Necessity is the mother of intention
Art of Hosting, Chaordic design, Complexity, Containers, Design, Featured
Back in the late 1990s, when Toke Møller and Monica Nissen were mentoring a group of Kaos Pilot students, they went to visit Dee Hock in California to learn about his ideas of the chaordic organization and the chaordic lenses that help organizations stay focused on a minimal necessary structure that allows for coherence and emergence. It was a useful contribution to the budding set of participatory leadership practices that were emerging amongst the early Art of Hosting developers.
After that, Dee Hock’s chaordic lenses got expanded a little and became the “Chaordic Stepping Stones” which we have developed further in the Art of Hosting community, so-called because they slow down the planning conversation and allow one to find secure places to stand in the flow and swirl of planning in complexity. The stepping stones give you places to rest and look around with a little bit of intention and provide you and the people you are working with with a set of conversations that help to make some decisions/ I’ve often described it as a project management tool for the times when “you don’t know what you’re doing, and you don’t know where you’re going.”
One of the things that distinguishes it from other planning processes is that we don’t start from vision or purpose; instead, we start from a sense of the current moment, what was called the need, and what I now call “the necessity.” Naming this is critical because current conditions limit what is possible. Too often, strategic planning starts with aspirations, which can either be so abstract that they are useless for guiding concrete action and decisions, or they are aspirations without paying attention to whether it is even possible to move from here to there.
Necessity is embedded in the present moment. When someone feels like “we have to do something,” they are responding to something in the present moment. It is always the first conversation I have with a client: what is happening right now that compels us to do something? In this sense, necessity is truly the mother of intention – a phrase that came to me this morning and is too good not to comment on. Intention – what we mean to do, what we think should happen, and what we want to commit to, provides the affordances that make a purpose concrete and avoids the aspirational aspect of purpose statements that avoid the reality of the situation and take us into a process that is too vague and diffuse to be effective.
PS: I have an online course on chaordic design you can take on-demand that goes into this planning tool in more detail.
Brilliant. You’ve put your finger on what bothers me about mission-and-visioning efforts: the fact that the aspiration they represent don’t always seem to be grounded in the necessity. Keeping this one prominently on hand!
Lovely.
Chris. I was thrilled to see this post on the work of Dee Hock.
I joined Visa six months after he left, but the legacy culture he left behind changed allowed me to thrive. I only realised after reading his book that his ideas and driving force created the culture. I had the chance to write and thank him back in 2020 and was amazed to receive an email back the same day. Your chaordic stepping stones are very interesting. I am curious to talk/know about how they fit with the Cynefin framework and Solution Focus. Do you have any work done on that?
That’s probably the subject of a future post actually. I certainly see them as compatible. We use them them differently in the different domains of Cynefin. The chaordic space for me – that space of generative emergence and the whole spectrum of control – order – chaordic – chaos – chamos maps on to what we no know as Cynefin, remembering of course that Dee’s work came several decades before we had much understanding in western organizational literature about the role of complexity in human systems. I find Dee’s work to be a helpful entry way into the whole field.
You can search my site for more on this but perhaps I’ll put up a post explicitly addressing your question.