My first reading of Margaret Wheatley’s writings many years ago aroused the sensation described by Keats in his “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” – which ends with those mesmerizing last words: “Silent, upon a peak in Darien“. Keats compares his sudden discovery of Chapman’s translation of Homer with the moment Hernan Cortes and his men “discovered” the Pacific ocean, after climbing “a peak in Darien”. It evokes a sense of total awestruck wonder at the opening up before one’s eyes of an infinite expanse of uncharted knowledge and a radically different way of seeing and making sense of things. Margaret Wheatley does to management, leadership and organizational thinking what I suppose meditation would do to a harried manager fighting fires…takes one to a totally different plane of awareness, applying principles of the fundamental, quantum nature of reality and those derived from the natural sciences to rewrite so much conventional wisdom.
Below are a few quotes I took down while reading some of her books. Most of these are taken from her classics like “Leadership and the New Science” and “Finding Our Way”. Unfortunately I am unable to cite more accurately than this as I wasn’t as conscientious when making these notes.
Mort Meyerson, a retired CEO, says that one of the primary tasks of a leader is to make sure the organization knows itself (in “Everything I Knew About Leadership Is Wrong” 1996). The leader’s role is not to make sure that people know exactly what to do and when to do it. Instead, leaders need to ensure that there is strong and evolving clarity about who the organization is. When this clear identity is avail- able, it serves every member of the organization. Even in chaotic circumstances, individuals can make congruent decisions. Turbulence will not cause the organization to dissolve into incoherence. – Margaret Wheatley
All life participates in the creation of itself, insisting on the freedom to self-determine. All life participates actively with its environment in the process of co-adaptation and co-evolution. No sub- atomic particle exists independent of its participation with other particles. And even reality is evoked through acts of participation between us and what we choose to notice. – Margaret Wheatley
We struggle to help teams form quickly and work effectively. We struggle to learn how to work with the uniqueness that we call diversity. We are terrified of the emotions aroused by conflict, loss, love. In all of these struggles, it is being human that creates the problem. We have not yet learned how to be together. I believe we have been kept apart by three primary Western cultural beliefs: individualism, competition, and a mechanistic world view. – Margaret Wheatley
Here is a very partial list of new metaphors to describe leaders: gardeners, midwives, stewards, servants, missionaries, facilitators, conveners. Although each takes a slightly different approach, they all name a new posture for leaders, a stance that relies on new relationships with their networks of employees, stakeholders and communities.
– Margaret Wheatley
The “basic building blocks” of life are relationships, not individuals. Nothing exists on its own or has a final, fixed identity. We are all “bundles of potential.” Relationships evoke these potentials. – Margaret Wheatley
At The Berkana Institute, (which I co-founded in 1992) we work with the assumption that “the leaders we need are already here.” – Margaret Wheatley
I crave companions, not competitors. I want people to sail with me through this puzzling and frightening world. I expect to fail at moments on this journey, to get lost—how could I not? And I expect that you too will fail. Even our voyage is cyclical—we can’t help but move from old to new to old. We will vacillate, one day doing something bold and different, excited over our progress, the next day, back to old behaviors, confused about how to proceed. We need to expect that we will wander off course and not make straight progress to our destination. To stay the course, we need patience, compassion, and forgiveness. We should require this of one another. It will help us be bolder explorers – it might keep us from going mad. – Margaret Wheatley
This is very new territory for us, and it is hard to silence our well-trained linear minds, to stop grasping for small ideas and techniques that we can apply immediately to our work. But before we reach for applications, I hope we are willing to sit quietly and contemplate the great paradoxes of this new land. Let us not move too quickly across its features, heads down, blinded by our past beliefs, looking only for some small ways to use this knowledge right now. Instead, let us stand still for a moment and dwell in the realization that we live in a world of inherent order, where paradoxical but natural processes exist for growth and self-renewal. – Margaret Wheatley
Arthur Miller noted that we know an era has ended when its basic illusions have been exhausted. – Margaret Wheatley
Biologist Lynn Margulis expresses a similar realization when she comments that independence is a political concept, not a biological concept. Everywhere life displays itself as complex, tangled, messy webs of relationships. From these relationships, life creates systems that offer greater stability and support than life lived alone. – Margaret Wheatley
And most organizations deny the systems-seeking, self-organizing forces that are always present, the forces that, in fact, are responsible for uncharted levels of contribution and innovation. These fail to get reported because they occur outside “the boxes of preconceived possibility.” – Margaret Wheatley
The tension of our times is that we want our organizations to behave as living systems, but we only know how to treat them as machines. – Margaret Wheatley
Only when information belongs to everyone can people organize rapidly and effectively around shifts in customers, competitors, or environments. The more access people have to one another, the more possibilities there are. Without connections, nothing happens. Organizations held at equilibrium by well-designed organization charts die. – Margaret Wheatley
“We don’t know what the future will be or how to manage this uncertainty, so let’s think of our employees as negotiable commodities.” What they’ve really said is “Let’s buy flexibility by giving up loyalty.” – Margaret Wheatley
Most organizational change failures are the result of some deep misunderstandings of who people are and what’s going on inside organizations. – Margaret Wheatley
4 Key Principles of Change:
1. Participation is not a choice (people only support what they create)
2. Life reacts to directives, never obeys them (only generates lifeless behaviors and indifference)
3. We do not see reality – we each create interpretations of what’s real
4. To create better health in a living system connect it to more of itself
– crude notes taken from some Margaret Wheatley passage
Characteristics of Living Systems to Consider when Driving Change:
1. A Living System Forms from Shared Interests
2. All Change Results from a Change in Meaning People, like all forms of life, only change when something so disturbs them that they are forced to let go of their present beliefs. Nothing changes until we interpret things differently.
3. Change occurs only when we let go of our certainty, our current views, and develop a new understanding of what’s going on.
4. Every Living System Is Free to Choose Whether It Changes
5. Systems Contain Their Own Solutions. Living systems contain their own solutions. Somewhere in the system are people already practicing a solution that others think is impossible.
– Margaret Wheatley
Uncertainty leads to increased fear. As fear levels rise, it is normal for people to focus on personal security and safety. We tend to withdraw, become more self-serving and more defensive. We focus on smaller and smaller details, those things we can control. Because of increased fear, many people turn to leaders with unreasonable demands. We want someone to rescue us, to save us, to provide answers.
There is no one simple answer, and not even the strongest of leaders can deliver on the promise of stability and security. We seldom acknowledge that. Instead, we fire the leader and continue searching for the perfect one. A troubled male executive described it this way: “We still charge the leader to provide solutions. When he doesn’t, we then sacrifice the king/priest to atone for the sins of the system.” – Margaret Wheatley
..as they work zealously on the impossible task of stabilizing an inherently temperamental world…a wise planning executive commented on how he has changed expectations of his function: “I tell people we’re not going to get any more clarity. This is as good as it gets.” – Margaret Wheatley
People are clamoring for their leaders to save and rescue them. Historically, people often give away their freedom and allow dictatorship when confronted with uncertainty. People press their leaders to do anything to end the uncertainty, to make things better, to create stability. Even leaders who would never want to become dictators, those devoted to servant leadership, walk into this trap. They want to help, so they exert more control over the disorder. They try to create safety, to insulate people from the realities of change. They try to give answers to dilemmas that have no answers. No leader can achieve this, and it drains energy out of those who try. Instead, as leaders we must help people move into a relationship with uncertainty and chaos. Spiritual teachers have been doing this for millennia. Therefore, I believe that the times have led leaders to a spiritual threshold. We must enter the domain of spiritual traditions if we are to succeed as good leaders
– Margaret Wheatley
Inside any bureaucracy, there’s a huge gap between ideas and actions, what’s known these days as a problem with “execution.” But this failure to implement doesn’t come from a thinking/doing division. It’s the result of people not caring about the work. They didn’t develop the project, they know it won’t change anything, and nobody takes risks for something they don’t believe in. But when it’s our idea, a result of our thinking together, and we see how it might truly benefit our lives, then we act immediately on any promising notion. And we keep at it until we discover a real solution. We hesitate to challenge those who offer us employment, funds, or respectability. – Margaret Wheatley
In meetings and in the media, often we listen to others just long enough to determine whether we agree with them or not. We rush from opinion to opinion, listening for those tidbits and sound bites that con- firm our position. Gradually we become more certain but less informed. I’m learning that we don’t have to agree with each other in order to think well together. There is no need for us to be joined at the head. We are joined already by our human hearts.
– Margaret Wheatley
So I try to relearn patience from the true exemplars, those spiritual teachers past and present who spend their whole ministries being repetitious. And I’m frustrated with repeating myself (I shall say it again. Shall I say it again?) because I know I’m saying things that have been said by others, over and over. I’m giving voice to ideas that have been expressed by mystics, martyrs, philosophers, scientists, and everyday people. For millennia. Is anybody listening?
These teachers so love the truth of what they say that they seem to enjoy repeating themselves. I think this must be the key. Loving truth so much that no vibrant repetition is tedious. Feeling truth new and each time it is voiced. Loving people so well that giving voice energizes the speaker long past normal human endurance. – Margaret Wheatley
We so want to know our purpose that we too quickly determine what we think it is, and we kill ourselves in the process. We turn from stillness and listening to earnest action, and Spirit disappears. How we’re going is important, not where. I want to go together and with faith. – Margaret Wheatley
Signs of moral decline – when selfishness replaces service
This is the intriguing paradox of identity: it can be greatly changed as the means to protect its existing self. Without identity there is no life, no creation, no responsiveness, no continuation, no possibility for evolutionary change. Yet every change is motivated by an at- tempt to preserve a self. You can prove this to yourself. Whenever you detect a change in a person, community, organization, or nation, observe how their old identity is referred to, sometimes many times over, even though they now appear quite changed. – Margaret Wheatley
Courage comes from the old French word for heart, coeur. When we are deeply affected, when our hearts respond to an issue or person. – Margaret Wheatley
Hopi advice: Banish the word struggle from your attitude and vocabulary. All that that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration. For we are the ones we have been waiting for. – Margaret Wheatley
Notes to Self 
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