THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

will predictably kill the very innovations that the circumstances
require.
Tony Judge, whom Alvin Toffler described as 'one of our most
brilliant organisation theorists', claims that the organisations of the
future will take the form of' networks not co-ordinated by anybody;
the participating bodies co-ordinate themselves'.
The first large-scale contemporary implementation of such
principles was accomplished by Dee Hock, when he founded the
VISA credit card system in the 1970s.298 VISA has grown
spectacularly to become the largest business organisation in the
world: it has a sales volume of 81.3 trillion per year and serves 600
million clients. And yet can you tell where its headquarters are? Or
on which stock market you can buy its shares? The surprising answer
is that it has no headquarters or stock available anywhere. And yet it
works efficiently, and has grown to a staff of 3,000 in 2 1 offices on
four continents. It is structured as an alliance among over 20,000
financial institutions in more than 200 countries and territories. It is a
structure where all relevant decision-making flows through the entire
system rather than only from the top. Dee Hock calls it the first
business 'chaord' (a term he coined to describe an organisation that is
both 'chaotic' and 'orderly'). 'Show me the Chairman of the Board of
the forest, show me the chief financial fish in the pond, show me'
(tapping his head) 'the Chief Executive neuron of the brain.'
It is indeed true that all this is not applicable just to monetary or
business matters. The work pioneered by the Santa Fe Institute on
complex adaptive systems has verified these principles in all types of
systems physical, biological, social, economic, etc.) which are
reaching a certain level of complexity. Complexity theory predicts
that contrary to Newtonian logic, complexity does not grow linearly,
but occurs in non-linear jumps in episodic stages of 'surfing at the
edge of chaos'. These 'near-chaos' periods are when systems