Birth of the Chaordic Age
When I came across this brilliant book of Dee Hock at the end of 2001, it turned out to become one of the most inspiring and rewarding reads in my life so far.
Reading the Birth of the Chaordic Age marks a turning point in my personal and professional development. Until that time I had understood and worked with chaos as something undesirable, in life, in work, in organisations. Chaos, as something that still needed to mature into order. Or maybe even worse, chaos as a lack of order.
Dee Hock turned my belief system upside down. Reading his book triggered my understanding that chaos is pure potential and possibilities. Chaos as a midwife of new patterns, structures and strategies of systems. Chaos as an experience of undiscovered order.
Our endless efforts as leaders and managers to forcefully bring order to chaos results ever so often in strategies to control something into becoming a thing that it simply doesn't want to become. To predict, the unpredictable...
Dee Hock shares his valuable lessons-learnt, what he calls MiniMaxims. The one that struck me the most as challenging for this dominant leadership paradigm: "Healthy organisations induce behaviour. Unhealthy organisations compel it".
Since reading Birth of the Chaordic Age, it has been my inquiry and purpose in most of my work to host the emergence of 'just enough order' for people to self-organise and self-govern. 'Just enough order' for complex systems to trust and rely on their fundamental organising patterns and, at the same time, to remain adaptive and nonlinear. 'Just enough order' to release potential and transform possibilities into productivities.
