Hock principle

The Hock principle is a management philosophy coined by Dee Hock, the founder and chief executive of Visa. It states that organizations with a simple, clear purpose and principles will exhibit complex, intelligent behavior, while organizations with complex rules and regulations will exhibit simple, stupid behavior.

The principle inverts the usual assumption that complex problems demand complex control. Hock argued the opposite. Specify the purpose and the principles tightly, then let the people closest to the work decide how to act. Elaborate behavior emerges from their judgment, not from a rule book imposed from above. Pile on rules instead, and the organization’s behavior collapses into rule-following — literal, defensive, and unable to adapt.

Hock developed the idea while building Visa in the 1970s. He designed it as a deliberately decentralized, member-owned cooperative in which thousands of competing banks governed a single global payment network through a thin set of shared principles rather than a central authority. The structure held because the principles did the coordinating work that rules and oversight would otherwise have to. In 1993, drawing on this experience, Hock introduced the term chaordic — a blend of "chaos" and "order" — for organizations that are neither rigidly controlled nor anarchic, and he expounded the philosophy in Birth of the Chaordic Age (1999).

The principle is an organizational counterpart to observations about complexity in systems design. Where the software complexity literature warns that elaborate structures breed big balls of mud, Hock makes the parallel claim about organizations: heavy regulation produces stupid behavior, and the way to get intelligent, adaptive behavior is to keep the governing constraints simple. It shares its instinct with Conway’s law, which treats organizational structure as the primary design decision, and with Gall’s law, which holds that complex working systems grow from simple ones rather than being specified whole.

See also

• Complexity
• Conway’s law
• Gall’s law
• Big ball of mud

References

• Hock, Dee (1999). Birth of the Chaordic Age. Berrett-Koehler.
• Hock, Dee (2005). One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization. Berrett-Koehler.