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.

Chaordic we are, chaordic we will remain, chaordic the world is, and chaordic our institutions must become.
Dee Hock

Theology of chaordic organisation

Heaven is purpose, principle and people.
Purgatory is paper and procedure.
Hell is rules and regulations.

Dee Hock describing his theology of chaordic organisation in Birth of the Chaordic Age (p146)

Nature

The striking of a match is every bit as wonderful as the working of a brain; the union of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen in a molecule of water isevery bit as wonderful as the growth of a child. nature does not class her works in order of merit; everything is just as easy to her as everything else: she puts her wholemind into all that she does ... she lives through all life, extends throaugh all extent, spreads undivided, operates unspent.
Stephen Paget