Linked with the 6 month online training course I’m on at the moment, we’ve been dissecting a very interesting interview this week with a guy called Dee Hock. Dee Hock is the founder and former CEO of Visa International. He’s written a book called Birth of the Chaordic Age (which I’ll definitely be adding to my list of books to read) that unwraps his thoughts about chaordic organisations. In case you hadn’t figured, chaordic is a word that Hock created from the words chaos and order.

I’ll share a few quotes and thoughts below, but for those of you who are leaders and/or interested in organisational systems, change, structure, etc, I’d highly recommend reading the whole interview.

I have to say, reading the interview really resonated with so much of our thinking for what we’re looking to create with Mosaic here in Sheffield. I loved this comment from the introduction to the interview:

“Chaordic organizations do not fear change or innovation. They are, by their very nature, supremely adaptive. They also tend to be inclusive, multi centric, and distributive and, ultimately, strongly cohesive due to their unshakable focus on common purpose and core principles.”

That just encapsulates so much of how we’re wanting to be. I love the use of the word multi-centric. I think I have only really considered there to be two options before: centralised and decentralised. Multi-centric is new and helpful language for me.

I found this comment on change very helpful too:

“I often tell people that every mind is like a room in an old house, stuffed with very old furniture. Take any space in your mind and empty it of your old conceptions and new ones will rush in, good or bad. So change is more a getting rid of rather than an adding to or an acquiring.”

It’s like before we are able to think in new ways, we have to clear out some of the old ways of thinking. This would fit very much with the journey me and Rachel have been on since leaving our previous church. We deliberately decided to have a complete break from being connected to any church for a while (was about 5 months in the end) and that really was a clearing out of the old furniture time. It’s out of that time that we’ve been able to start to see things very differently. We are seeing the importance of this clearing out process with others who are connecting with us too.

One final quote that really stood out to me:

“I believe that purpose and principle, clearly understood and articulated, and commonly shared, are the genetic code of any healthy organization. To the degree that you hold purpose and principles in common among you, you can dispense with command and control.”

Our third core value at Mosaic is that structure must always submit to spirit. That is to say that we don’t want to become something that is constraining and institutional. Institutional structures end up typically controlling and stifling people. They rely heavily on command and control and as a result need to be very centralised. We believe that every individual is loaded with latent potential that we want to see unleashed. It’s because of this we want to have a structure that supports rather than dictates and empowers rather than controls. That means we are looking to have a much more organic structure that naturally and spontaneously expands and multiplies. And this quote really captures well how we’re wanting to operate. We want to rely on a healthy, internal “genetic code” rather than external command and control.

This strong internal genetic code would be alternative language really for what we typically talk about at Mosaic in terms of ethos and culture (which we see as being formed though our 5 core values). We want to have a healthy ethos that permeates every aspect of who we are, wherever we are. This is critical when thinking about organic, spontaneous growth. When a cell multiplies, that’s only a good thing if the original cell is healthy. Having a healthy organisational culture is critical to a healthy, reproducing movement. (You can read a previous post on the leaders role in shaping an organisations culture here.)

What do you think?

This entry was posted on Friday, March 9th, 2007 at 10:04 am and is filed under Leadership, Mosaic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.