Top 98 Margaret J. Wheatley Quotes of All time - Quotes.Pub

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Sociologist James Evan reviewed citations in more than thirty-four million articles published in academic journals and noted how the number of different citations declined after the advent of search engines. These information-filtering tools, he observed, “serve as amplifiers of popularity, quickly establishing and then continually reinforcing a consensus about what information is important and what isn’t.”36.

Life offers us this great gift of self-organization, how we can be held in the basin of shared meaning and, within that, exercise individual freedom. It is such a shame to waste it on fear and doubt. Or to seek to contain and control it.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Most people associate command and control leadership with the military.

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

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.

Who you are depends on who you meet.

All of us need better skills in listening, conversing, respecting one another’s uniqueness, because these are essential for strong relationships.

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

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

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

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

The energy now spent on self-protection can be converted into positive energy if we’re willing to encounter reality and see it clearly. Facing reality is an empowering act – it can liberate our mind and heart to discern how best to use our power and influence in service for this time.

Independence is a political concept, not a biological concept.

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

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

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.

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.

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?’

In Yellowstone National Park, human-imposed stability thwarted for many years the natural process of small fires, which regularly clean out brush and dead trees. The result was a fragile equilibrium completely vulnerable to the cataclysm of fire that destroyed large areas of the park. The attempt to manage for stability and to enforce an unnatural equilibrium always leads to far-reaching destruction. The.

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

Circles create soothing space...

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

We have created trouble for ourselves in organizations by confusing control with order. This is no surprise, given that for most of its written history, leadership has been defined in terms of its control functions.

Hopelessness has surprised me with patience.

Whatever your personal beliefs and experiences, I invite you to consider that we need a new worldview to navigate this chaotic time. We cannot hope to make sense using our old maps. It won’t help to dust them off or reprint them in bold colors. The more we rely on them, the more disoriented we become. They cause us to focus on the wrong things and blind us to what’s significant. Using them, we will journey only to greater chaos.

Power is the capacity to generate relationships.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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!

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.

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