The New Leadership Literacies by Bob Johansen

Author:Bob Johansen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Published: 2017-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Shape-Shifting Organizations Will Be Difficult to Lead

I met Dee Hock in the 1990s, well after he had founded Visa International and well after he invented much of the credit card system as we know it today. After recovering from a bruising experience as the founder and first CEO of Visa, Dee Hock concluded that Visa was a prototype for a new form of organization that is similar to what I’m now calling a shape-shifting organization. Dee Hock called it a chaord, for part chaos and part order. He said that the internet was the first chaordic organization and Visa International was the second. Here’s how he defined a chaord:

1. Any self-organizing, self-governing, adaptive, nonlinear, complex organism, organization, community, or system, whether physical, biological or social, the behavior of which harmoniously blends characteristics of both chaos and order. 2. An entity whose behavior exhibits observable patterns and probabilities not governed or explained by the rules that govern its constituent parts . . . patterned in a way dominated neither by chaos or order. 3. Characteristic of the fundamental organizing principles of evolution and nature. (Hock 1999)

Leaders in chaordic organizations decide when to play which card: chaos or order.

When his book Birth of the Chaordic Age came out, Dee Hock sent me a signed copy with a personal note that said in part: “Whether it will attract enough attention to help catalyze the kind of institutional change that a livable world seems to demand is impossible to know, but one can always hope.”

The Birth of the Chaordic Age did not succeed the way Dee Hock had hoped. He formed the Chaordic Alliance to help seed, nurture, and spread the concept. The Alliance lasted for about five years but eventually folded. I’ve tried to discern just what happened, and I suspect it was mostly about timing. Also, I never thought the term chaord was very compelling, though it did express the essence of the new form of organization that is still emerging. Dee Hock did very interesting things at the birth of shape-shifting organizations, but he wasn’t able to help them scale. In fact, he wasn’t even able to create a sustainable organization at Visa International, which is now a rather traditional company—far from the bold vision of its founder.

There are new models emerging, particularly from experiences in the military, which is ahead of business in learning how to organize in a VUCA world. For example, Stanley McChrystal (retired U.S. Army general) has a fascinating book called Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. McChrystal emphasizes connectivity, idea flow, and trust as key to creating shape-shifting organizations:

“Idea flow” is the ease with which new thoughts can permeate a group. Pentland [Professor Alex Pentland from MIT] likens it to the spread of the flu: a function of susceptibility and frequency of interaction. The key to increasing the “contagion” is trust and connectivity between otherwise separate elements of an establishment. The two major determinants of idea flow, Pentland has found, are

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