One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organizati…

Why are organizations, everywhere, political, commercial, and social, increasingly unable to manage their affairs?

Why are individuals, everywhere, increasingly in conflict with and alienated from the organizations of which they are part?

Why are society and the biosphere increasingly in disarray?

Everyone, any time, could see the picture emerge and evolve. They could see how the whole depended on their work, and how their work was connected to every other part of the effort. [...] To be able to get one's own work done and help another became a sought-after privilege.

Making good judgments and acting wisely when one has complete data, facts, and information is not leadership. It's not even management. It's bookkeeping.

Visa was a quasi-governmental, quasi-for-profit, quasi-consulting, [...] It was none of them, yet it was all of them. It was chaordic. In the strict legal sense, Visa was a nonstock, for-profit, membership organization. [...] The financial institutions that create its products were, at one and the same time, its owners, its

the first and primary function of the card was to identify buyer to seller and seller to buyer. [...] The seller would receive good funds in local currency and the buyer would be billed later in the currency of their country. Thus, the second primary function was as guarantor of the value data. Clearly, it warranted to both buyer and sell

organizations increasingly unable to achieve the purpose for which they were created, yet continuing to expand as they devour resources, demean the human spirit, and destroy the environment

people with power to write and enforce rules rarely spend much time following them.

The issue of duality was the greatest example. On no issue were we more right. On none did we fail more ignominiously. [...] complete freedom of banks to become owner/members of both the MasterCharge and BankAmericard systems would foreclose the emergence of new systems, and severely limit consumer choice.

Data, on one end of the spectrum, is separable, objective, linear, mechanistic, and abundant. Wisdom, on the other end of the spectrum, is holistic, subjective, spiritual, conceptual, creative, and scarce. [...] Today we are drowning in a raging flood of new data and information and the raft of wisdom to which we desperately cling is breaking