We called our crowdsourcing platform Chaordix as a salute to Dee Hock, the founder/creator and former CEO of the VISA credit card association. He coined the term to describe the dynamic tension he’d set up in Visa: encourage as much competition and initiative as possible throughout the organization — “chaos” — while building in mechanisms for cooperation — “order.”
When we talk about crowdsourcing, we consider the same principles that Hock considered when creating what would become VISA. These principles are the foundation for any chaordic organization:
- What if ownership was in the form of irrevocable right of participation, rather than stock: rights that could not be rated, traded, bought, or sold but only acquired through application or acceptance of membership?
- What if it were self organizing, with participants having the right to self organize at any time, for any reason, at any scale, with irrevocable rights of participation in governance at any greater scale?
- What if power and function were distributive, with no power vested in or function performed by any part that could reasonably exercised by any more peripheral part?
- What if governance was distributive, with no individual, institution, or combination of either or both, particularly management, able to dominate deliberations or control decisions at any scale?
- What if it could seamlessly blend cooperation and competition, with all parts free to compete in unique, independent ways, yet able to yield self interests and cooperate when necessary to the good of the whole?
- What if it were infinitely malleable, yet extremely durable, with all parts capable of constant, self generated, modification of form or function without sacrificing its essential purpose, nature, or embodied principle, thus releasing human ingenuity and spirit?
Instead of trying to enforce cooperation by restricting what the members can do, the Visa bylaws encourage them to compete and innovate as much as possible. “Members are free to create, price, market, and service their own products under the Visa name,” he says. “At the same time, in a narrow band of activity essential to the success of the whole, they engage in the most intense cooperation.” This harmonious blend of cooperation and competition is what allowed the system to expand worldwide in the face of different currencies, languages, legal codes, customs, cultures, and political philosophies.
It’s a shift and one that is easier for some industries over others, but Dee Hock’s message is inspiring. Instead of looking to crowdsourcing as something that is taking away power, look to it as something that is enabling innovation – a complex balance of collaboration and competition bringing us new ideas.
To read more, pick up Dee Hock’s book, Birth of the Chaordic Age
