WIE: In your book Birth of the Chaordic Age, you describe how you combined the first syllables of chaos and order, inventing the term chaordic to describe a dynamic form of organization modeled on the fundamental organizing principles of evolution and nature. Your work, the underpinnings of which have much in common with the science of chaos theory, involves reconceiving organizations according to these fundamental chaordic principles and represents a departure from the traditional, relatively rigid, mechanistic model that characterizes most organizations today.

DEE HOCK: Yes, and to add to the definition a little more, chaordic simply describes the behavior of any self-governing organism or system that harmoniously blends what were previously conceived to be opposites, such as chaos and order or cooperation and competition. But most importantly, this is a way of thinking. And in fact, everything I could say about it, you already know. It's already there because you are chaordically organized. It's the way nature has been organizing things since the beginning of time, including you—your brain, your immune system—and every living thing. So in terms of a chaordic commercial, political, or social organization, the question becomes: Can you evoke it, or bring it into being?

WIE: What inspired you to become involved in organizational transformation?

DH: Well, years and years ago, I started to ask myself three very simple questions, which dominated my life for many years. One of them was, "Why are organizations everywhere, whether commercial, social, or religious, increasingly unable to manage their affairs?" The second question was, "Why are individuals throughout the world increasingly in conflict with and alienated from the organizations of which they're a part?" And the third was, "Why are society and the biosphere increasingly in disarray?" When I asked these questions to audiences a few years ago, they didn't have that much meaning to most people. But with such recent events as September 11 and the collapse of Enron and WorldCom, it's all pretty obvious now. So if all those things are true—and to me they're just as obvious as the nose on anybody's face—there has to be some deep, universal, underlying thing we're not getting at. There has to be.

WIE: How do you help people understand chaordic principles in relation to the current forms of organization that are so much a part of our lives?

DH: An illustration I use to get people to understand it is this: I'll ask major corporate audiences: Why don't you just take all your traditional beliefs about organizations, and apply them to the neurons in your brain? Organize the neurons in your brain, the most complex, infinitely diverse organ that has ever emerged in evolution, as you would a corporation. The first thing you've got to do is appoint the Chief Executive neuron, right? Then you've got to decide which are going to be the Board of Directors neurons and the Human Resources neurons, and then you have to write an operating manual for it. Now, if you could organize your brain on that model, what would happen? You would instantly be unable to breathe until somebody told you how and where and when and how fast. You wouldn't be able to think or see. What if your immune system were organized on this basis? First you'd have to do some market research to determine what virus, if any, was attacking you, right? Then you'd have to write a business plan for how you were going to deal with it. And you'd have to get it approved by the senior executive neurons in your brain. Then you'd have to have marching orders for all the various aspects of your immune system. Okay. So why in God's world do we think we can use something like the brain, which is organized on this beautiful set of chaordic principles to organize society in a superior manner? That's an exercise in arrogance and ego.

WIE: So, basically, what you're saying is that it just doesn't make sense for us, as part of evolution's intricate design, to think we can organize society in a manner that is superior to the way in which nature has so perfectly organized us?

DH: Exactly. It's unbelievably arrogant and foolish.


THE COLLAPSE OF FLOAT

WIE: Before we talk further about why our old models need to be abandoned, I'd like to ask you about the current climate of change surrounding the emergence of chaordic systems. We just interviewed Don Beck, a leader in large-scale systemic transformation, and he emphasized how our climate of rapidly accelerating change and increasing complexity is generating the need for new organizational forms. This is how he put it:

We know what's happening everywhere on the planet within ten minutes after it happens, and it's on the TV news live. The complexity has been there in the past, but it didn't arrive here until the ship came in six months later or by telegraph maybe twenty-four hours later. Now all these things that are happening on the planet are suddenly right in our face in real time. And that's one reason why there's so much stress on us, which also means that we might be looking for new organizational forms—more ensembles of people—because no single person is going to be able to keep all these things in mind.

Now, you have actually brought a new organizational form into being. Does what Beck describes here match your experience?

DH: Well, I agree completely with what he's saying, except I think he's understating the case. I use two different examples to try to get people to understand this: one called "float" and one called "CRUSTTI," which is an acronym for the Capacity to Receive, Utilize, Store, Transform, and Transmit Information. You can probably remember the days when a check would often take weeks to find its way through the banking system. That was called "float." This float was used as an early form of venture capital. Now, stop and think about other kinds of float. Think about information float (this is what Beck is speaking about): if you go back just a few centuries, it took, for example, almost a century for the knowledge about the smelting of iron ore to cross one continent. That brought in the Iron Age. When we landed on the moon, it was known and seen in every corner of the world in 1.4 seconds. Think about technological float: it took centuries for the wheel to gain universal acceptance. Now any microchip device can be in use around the world in weeks. Think about cultural float: it used to take centuries for one culture to even learn about or be exposed to a tiny bit of information about another. And now anything that becomes popular anywhere in the world can sweep through other countries in weeks. Consider space float: in just one long lifetime, a hundred years or so, we've gone from the speed of the horse to interstellar travel. People and materials now move in minutes when they used to move in months. And even life float—the time it takes to evolve new life-forms—is collapsing with genetic engineering.

What all this means is the loss of change float—the time between what was and what is going to be, between the past and the future—so the past then becomes ever less predictive, the future ever less predictable, and everything is accelerating change with one exception: our institutions. There has been no truly new concept of organization since the ideas of nation-state and corporation emerged several centuries ago.

Now even more important—and you have to think hard about this—is the history of what I call the "capacity to receive, utilize, store, transform, and transmit information." If you go back to the first single-cell form of life, it clearly possessed the capacity to receive, to utilize, to store, to transform, and to transmit information. This capacity even precedes the cell, for that's the very definition of DNA. So the key to understanding what Beck is speaking about is that the greater the capacity of any entity or organization to receive, utilize, store, transform, and transmit information, the more diverse and complex the entity. You can track this capacity from particle to neutrino to nucleus to atom to amino acid to protein to molecule to cell to organ and to organism. Or the phrase I like to use: from bacteria to bee to bat to bird to buffalo right on through to the baseball player.

And evolution went on, and in time this ability to receive, utilize, store, transform, and transmit information escaped the individual entity and became shared—as the song of birds, the sonar of bats, the pheromone of ants, or the language of humans. With the capacity to communicate, immediately came the evolution of complex communities of organisms: hives, flocks, tribes, herds, whatever. Language was a huge expansion of that capacity to deal with information. And immediately you had a huge leap in societal complexity. With mathematics, the first global language, you had the same thing—a huge increase in societal diversity and complexity. With the printing press came the capacity to include that which can be mechanically recorded and transported. Then the telegraph brought electronic capacity, and the telephone brought phonic capacity, and television brought visual capacity. Every single one of those expansions was immediately followed by a huge leap in societal complexity.

All of a sudden, just within the last three decades with the emergence of microtechnology, we have on the order of a thousand times better algorithms, five hundred thousand times more computing power per individual, and five hundred million times more mobility of information. As I like to say, the entire collective memory of the species—that means all known and recorded information—is going to be just a few keystrokes away in a matter of years. Now, what does that explosion in the capacity to receive, utilize, store, transform, and transmit information mean for organizational forms and for the complexity and diversity of our problems?

But that's nothing. Take nanotechnology—which in simple language is the engineering of self-replicating computers and assembly machines so tiny they can arrange atoms as though they were bricks—that's the way that we're going to be constructing organs, organisms, products, and services within three or four decades. With nanotechnology, information will move in speed and quantities hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times greater than it moves today, okay? And equally important, each such change brings an equal increase in our power to alter and destroy nature. That's where we are. So unless evolution has totally changed its ways, we're going to face an explosion of societal diversity and complexity, and a disruption of biological systems, enormously greater than we now experience or can yet imagine. The essential question then becomes: Can we deal with it with the same old seventeenth-century mechanistic command-and-control forms of organizations? There's not a snowball's chance in hell. I always tell my audiences, if you think this change isn't going to happen, or isn't happening, or that you can prevent it, or that you can operate in the old way and not deal with it, just try to remember the last time evolution rang your telephone number and asked your permission. It is going to happen. But there are two ways it could happen. We can continue to perpetuate these old forms and try to make the world behave in accordance with our old mechanistic internal model of reality, or we can change our internal model of reality. The first is not only foolish, it's futile. The second is difficult, but it is essential if we are to have a livable world.

WIE: The way you're describing it, our individual and collective willingness to change our internal model of reality is fundamental to meaningful transformation. But what you seem to be saying is that what we're replacing the old model with isn't merely a new substitute model. What we're actually attempting to do is to align our perception and behavior with the essential nature of evolution.

DH: Yes. We don't have to remain in this radically destructive mind-set and institutional-set. We can change, and the natural order of things could emerge in all of our societal organizations—government, commerce, religion—it's right there, waiting to happen. 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.


BEYOND THE MECHANISTIC MINDSET

WIE: At the end of your book you emphasize that you hadn't anticipated the power of individuals' resistance to change. You noticed this phenomenon throughout your experience with Visa. Since then, how have you come to understand this resistance to change?

DH: The reason people have so much trouble with change, I think, is a matter of conditioning. It arose many thousands of years ago, but essentially, this mechanistic way of thinking came into dominance about the time of Newton and Descartes, when Newtonian science postulated that the universe and everything in it could only be understood as a clocklike mechanism, a machine, with each part acting on the other part with precise linear laws of cause and effect. So when this way of thinking came into being through science, we began to try to apply it to everything. Starting about four hundred years ago, we tried to organize every aspect of society based on this mechanistic, scientific perspective. The Newtonian way of thinking has marvelous uses. For example, if I go in the hospital for eye surgery, I don't want a chaordic operating room. If you're going to build a perfect silicon chip, you need a totally controlled, very clean, highly organized, almost mechanistic environment. But that doesn't mean it's a good way to run Intel, or a good way to run a health care system.

So for four hundred years we've been trying to build all our organizations as though the Newtonian mechanistic internal model of reality were universally applicable. You know, this person reports to that person who reports to that person. Planning comes from the top and is distributed down. Everything else—money, power—is distributed up. Everything has linear cause and effect, which leads to endless manuals of rules and regulations.

If you think about it, you realize that every institution you have experienced in your lifetime is consciously or unconsciously based on that metaphor and that model. Your school operated that way, and your church, and your community, and your state. Your internal model of reality is the machine. So it doesn't surprise me at all that it's difficult to think otherwise or even to really understand that you are thinking in a mechanistic way. Stress arises out of having this internal model of reality at a subconscious level, literally in your genes, without knowing you've got it, and without asking how you've got it, and why you've got it, and whether it's useful any longer. And it's enormously more difficult, even if you can intellectually understand it, to literally get it in the bone.

So it's just not surprising at all that people should have such difficulty after so many years of conditioning, and given the fact that even if they start thinking in a different way, they are immediately head-to-head with a society in which virtually every institution and situation is operating on the old Newtonian model. That's why it's difficult. I think it will take several or more generations to break completely free of the Newtonian mechanistic mindset.

WIE: In light of the enormity of this conditioning and our reluctance to let it go, what do you think actually provokes the leap out of the old system? You were incredibly motivated to do this. What do you think it's going to take for individuals to be willing to endure the discomforts of leaving the old model behind?

DH: Well, first of all, you really need to open your mind to try to understand what your existing internal model of reality is and how it functions. And then you need to familiarize yourself with it. Emerson had a wonderful line. He said, "Everywhere you go you take your giant with you." So you have this giant unconscious thing, this internal model of reality, against which you judge and measure everything. You're never going to get rid of it, so you might as well turn around, introduce yourself to it, and say, "We're going to be together the rest of our lives, but I'm not going to let you drive my thinking any more. You have to live with my ability to think in a different way." You just confront it. I often tell audiences, "Lord, I was raised to command and control. I'm a sort of command-and-control-a-holic." I may never get it out of my system. But unless I understand it, I can't begin to deal with it.