Margaret J. Wheatley Quotations

I think it is quite dangerous for an organisation to think they can predict where they are going to need leadership. It needs to be something that people are willing to assume if it feels relevant, given the context of any situation

Aggression is inherently destructive of relationships. People and ideologies are pitted against each other, believing that in order to survive, they must destroy the opposition.

We know from science that nothing in the universe exists as an isolated or independent entity.

There are many benefits to this process of listening. The first is that good listeners are created as people feel listened to. Listening is a reciprocal process - we become more attentive to others if they have attended to us.

In our daily life, we encounter people who are angry, deceitful, intent only on satisfying their own needs. There is so much anger, distrust, greed, and pettiness that we are losing our capacity to work well together.

Listening is such a simple act. It requires us to be present, and that takes practice, but we don't have to do anything else. We don't have to advise, or coach, or sound wise. We just have to be willing to sit there and listen.

Even though worker capacity and motivation are destroyed when leaders choose power over productivity, it appears that bosses would rather be in control than have the organization work well.

For us, someone who is willing to step forward and help is much more courageous than someone who is merely fulfilling the role.

In these troubled, uncertain times, we don't need more command and control; we need better means to engage everyone's intelligence in solving challenges and crises as they arise.

Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.

Too many problem-solving sessions become battlegrounds where decisions are made based on power rather than intelligence.

And time for reflection with colleagues is for me a lifesaver; it is not just a nice thing to do if you have the time. It is the only way you can survive.

When leaders take back power, when they act as heroes and saviors, they end up exhausted, overwhelmed, and deeply stressed.

Determination, energy, and courage appear spontaneously when we care deeply about something. We take risks that are unimaginable in any other context.

For me, this is a familiar image - people in the organization ready and willing to do good work, wanting to contribute their ideas, ready to take responsibility, and leaders holding them back, insisting that they wait for decisions or instructions

I'm sad to report that in the past few years, ever since uncertainty became our insistent 21st century companion, leadership has taken a great leap backwards to the familiar territory of command and control.

Whatever life we have experienced, if we can tell our story to someone who listens, we find it easier to deal with our circumstances.

Our willingness to acknowledge that we only see half the picture creates the conditions that make us more attractive to others. The more sincerely we acknowledge our need for their different insights and perspectives, the more they will be magnetized to join us.

When we can lay down our fear and anger and choose responses other than aggression, we create the conditions for bringing out the best in us humans.

Aggression only moves in one direction - it creates more aggression.

Probably the most visible example of unintended consequences, is what happens every time humans try to change the natural ecology of a place.

Everyone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. The more interpretations we gather, the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole.

I believe that our very survival depends upon us becoming better systems thinkers.

For eons, humans have struggled to find less destructive ways of living together.

Thinking is the place where intelligent actions begin. We pause long enough to look more carefully at a situation, to see more of its character, to think about why it's happening, to notice how it's affecting us and others

The nature of the global business environment guarantees that no matter how hard we work to create a stable and healthy organisation, our organisation will continue to experience dramatic changes far beyond our control.

Yet we act as if simple cause and effect is at work. We push to find the one simple reason things have gone wrong. We look for the one action, or the one person, that created this mess. As soon as we find someone to blame, we act as if we've solved the problem.

We have created trouble for ourselves in organizations by confusing control with order.

In the past, it was easier to believe in my own effectiveness. If I worked hard, with good colleagues and good ideas, we could make a difference. But now, I sincerely doubt that.

Aggression is the most common behavior used by many organizations, a nearly invisible medium that influences all decisions and actions.

In virtually every organization, regardless of mission and function, people are frustrated by problems that seem unsolvable.

For example, I was discussing the use of email and how impersonal it can be, how people will now email someone across the room rather than go and talk to them. But I don't think this is laziness, I think it is a conscious decision people are making to save time.

We do as much harm holding onto programs and people past their natural life span as we do when we employ massive organizational air strikes. However, destroying comes at the end of life's cycle, not as a first response.

Destroying is a necessary function in life. Everything has its season, and all things eventually lose their effectiveness and die.

Most people associate command and control leadership with the military.

These days, our senses are bombarded with aggression. We are constantly confronted with global images of unending, escalating war and violence.

Without aggression, it becomes possible to think well, to be curious about differences, and to enjoy each other's company.

Listening moves us closer, it helps us become more whole, more healthy, more holy. Not listening creates fragmentation, and fragmentation is the root of all suffering.

We experience problem-solving sessions as war zones, we view competing ideas as enemies, and we use problems as weapons to blame and defeat opposition forces. No wonder we can't come up with real lasting solutions!

Organisations are now confronted with two sources of change: the traditional type that is initiated and managed; and external changes over which no one has control.

Circles create soothing space, where even reticent people can realize that their voice is welcome.

I believe that the capacity that any organisation needs is for leadership to appear anywhere it is needed, when it is needed.

I've wanted to see beyond the Western, mechanical view of the world and see what else might appear when the lens was changed

Successful organizations, including the Military, have learned that the higher the risk, the more necessary it is to engage everyone's commitment and intelligence.

I think a major act of leadership right now, call it a radical act, is to create the places and processes so people can actually learn together, using our experiences

In this present culture, we need to find the means to work and live together with less aggression if we are to resolve the serious problems that afflict and impede us.

I think we have to notice that the business processes we use right now for thinking and planning and budgeting and strategy are all delivered on very tight agendas.

We could focus our efforts on discovering solutions that work uniquely for us.

Passion mutates into procedures, into rules and roles. Instead of purpose, we focus on policies. Instead of being free to create, we impose constraints that squeeze the life out of us.

Aggression only breeds more aggression. It only creates more fear and anger.

Thinking is always dangerous to the status quo. [...] The moment you start thinking, you'll want to change something.

This is a world of process, not a world of things.

The search for the lessons of the new science is still in progress, really in its infancy. In this realm, three is a new kind of freedom, where it is more rewarding to explore than to reach conclusions, more satisfying to wonder than to know, and more exciting to search than to stay put. Curiosity, not certainty, becomes the saving grace.

Self-production: the characteristic of living systems to continuously renew themselves and to regulate this process in such a way that the integrity of their structure is maintained. It is a natural process which supports the quest for structure, process renewal and integrity.

Independence is a political concept, not a biological concept.

Organizations are now confronted with two sources of change: the traditional type that is initiated and managed; and external changes over which no one has control.

Life is creative. It makes it up as it goes along.

I've found that I can only change how I act if I stay aware of my beliefs and assumptions. Thoughts always reveal themselves in behavior.

In this new world, you and I make it up as we go along, not because we lack expertise or planning skills, but because that is the nature of reality. Reality changes shape and meaning because of our activity. And it is constantly new. We are required to be there, as active participants. It can't happen without us and nobody can do it for us.

Ask what's possible, not what's wrong. Keep asking.

Listening is a reciprocal process - we become more attentive to others if they have attended to us.

Innovation is fostered by information gathered from new connections; from insights gained by journeys into other disciplines or places; from active, collegial networks and fluid, open boundaries. Innovation arises from ongoing circles of exchange, where information is not just accumulated or stored, but created. Knowledge is generated anew from connections that weren't there before.

All social change begins with a conversation.

No longer in a relational universe, can we study anything as separate from ourselves. Our acts of observation are part of the process that brings forth the manifestation of what we are observing.

They have eliminated rigidity, both physical and psychological, in order to support more fluid processes whereby temporary teams are created to deal with specific and ever-changing needs. They have simplified roles into minimal categories; they have knocked down walls and created workplaces where people, ideas, and information circulate freely.

Circles create soothing space...

In fact, Western culture has spent decades drawing lines and boxes around interconnected phenomena. We've chunked the world into pieces rather than explored its webby nature.

A world based on machine images is a world filled with boundaries. In a machine, every piece knows its place.

Space is the basic ingredient of the universe; there is more of it than anything else.

Our growing addiction to the Internet is impairing precious human capacities such as memory, concentration, pattern recognition, meaning-making, and intimacy. We are becoming more restless, more impatient, more demanding, and more insatiable, even as we become more connected and creative. We are rapidly losing the ability to think long about any- thing, even those issues we care about. We flit, moving restlessly from one link to another.

As we let go of the machine model of work, we begin to step back and see ourselves in new ways, to appreciate wholeness, and to design organizations that honor and make use of the totality of who we are.

Power is the capacity to generate relationships.

Let's just keep asking ourselves this question: 'Is what I'm about to do strengthening the web of connections, or is it weakening it?'

To make a system stronger, we need to make stronger relationships.

One of the easiest human acts is also the most healing. Listening to someone. Simply listening. Not advising or coaching, but silently and fully listening.

Perseverance is a choice. It's not a simple, one-time choice, it's a daily one. There's never a final decision.

When error holds so much power, play disappears. Creativity ceases.

Power in organizations is the capacity generated by relationships. It is an energy that comes into existence through relationships.

We've taken disturbances and fluctuations and averaged them together to give us comfortable statistics. Our training has been to look for big numbers, important trends, major variances. Yet it is the slight variations - soft-spoken, even whispered at first - that we need to encourage.

Surrendering to life offers some wonderful realizations. We learn we're capable of being in this dance, of working with whatever happens. We learn to trust ourselves and then others and, gradually, we learn that life itself can be trusted.

Life doesn't move in straight lines, and neither does a good conversation.

Many of us have created lives that give very little support for experimentation. We believe that answers already exist out there, independent of us. What if we invested more time and attention to our own experimentation? We could focus our efforts on discovering solutions that work uniquely for us.

I believe that the capacity that any organization needs is for leadership to appear anywhere it is needed, when it is needed.

Who you are depends on who you meet.

We need to move from the leader as hero, to the leader as host.

Without reflection, we go blindly on our way..

Nothing has given me more hope recently than to observe how simple conversations give birth to actions that can change lives and restore our faith in the future. There is no more powerful way to initiate significant social change than to start a conversation. When a group of people discover that they share a common concern, that's when the process of change begins.

One of the great errors organizations make is shutting down what is a natural, life-enhancing process-chaos. We are terrified of chaos. As a manager, it signals failure. But if you move out of control and into an appreciation of natural order, you understand that the only way a system changes is when it is far from equilibrium, when it moves from the 'quiet' we treasure and is confronted with the choice to die or reorganize. And you can't reorganize to a higher level unless you risk the perils of the path through chaos.

We would do well to ponder the realization that love is the most potent source of power.

In our daily life, we encounter people we are angry, deceitful, intent only on satisfying ere is so their own needs. There is so much anger, distrust, greed, and pettiness that we are losing our capacity to work well together.

Hopelessness has surprised me with patience.

A leader these days needs to be a host - one who convenes diversity; who convenes all viewpoints in creative processes where our mutual intelligence can come forth.

We each create our world by what we choose to notice, creating a world of distinction that makes sense to us. We then 'see' the world through the self we have created.

The future cannot be determined. It can only be experienced as it occurring. Life doesn't know what it will be until it notices what it has become.

You can’t hate someone whose story you know.

Leadership is a series of behaviors rather than a role for heroes.

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 by our human hearts.

In organizations, real power and energy is generated through relationships. The patterns of relationships and the capacities to form them are more important than tasks, functions, roles, and positions.

We are, always, poets, exploring possibilities of meaning in a world which is also all the time exploring possibilities.

We can no longer stand at the end of something we visualized in detail and plan backwards from that future. Instead we must stand at the beginning, clear in our mind, with a willingness to be involved in discovery... it asks that we participate rather than plan.