some predictive power. Thus discovering that some random-like events are actually chaotic means one has uncovered a simple determinstic basis for the system and so enabled its understandability. (from Rajesh R. Parwani, Complexity: An introduction, National University of Singapore).

Produced by Peter Troxler trox.net Aberdeen, Scotland, UK and Lucerne, Switzerland. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivsNonCommercial License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.

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