What's Wrong with Chaordic/Renewal

Different Leaders have given a number of reasons they are against the recent changes in La Leche League, particularly since the association of LLLI with the Chaordic Commons. These fall roughly into the following categories:

Financial:

• Accepting funds earmarked for specific organizations
  • In fact, such a donation is not made to La Leche League, but to the other organization and only funnelled through LLL
  • Donations that are given with conditions such as these put LLL at the mercy both of the donor and the second organization

• Possible use of general funds for chaordic (it is unclear at this time if this is happening or not)
• Questions about fundraising for non-LLL purposes
• Objections to long-term funding of chaordic consultants

Ideological:

• Changes to principles or other basic LLL documents
• Adaptation of new principles, to be used in addition to or instead of (unclear which) basic LLL philosophy
  • Many of the new prose is copied word-for-word from the chaordic organization

• Identification with organizations with principles different from LLL's original principles
  • Chaordic is seen by some as being "socialist", "New Age", or "kooky" (or all of the above)
    • Some Leaders who consider themselves New Age still object to its being associated with LLL

  • We are being associated with other organizations that are associated with chaordic

• Allowing non-Leader chaordic consultants access to Leader-only personal information

Practical/Organizational:

• Leaders are retiring because of recent changes
• Do we know that chaordic works in the long term?
• Tearing down existing support networks without a replacement in place risks destroying the organization.
• Restructuring an organization requires first knowing what is working in addition to what is not working; this seems not to have been done
• Organizations often fail when outside consultants are given too much power
• While basic chaordic principles state that decisions should be made at the lowest level, the change to chaordic is being pushed from the top down

Gobble-dy-gook-ical:

• Misuse of terminology
• Unclear written materials
• Frequent statements such as "you had to be there to understand"
• Constantly changing expectations
• Stating different things to different audiences
  • Assuming good intent only seems to have to work in one direction