Six Lenses |
|||||||||||||||
|
The technique of looking at an organization through different kinds of “lenses” was suggested by Dee Hock as a way of:
As outlined by Hock in the prologue to his book, Birth of the Chaordic Age, one would first “look” at the organization through lens of purpose, then take each other lens in turn, moving in a clockwise rotation. As he put it, “Forming a chaordic organization begins with an intensive The fact that the lenses fall into a sequence but that the process is also highly nonlinear is often difficult to understand. It is that, as Hock observes, “Every part of the process illuminates all subsequent and preceding parts, allowing each to be constantly revised and improved.” Each lens may focus on a particular aspect of the organization, but never to the exclusion of the rest. When looking through the Principles lens, for example, we still see the need for an organizational concept and legal agreements, and we take time to assess how consistent our current thinking is with the principles that we want embedded in the organization. How principled are the agreements? Similarly, when looking through the Agreements lens, we can assess which statements of principle are suitable for inclusion in legal documents and which are still too “fuzzy” or imprecise. We spend time identifying the degree to which a principle we’ve uncovered is meant to be a strongly binding parameter for actions, or something more aspirational, setting a tone or a direction. What is the nature of the agreement about the principles? All of these questions are important, of course, and the clearer one set of answers becomes, the easier it is to be clear about the other sets of answers. The work in a given lens is not complete until the work in all lenses is has been completed. The following summaries of the various lenses are drawn from the Chaordic Commons website. Used with permission.
|
 |
Topics
Summaries Notes
Other |
search for Purpose, then proceeds to Principles, [Participants], and Concept, and only then to [Agreements] and Practice. It can’t be done well as a linear process. Each of the six elements can be thought of as a perspective, a sort of “lens” through which participants examine the circumstances giving rise to the need for a new concept of organization and what it might become.” 
