Process and pain
I've been at a board retreat of the Chaordic Commons for the past two days. It has been a study in frustration. The whole point of this organization has been to support and disseminate notions developed by Dee Hock that have already proven they can guide the founding of healthy, democratic shared-ownership and self-organizing organizations. The problem with the Commons, unlike the organizations actually using chaordic thinking, is that in every case, successful chaords form to accomplish some goal or profit (in the form of betterness of a situation as well as financial profit) while the Commons has no shared ends except the propigation of chaordic principles. Without meaningful ends that address the full range of human needs, chaordic principles become about as useful as Catholicism in Afghanistan.
With a shared goal in common, something that is largely worked out in practice, chaordic groups will strike an agreement between participants and use that agreement to govern their affairs to the degree that they are intertwined. At the Chaordic Commons, however, the constitution and a set of principles came before any common interest besides the principles themselves.
And everyone sees those principles differently. When folks from the government look at organizations, they see an armidillo where a private sector person might see a giraffe. Same "animal" different perspective.
I had lunch today with Mitch Kapor, whose team working on Chandler has encounted the same type of perspective problem.When thinking about how to store data, the PC applications veterans say "Well, let's build something of our own [in the application memory space] and fill it with the stuff we need to manage and the data that describes that stuff." The guys who come from Netscape and other network companies say "No, we need to be able to store this in any type of repository, not just our own."
Mitch explains that the two perspectives informed a hybrid solution. Since each Chandler client is a little server unto itself, they cleanly separated the front-end from the back and built an interface that could call a local server or a remote one with equal ease. Simple: treat the PC itself like it is a network so that if there is a network in between the front-end and the data repository (such as when you access your calendar from a Web kiosk at the airport), the system will continue to work reliably.
Unfortunately, when you are talking about organizations, the clean break that allows the hybrid solution to occur has to take place in the mind. The screwed up human mind -- no two are alike, so a standard solution is impossible (and I'm glad it is so). There is the old saying that genius is the ability to hold two diametrically opposed ideas in mind at the same time. It's also true that most geniuses make lousy leaders, many are among the worst company I've ever known. It is the rare privelege to meet a genius who is a wonderful wit and a generous host, but when it happens you never forget it.
Personally, I'm comfortable being quite dense and doing nothing more than asking stupid questions or pointing out the obvious.
So, the rub: The Chaordic Commons has no common goal, because it consists of members representing different constituencies -- public, private and non-profit -- that are trying to promote an abstract idea, "chaordics," that has only worked in practice and hardly been subject to any rigorous study. We're advocating a fluid idea, which is what emergent organization-building is all about. The Commons has no ends in common that would define the means its members need from it as an organization dedicated to the promotion of chaordic thinking.
The Commons does, however, have a constitution that is a thing of some elegance. In fact, it is chaordic organizations' reliance on contractual frameworks for responsibilities and shared rewards that make it so interesting. The constitution in this case, however, is an equisite cart for which there is no horse, no urgency that will make people get together and pull.
I started the meeting this time quite disappointed that the first thing I saw was a copy of the Commons' constitition sitting at my place on the table. It seems like all we do is wrestle this document, and there is no clear reason why. But we write resolutions more than we do substantive stuff, like create tools for people to use to apply chaordic solutions to problems. So, I ripped up the constitution at the start of the meeting and it felt good.
Unfortunately, because many of the people who have applied these ideas have also spent years developing special communications processes to deal with barriers to understanding, they manage to get pretty religious about the way one should talk and interact with others. When you bring people from government and the private sector together, for example, the private sector people are a lot more willing to forego the niceties of the World Cafe dialog process and just say what's on their mind. That's not to say the World Cafe process isn't valuable, only that it shouldn't be applied rigidly.
Alas, if people are already engaged in a process that they believe encourages communication, deviation from that process is discouraged. Yet, if a group is going to be diverse it needs to endorse different ways of communicating simultaneously and all differences to the degree that it wishes to be inclusive. There is every reason to set limits for a community, but only when you've hashed out that differences the group will not tolerate. Because chaordic organizations encourage "consensual decision-making" and "educing" change, most chaords only arrive at a level of tolerance after a lot of argument (such as how many fish one can take from an Atlantic fishery each year -- do you think that was discussed politely at first?). In an unnatural parroting of the end result of chaordic organizing, the Commons board has existed in a vacuum that dismisses conflict as unconstructive.
I've studied community a long time. It's one thing to write "online community" on a white board and another to make it work and this is true all the more so in face-to-face meetings. Community (or a good marriage, for that matter) is born out of conflict, through people's decision to tolerate their differences rather than part ways, because by staying together they will benefit more than they would by separating. If we don't acknowledge differences in a community, a company, a team, they fail because the group will never come to the point where they see past their differences to what makes them stronger together.
Now, all this is to say that I have no idea whether the Chaordic Commons can or will survive or thrive, because after seven months on the board of trustees, I've never seen us do anything but deal with the process of communication rather than our real differences. We have no common goal, because any one of us can go and apply chaordic ideas on their own -- we don't need the Commons because we know the principles and already apply them. We haven't created a situation where anyone but a volunteer can feel satisfied, while those of us whose employers (usually ourselves) don't pay for us to attend and participate can't make a meaningful contribution without huge sacrifices. The spirit of the Commons is that of an Illinois 501-C3 non-profit, and that is a stultifying thing.
This is all especially ironic since Dee Hock thought of these ideas while building the largest economic entity on the planet, Visa. The ideas work elsewhere, but Dee always saw the power of greed, even if it was only the opportunity by some participants to protect what they already had by being more transparent and sharing resources. Every player in the Visa story was hoping for huge gains, not just a fairer environment for transaction processing. Nevertheless, the harmonizing of profit motive with representativeness and self-organizational models produced something great. All we have at the Commons right now is a non-profit struggling to find a meaning for itself. Since that meaning must emerge from a group of minds, we need to let go of the processes and wrangle a bit, because nothing in human history has come as easily as we would like and if we back away from the conflict through which we must pass to find what we have in common nothing will ever be accomplished.
5:32:36 PM 
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