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Order is traditionally seen as the key to knowledge, and the basis of power in

organisations. However, there is a raising interest in chaos mathematics, physicsand biology but also organisation theory started to study chaos.

Self-organisation, the behaviour of ants, developments at the stock exchange, andthe weather might be explained by chaos and complexity theory.

Various organisations have subscribed to the idea of the combination of chaos and

order: VISA International being the most high profile example, Chaordic Commonsor the Danish business school KaosPilot and the affiliated consultancyKaosManagement.

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Wherever it takes you... Dee Hock is the founder and CEO emeritus ofVISA. He was the first to establish a global system for the electronic paymentscheme. And he is the author of Birth of the Chaordic Age, a story of apersonal odyssey and a manifesto for the future a future of transformedorganisations, of the belief that the chaos of competition and the order ofcooperation can and will coexist. Hock criticises today's culture of command-

and-control in institutions: Organisations are falling apart, failing to achievetheir own purpose, failing address the diversity and complexity of society asa whole.

Hock claims that VISA International is an organisation formed on chaordicprinciples. Today, VISA links in more than 20,000 financial institutions, 14million merchants and 600 million consumers across 220 countries. Hockdescribes how ingenuity and effort are wasted on circumventing the rulesand regulations of hierarchical bureaucracies. He examines how thissituation is ruining our potential as individuals and communities andcontemplates what can be changed.

All organizations are merely conceptual embodiments of a very

old, very basic idea -- the idea of community. They can be no moreor less than the sum of the beliefs of the people drawn to them; oftheir character, judgments, acts, and efforts. An organization'ssuccess has enormously more to do with clarity of a shared purpose,common principles and strength of belief in them than to assets,expertise, operating ability, or management competence, importantas they may be.

Hocks style is certainly a bit too New Age, too spiritual. However, hisconclusions are clear and provoking. In the chaordic age success willdepend less on rote and more on reason; less on the authority of the fewand more on the judgment of many; less on compulsion and more onmotivation; less on external control of people and more on internaldiscipline (Hock).

Chaord (kay ord):any autocatalytic, self-regulating, adaptive, nonlinear, complex organism,organization, or system, whether physical, biological or social, the behavior of whichharmoniously exhibits characteristics of both order and chaos. 2: an entity whosebehavior exhibits patterns and probabilities not governed or explained by thebehavior of its parts. 3: the fundamental organizing principle of nature andevolution.

Chaordic (kay ordic):anything simultaneously orderly and chaotic. 2: patterned in a way dominatedneither by order nor chaos. 3: existing in the phase between order and chaos.

"Chaord" and "Chaordic" are registered trademarks of the Chaordic Alliance.

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The organisation that promotes the idea of chaordic is the ChaordicCommons. The ideas of Chaordic Commons derive from chaos theory, andthis organisation is striving to create conditions for practical, innovativeorganisations which address societys major issues. The project is using theaction research methodology of Appreciative Inquiry to simultaneously raiseawareness of and grow chaordic activity while searching for examples of it.

The goal is to learn about the underlying principles, processes, and practicesthat help human systems adapt for success in the contemporary world. A listof past projects includes Sol (Society for Organizational Learning),Appleseed Foundation and The Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance.Chaordic Commons holds events in the USA and it is possible to participatevirtually.

Some Hockian principles on management (from www.fastcompany.com)

PhD in Leadership, Short Course:Make a careful list of all things done to you that you abhorred. Don't do them toothers, ever. Make another list of things done for you that you loved. Do them forothers, always.

Associates:Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity;fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Withoutintegrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; withoutcapacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless;without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly

put to good use by people with all the other qualities.

Employing Yourself:Never hire or promote in your own image. It is foolish to replicate your strength. It isidiotic to replicate your weakness. It is essential to employ, trust, and reward thosewhose perspective, ability, and judgment are radically different from yours. It is alsorare, for it requires uncommon humility, tolerance, and wisdom.

Compensation:Money motivates neither the best people, nor the best in people. It can move thebody and influence the mind, but it cannot touch the heart or move the spirit; that isreserved for belief, principle, and morality. As Napoleon observed, "No amount ofmoney will induce someone to lay down their life, but they will gladly do so for a bit

of yellow ribbon."

Some Hockian Principles on organisations (from www.fastcompany.com)

Form and Substance:Substance is enduring, form is ephemeral. Failure to distinguish clearly between the

two is ruinous. Success follows those adept at preserving the substance of the past byclothing it in the forms of the future. Preserve substance; modify form; know the

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difference. The closest thing to a law of nature in business is that form has an affinityfor expense, while substance has an affinity for income.

Creativity:The problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to

get old ones out. Every mind is a room packed with archaic furniture. You must getthe old furniture of what you know, think, and believe out before anything new can

get in. Make an empty space in any corner of your mind, and creativity will instantlyfill it.

Leadership:Here is the very heart and soul of the matter. If you look to lead, invest at least 40%of your time managing yourself -- your ethics, character, principles, purpose,motivation, and conduct. Invest at least 30% managing those with authority overyou, and 15% managing your peers. Use the remainder to induce those you "workfor" to understand and practice the theory. I use the terms "work for" advisedly, for ifyou don't understand that you should be working for your mislabeled "subordinates,"you haven't understood anything. Lead yourself, lead your superiors, lead yourpeers, and free your people to do the same. All else is trivia.

The organization must be adaptable and responsive to changing conditions, whilepreserving overall cohesion and unity of purpose.This is the fundamental paradox facing businesses, governments, and societies alike,

says Hock -- not to mention living cells, brains, immune systems, ant colonies, andmost of the rest of the natural world. Adaptability requires that the individualcomponents of the system be in competition. And yet cohesion requires that thosesame individuals cooperate with each other, thereby giving up at least some of theirfreedom to compete.

The trick is to find the delicate balance that allows the system to avoid turf fights andback-stabbing on the one hand, and authoritarian micromanagement on the other."Neither competition nor cooperation can rise to its highest potential unless both areseamlessly blended," says Hock. "Either without the other swiftly becomes dangerousand destructive."

The organization must cultivate equity, autonomy, and individual opportunity."Given the right circumstances," says Hock, "from no more than dreams,

determination, and the liberty to try, quite ordinary people consistently doextraordinary things."

The organization s governing structure must distribute power and function to thelowest level possible."No function should be performed by any part of the whole that could reasonably bedone by any more peripheral part," says Hock, "and no power should be vested inany part that might reasonably be exercised by any lesser part."

The governing structure must not be a chain of command, but rather a framework fordialogue, deliberation, and coordination among equals.Authority, in other words, comes from the bottom up, not the top down. The U. S.

federal system is designed so authority rises from the people to local, state, andfederal governments; in Visa, which contains elements of the federal system, themember banks send representatives to a system of national, regional, andinternational boards. While the system appears to be hierarchical, the Visa hierarchyis not a chain of command. Instead, each board is supposed to serve as a forum formembers to raise common issues, debate them, and reach some kind of consensusand resolution.

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Dear reader,(from http://www.kaospilot.dk/docs/showArticle.asp?id=65)

Imagine that you graduated from the KaosPilots today. In your hand you areholding the proof that you can rule chaos.

You have just finished your last examen, where you were examined by UffeElbk and two very competent external examiners. They have been hard onyou, but your examen has gone fantastically well and you have done afabulous project.

Imagine that you are part of a team of KaosPilots who have spent threeyears together, exploring the world, doing projects in South Africa andUSA. Together you have been through an education - at times euforic, atother times deeply frustrating.

No doubt, you will remember that you have been asked the qusetion - Why?- over and over again, by fellow students, by coaches and your principal.

You have answered every single time, even though sometimes you almostreflected yourself to death. Why this and why that? However, this constant

pressure to take a stand on things most definitely has had influence on yourfinal project, as well as on the project manager you have become today.

If you look back, you will surely remember that one of the skills you havelearnt is about vizualizing, create visions or draw ideas. Maybe in one ofyour projects, you have kick-started the dreams of a group of South Africans- other times you have been more down to earth, when you had to use yourKaosPilots skills in a last effort to make the dream come true. You have ledyourself and taken part in leading others.

Well, but now you have finished - and apart from people, questions andparties in good style, you now have a huge amount of experience fromprojects in Denmark, Norway, Africa and America in you luggage. To

refresh your memory and extract the last to be learnt, we will now take youthrough the projects at home and abroad during the last three years - oncemore.

Have a nice flight and a good landing!

N.B:

When you have opened the download file, activate the zoom function, alittle magnifying glass at the top the page, pull it down to the project andclick until you have found a size that suits your eyes.

The KaosPilots is another Danish project, another project that MMMMM.The KaosPilots is today a modern, value-based and internationally orientededucation program that focuses on entrepreneurship and leadership. Whenfounded in 1991 it was a visionary, far-sighted but possibly airy educational concept, hatched and developed by a small group drawn fromthe cultural grass roots of Aarhus, people who preferred techno raves togolf.

In their quest for new ways of organising life and development, theKaosPilots have built an organization where performance, commitment,learning and daily development form the cornerstones of the program.

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KaosManagement is an independent consultancy company. Former studentsof the KaosPilots program started the company in 1993. KaosManagementis built on the believe that the vast majority of companies and organizationshave all the human and physical resources they need, and that solutions toproblems often involve creating better conditions and strategies to allowexisting resources to develop and flourish.

Approximately half of KaosManagements current clients come fromNorway, Sweden and Germany, the other half from the domestic Danishmarket.

The aim of the KaosPilots is to train entrepreneurial and internationally oriented students in creative

process, project and business design

The objectives of the KaosPilots are that

the student acquires the practical and theoretical skills and knowledge to

carry out process, project and business design in the arena between arts

and business

the student acquires practical experience from working in

an international context

the student develops his or her own social responsibility in relation

to society as a whole

The KaosPilots is built on six core values Playful... it must be a commitment to joy, creativity and curiosity to study

and work at the KaosPilots

Real World... projects or task-solving are always real, i.e. no cases but

real projects for real clients to help them meet their needs and solve their

problems

Streetwise... at the KaosPilots we need to always know what moves in

society, business and the arts because we have no doubt where all new

thinking comes from. It comes from the bottom

Risk-Taking... No courage no innovation. With no courage to experiment

and take the risk of failing there will be no innovation

Balance... the KaosPilots is a living and moving organism that always strives

for connection and balance between body and mind, the individual member of

the community and the community seen as a whole, between local and global

Compassion... our ambition is not to be the best school in the world, but to

be the best school for the world.

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One says that a system is complex if it consists of many interacting and if it exhibitsbehaviour that is interesting but at the same time not an obvious consequence of theknown interaction among the sub-units: dynamical systems that are (generally) out-of-equilibrium and thus highly non-linear. Such systems actually form the bulk of naturalphenomena but for which the theoretical tools are as yet poorly developed.

Some examples of such complex systems or phenomena are:

The economy, the stock-market, the weather, ant colonies, earthquakes, traffic jams,living organisms, ecosystems, turbulence, epidemics, the immune system, rivernetworks, land-slides, zebra stripes, sea-shell patterns, and heartbeats.

There is no single Theory of Complexity, and it is unlikely that there will ever be one.

Rather one hopes that apparently different complex systems can be groupedaccording to some common features that they have, so that intuition and insightgained in studying one can be transferred to another.

Complexity studies aim to develop concepts, principles and tools that allow one todescribe features common to varied complex systems.

One concept is that of emergence, which refers to the appearance of laws, patterns

or order through the cooperative effects of the sub-units of a complex system. Thusthe emergent phenomena or laws are not an intrinsic property of the sub-units but

rather something that is a property of the system as a whole. Sometimes one sees thephrase the whole is more than the sum of its parts, as a definition of emergence.This again reflects the non-linearity of the system, whereby the output is notproportional to the input; small changes can give rise to large effects, and the non-obvious results that can be produced in a large system.

Another concept is fractal geometry: shapes that are self-similar over a wide range ofscales, thus implying scale-invariance.

Ant-colonies are classic examples of self-organisation. Without a leader (the queen is

actually an egg-laying machine) orchestrating everything, and without any of the antshaving taken a course in engineering or social science, each ant seems to do its ownthing, following a few simple rules that determines its interaction with its environmentor its ant-mates. Yet, an incredibly complex and organised society emerges from such

an interaction of the many ants. Ant-colonies display remarkable adaptation tochanging circumstances, using both feedback mechanisms and parallel analysis ofoptions. In recent years social and computer scientists have taken a keen interest instudying ant colony behaviour in order to help solve problems in their own fields.

Chaos refers to the property of some non-linear dynamical systems whereby theybecome extremely sensitive to initial conditions and display long-term aperiodicbehaviour that seems unpredictable. Though chaotic behaviour might appearessentially random, there is actually hidden order. Furthermore, many chaoticsystems show universality in their approach to chaos, giving one some predictivepower. Thus discovering that some random-like events are actually chaotic meansone has uncovered a simple determinstic basis for the system and so enabled itsunderstandability.

(from Rajesh R. Parwani, Complexity: An introduction, National University ofSingapore).

Produced by Peter Troxler trox.net Aberdeen, Scotland, UK and Lucerne,

Switzerland. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial License. To view a copy of this license, visit

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/ or send a letter to Creative

Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA.