enabling organisation

The core [of VISA] was an enabling organization that existed for the sole purpose of assisting owner-members to do what they wished with greater capacity, more effectively, and at less cost.

Dee Hock, 1999, Birth of the chaordic age, p.190

Time for new stories

We have lost our local, communal stories and destroyed the places for their telling. Nor do we have a new compelling global story or communal places for its telling. The stories now endlessly drummed into us are not our stories. The are the stories those with escalating power and wealth tell to one another. Stories that incessantly pour into us through commercialisation of media and every other aspect of life. They are stories designed to arouse greed in the many to satisfy it in the few. They are stories that appeal to the worst, not the best in us. They are false stories. Deep inside, we no longer believe them. Neither do those who tell them, if the truth be known.

Dee Hock, 1999, Birth of the chaordic age, p.298f

Nothing but an idea

Any organisation ... is nothing but an idea. All institutions are no more than a mental construct to which people are drawn in pursuit of common purpose; a conceptual embodiment of a very old, very powerful idea called community. All organisations can be no more than the moving force of the mind, heart and spirit of people, without which all assets are just so much inert mineral, chemical, or vegetable matter, by the law of entropy steadily decaying to a stable state.

Dee Hock, 1999. Birth of the chaordic age, p.119

hoist with our own petard

The essential thing to remember is not that we became a world of expert managers and specialists, but that the nature of our expertise became the creation and management of constants, uniformity, and efficiency, while the need has become the understanding and coordination of variability, complexity, and effectiveness, the very process of change itself. It is not complicated. The nature of our organisation, management, and scientific expertise is not only increasingly irrelevant to presssing societal and environmental needs, it is a primary cause of them.

Dee Hock. 1999. Birth of the chaordic age, p.57

Community and proximity

Community is not about profit. It is about benefit ... When we attempt to monetize all value, we methodically disconnect people and destroy community.
The nonmonetary exchange of value is the most effective, constructive system ever devised. Evolution and nature have been perfecting it for thousands of millennia. It requires no currency, contracts, government, laws, courts, police, economists, lawyers, accountants. It does not require anointed or certified experts at all. It requires only ordinary, caring people.
True community requires proximity; continual, direct contact and interaction between the people, place, and things of which it is composed.

Dee Hock, 1999, Birth of the chaordic age, p.43

institutional crisis

We're in an accelerating, global epidemic of institutional failure ... [with] organizations increasingly unable to achieve the purpose for which they were created, yet continuing to expand ...
schools that can't teach
universities far from universal
corporations that can neither cooperate nor compete, only consolidate
unhealthy health-care systems
welfare systems in which noone fares well
farming systems that destroy soil and poison food
families far from familial
police that can't enforce the law
judicial systems without justice
governments that can't govern
economies that can't economize ...

Dee Hock - 1999 - Birth of the chaordic age - page 28.

Purple

Posted by http://jonnybaker.blogs.com/jonnybaker/grace/


Christ's piece is you,
Christ's piece is me,
It is those that do,
And it is those that be,
Without one another we can't cover 360 degrees,
Because we don't need 'I's to see, we need We.

As every image that we see of ourselves is reflected,
Every image that we see of the world is subjective,
We need two points of view to gain some perspective,
And the ability and humility to accept this.

Because in our vision lies division,
A polarised view of action and pacifism,
But contradiction doesn't mean fact and fiction,
more like discordant harmonies in the melody of wisdom.

I need you, like red needs blue,
You need me, like do needs be,
And life shouldn't be binary,
Our eyes shouldn't be primary,
We need to trade in reds and blues for indigos and violets see:
We need to try and be purple.

Not just protest march bruises as we go out and do,
Or blood filled cheeks as we hold our breath and be,
I mean purple.
Full circle.
The hares and the rabbits,
the tortoises and turtles,
Purple.

So let us be moved to be mauve,
Maroon and mulberry,
Lilac, plum and lavender,
May the red and blue poles of our souls and our minds combine to be magnets of magenta,
Purple.

May we take the opposites and make the composite,
As every image has its limits
And every picture could be richer,
If we have someone else to see that we are in it,
We need to be purple.

[by Harry Baker aka Dubb]

Don't hold on so tight

"How do we present our views in the fullness of our embodied and perspectival commitment, without falling back into a pre-modern universalism that has rightly been criticised as expressing the will to power of those who have been able to express their views? I suggest it is not by pretending to an intellectual neutrality which in any case is only a pose, but rather by acknowledging and affirming the conditions of time and space, which limit our perspectives as well as giving them their distinctive perspectival power… We should not hold our views so tightly that we cannot appreciate the perspectival truths embodied in the lives and works of others. We should think of our 'truth claims 'as the product of embodied thinking not as terminally bored universally valid thought." 


Christ, C P. 1988, Embodied thinking: reflections on feminist theological method. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5, 1 - page 15. 

learning organisations

learning organisations are "organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to learn together.” (Senge, 1990, p.3). 

Senge, P.M.    1990    The Fifth Discipline     London: Century Business