Dr. Edna Pasher interviewing exclusively for "Status Magazin" Dee Hock the founder and former CEO of the Visa credit card association
Published: 7/6/20 Photo: PR
This is VERY exciting indeed! I have been inspired by Dee Hock and The Chaordic Organization for many years. In this written interview, Dee Hock,who is 92 years old, answered all of my questions in length and with passion of a young man. Read it! It is very special indeed! I was VERY touched, when I got it. Thank you, dear Dee, for this great gift! Best wishes for good health! I am grateful and honored indeed!
1. What are your lessons learnt for change agents like me who are trying to introduce the chaordic culture into organizations?
There are far to many to be contained in a paragraph or two. Paramount among them are
(a) creating a chaordic culture requires an enormous change in the consciousness of each individual.
(b) Such substantive change is a thing that people instinctively fear most, and thus resist, since it is a crisis in self esteem. It destroys sense of time, place, and identity. People become uncertain about their place, and worth, in a new order of things.
(c) Even though they may understand the concepts intellectually, it is extremely hard to “get them in the bone”- – – -to absorb them into their being to the point they can behave in no other way. No matter how well they understand chaordic concepts intellectually, they immediately encounter the old, command and control organizations in every aspect of their activities and in daily conversation with others. It takes time and constant reinforcement to make such a change, no matter how beneficent.
(d) Since every form of organization exists only in the mind, an organization cannot change until the vast majority of participants each make profound internal change.
(e) Every individual must come to such change in their own time, for their own reasons, in their own way.
2. Any difference between acceptance of your vision between men and women?
I am often asked who most readily accepts chaordic concepts of organization. Although generalization are difficult in such a complex subject, my experience indicates that women generally understand them more intuitively than men, primarily because woman usually function in their activities with one another in less formal or domineering ways than do men.
3. Any difference between eastern and western cultures re. acceptance?
People deeply embedded in eastern cultures are usually more receptive to the concepts than those from western cultures. By far the most receptive, are native, or aboriginal cultures, since they have experience much more Chaordic societal organizations for centuries, and have not been traditionally embedded in hierarchical, command and control organizations.
4. Organizations are becoming digital, will it help us transform them to chaordic ?
Organizations are not becoming digital, information is. Digital information is function, not form. Digital information may have some effect on transforming organizational form, but it can also easily reinforce the old forms. The structure and management of Google,
Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and nearly every other aspect of the micro electronic revolution, other than the internet, are antithetical to chaordic concepts of organization and management.
5. We now move to eco‑systems which by definition are chaordic, will it help us introduce it inside organizations as well?
We are not moving to chaordic eco-systems. The universe and all it contains, including this planet and its life forms, have always been chaordic. It is the fundamental organizing principle of evolution and nature. The sole exception is the societal organizations that have emerged in Homo Sapient culture in the past four hundred years, primarily brought about by Newtonian science, Cartesian philosophy, and the industrial age.
6. The Corona pandemic as an opportunity to reinvent organizations?
From my perspective, the covid 19 pandemic merely illuminates a much greater pandemic which I have been pointing out and writing about for more than three decades – – – a global epidemic of institutional failure. It was carefully laid out in my book, “Birth Of The Chaordic Age,” in 1999, and enlarged upon in 2006 in a second edition, entitled “One From Many.”
If you examine the covid 19 virus and how it has evolved, you will note that it has mushroomed chaordicly. At the same time, one can observe the pathetic response by our present forms of organization, political, social and economic, that cannot accurately document the spread of the virus, cannot medically cope with it, cannot adopt a sensible global response to it, cannot agree on the consequences of it, and cannot continue their normal operations in the face of it.
I have been arguing for three decades that we are on the knifes edge between understanding, and bringing into being, new, chaordic concepts of societal organization more in harmony with the human spirit and biosphere, or risk ever increasing organizational failure, and enormously greater social and environmental carnage. Well, we didn’t, and here we are. Above all else, the covid 19 pandemic is a wake up call which we ignore at our peril.
7. Other insights and tips you would like to share with us to help us in the right direction?
Never give up! Never, never give up! Never, never, ever give up!
*Dr. Edna Pasher, is founder of Edna Pasher PhD. & Associates (Tel aviv, Israel), a management consulting firm, and the Knowledge in Action series of international conferences.
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