Category: organisation

>I bean a-countin’

David Herbert1 Comment

>I have been guilty of disparaging accountancy. (For example, see here). I know I am not alone! Ever since Monty Python we have suspected that accountants all need a humerus implant. But, not so. Leicester accountants, Mark J Rees, have their own accountantjokesite with jokes such as:


The doctor comes to see his heart transplant patient. “There is good news. It is very unusual but we have two donors to choose form for your new heart.” The patient is pleased. He asks, “What were their jobs?” “One was a teacher and the other was an accountant.”
“I’ll take the accountant’s heart,” says the patient. “I want one that hasn’t been used.”



I’ve been reminded by Dee Hock this morning that accountancy is an old and honourable profession. In ‘Birth of the Chaordic Age‘ Hock traces the phenomenon of accounting to the tribal storyteller whose role was to accurately portray “their tribe as it was, as it is, as it might become, and as it ought to be”. Unfortunately, the primary language used for accounting for present day community is the language of mathematics and number. Consequently, the story is made up of measurements of what was, what is, and what might happen. The really important issues of what we ought to be is beyond the reach of accountancy speaking only the language of numbers.

Hock quotes H. Thomas Johnson, an economic historian, CPA, and former president of the Academy of Accounting Historians: 

“The language of financial accounting merely asserts answers, it does not invite inquiry. In particular it leaves unchallenged the worldview that underlies the way organisations operate. Thus, management accounting has serbved as a barrier to genuine organisational learning… Never again should management accounting be seen as a tool to drive people with measures. Its purpose must be to promote inquiry into the relationships, patterns and processes that give rise to accounting measures.”

Sorry accountants.

Blackbirds and Hock

David Herbert2 Comments

I am back with Dee Hock this month as I reread his book ‘Birth of the Chaordic Age‘. What a treat that is for me. Dee Hock has spent his life considering these important questions:

  1. Why are organisations, everywhere, whether political, commercial, or social, increasingly unable to manage their affairs?
  2. Why are individuals, everywhere, increasingly in conflict with and alienated from the organisations of which they are part?
  3. Why are society and the biosphere increasingly in disarray?

He contrasts the ways of nature with the ways of institutions. He describes his own childhood discovery of the lack of generosity and respect within institutions by telling the story of a disastrous event in church in which he was scapegoated for the spilling of the communion (and he was not guilty!) He writes:

What is this chasm between how institutions profess to function and how they actually do; between what they claim to do for people and what they actually do to them? What makes people behave in the name of institutions in ways they would never behave in their own name? Church, school, government, business – all the same…. Nothing in nature feels like church or school. There’s no ‘principal’ blackbird pecking away at the rest of the flock. There’s no Super frog telling the others how to croak. There’s no teacher tree lining up the saplings and telling them how to grow….

 Nothing in the early years prepared me for the shock of institutions. With school and church came crushing confinement and unrelenting boredom … It was as though everyone began to shed wholeness and humanity at the door, along with coats and overshoes, and, one by one, to cut the threads of connection to the inner spirit, the world of nature and the humanity of others.

Hock’s response was the creation of VISA for which he is renowned and from which he turned to work on land savaged by over-cropping from a culture of command and control. He translates his learning from nature into his thinking about organisation, and the “birth of the chaordic age”.

Tyranny is tyranny no matter how petty, how well rationalised, how unconscious, or how well intended. It is that to which we have persuaded ourselves for centuries, in thousands of subtle ways, day after day, month after month, year after year. It need not be so, ever. It need not be so now. It cannot be for ever. (p24)

Tyranny’s culture is reversed, nature is respected and chaordic organisation is celebrated as Hock reports that “soil is building as thousands of gophers, mice and moles work assiduously carrying grass underground and dirt to the surface. Beneath us, billions of worms, ants, beetles, and other creatures till the soil round the clock. Trillions of microscopic creatures live, eat, excrete and die beneath my feet, fulfilling their destiny and mine as well, just as surely I fulfil theirs.” (p21)

>Small pieces loosely joined

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Eavesdropping a conversation between Bishop Alan and Euan Semple I notice agreement between them about the strength of “small pieces loosely joined” (the title of a book by David Weinberger). They talked about the nature of churches and the degree of structure and institution needed to hold them together and that “dogma and rules are vehicles for power rather than entirely necessary for collective understanding”.
The “dramatic” viewpoint takes the standpoint of a participant in the drama while the “epic standpoint” is that of the external spectator able to see the whole play. Western Christendom has usually taken the “epic viewpoint” which has resulted in totalising and patronising theories of what is right and what is wrong. Hans Urs von Balthasar uses the dramatic viewpoint to look at what the church is. His dramatic theory is that there is no “external spectator”, and that in the “everyman” theatre even the audience is caught up in the drama as they see their own condition and dilemnas played out on the stage. They are caught up in the drama. There is only one “external spectator”, who is God. His is the epic viewpoint – though  there are other pretenders pretending they know what it’s all about.

Balthasar’s image is rather powerful when applied to what the church is. We don’t know what the church is. The church is there to find – to be received and not pre-conceived. For Balthasar the stage is set in Christ. From this viewpoint we all become players – church and non-church, caught in the act of being human, in  inter-play and the inter-action with all the other characters. Small pieces loosely joined sounds about right from this dramatic point of view where what is expected in terms of fruit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness ….. (Galatians 5:22)