Global Financial Revolution

A 21st-Century Bretton Woods? Global financial summit hinges on China playing a role once taken by U.S.

Sebastian Mallaby


As international pressures build to create a new international financial and currency order in the wake of the most severe global crisis since the 1930s, interest—and fantasy—center not only on the critical role of the United States but equally on China. China is now in the spotlight not only because of its position as a rising economic power, not only because of its vast financial currency reserves in the range of $2 trillion, but also because of currency strategies that align the yen to the dollar to keep its value low in order to maximize exports. Here Sebastian Mallaby looks back and forward to envisage a new financial order that would place China at the center. Japan Focus


There wasn't much to see in Bretton Woods in July 1944, when delegates from 44 countries checked into the sprawling Mount Washington Hotel for the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. Almost a million acres of New Hampshire forest surrounded the site; there were free Coca-Cola dispensers, but few other distractions.




The Mount Washington Hotel. site of the Bretton Woods Conference


In this scene of rustic isolation, 168 statesmen (and one lone stateswoman, Mabel Newcomer of Vassar College) joined in history's most celebrated episode of economic statecraft, remaking the world's monetary order to fend off another Great Depression and creating an unprecedented multinational bank, to be focused on postwar reconstruction and development.




Delegates at the 1944 conference in Bretton Woods, N.H.



At the Final Plenary, a sea of black-tied delegates gave a standing ovation to British economist John Maynard Keynes, whose intellect had permeated the three weeks of talks. Lord Keynes paid tribute to his far-seeing colleagues, who had performed a task appropriate "to the prophet and to the soothsayer."


The Bretton Woods conference has acquired mythical status. To economic-history buffs, it's akin to the gathering of the founding fathers at the constitutional convention. To politicians anxious to make their marks upon the world, it's a moment to be richly envied. The recent calls from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy for a new Bretton Woods conference, to which the Bush administration has acceded, have caused TV crews to descend upon the old hotel, which has undergone a $50 million facelift. But Bretton Woods revivalism is nothing new. Indeed, it's a long tradition.

After the onset of the Latin debt crisis in 1982, U.S. Treasury Secretary Donald Regan floated the idea of a new Bretton Woods to steady the hemisphere's currencies. The following year, reeling from three devaluations of the franc, French President Francois Mitterrand declared, "The time has really come to think in terms of a new Bretton Woods. Outside this proposition, there will be no salvation." Mitterrand persisted in this grandiloquence over the next two years. He finally quieted down in 1985, when Margaret Thatcher dismissed his proposal as "generalized jabberwocky."

In the wake of the emerging-market crises of 1997-98, Bretton Woods nostalgia broke out again -- this time in post-Thatcher Britain. "We should not be afraid to think radically and fundamentally," Tony Blair opined. "We need to commit ourselves today to build a new Bretton Woods for the next millennium." The precise content of Mr. Blair's millennial ambition was, shall we say, vague. But no fellow leader was rude enough to say so.



French President Nicolas Sarkozy (left) with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown earlier this month


Among acts of international economic statesmanship, perhaps only the Marshall Plan has been invoked more frequently. There have been calls for a Marshall Plan for postcommunist eastern Europe, a Marshall Plan for Africa, a Marshall Plan for the inner cities. Indeed, anybody wanting Washington to splurge finds Marshall exceedingly convenient.

But Bretton Woods has a richer and more rarefied cachet. It was about reordering the international system, not just mobilizing money for an enlightened cause. And whereas the Marshall Plan was an example of the unilateralism for which the U.S. is known, the Bretton Woods conference was a triumph of multilateral coordination. It featured countries as diverse as Honduras, Liberia and the Philippines (Keynes spoke disdainfully of a "most monstrous monkey-house"), though it did not include South Korea or Japan, important voices in today's economic summitry.

Both sides of the Bretton Woods achievement seem alluring today, yet both may be chimerical. The conference rebuilt the economic order by creating a system of fixed exchange rates. The aim was to prevent a return to the competitive devaluations best illustrated by the "butter wars." In 1930 New Zealand secured a cost advantage for its butter exports by devaluing its money; Denmark, its main butter rival, responded with its own devaluation in 1931; the two nations proceeded to chase each other down with progressively more drastic devaluations.

This beggar-thy-neighbor behavior added to the protectionism that brought the world to ruin, and the Bretton Woods answer was simple. In the postwar era, the dollar would be anchored to gold, and other currencies would be anchored to the dollar: No more fluctuating money, ergo no competitive devaluation. To undergird this system, the Bretton Woods architects created the International Monetary Fund, which was far more central to their ambitions than their other legacy, the World Bank. If a country's fixed exchange rate led it into a balance of payments crisis, the IMF would bail it out and so avert devaluation.



John Maynard Keynes addressing the delegates


Today the idea of another monetary rebirth has much to recommend it. The credit bubble that has wreaked havoc on the world's financial markets has its origins in a two-headed monetary order: Some countries allow their currencies to float, while others peg loosely to the dollar. Over the past five years or so, this mixture created a variation on the 1930s: China, the largest dollar pegger, kept its currency cheap, driving rival exporters in Asia to hold their exchange rates down also. Thanks to this new version of competitive currency manipulation, the dollar-peggers racked up gargantuan trade surpluses. Their earnings were pumped back into the international financial system, inflating a credit bubble that now has popped disastrously.

Persuading China to change its currency policy would be a worthy goal for a new Bretton Woods conference. But currency reform is low on the agenda of the summit that the Bush administration plans to host on Nov. 15. (The administration styles this gathering a "G-20 meeting," ignoring the European talk of a Bretton Woods II.) The British and French leaders who pushed for the meeting want instead to talk about financial regulation -- how to fix rating agencies, how to boost transparency at banks and so on. But many of these tasks require minimal multilateral coordination.



Henry Morganthau and H.H. Kung, heads of the U.S. and Chinese delegations at Bretton Woods talk with reporters


If the Europeans shrink from demanding that China cease pegging to the dollar, it's perhaps because they anticipate the concession that would be asked of them. China isn't going to give up its export-led growth strategy for the sake of the international system unless it gets a bigger stake in that system -- meaning a much bigger voice within the International Monetary Fund and a corresponding reduction in Europe's exaggerated influence. When you strip out the blather about bank transparency and such, this is the core bargain that needs to be struck. Naturally, the Europeans aren't proposing it.

It will be up to the two great powers -- the U.S. and China -- to fashion the deal that brings China into the heart of the multilateral system. Here, too, is an echo of the first Bretton Woods, for underneath the camouflage of a multilateral process there was a bargain between two nations. Britain, the proud but indebted imperial power, needed American savings to underpin monetary stability in the postwar era; the quid pro quo was that the U.S. had the final say on the IMF's design and structure. Today the U.S. must play Britain's role, and China must play the American one.

There's a final twist, however. In the 1940s the declining power practiced imperial trade preferences; the rising power championed an open world economy. When Franklin Roosevelt told Winston Churchill that free trade would be the price of postwar assistance, he was demanding an end to the colonial order and the creation of a level playing field for commerce. "Mr. President, I think you want to abolish the British empire," Churchill protested. "But in spite of that, we know you are our only hope."

Today it is the rising power that pursues mercantilist policies via its exchange rate. China's leadership, which sits atop an astonishing $2 trillion in foreign-currency savings, could trade a promise to help recapitalize Western finance for an expanded role within the IMF. But China may simply not be interested. The future of the global monetary system depends on whether China aspires to play the role of Roosevelt -- or whether it prefers to be a modern Churchill.


Sebastian Mallaby directs the Center for Geoeconomic Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is writing a history of hedge funds.

This article appeared in The Wall Street Journal on Oct 25, 2008. Published at Japan Focus on November 2, 2008.

cambodia and global financial crisis

By Chun Sakada, VOA Khmer
Original report from Phnom Penh
07 November 2008

Cambodia's economic growth rate will be slashed by more than half compared to 2007, as a financial slowdown continues to plague world markets, the International Monetary Fund said Friday.

Cambodia's economic growth rate will be around 6.5 percent for 2008 and will decrease to 4.25 percent next year, the IMF said, reporting findings of a visit in recent weeks. Those numbers starkly differ from Cambodia's halcyon growth rate of 10.25 percent in 2007.

Cambodia's "narrow production and export base" will subject it to the global markets, said David Cowen, deputy division chief of the IMF's Asia and Pacific Department.

The global economy has constricted amid ripples of a US sub-prime mortgage meltdown, shrinking consumer confidence, and tumbling stock markets.

"Cambodia's economy will not be immune to this slowdown," Cowen told reporters.

The IMF noted on its visit a sharp increase in inflation driven by higher fuel and food prices, as well as the weakened US dollar, which Cambodia follows, and heavy domestic demand for goods.

"Following several years of very strong performance, Cambodia's economy faces a number of challenging headwinds," the IMF said in a statement Friday. "After a robust start, growth momentum eased over the course of 2008, and more recently the economy has begun to experience adverse effects from global financial stress."

Cambodian officials have already acknowledged a slowdown, while large construction projects in Phnom Penh have been put on hold and microfinance lenders have reduced operations.


"Cambodia's economic slowdown is following the global financial crisis, which has slowed down foreign trade to Cambodia," Finance Minister Keat Chhon told reporters on Monday. "We must increase agricultural production and increase the [value added tax] on agricultural products for export. And we are trying to attract foreign investment by all means to come to develop in Cambodia."

Garment exports and tourist arrivals—the two main engines of Cambodia's economy—were both slowing, the IMF said, part of a "rapid downturn" in the economies of its trading partners.

The IMF also estimated that the overall inflation rate for 2008 would come to around 15.5 percent, following its highest point, 26 percent, in May.

The IMF commended the government on "steady budget implementation, particularly through the election period," and for improved tax administration.

ACMECS Senior Officials’ Meeting opens in Hanoi

The Senior Officials’ Meeting (SOM) of the Ayayewady-Chao Phraya-Mekong Economic Cooperation Strategy (ACMECS) took place in Hanoi on November 5.

At the meeting, which focused on preparations for the 3rd ACMECS Ministers’ Meeting and Summit, officials from ACMECS heaped praise on the positive results recorded since the 2nd Summit in Bangkok, Thailand, particularly in the areas of cooperation in trade and investment facilitation, transport, agriculture, industry, energy, healthcare, tourism and human resources development.

In the context of fluctuating regional and international economies, the participants agreed to increase ACMECS cooperation effectively and practically in order to take advantage of new opportunities and to cope with new challenges as well as speeding up economic integration among ACMECS members in particular and countries in the Mekong sub-region in general.

In addition to accelerating the development of the sub-regional transport network, the ACMECS officials emphasised the necessity of the facilitation of a range of procedures and mechanisms, particularly customs procedures.

They also encouraged a host of activities to promote tourism, including the implementation of the “Five Nations, One Destination” initiative and linking the member countries’ cultural and natural heritages.

At the event, the member nations spoke highly of Vietnam and Thailand’s readiness to sign memorandums of understanding on developing vocational training for other ACMECS members.

The officials discussed and approved the agenda of the 3rd ACMECS Ministers’ Meeting and Summit. They also discussed the basic contents of a joint statement to be released at the upcoming summit and ACMECS leaders’ statement regarding trade, investment and tourism promotion and agreed to propose them for approval at the 3rd Summit.

ACMECS includes five member countries, namely Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar and Vietnam.

(Source: VNA)

Leadership

Margaret Wheatley on Leadership
http://www.margaretwheatley.com/index.html

The Irresistible Future of Organizing
July/August 1996
Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers
Why do so many people in organizations feel discouraged and fearful about the future? Why does despair only increase as the fads fly by, shorter in duration, more costly in each attempt to improve? Why have the best efforts to create significant and enduring organizational change resulted in so many failures? We, and our organizations, exist in a world of constant evolutionary activity. Why has change become so unnatural in human organizations?

We believe that the accumulating failures at organiza-tional change can be traced to a fundamental but mistak-en assumption that organizations are machines. Organizations-as-machines is a 17th century notion, from a time when scientists began to describe the universe as a great clock. Our modern belief in prediction and con-trol originated in these clockwork images. Cause and effect were simple relationships; everything could be known; organizations and people could be engineered into efficient solutions. Three hundred years later, we still search for "tools and techniques" and "change levers"; we attempt to "drive" change through our orga-nizations; we want to "build" solutions and "reengineer" for peak efficiencies.

But why would we want an organization to behave like a machine? Machines have no intelligence; they fol-low the instructions given to them. They only work in the specific conditions predicted by their engineers. Changes in their environment wreak havoc because they have no capacity to adapt.

These days, a different ideal for organizations is sur-facing. We want organizations to be adaptive, flexible, self-renewing, resilient, learning, intelligent-attributes found only in living systems. The tension of our times is that we want our organizations to behave as living sys-tems, but we only know how to treat them as machines.

It is time to change the way we think about organizations. Organizations are living systems. All living systems have the capacity to self-organize, to sustain themselves and move toward greater complexity and order as needed. They can respond intelligently to the need for change. They organize (and then reorganize) themselves into adaptive patterns and structures without any externally imposed plan or direction.

Self-organizing systems have what all leaders crave: the capacity to respond continuously to change. In these systems, change is the organizing force, not a problemat-ic intrusion. Structures and solutions are temporary. Resources and people come together to create new ini-tiatives, to respond to new regulations, to shift the orga-nization's processes. Leaders emerge from the needs of the moment. There are far fewer levels of management. Experimentation is the norm. Local solutions predomi-nate but are kept local, not elevated to models for the whole organization. Involvement and participation con-stantly deepen. These organizations are experts at the process of change. They understand their organization as a process of continuous organizing.

Self-organization offers hope for a simpler and more effective way to accomplish work. It challenges the most fundamental assumptions about how organization hap-pens and the role of leaders. But it is not a new phenom-enon. We have lived our entire lives in a self-organizing world. We watch self-organization on TV in the first hours after any disaster. People and resources organize without planning into coordinated, purposeful activity. Leaders emerge and recede based on who is available and who has information. Everything happens quickly and a little miraculously. These self-organized efforts create effective responses long before official relief agen-cies can even make it to the scene.

In the history of organizational theory, we have known about self-organization. Years ago, we called it the "infor-mal organization." This was a description of what people did in order to accomplish their work. Often people ignored the formal structures, finding them ineffective and unresponsive. They reached out for the resources and relationships they needed; they followed leaders of their own choosing, those they knew they could rely on.

A more recent description of self-organization is found in a new term that describes organizations as "communities of practice." These "communities" are webs of connections woven by people to get their work done. People organize together based on their percep-tion of needs and their desires to accomplish. The Xerox Corporation promotes this concept by stating that a suc-cessful company must acknowledge the power of com-munity and adopt those "elegantly minimal processes" that allow communities to emerge.

And the Worldwide Web is probably the most potent and visible example of a self-organizing network forming around interests, the availability of information, and unbounded access to one another. It will be interesting to observe the Web's future now that control issues have become a paramount concern.

While there are many other examples of self-organiza-tion occurring in our midst, including well-documented experiences with self-managed teams, we will simply note that self-organization is not a new phenomenon. It has been difficult to observe only because we weren't interested in observing it. But as we describe organiza-tions as living systems rather than as machines, self-orga-nization becomes a primary concept, easily visible.

Order in Complex Systems
In the natural sciences, the search to understand self-organization derives from a very large question. How does life create greater order over time? Order is the unique ability of living systems to organize, reorganize, and grow more complex. But theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman has demonstrated that the inevitable desire to organize is evident even in a non-living system of light bulbs. Kauffman constructed a network of 200 light bulbs, connecting one bulb to the behavior of only two others (using Boolean logic). For example, light bulb 23 could be instructed to go on if bulb 46 went on, and to go off if bulb 67 went on. The assigned connections were always random and limited to only two. Once the network was switched on, different configurations of on-and-off bulbs would illuminate. The number of possible on/off configurations is 10 to the 30th, a number of inconceivable possibilities. Given these numbers, we would expect chaos to rule. But it doesn't. The system settles instantly (on about the fourteenth iteration) into a pattern of on/off bulbs that it then continues to repeat.

A few simple connections are sufficient to generate orderly patterns. Complex behavior originates from sim-ple rules of connection. Order is not predesigned or engineered from the outside. The system organizes itself. We live in a universe, states Kauffman, where we get "order for free."

Emergence: The Surprise of Complexity
Social insects, bird flocks, fish schools, human traffic jams, all exhibit well-synchronized, highly ordered behaviors. Yet these sophisticated movements are not directed by any leader. Instead, a few rules focused at the local level lead to coordinated responses. Computer simulations that mimic flocking, swarming, or schooling behaviors program in only two or three rules for individ-uals to follow. There is never a rule about a leader or direction. The rules focus only on an individual's behav-ior in relation to that of its neighbors. Synchronized behavior emerges without orchestrated planning. (Recent commentators on the history of science note that scientists consistently avoided the conclusion that there was no leader. The belief in the need for planning and authority runs deep in Western thought.)

A startling example of complex and coordinated behavior emerging without leaders or plans is found in a species of termites. In Africa and Australia, certain ter-mites build intricate towers 20 to 30 feet high; these are the largest structures on earth proportionate to the size of their builders. These towers are engineering marvels, filled with intricate chambers, tunnels, arches, and air-conditioning and humidifying capabilities. Termites accomplish this feat by following a bizarre job descrip-tion. They wander at will, bump up against one another, and react. They observe what others are doing and coor-dinate their own activities with that information. Without blueprints or engineers, their arches meet in the middle.

Whether it be light bulbs, birds, termites, or humans, the conditions that create organization are the same. Individuals are similarly focused. Members develop con-nections with one another. Each determines its behavior based on information about what its neighbors are doing and what the collective purpose is. From such simple conditions, working communities emerge, self-organizing from local connections into global patterns and process-es. Nothing is preplanned; patterns of behavior emerge that could not be predicted from observing individuals.

There is much to startle us in these scientific visions of how life organizes itself. Can human organizations be more intentionally self-organizing?

Three Conditions of Self-Organizing Organizations
If complex systems emerge from simple initial condi-tions, then human organizations similarly can be rooted in simplicity. During the past few years, our own search has focused on the simple conditions that support an organization's capacity to access its intelligence and to change as needed. We have seen evidence of these con-ditions in a wide variety of settings: in world-wide manu-facturers, in schools, in experiments with future battle strategy in the U.S. Army.

Organizations assume different forms, but they emerge from fundamentally similar conditions. A self gets organized. A world of shared meaning develops. Networks of relationships take form. Information is noticed, interpreted, transformed. From these simple dynamics emerge widely different expressions of organi-zation. We have identified these essentials as three primary domains: identity, information, and relationships.

Identity-the sense-making capacity of the organization.
How does an organization spin itself into existence? All organizing efforts begin with an intent, a belief that something more is possible now that the group is together. Organizing occurs around an identi-ty-there is a "self" that gets orga-nized. Once this identity is set in motion, it becomes the sense-mak-ing process of the organization. In deciding what to do, a system will refer back to its sense of self. We all interpret events and data according to who we think we are. We never simply "know" the world; we cre-ate worlds based on the meaning we invest in the information we choose to notice. Thus, everything we know is determined by who we think we are.

As we create perceptions of the world, we primarily use information that is already in us to make sense of something new. Biologist Francisco Varela explains that more than 80 percent of the information we use to create visual perceptions of the world comes from information already inside the brain. Less than 20 percent of the information we use to create a perception is external to the brain. Information from the outside only perturbs a system; it never functions as objective instructions. Varela describes this in an important maxim: "You can never direct a living system. Youcan only disturb it." This explains why organizations reject reports and data that others assume to be obvious and compelling. A system will be disturbed by information based on what's going on inside the organization-how the organi-zation understands itself at that moment. This maxim also explains why organizations are never changed by assembling a new set of plans, by implementa-tion directives or by organizational restructurings. You can never direct a living system, you can only disturb it.

The self the organization refer-ences includes its vision, mission, and values. But there is more. An organization's identity includes current interpretations of its histo-ry, present decisions and activities, and its sense of its future. Identity is both what we want to believe is true and what our actions show to be true about ourselves.

Because identity is the sense-making capacity of the organization, every organizing effort-whether it be the start-up of a team, a community project, or a nation- needs to begin by exploring and clarifying the intention and desires of its members. Why are we doing this? What's possible now that we've agreed to try this together.? How does the purpose of this effort connect to my personal sense of purpose, and to the purposes of the large system?

Think for a moment of your own experiences with the start-up activities of new projects or teams. Did the group spend much time discussing the deeper and often murkier realms of purpose and commitment? Or did people just want to know what their role was so they could get out of the meeting and get on with it? Did leaders spend more time on policies and procedures to coerce people into contributing rather than try to engage their desire to contribute to a worthy purpose?

Most organizing efforts don't begin with a commitment to creating a coherent sense of identity. Yet it is this clarity that frees people to contribute in creative and diverse ways. Clear alignment around principles and purposes allows for maximum autonomy. People use their shared sense of identity to organize their unique contributions. (This critical partnering of high alignment and high autonomy also appears in Information Technology discus-sions as design criteria for creating effective distributed data processing or client server systems.)

Organizations lose an enormous organizing advantage when they fail to create a clear and coherent identity. In a chaotic world, organizational identity needs to be the most stable aspect of the endeavor. Structures and pro-grams come and go, but an organization with a coherent center is able to sustain itself through turbulence because of its clarity about who it is. Organizations that are coherent at their core move through the world with more confidence. Such clarity leads to expansionary behaviors; the organization expands to include those they had kept at bay-customers, suppliers, government regulators, and many others.

Information-the medium of the organization.
Information lies at the heart of life. Life uses information to organize itself into material form. What is information? We like Gregory Bateson's definition, "Information is a difference which makes a difference," and Stafford Beer's explanation that "Information is that which changes us." When a system assigns meaning to data-"in-forms" it--data then becomes information.

Complex, living systems thrive in a zone of exquisite-ly sensitive information-processing, on a constantly changing edge between stability and chaos that has been dubbed "the edge of chaos." In this dynamic region, new information can enter, but the organization retains its identity. Contradicting most efforts to keep organiza-tions at equilibrium, living systems seem to seek this far from-equilibrium condition to stay alive. If a system has too much order, it atrophies and dies. Yet if it lives in chaos, it has no memory. Examples of both these behav-iors abound in corporate America. The implosion of IBM and General Motors evidences how sophisticated information and measurement systems could create a sense of internal order while failing to allow for critical new information. And during the 1980s, many firms reached out chaotically without any sense of identity to markets and businesses they were incapable of managing.

Information that flows openly through an organization often looks chaotic. But it is the nutrient of self-organi-zation. As one utility chief executive aptly put it: "In our organization, information has gone from being the currency of exchange-we traded it for power and status-to being the medium of our organization. We can't live with-out it; everyone feeds off of it. It has to be everywhere in the organization to sustain us."

Only when information belongs to everyone can peo-ple organize rapidly and effectively around shifts in cus- tomers, competitors, or environments. People need access to information that no one could predict they would want to know. They themselves didn't know they needed it until that very moment.

To say that information belongs to everyone doesn't mean that all decisions move to the most local units. When information is available everywhere, different people see different things. Those with a more strategic focus will see opportuni-ties that others can't discern. Those on a production line similarly will pick up on information that others ignore. There is a need for many more eyes and ears, for many more members of the organization to "in-form" the available data so that effective self-organization can occur. But it is information-unplanned, uncontrolled, abun-dant, superfluous-that creates the conditions for the emergence of fast, well-integrated, effective responses.

Relationships-the pathways of organization.
Relationships are the pathways to the intelligence of the system. Through relationships, informa- tion is created and transformed, the organization's identi-ty expands to include more stakeholders, and the enter-prise becomes wiser. 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. In self-organizing systems, people need access to everyone; they need to be free to reach anywhere in the organization to accomplish work.

To respond with speed and effectiveness, people need access to the intelligence of the whole system. Who is available, what do they know, and how can they reach each other? People need opportunities to "bump up" against others in the system, making the unplanned connections that spawn new ventures or better integrat-ed responses.

Where members of an organization have access to one another, the system expands to include more and more of them as stakeholders. It is astonishing to see how many of the behaviors we fear in one another dissipate in the presence of good relationships. Customers engaged in finding a solution become less insistent on perfection or detailed up-front specifications. Colleagues linked by a work project become more tolerant of one another's diverse lives. A community invited into a local chemical plant learns how a failure at the plant could create devastating environmental disasters, yet becomes more trusting of plant leadership.

The Dynamics of Self-Organization
The domains of identity, information, and relationships operate in a dynamic cycle so intertwined that it becomes difficult to distinguish among the three ele-ments. New relationships connect more and more of the system, cre-ating information that affects the organization's identity. Similarly, as information circulates freely it creates new business and propels people into new relationships. As the organization responds to new information and new relation-ships, its identity becomes clearer at the same time that it changes.

Earlier we stated that self-orga-nization is not new in our experi-ence of organizations, it just takes different eyes to see it. Self-orga-nization has been going on all the time, but our attention has been diverted to perfecting the controls and mechanisms that we thought were making work happen. It is our belief that most people, what-ever their organization, are using information, relationships, and identity to get work done. They work with whatever information is available, but it is usually insufficient and of poor quality. If they need more, they create misinfor-mation and rumors. But always they are organizing around information. People also work with whatever relationships the system allows, often going around the system to make critical connections. Most people know which relationships would bolster their effectiveness, although this awareness may be voiced only as com-plaints. And as they do their work and make decisions, employees reference the organizational identity that they see and feel-the organization's norms, unspoken expectations, the values that are rewarded.

When errors or problems occur, the real work is to look into the domains of self-organization and determine what's going on at this subterranean level. In organiza-tions, problems show up in behaviors, processes, or structures. Once we diagnose the problem, our collective practice has been to substitute new behaviors, new structures, new processes for the problematic elements. But this seldom works. The problems that we see in organizations are artifacts of much deeper dynamics occurring in the domains of information, relationships, or identity. If we can inquire at this deeper level, if we can inquire into the dynamic heart of organizing, both the problem and the solution will be discovered.

We observed the power of inquiring into these depths in a DuPont chemical plant in Belle, West Virginia. Safety had been a major focus for many years, addressed in many different ways. They had moved from 83 recordable injuries to none. But after more, than a year with no recordable injuries, three minor personal accidents occurred within a few months. The leadership team knew from past experience that the solution to their safety problems did not lie in new regulations. Instead, they examined the organization in terms of these originating dynamics of identity, information, and relationships. What were they, as leaders, trying to accomplish? Did they still believe in their principles? How were their relationships with one another? Did everyone still have access to all information? These lead-ers could have responded in more traditional ways. They could have initiated disciplinary action, more regula-tions, safety training classes, or increased supervision. Instead, they questioned themselves more deeply and noted that because of several new members, they were no longer guided by the same shared clarity about safety. The re-creation of that clarity restored them to superior levels of safety performance.

If self-organization already exists in organizations-if people are naturally self-organizing-then the challenge for leaders is how to create the conditions that more effec-tively support this capacity. They do this by attending to what is available in the domains of information, relation-ships, and identity.

Leaders In Self-Organizing Organizations
What do leaders do in self-organizing organizations? As their organizations move towards a mode of operating that seems to exclude most traditional activities of planning and control, is there a role for leaders? Absolutely. Leaders are an essential requirement for the move toward self--organization. This is not laissez-faire management dis-guised as new biology. Given existing hierarchies, only leaders can commit their organizations to this path. But their focus shifts dramatically from what has occupied them in the past. In our work, we have observed many of the pleasures and perils of leaders on this path. We also are aware of some of the siren calls that seem to threaten the resolve of even the clearest of leaders.

The path of self-organization can never be known ahead of time. There are no prescribed stages or models. "The road is your footsteps, nothing else," as the South American poet Machados wrote. Therefore, leaders begin with a strong intention, not a set of action plans. (Plans do emerge, but locally, from responses to needs and contingencies.) Leaders also must have confidence in the organization's intelligence. The future is unknown, but they believe the system is talented enough to organize in whatever ways the future requires. This faith in the organization's ability and intelligence will be sorely tested. When there are failures, pressures from the outside, or employee resistance, it is easy to retreat to more traditional structures and solutions. As one manager describes it: "When things aren't going well, we've had to resist the temptation to fall back to the perceived safety of our old, rigid structures. But we know that the growth, the creativity, the opening up, the energy improves only if we hold ourselves at the edge of chaos."

The path of self-organization offers ample tests for leaders to discover how much they really trust their employees. Can employees make wise decisions? Can they deal with sensitive information? Can they talk to the community or government regulators? Employees earn trust, but leaders create the circumstances in which such trust can be earned.

Because dependency runs so deep in most organizations, employees often have to be encouraged to exer-cise initiative and explore new areas of competence. Not only do leaders have to let go and watch as employees figure out their own solutions, they also have to shore up their self-confidence and encourage them to do more. And leaders need to refrain from taking credit for their employees' good work-not always an easy task.

While self-organization calls us to very different ideas and forms of organizing, how else can we create the resilient, intelligent, fast, and flexible organizations that we require? How else can we succeed in organizing in the accelerating pace of our times except by realizing that organizations are living systems? This is not an easy shift, changing one's model of the way the world organizes. It is work that will occupy most of us for the rest of our careers. But the future pulls us toward these new understandings with an insistent and compelling call.
THE UNPLANNED ORGANIZATION:
LEARNING FROM NATURE'S EMERGENT CREATIVITY

From Noetic Sciences Review #37
Spring 1996

by Margaret Wheatley ©2007


In my work with large organizations, one of the questions we often ask is, "How would we work differently if we really understood that we are truly self-organizing?" The first thing we recognize is that, just like individuals, the organizations we create have a natural tendency to change, to develop. This is completely counter to the current mantra of organizational life: "People resist change. People fear change. People hate change." Instead, in a self-organizing world, we see change as a power, a presence, a capacity, that is available. It's part of the way the world works -- a spontaneous movement toward new forms of order, new patterns of creativity.


We live in a world that is self-organizing. Life is capable of creating patterns and structures and organization all the time, without conscious rational direction, planning, or control, all of the things that many of us have grown up loving. This realization is having a profound impact on our beliefs about the nature of processin interpersonal relations, in business organizations, as well as in nature itself. In this article, I will focus on some of the recent shifts in our understanding of the way things change.

Three images have changed my life -- one, a picture of a chemical reaction, another, a termite tower in Australia, and a third, an aspen grove in my new home state of Utah. Each image in its own way represents a profound shift in my understanding about the nature of change in organizations. I will explain their significance later, but first I want to discuss eight tenets of what I call "unplanned organization", inspired by these images.

We live in a world in which life wants to happen.
This is a simple, though profound, realization. You might not think it is such a remarkable notion, but we grew up in a culture influenced by Darwinian evolutionary theory which said life was an accident. Now, if life is an accident, that means there is nothing here to support us; so we do it all alone, and if we don't get it right, we get killed because the world is an inhospitable place. I believe this kind of thinking led to the heroic image of the great corporate leader who would craft organizations and make things happen -- nothing would happen without this great impetus of human ingenuity and human control.

We used to believe that for the first seven-eighths of the planet's existence there was no life, that it showed up about 600 million years ago. Now scientists agree that life seems to have emerged almost instantaneously with the creation of the planet. This is a very important realization. For me, this means that I belong to a whole planetary community of life, and that I am supported in my own small efforts by a deep natural history spanning between four and five billion years -- life wants to happen as a community and we are all part of it.

Organizations are living systems, or at least the people in them are living systems.
I sometimes feel embarrassed to point this out because it seems so obvious. We're moving away from a terribly deadening image of who we are and how we should organize. The image of the world as a machine that came into our consciousness in the seventeenth century was a wonderful metaphor that then went out of control. Ultimately, we came to believe not only that the world is a machine but that people can best be understood as machines.

One of the interesting things I learned recently is that since about 1850 we have described our brains in terms of our current technology. So, in the middle of the nineteenth century brains were thought of as hydraulic pumps. Then they were thought of as telegraph systems, then as telephone switchboards, and now we're up to neural nets. But these are all technological machine metaphors for understanding ourselves.

When we say that organizations or people are living systems, we're saying that, unlike machines, people have intelligence. Again, this is not a profound thought, except we've strayed so far from it. People are capable of change, whereas machines have no capacity to change apart from their programs or designs devised by some smart engineers. Machines have no intelligence. They're created for specific tolerances. It is stultifying to think about life this way, and yet this way of thinking is so deeply embedded in our culture that it's going to take a while to think otherwise.

We live in a universe that is alive, creative, and experimenting all the time to discover what's possible.
This is my favorite realization. We see this at all levels of scale, whether we're looking at the smallest microbes or looking out into the galaxies. We live in a world which is constantly exploring what's possible, finding new combinationsnot struggling to survive, but playing, tinkering, to find what's possible.

People are intelligent. We're creative, we're adaptive, we seek order, we seek meaning in our lives. When we really start to understand this, when we really start to change our perception of who people are, then it changes how we think about organizing.

It is the natural tendency of life to organize -- to seek greater levels of complexity and diversity.

One of my own beliefs, inspired by different readings, is that everywhere you look you see that life is system-seeking. We are rediscovering our interconnectedness; there are no isolated individuals in the natural world. Life seeks to affiliate with other life, and as it does that it makes more possibilities available, it makes more diversity possible. I believe (and this is just my own perspective right now) that the reason life seeks to organize is so that it can explore its diversity, so that it can explore its creative potential. It doesn't seek to organize to protect itself, to defend itself -- that seems to me a 300-year-old Western conceptual overlay.

I think life seeks systems because systems allow more diversity, they allow individuals to thrive, and they give each of us (when we're in a healthy functioning system) more freedom to experiment with what we want to beas long as we remain conscious of our connections to the whole of the system. To repeat: Life is self-organizing. It seeks to create patterns, structures, organization, without pre-planned directive leadership.

Life uses messes to get to well-ordered solutions.
Life is incredibly messy. We could even say it is unbelievably wasteful. But shift perspective and judgments, and what at first glance what may appear to be messy and inefficient may actually be life experimenting -- discovering what is possible. If you have ever tried to create an aquarium, you'll know how messy that can be. You keep trying to put in new life forms and hoping that the whole will suddenly take hold as a system. Then your fish die. But if you keep messing around, sooner or later the aquarium takes as a system, and sustains itself.

This is a recurring phenomenon in the re-creation of eco-systems. Scientists say it takes a lot of messes to finally discover what works. But underneath is the realization that all of those messes are tending toward the discovery of a form of organization that will work for multiple species. Life uses messes, but the direction is always toward organization; it's always toward order.

Life is intent on finding what works, not what's right.
I find this very liberating. This is where playfulness can enter into our own human relationships in a different way, because the task of the moment, of any moment, is to find something that works, but not be so ego-attached to it that we believe it is the only solution, the only right answer. How many relationships split up because of arguments about who is right? Yet when you look around, you see life tinkering, experimenting, playing, as if to say, "If it works, fine; and if it doesn't work, let's see if we can find a way that does work." For me it's a different sensibility, and it creates a much greater sense of playfulness in my own work.

Life creates more possibilities as it engages with opportunities.
A phrase I often hear used in business is that life -- or some project, or the market -- presents a "narrow window of opportunity". This is not true. Systems don't work that way. Every time we try to make something work, we are creating more possibilities within the system -- we open many different "windows of opportunity". If a particular opportunity is not fulfilled, there are always many others to engage with. Each path of opportunity leads to its own pattern of order. It may be unpredictable, but life is attracted to order. It is the nature of natural systems.

Life organizes around identity.
Out of all of this blooming, buzzing confusion of life, how do we decide to pay attention to certain things, or to make sense of certain things? We look for information that is meaningful to us in some way, given who we think we are.

Someone once asked me, "What's the 'self' that gets organized in 'self-organizing'?" These two words are equally important. Life organizes spontaneously and creatively, but it organizes around a self. It is making self. For me, this feels like further evidence that consciousness is at work in everything because you can't organize around a self without being conscious that you are a self. So when we see self-organization, I believe what we're watching is consciousness forming itself into different identifiable beings.

Thus, we live in a world which is truly co-creative, in which you and I cannot exist in isolation. Richard Lewontin, a geneticist whose work I admire greatly, once said that "environment" is a strange concept because we talk about it as if it exists independently of us. We even talk of "saving the environment". He said that the environment is an organized set of relationships between individuals. We're constantly affecting one another, constantly being changed by the process of being in relationship with one another by our choices. For those of us who have tried to save the world, I think this is a humbling thought. There's nothing out there to save. There is a lot to be engaged with.

Beyond the Machine Image

This brings me to the three images that have changed my life. The first is a chemical process called the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (B-Z) reaction. We've known about its existence in Western culture, particularly in Russia, since the 1940s. It was so revolutionary to scientific thinking that its existence was denied for a long time.

This wonderful little chemical reaction is saying that the universe is not all "downhill". This is contrary to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that the natural tendency of any system is to run down from a state of order to disorder, from energy to entropy. The Second Law says that with every change you give up useful energy, and you have no way of recouping it, so you fall into a state of entropy -- where all you can do is wait for death and disorder to overtake you. Someone recently defined the Second Law as "You can't win, and you can't get out of the game." That's a terrible burden on our Western way of thinking.

Yet what these surprising little chemicals showed is that there is a self-organizing capacity in matter. When confronted with turbulence and change, it's not all downhill. For example, in the B-Z reaction, red and white chemicals had blended in perfect equilibrium. The next discernible state for this system, given the traditions of Western science, was that it would disintegrate, or at best remain in disordered equilibrium. In fact, when scientists added chemicals, stirred it up, lit a flame under it, and poked a hot wire into it -- a lot of change if you're a chemical -- what happened was that the system separated out into its constituent chemical groups, red and white, and instead of falling apart and dissipating, the chemicals restructured themselves. Beyond dissipation, there was spontaneous reorganization -- self-organization.

This is quite startling because what these inert, (allegedly) unconscious chemicals created were intricate spirals. How do you explain this if these chemicals, which are supposedly dead, are not communicating, if they're not conscious in some way? Many scientists disagree with this attribution of consciousness, but they all agree that the B-Z reaction is a stunning image of the self-organizing capacity of our world.

What this says to me is that when confronted with change, you and I have a choice between two options, and we are not doomed to an inevitable course of action as the old belief system would have had us believe. The old myth was that we would disappear, that we would die, that we would dissipate -- and that would be the end of it. But the new recognition of a self-organizing world tells us that we can use any period of chaos and dissipation to reorganize ourselves to a structure better suited to the environment.

The whole quest to understand the world of self-organizing is really a quest to realize that there is a deeper, more elemental force at work behind the structures we see. What cause is behind the patterns of organization we see in the world -- where organization occurs without directive leaders or planning? What deeper elemental force gives rise to it all? The answer, it appears, is that behind the organizing patterns we recognize as life is self-organizationa spontaneous capacity to generate pattern and organization from within. And this, of course, is one way of defining consciousness.

According to Fritjof Capra, who is publishing a new book on self-organization, we've had four or five billion years of experience with this; this is how life discovered the possibility of creating more and more life. So there is this deep, elemental capacity for organizing in all of us. Knowing this, when we see resistance to change - and we certainly see a lot of that these days -- we can understand what's happening in a different way. It seems to me that resistance always reflects the need of each of us to understand who we are in the moment -- our identity. When we see a change being forced on us, we recognize it as threatening our sense of self. Resistance reflects our need to protect our sense of dignity and identity as presently defined. Resistance does not represent a fundamental tendency toward inertia, which is the old belief about human nature.

If you start to think about this for a while, and you're engaged in a change process or a change strategy, this alters the way you relate to change. If identity is a key issue, then it seems to me inescapable that we involve people from the start in whatever the change is going to be. Then they have the chance to reorganize their own sense of identity to fit the changed reality. You can't change people, but people change all the time. That's who we are.

Realizing that we live in a self-organizing world is to recognize that so much more is available for us as groups, as organizations, as communities. So much more is available to us in the form of a naturally occurring energy -- the self-organizing capacity we all have. We have to learn how to engage it, how to evoke it.

Termite Towers and Leaderless Groups

And so to life-changing image number two: a termite tower on the Australian savanna. The one I have a picture of is about 20 feet high, so if you think of the size of the termite, these are the tallest structures on Earth, relative to the size of their builders. A particularly interesting one is called a "magnetic tower" because the termites always build it on a north-south axis. The interior is a very complex structure. It has tunnels and arches. Their function is to move air into a darkened interior where it is cooler, because even though termites live in hot places they don't do well with heat. The nests are also designed to move moisture in so the termites can farm a form of fungi they require for digestion. These are very sophisticated structures.

Entomologists who study termites looked at these for years, and, recognizing a very complex structure, wondered, "Where's the leader? Where's the engineer? Where's the brains behind this operation?" The search for a leader was a long and futile quest. What is interesting is that the leaderless phenomenon wasn't even pointed out until some women started critiquing the history of science, and came up with the stunning realization that there didn't have to be a leader.

Termite colonies are examples of a wonderful self-organizing process, and can be highly instructive about human endeavor as well. For instance, individual termites are capable only of digging dirt piles. They don't do anything sophisticated. This is true of most social insects. If you think of the hive as a brain, and the social relations as a mind, individual termites are like single neurons. Isolated, they barely have any significance. But as a coordinated group they perform like a hive-mind. Like neurons, they emit chemicals for communication. Termites emit scents that attract other termites. They are constantly aware of what's going on in their environment; they're very tuned in. They wander at will, bump up against one another, and then they respond.

I think this is an excellent maxim for organizational life. You wander at will, you bump up against one another, and you respond. But you're developing so much more consciousness of what's going on in your environment, and you're tuned to so much more information than we have allowed people in those "org. chart" disasters.

So after a certain number of termites collect, their behavior shifts, emerging into something with an entirely new capacity, and they start building their towers. A group of termites over here will start an arch, another group over there will notice it, and they'll start the other side of the arch. Spontaneously, it meets in the middle, and there was no engineer present.

Termites build towers only because the "self" they're organizing around is very clear to them. But the way in which they create elaborate complex structure is in the moment. Entomologist Edward O. Wilson compared it to dynamic programming in computers: You do something, you notice its effect, you do the next thing. This is a view of life beyond conventional strategic plans, planners, goals, objectives, and Myers-Briggs tests. Let me explain that last remark: Myers-Briggs is a system for assessment of psychological types. It's a way of understanding who you are, how you take in information, how you thrive. Like all such tests, it is focused on individuals -- when we're just out there digging dirt piles, so to speak.

But as far as I can tell, right now, none of our personality assessors or indicators let us know who or what we are capable of being when we are in community with one another. I believe it is a travesty to think we can understand ourselves or another human being independent of being in a relationship with them. And one of the wonderful things the termites show is that we live in a world that has emergent properties, which means that when a group is together it is capable of behaviors that simply are not knowable when you study the individuals. It doesn't matter how well, how deeply, or how long you study the individuals, you would never see the potential for the tower in the individual termite. I think this is true of human behavior as well. So why do we spend so much time trying to understand our self (little s), since that self changes -- whole new capacities come forward in us -- when we are together in our communities?

The reason I think this is so problematic for us is that you cannot plan; you can only watch once you're in the process of being together. You can only notice what's happening, and then tinker with it. Instead of creating dream teams, you just get into the process of organizing and see what emerges. That feels unplanned, it looks messy, it smacks us in the face; it goes against all the ways we have been taught to be effective leaders, or effective individuals. In contemporary society, we've gone crazy with goal-setting and planning and thinking about our lives in a linear progression.

We would do well to learn from the termites. There is a lot of wisdom available in the study of emergent behavior. And it is available only because we live in a world which is self-organizing. We live in a world in which, when we come together, we can discover new possibilities. And we live in a world in which the discovery of new possibilities is, I believe, the reason for existing.

This says something about organizing activities that I want to stress. If you think of life as a network, then you don't have bottoms or tops. Emergent solutions can come from anywhere, but they are always very situational, always highly contextual, and therefore they're going to be quite variable, and always unplanned.

I also want to emphasize that emergent organizations are leader-full, not leaderless. Leaders emerge and recede as needed. Leadership is a series of behaviors rather than a role for heroes.

Aspen Trees and Hidden Connectedness

I recently learned from my son's fifth grade teacher that the largest known living organism on the planet lives in Utah, where we now live. My son got excited and thought it was Bigfoot, but it's not. It's a grove of aspen trees that cover thousands of acres. When we look at them, we think, "Oh, look at all the trees." When botanists looked underground they said, "Oh, look at this system, it's all one. This is one organism." You see, when aspen trees propagate, they don't send out seeds or cones, they send out runners, and a runner runs for the light (there's wonderful imagery in all of this), and we say, "Aha! There's another tree . . ." until we look underground, and we see that it is all one vast connection.

Before I was aware of the Utah aspens, I used to think that the Michigan mushroom, which covered 37 acres, was the largest organism. What was interesting about that was when mycologists looked at these mushrooms they couldn't figure out how they survived, because they didn't have all the "functionality" they needed to be healthy mushrooms. When they looked underground they found the answer -- it was just one large organism.

In a self-organizing world, one of the things that works on our behalf is not only that we have a natural tendency toward change, that we can constantly reorganize, or that we can structure ourselves without leaders (as long as we're well connected and informed and focused) but that, underneath it all, what we're doing is discovering our connections.

One of the great teachings in chaos theory is that a very slight twitch in a connective system will create convulsions elsewhere. I'm sure you've had a negative version of this experience in which you made an offhand comment to somebody, and later it blew up in your face. Whereas you may have presented your life's work, thinking it was the greatest gift to humankind, others just looked at it and said, "Well, that's very nice, dear."

Biologist Francisco Varela has said that you cannot direct a living system, you can only disturb it. In a system, the most we can do, when we are trying to serve, is to contribute a little twitch, be a little disturbance. One of the great things about living systems is that not only can they not be leveraged, they cannot be directed. You cannot tell another human being or a human organization what to do and expect it to do it. Yet this is not a lesson we have learned. It has been in our faces all our lives -- especially if you're a parent of a teenager (actually it starts much younger, with two-year-olds) that we can't direct living things.

If we really start to sense the self-organizing capacity that is around us, we could realize that our efforts to foster change or to midwife change -- not to manage change -- have much support.

In my own work, I'm trying to feel more playful about it, and to take away some of the drama -- "If we don't get it right now, we're all going to perish." I believe that's a true statement, but it doesn't help me play with life the way I want to, the way in which I see life playing with us. I would like us just to be more experimental. We are not looking for the solutions, we're just seeing what works for this system, with a deep respect for its interconnections. When it doesn't work, we move on and try something else, and when it works, we feel very blessed.


This article was adapted from a talk by Margaret Wheatley, "The Heart of Organization", at IONS' fourth annual conference, "Open Heart, Open Mind" in San Diego, California, July 1995.
Goodbye, Command and Control
Leader to Leader, July 1997
Margaret Wheatley©
0ld ways die hard. Amid all the evidence that our world is radically changing, we cling to what has worked in the past. We still think of organizations in mechanistic terms, as collections of replaceable parts capable of being reengineered. We act as if even people were machines, redesigning their jobs as we would prepare an engineering diagram, expecting them to perform to specifications with machine like obedience. Over the years, our ideas of leadership have supported this metaphoric myth. We sought prediction and control, and also charged leaders with providing everything that was absent from the machine: vision, inspiration, intelligence, and courage. They alone had to provide the energy and direction to move their rusting vehicles of organization into the future.

But in the late 1990s, we are surrounded by too many organizational failures to stay with this thinking. We know, for example, that in many recent surveys senior leaders report that more than two-thirds of their organizational change efforts fail. They and their employees report deep cynicism at the endless programs and fads; nearly everyone suffers from increased stress at the organizational lives we have created together. Survey after survey registers our loss of hope and increased uncertainty for every major institutional form in our society. Do we know how to organize anything anymore so that people want to engage in productive and contributing work?

But there is good news also. We have known for nearly half a century that selfmanaged teams are far more productive than any other form of organizing. There is a clear correlation between participation and productivity; in fact, productivity gains in truly self-managed work environments are at minimum 35 percent higher than in traditionally managed organizations. And in all forms of institutions, Americans are asking for more local autonomy, insisting that they, at their own level, can do it better than the huge structures of organizations now in place. There is both a desire to participate more and strong evidence that such participation leads to the effectiveness and productivity we crave.

With so much evidence supporting participation, why isn't everyone working in a self-managed environment right now? This is a very bothersome question because it points to the fact that over the years, leaders consistently have chosen control rather than productivity. Rather than rethinking our fundamental assumptions about organizational effectiveness, we have stayed preoccupied with charts and plans and designs. We have hoped they would yield the results we needed but when they have failed consistently, we still haven't stopped to question whether such charts and plans are the real mute to productive work. We just continue to adjust and tweak the various control measures, still hoping to find the one plan or design that will give us what we need.

Organizations of all kinds are cluttered with control mechanisms that paralyze employees and leaders alike. Where have all these policies, procedures, protocols, laws, and regulations come from? And why is it so difficult to avoid creating more, even as we suffer from the terrible confines of over-control? These mechanisms seem to derive from our fear, our fear of one another, of a harsh competitive world, and of the natural processes of growth and change that confront us daily. Years of such fear have resulted in these byzantine systems. We never effectively control people with these systems, but we certainly stop a lot of good work from getting done.

In the midst of so much fear, it's important to remember something we all know: People organize together to accomplish more, not less. Behind every organizing impulse is a realization that by joining with others we can accomplish something important that we could not accomplish alone. And this impulse to organize so as to accomplish more is not only true of humans, but is found in all living systems. Every living thing seeks to create a world in which it can thrive. It does this by creating systems of relationships where all members of the system benefit from their connections. This movement toward organization, called self--organization in the sciences, is everywhere, from microbes to galaxies. Patterns of relationships form into effective systems of organization. Organization is a naturally occurring phenomenon. The world seeks organization, seeks its own effectiveness. And so do the people in our organizations.

As a living system self-organizes, it develops shared understanding of what's important, what's acceptable behavior, what actions are required, and how these actions will get done. It develops channels of communication, networks of workers, and complex physical structures. And as the system develops, new capacities emerge from living and working together. Looking at this list of what a self-organizing system creates leads to the realization that the system can do for itself most of what leaders have felt was necessary to do to the systems they control.

Whenever we look at organizations as machines and deny the great self-organizing capacity in our midst, we, as leaders, attempt to change these systems from the outside in. We hope to change our organization by tinkering with the incentives, reshuffling the pieces, changing a part, or retraining a colleague or group. But these efforts are doomed to fail, and nothing will make them work. What is required is a shift in how we think about organizing. Where does organization come from? Organization occurs from the inside out, as people see what needs to happen, apply their experience and perceptions to the issue, find those who can help them, and use their own creativity to invent solutions. This process is going on right now, all over our organizations, in spite of our efforts at control. People are exercising initiative from a deeper desire to contribute, displaying the creativity that is common to all living things. Can we recognize the self-organizing behaviors of those in our organizations? Can we learn to support them and forgo our fear-based approaches to leadership?


Belief in the System

To lead in a self-organizing system, we have to ask ourselves, "How much trust do I really have in the people who work here? Have they demonstrated any of these self-organiz-ing behaviors already?" This question of trust leads to a moment of deep reflection for any leader. Those leaders who have embraced a more participative, self-organizing approach tell of their astonishment. They are overwhelmed by the capacity, energy, creativity, commitment, and even love that they receive from the people in their organization. In the past they had simply assumed that most people were there for the money, that they didn't care about the welfare of the whole enterprise, that they were self-serving and narrowly focused. No leader would voice these assumptions, but most leader behaviors reveal these beliefs. Does the leader believe that his or her vision is required to energize the whole company? Does the leadership team keep searching for new incentives to motivate employees as if they have no intrinsic motivation? Does the organization keep imposing new designs and plans on people and avoid real participation like the plague?

Every so often, we open ourselves to a moment of truth and realize the conflict between our behaviors and our deeper knowledge. As one manager of a For-tune 100 company said to me: "I know in my heart that when people are driving in to work that they're not thinking, 'How can I mess things up today? How can I give my boss a hard time?' No one is driving here with that intent, but we then act as if we believed that. We're afraid to give them any slack."

Most of us know that as people drive to work they're wondering how they can get something done for the organization despite the organization-despite the political craziness, the bureaucratic nightmares, the mind-less procedures piled up in their way. Those leaders who have opened to participation and self-organization have witnessed the inherent desire that most people have to contribute to their organizations. The commitment and energy resident in their organizations takes leaders by surprise. But in honoring and trusting the people who work with them, they have unleashed startlingly high levels of productivity and creativity.


Strategies for Change

If we think of organizations as living systems capable of self-organizing, then how do we think about change in these systems? The strategy for change becomes simpler and more localized. We need to encourage the creativity that lives throughout the organization, but keep local solutions localized. Most change efforts fail when leaders take an innovation that has worked well in one area of the organization and attempt to roll it out to the entire organization. This desire to replicate success actually destroys local initiative. It denies the creativity of everyone except a small group. All living systems change all the time, in new and surprising ways, discovering greater effectiveness, better solutions. They are not acting from some master plan. They are tinkering in their local environments, based on their intimate experience with conditions there and their tinkering shows up as effective innovation. But only for them. Information about what has worked elsewhere can be very helpful. However, these solutions cannot be imposed; they have to remain local.

This highly localized change activity does not mean that the organization spins off wildly in all directions. If people are clear about the purpose and true values of their organization-if they understand what their organization stands for and who it shows itself to be through its actions-their individual tinkering will result in systemwide coherence. In organizations that know who they are and mean what they announce, people are free to create and contribute. A plurality of effective solutions emerges, each expressing a deeper coherence, an understanding of what this organization is trying to become.

Mort Meyerson, chairman of Perot Systems, said that the primary task of being a leader is to make sure that the organization knows itself. That is we must realize that our task is to call people together often, so that everyone gains clarity about who we are, who we've just become, who we still want to be. This includes the interpretations available from our customers, our markets, our history, our mistakes. If the organization can stay in a continuous conversation about who it is and who it is becoming, then leaders don't have to undertake the impossible task of trying to hold it all together. Organizations that are clear at their core hold themselves together because of their deep congruence. People are then free to explore new avenues of activity, new ventures and customers in ways that make sense for the organization. It is a strange and promising paradox of living systems: Clarity about who we are as a group creates freedom for individual contributions. People exercise that freedom in the service of the organization, and their capacity to respond and change becomes a capability of the whole organization.

If we as leaders can ensure that our organization knows itself, that it's clear at its core, we must also tolerate unprecedented levels of "messiness" at the edges. This constant tinkering, this localized hunt for solutions does not look neat. There is no conformity possible unless we want to kill local initiative. Freedom and creativity create diverse responses. We have to be prepared to support such diversity, to welcome the surprises people will invent, and to stop wasting time trying to impose solutions developed elsewhere.

People always want to talk about what they do, what they see, how they can improve things, what they know about their customers. Supporting these conversations is an essential task of leaders. It's not about you, "the leader," developing the mission statement or employing experts to do a detailed analysis of your market strategy. These exercises, because they exclude more people than they include, never work as planned. Only when everyone in our organization understands who we are, and has contributed to this deep understanding, do we gain the levels of commitment and capacity we so desperately need. As a leader supports the processes that help the organization know itself, the organization flourishes.

It's also notable that when we engage in meaningful conversations as an organization, and when we engage our customers, suppliers, community, and regulators in these conversations, that everything changes. People develop new levels of trust for one another that show up as more cooperation and more forgiveness. People stop being so arbitrarily demanding when they are part of the process, when they no longer are looking in from the outside trying to get someone's attention.


Moving to Action

Leaders put a premium on action. Organizations that have learned how to think together and that know themselves are filled with action. People are constantly taking initiative and making changes, often without asking or telling. Their individual freedom and creativ-ity becomes a critical resource to the organization. Their local responsiveness translates into a much faster and more adaptable organization overall.

But leaders need to know how to support these self-organizing responses. People do not need the intricate directions, time lines, plans, and organization charts that we thought we had to give them. These are not how people accomplish good work, they are what impede contributions. But people need a lot from their leaders. They need information, access to one another, resources, trust, and follow-through. Leaders are necessary to foster experimentation, to help create connections across the organization, to feed the system with rich information from multiple sources--all while helping everyone stay clear on what we agreed we wanted to accomplish and who we wanted to be.

Most of us were raised in a culture that told us that the way to manage for excellence was to tell people exactly what they had to do and then make sure they did it. We learned to play master designer, assuming we could engineer people into perfect performance. But you can't direct people into perfection; you can only engage them enough so that they want to do perfect work. For example, in a few chemical plants that operate with near-perfect safety records for years at a time, they achieve these results because their workers are committed to safety. It becomes a personal mission. The regulations, the EPA, OSHA, are all necessary parts of their system, but they never can spell out the route to perfect safety. That comes from hundreds and thousands of workers who understand their role in safety, who understand the whys of safety, who understand that it's up to them.

For all the unscripted events an irate customer, a leak, a winter storm--we depend on individual initiative. Ultimately, we have to rely not on the procedure manuals, but on peoples' brains and their commitment to doing the right thing. If they are acting by rote or regimen, they actually have lost the capacity for excellence. Imposed control breeds passivity. But people do have to know what "right" means. They have to know what safety really means. If they know what's right, then we have engaged their intelligence and heart on behalf of the organization.


No More Quick Fixes

Self-organization is a long-term exploration requiring enormous self-awareness and support. This is true partially because it represents such a fundamentally different way of thinking about organization, and partially because all changes in organization take much longer than we want to acknowledge. If we've learned anything in the past 20 years, it's that there are no quick fixes. For most organizations, meaningful change is at least a three- to five-year process-although this seems impossibly long for many managers. Yet multiyear strategic change efforts are the hard reality we must face. These things take time. How long, for instance, has your organization been struggling with total quality? At Motorola, it's been more than a decade. How many years have you been working with the concept of teams? Jack Welch, for one, understood that it would take at least 10 years to develop the capacities of GE's people. In the crazed world of the late '80s, that was a radical insight and a shocking commitment.)

Most CEOs aren't trying to simply squeeze their organizations for short-term profitability or shortsighted outcomes that don't endure. Most leaders would never say, "I just want this organization to perform well for a few quarters." More and more, leaders talk about their legacy. They talk about a deep desire for their work to which to be a leader. Leaders are not immune to the terrible destruction we've visited on many organizations. have meant something. This has been a difficult time in A senior executive of a major industrial firm, speaking for many, said in a meeting: "I've just destroyed what I spent 20 years creating." Who among us wants to end a career with that realization?

But if we are to develop organizations of greater and enduring capacity, we have to turn to the people of our organization. We have to learn how to encourage the creativity and commitment that they wanted to express when they first joined the organization. We have to learn how to get past the distress and cynicism that's been created in the past several years, and use our best talents to figure out how to reengage people in the important work of organizing.


The Leader's Journey

Whenever we're trying to change a deeply struc-tured belief system, everything in life is called into question---our relationships with loved ones, children, colleagues, our relationships with au-thority and major institutions. One group of senior leaders, reflecting on the changes they've gone through, commented that the higher you are in the organization, the more change is required of you personally. Those who have led their organizations into new ways of organizing often say that the most important change was what occurred in themselves. Nothing would have changed in their organizations if they hadn't changed.

All this seems true to me, but I think the story is more complex. Leaders managing difficult personal transi tions are usually simultaneously opening new avenues for people in the organization. They are moving toward true team structures, opening to more and more participative processes, introducing new ways of thinking. They are setting a great many things in motion inside the organization. These ripple through the system; some work, some don't, but the climate for experimentation is evident. A change here elicits a response there, which calls for a new idea, which elicits yet another response. It's an intricate exchange and coevolution, and it's nearly impossible to look back and name any one change as the cause of all the others. Organizational change is a dance, not a forced march.

Leaders experience their own personal change most intensely, and so I think they report on this as the key process. But what I observe is far more complex. In the end, you can't define a list of activities that were responsible for the organization shifting, and you certainly can't replicate anyone else's exact process for success. But you can encourage the experimentation and tinkering, the constant feedback and learning, and the wonderful sense of camaraderie that emerges as every-one gets engaged in making the organization work better than ever before, even in the most difficult of circumstances.


Sustainability, Not Employability

I believe there is one principle that should be embraced by all organizations as they move into the future, and that is sustainability. How can we endure over time? What about us is worth sustaining longterm? This focus flies in the face of current fashion. Our infatuation with fleeting "virtual" organizations misses an important truth: We cannot create an organization that means something to its people if that organization has no life beyond the next project or contract. We cannot promise people, for instance, only three years of employment with vague assurances of their future "employability"-- and expect the kind of energy and commitment that I've described.

Employability in lieu of mutual commitment is a cop-out. We seem to focus on it as a response to the grave uncertainty we feel about the future. Since we can't predict markets, products, customers, governments, or anything, we decide not to promise anything to anyone. Too many leaders are saying, in effect, "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."

Commitment and loyalty are essential in human relationships. So how can we pretend we don't need them at work? The real issue is that we don't know yet how to engage people's loyalty and yet maintain the flexibility we require. But leaders should be searching for creative answers to this dilemma, not ignoring it by settling on the nonsolution of so-called employability. Employability is a far more destructive practice than we have imagined. The organizations that people love to be in are ones that have a sense of his-tory and identity and purpose. These are things that people want to work for. The belief that a company has stood for something in the past is a reason to want to move it into the future.


The Real Criteria for Measuring Change

You know when you walk in the door of an organization whether people want to be there or not. The sense of belonging (or not) is palpable. Yet few change efforts take that into account and far too many end up killing the organization's capacity for more change. To measure whether a change effort has been successful, we need to ask, "Are people in the organization more committed to being here now than at the beginning of this effort?" In terms of sustainability, we need to ask if, at the end of this change effort, people feel more prepared for the next wave of change. Did we develop capacity or just stagean event? Do people feel that their creativity and ex-pertise contributed to the changes?

If we're focused on these questions as indicators, we can create organizations that know how to respond continuously to shifts in markets and environments, organizations that have learned how to access the intelligence that lives everywhere in the system. We will have supported people's innate capacity to deal with changing conditions because we will have learned how to engage them. We will have honored their innate capacity for self organization. And they will respond with the initiative and creativity that is found only in life, never in machines.
The New Story is Ours to Tell
World Business Academy/Perspectives on Business and Global Change, June 1997
Willis Harman changed my work with one lengthy letter written to me over two years ago. Willis was the best responder I've ever met. He responded to manuscripts, telephone calls, and in this experience of mine, to listening to me give a seminar. He was so gracefully responsive that I began to think his mind was connected to a printer; he only had to press "print" to send forth his comments, critiques, endorsements. How else could I explain Willis' prolific responses? If he didn't have such a print function, what did his availability say about my own slow, clumsy process for responding to requests?
In his letter, Willis urged me on in my message, but warned me to stop deriving it solely from science. As he did with so many, he wanted me to understand the deeper premises of modern science, which, for all the "new science" hoopla, were anything but new. He encouraged me to explore the deeper values and premises of my work which were far more important than any science.
I contemplated his letter for months. I realized that I was using the science to get the attention of those who could hear this message in no other form. (When I told Willis this, he laughed and applauded my clarity. If you're being Machiavellian, it's good to realize it.) Now it is two years later, and what was "my message" has grown in depth and strength into a "new story." It is sourced from many traditions, not just Western science, and I offer it to any individual or group that is willing to listen. I am less focused on persuasion and more engaged in the telling of a story that gives hope and possibility to us all. Willis is present in both the story line and in me every time I tell it.
I believe that all of us attracted to the World Business Academy and to the Institute of Noetic Science hold this new story. But I meet too many of us who falter in expressing this voice because we've been told that these ideas about leaders, organizations, and people are crazy. It is time to change this definition of craziness. We, in fact, represent the new sanityÐ the ideas and values and practices that can create a future worth wanting.
Those who carry a new story and who risk speaking it abroad have played a crucial role in times of historic shifts. Before a new era can come into form, there must be a new story. The playwright Arthur Miller noted that we know an era has ended when its basic illusions have been exhausted. I would add that these basic illusions not only are exhausted, but also have become exhausting. As they fail to produce the results we want, we just repeat them with greater desperation, plummeting ourselves into cynicism and despair as we lock into these cycles of failure.
I was introduced to the critical nature of the teller-of-new-stories role in reading the work of physicist and author Brian Swimme. Brian, partnering with Thomas Berry, has spent the past several years developing a new story of the universe, based on their belief that creating a new cosmic story is the most important work of our times because it will usher in a new era of human and planetary health. (see The Universe Story, with Thomas Berry, HarperSanFrancisco, 1992)
Lest you believe that cosmic stories can only be told by physicists or theologians, their idea of a cosmic story is one that answers such questions as: What's going on? Where did everything come from? Why are you doing what you do?
I believe that you and I have an important theme to contribute to this new cosmic story. Each of us holds a story that is quite different from the dominant one of our times. I would like to contrast in some detail the new and the old stories. My hope is that in seeing the great polarities between these two, you will feel even more strongly called to give voice to the new.
For at least three hundred years, Western culture has been developing the old story. I would characterize it as a story of dominion and control, and all-encompassing materialism. This story began with a dream that it was within humankind's province to understand the workings of the universe, and to gain complete mastery over physical matter. This dream embraced the image of the universe as a grand, clockwork machine. As with any machine, we would understand it by minute dissection, we would engineer it to do what we saw fit, and we would fix it through our engineering brilliance. This hypnotic image of powers beyond previous human imagination gradually was applied to everything we looked at: our bodies were seen as the ultimate machines; our organizations had all the parts and specifications to assure well-oiled performance; and in science, where it had all begun, many scientists confused metaphor with reality and believed life was a machine.
This dream still has immense hypnotic power over us. For every problem, we quickly leap to technical solutions, even if technology is the cause of the initial problem. Science will still save us, no matter the earthly mess we've created. In our bodies, we long to believe the promises of genetic engineering. Our greatest ills, perhaps even death, will vanish once we identify the troubling gene. We need only invest more in technology to yield unsurpassed benefits in health and longevity, and all because we are such smart engineers of the human body.
In most of our endeavors--in science, health, organizational management, self-help--the focus is on creating better functioning machines We replace the faulty part, reengineer the organization, install a new behavior or attitude, create a better fit, recharge our batteries. The language and thinking is all machines. And we give this image such hegemony over our lives because it seems our only hope for combating life's cyclical nature, our one hope of escape from life's incessant demands for creation and destruction.
When we created this story of complete dominion over matter, we also brought in control's unwelcome partner, fear. Once we are intent on controlling something, we can only interpret it's resistance to our control as fearsome. Since nothing is as controllable as we hope, we soon become entangled in a cycle of exerting control, failing to control, exerting harsher control, failing again. The fear that arises from this cycle is notable in many of us. It is especially notable in our leaders. Things aren't working as they had hoped, but none of us knows of any other way to proceed. The world becomes scarier and scarier as we realize the depths of our ignorance and confront our true powerlessness. It is from this place, from an acknowledgment of our ignorance and lack of power, that the call goes out for a new story.
But the old story has some further dimensions worth noticing. This story has had a particularly pernicious effect on how we think about one another, and how we approach the task of organizing any human endeavor.
When we conceived of ourselves as machines, we gave up most of what is essential to being human. We created ourselves devoid of spirit, will, passion, compassion, even intelligence. Machines have none of these characteristics innately, and none of them can be built into its specifications. The imagery is so foreign to what we know and feel to be true about ourselves that it seems strange that we ever adopted this as an accurate description of being human. But we did, and we do. A colleague of mine, as he was about to work with a group of oil company engineers, was warned that they had "heads of cement." He cheerfully remarked that it didn't matter, because they all had hearts, didn't they? "Well," they replied, "we call it a pump."
The engineering image we carry of ourselves has led to organizational lives where we believe we can ignore the deep realities of human existence. We can ignore that people carry spiritual questions and quests into their work; we can ignore that people need love and acknowledgment; we can pretend that emotions are not part of our worklives; we can pretend we don't have families, or health crises, or deep worries. In essence, we take the complexity of human life and organize it away. It is not part of the story we want to believe. We want a story of simple dimensions: people can be viewed as machines and controlled to perform with the same efficiency and predictability.
It is important to recognize that in our experience, people never behave like machines. When given directions, we insist on putting our unique spin on them. When told to follow orders, we resist in obvious or subtle ways. When told to accept someone else's solution, or to institute a program created elsewhere, we deny that it has sufficient value.
As leaders, when we meet with such non-mechanical responses, we've had two different options. We could criticize our own leadership, or we could blame our followers. If we the leader were the problem, perhaps we it was due to poor communication skills; perhaps we weren't visionary enough; maybe we'd chosen the wrong sales technique. If "our people" were the problem, it was because they lacked motivation, or a clear sense of responsibility, or it could be that this time we'd just been cursed with an obstinate and rebellious group. With so much blame looking for targets, we haven't taken time to stop and question our basic beliefs about each other. Are expectations of machine-like obedience and regularity even appropriate when working together?
Trying to be an effective leader in this machine story is especially exhausting. He or she (but in this story it's primarily he) is leading a group of lifeless, empty automatons who are just waiting to be filled with vision and direction and intelligence. The leader is responsible for providing everything: the organizational mission and values, the organizational structure, the plans, the supervision. The leader must also figure out, through clever use of incentives or coercives, how to pump energy into this lifeless mass. Once the pump is primed, he must then rush hither and yon to make sure that everyone is clanking along in the same direction, at the established speed, with no diversions. It is the role of the leader to provide the organizing energy for a system that is believed to have no internal capacities for self-creation, self-organization, or self-correction.
As I reflect on the awful demands placed on leaders by the old story, I wonder how anyone could survive in that job. Yet the mechanistic story has created roles for all of us that are equally deadly. It has led us to believe that we, with our unpredictable behaviors, our passions, our independence, our creativity, our consciousnessÐ that we are the problem rather than the blessing. While the rest of nature follows obediently in the great mechanistic parade of progress, we humans show up as rebellious and untrustworthy. Our problematic natures are the very reason we need to create organizations as we do. How else could we structure such recalcitrance into vehicles of efficient production?
In this story, such key human traits as uniqueness, free will, and creativity pose enormous problems. Machines are built to do repetitive functions that require no thought and minimal adjustment. Conformity and compliance are part of the expectations of this story. Creativity is unwanted, because it is always surprising and therefore uncontrollable. If we tolerate creative expressions, we find ourselves with unmanageable levels of diversity. A machine world is willing to sacrifice exploration for prediction. Guaranteed levels of performance are preferable to surprising breakthroughs. In our machine-organizations, we try to extinguish individuality in order to reach our goal of certainty. We trade uniqueness for control, and barter our humanness for petty performance measures.
It is one of the great ironies of our age that we created organizations to constrain our problematic human natures, and now the only thing that can save these organizations is a full appreciation of the expansive capacities of us humans.
So it is time for the new story. Our old one, with its alienating myths, is eating away at us from the inside, rotting from its core. Fewer of us can tell it with any conviction. Many more of us are beginning to understand that our experience and our beliefs tell a story that celebrates life rather than denying it. We can see these in the pronounced increase in conversations and writings about destiny, purpose, soul, spirit, love, legacy, courage, integrity, meaning. The new story is being born in these conversations. We are learning to give voice to a different and fuller sense of who we really are.
I would like to characterize the new story as a tale of life. Setting aside our machine glasses, we observe a world that exhibits life's ebullient creativity and life's great need for other life. We observe a world where creative self-expression and embracing systems of relationships are the organizing energies, where there is no such thing as an independent individual, and no need for a leader to take on as much responsibility for us as we've demanded in the past.
As I develop some of the major themes of this new story of life, I will be drawing first on the work of modern science. However, science is only adding its voice to a story that in fact is very ancient. We find this story in primal wisdom traditions, in toady's indigenous tribes, in most spiritual thought, and in poets old and new. It is a story that has never been forgotten by any of us, and that has been held for us continually by many peoples and cultures. Yet for those of us emerging from our exhaustion with the old mechanistic tale, it feels new. And it certainly opens us to new discoveries about who we are as people, as organizations, and as leaders.
For me, one of the most wonderful contrasts of the old and new stories came from thinking about a passage I read in Kevin Kelly's book, Out of Control (Addison-Wesley, 1994). As he reached for language to describe life, he moved into sheer exuberance. (I always pay attention when a scientist uses poetry or exuberant languageÑI know that something has touched him or her at a level of awareness that I don't want to ignore.) Kelly was trying to describe the ceaseless creativity that characterizes life. He said that life gives to itself this great freedom, the freedom to become. Then he asked, "Becoming what?" and went on to answer:
"Becoming becoming. Life is on its way to further complications, further deepness and mystery, further processes of becoming and change. Life is circles of becoming, an autocatalytic set, inflaming itself with its own sparks, breeding upon itself more life and more wildness and more 'becomingness.' Life has no conditions, no moments that are not instantly becoming something more than life itself."
Kelly's passionate descriptions of processes that inflame, breed more life and wildness, create more deepness and mystery, stand in stark contrast to the expectations we have held for one another. I like to contemplate Kelly's description of life with the lives we describe when we design an organizational chart. The contrast between the two is both funny and sobering. Could we even begin to tolerate such levels of passion and creativity in our organizations? But can we survive without them?
In the 1960's, the great American poet A.R. Ammons told the same story in different and precise language (Tape for the Turn of the Year, W. W. Norton and Company, Inc. 1965) :
Don't establish the
boundaries
first
the squares, triangles,
boxes
of preconceived
possibility,
and then
pour
life into them, trimming
off left-over edges,
ending potential:
let centers
proliferate
from
self-justifying motions!
In both recent science and poetry we are remembering a story about life that has creativity and connectedness as its essential themes. As we use this new story to look into our organizational lives, it offers us images of organizations and leaders that are both startling and enticing. It offers us ways of being together where our diversity--our uniqueness--is essential and revered. It offers us an arena big enough to embrace the full expression of our infinitely creative human natures. And for the first time in a long time, it offers us the recognition that we humans are, in the words of physicist Ilya Prigogine, "the most striking realization of the laws of nature." We can use ourselves and what we know about ourselves to understand the universe. By observing with new eyes the processes of creation in us, we can understand the forces that create galaxies, move continents, and give birth to stars. No longer intent on describing ourselves as the machines we thought the universe to be, we are encouraged now to describe the universe through the life we know we are.
As we look at life through the lens of human nature and human desire, we are presented with some wonderful realizations. Our own desire for autonomy and creativity is reflected in all life. Life appears as boundlessly creative, searching for new possibilities and new capacities wherever it can. Observing the diversity of life forms has become a humbling experience for many biologists. At this point, no one knows how many different species there are, or where the next forms of life will appear, except that now we even expect them to appear elsewhere in our solar system.
Life is born from this unquenchable need to be. One of the most interesting definitions of life in modern biology is that something is considered alive if it has the capacity to create itself. The term for this is autopoiesisÑself-creation--from the same root as poetry. At the very heart of our ideas about life is this definition, that life begins from the desire to create something original, to bring a new being into form.
As I have read about and observed more consciously the incredible diversity of life, I have felt witness to a level of creativity that has little to do with the survival struggles that we thought explained everything. Newness appears not for simple utilitarian purposes, but just because it is possible to be inventive. Life gives to itself the freedom to become, as Kevin Kelly noted, because life is about discovering new possibilities, new forms of expression. Two Chilean biologists, Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, observe that life responds not to "survival of the fittest," but to the greater space of experimentation of "survival of the fit." Many designs, many adaptations are possible, and organisms enjoy far more freedom to experiment than we humans, with our insane demand to "Get it right the first time."
The freedom to experiment, to tinker oneself into a form of being that can live and reproduce, leads to diversity that has no bounds. In my own telling of a new cosmic story, I believe that the great forces of creation are focused on exploring newness, that newness is a primary value embraced by all life, a primary force that encourages life into new discoveries. The need and ability to create one's self is a force we see quite clearly in human experience, but which we have greatly misunderstood in our organizations.
The second great force I would like to add to this new story is that life needs to link with other life, to form systems of relationships where all individuals are better supported by the system they have created. It is impossible to look into the natural world and find a separated individual. As an African proverb states: "Alone, I have seen many marvelous things, none of which were true." Biologist Lynn Margulis expresses a similar realization when she comments that independence is a political concept, it is 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. Organisms shape themselves in response to their neighbors and their environments. All respond to one another, co-evolving and co-creating the complex systems of organization that we see in nature. Life is systems-seeking. It seeks organization. Organization is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Self-organization is a powerful force that creates the systems we observe, and testifies to a world that knows how to organize from the inside out.
Self-organizing systems have the capacity to create for themselves the aspects of organization that we thought we, as leaders, had to provide. Self-organizing systems create structures and pathways, networks of communication, values and meaning, behaviors and norms. In essence, they do for themselves most of what we believed we had to do for them. Rather than thinking of organization as an imposed structure, plan, design, or role, it is clear that in life, organization arises from the interactions and needs of individuals who have decided to come together. We see the results of these relationships in the forms that arise; but it is important, especially because we are so easily seduced by material forms, to look past these manifestations to the desires for relationship that gave birth to the forms.
It is easy to observe the clash of the old and new stories in many places, but one arena where it is painfully visible is in organizations that were created to fulfill some special purpose, some important call. People came together in response to the call; they joined because they knew that more was possible by organizing together than by staying alone. Their dream of contribution required an organization to move it forward. These human desires Ð to find meaning in one's life, to bring more good into the world, to seek out others Ð are part of the new story.
But the clash with old beliefs and images occurs as soon as we embark on the task of creating an organization. We move back to machine ideas about structures, roles, designs, leaders. We create organizations from the outside, imposing these limiting designs on the rich desires of those who have come together. Over time, the organization that was created in response to some deep call becomes a rigid structure that impedes fulfilling that call. People come to resent the organization they created, because now it is a major impediment to their creativity, to their faith, to their purposeful dreams.
The new story holds out different images of organizationÐ it teaches us that we, when we join together, are capable of giving birth to the form of the organization, to the plans, to the values, to the vision. All of life is self-organizing and so are we. But the new story also details a process for organizing that stands in shocking contrast to the images of well-planned, well-orchestrated, well-supervised organizing. I can summarize the organizing processes of life quite simply: Life seeks organization, but it uses messes to get there. Organization is a process, not a structure. Simultaneously, and in ways difficult to chart, the process of organizing involves creating relationships around a shared sense of purpose, exchanging and creating information, learning constantly, paying attention to the results of our efforts, co-adapting, co-evolving, developing wisdom as we learn, staying clear about our purpose, being alert to changes from all directions. Living systems give form to their organization, and evolve those forms into new ones, because of exquisite capacities to create meaning together, to communicate, and to notice what's going on in the moment. These are the capacities that give any organization its true liveliness, that support self-organization.
In the new story, we enter a world where life gives birth to itself in response to powerful forces, the imperative to create one's self as an exploration of newness, and the need to reach out for relationships with others to create systems. I could similarly describe these as the forces of creativity and freedom, and the need to join with others for purposes that enrich both the individual and the system. These forces do not disappear from life, whatever approach we take to leadership, organizing, or relating. Even if we deny them, we never extinguish them. They are always active, even in the most repressive human organizations. Life can never stop asserting its need to create itself, and life never stops searching for connections.
We fail to acknowledge these unstoppable forces of life whenever we, as leaders, try to direct and control those in our organization. Life always pushes back against our demands. But instead of learning about life, we tend to see their "difficult" behaviors as justification for a more controlling style of leadership. I believe that many of the failures and discontents in today's organizations can be understood as the result of this denial of life's forces, and the pushing back of life against a story that excludes them.
As an example of these competing forces, think about how many times you have engaged in conversations about "resistance to change." I have participated in far too many of these, and in the old days, when I still thought that it was me who was "managing" change, my colleagues and I always were thoughtful enough to plan a campaign to overcome this resistance. Contrast this view of human resistance to change with Kelly's images of life as "further processes of becoming and change . . . circles of becoming, inflaming itself with its own sparks, breeding upon itself more life and more wildness." Who's telling the right story? Do we, as a species, dig in our heels while the rest of life is engaged in this awesome dance of creation? Are we the only problem, whereas the rest of life participates in something wild and wonderful?
The old story asserts that resistance to change is a fact of life. Locked into a world image that sought stability and control, change has always been undesired and difficult. But the new story explains resistance not as a fact of life, but as evidence of an act against life. Life is in motion, constantly creating, exploring, discovering. Newness is its desire. Nothing alive, including us, resists these great creative motions. But all of life resists control. All of life pushes back against any process that inhibits its freedom to create itself.
In organizations of the old story, plans and designs are constantly being imposed. People are told what to do all the time. As a final insult, we go outside the organization to look for answers, returning with benchmarks that we offer up as great gifts. Yet those in the organization can only see these packaged solutions as insults. Their creativity has been dismissed, their opportunity to discover something new for the organization has been denied. When we deny life's need to create, life pushes back. We label it resistance and invent strategies to overcome it. But we would do far better if we changed the story and learned how to invoke the resident creativity of those in our organization. We need to work with these insistent creative forces or they will be provoked to work against us.
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." There is no better indicator of the daily but unrecognized contributions made by people than when a municipal union decides to "work to rule." These unions are prohibited from going on strike. But they have developed an effective form of protest against problematic working conditions. They work only according to the rule book. They only follow policies and job descriptions. Even though the rule books and policy manuals were designed to create productive employees, as soon as they take them literally, cities cease running, effective civil functioning stops. What they demonstrate so forcefully is that no organization can function on the planned contributions of its members. Every organization relies intensely on its members going beyond the rules and roles. The organization relies on its members to figure out what needs to be done, to solve unexpected problems, to contribute in a crisis situation. But although organizations depend on this self-organizing activity, leaders seldom acknowledge this experience and use it to question beliefs about structure, leadership, or human motivation.
We also deny these system-seeking forces when we narrow people to self-serving work, when we pit colleagues against one another to improve performance, when we believe people are most strongly motivated by promises of personal gain. If we deny people's great need for relationships, for systems of support, for work that connects to a larger purpose, they push back. They may respond first by embracing competition, but then lose interest in the incentives. Performance falls back to pre-contest levels. In organizations driven by greed, people push back by distrusting and despising their leaders. In organizations that try to substitute monetary rewards for a true purpose, people respond with apathy and disaffection.
It is possible to look at the negative and troubling behaviors in organizations today as the clash between the forces of life and the forces of domination, between the new story and the old. Once we realize that we cannot ever extinguish these creative forces, that it is impossible to deny the life that lives in our organizations, we can begin to search for new ways of being together.
In many different places, the new story is emerging. It is, in its essence, a story about the human spirit. This realization is surfacing in many different disciplines and people. For those who have focused on organizations, I find it delightful to note that two great management thinkers, Edward Deming, the great voice for quality in organizations, and Robert Greenleaf, the prophet of servant leadership, both focused on the human spirit in their final writings. Deming concluded his long years of work by stating simply that quality was about the human spirit. As we grew to understand that spirit, we would create organizations of quality. Greenleaf understood that we stood as servants to the human spirit, that it was our responsibility to nurture that spirit. Following different paths, they arrived at the same centering place. We can create the lives and organizations we desire only by understanding the enlivening spirit in us that always is seeking to express itself.
Leaders who live in the new story help us understand ourselves differently by the way they lead. They trust our humanness; they welcome the surprises we bring to them; they are curious about our differences; they delight in our inventiveness; they nurture us; they connect us. They trust that we can create wisely and well, that we seek the best interests of our organization and our community, that we want to bring more good into the world.
We who hold this story feel both its beauty and its promise. What might we create if we lived our lives closer to the human spirit? What might our organizations accomplish if they trusted and called on that spirit? I want us to be telling this story in healthcare organizations, on campuses, in schools, in religious denominations, in corporations. I want us to stop being quiet in the presence of business people who sit on our boards and in our executive offices. As they offer their story as the standard, I want our voices to emerge with what we know to be true. I want traditional business/economic logic to stop being the only story; I want business/economic imperatives to stop moving us away from the deeper realities we know. Even in the for-profit sector where it still dominates, the old story has not created organizations that are sustainable over time or welcoming of the human spirit. Why would we continue to let such thinking move unchallenged into other types of organization?
I would like to end by returning to the historic importance of the teller of new stories. When it is time for a new story to emerge, holding onto the past only intensifies our dilemma. We experience our ineffectiveness daily, and if we fail to find anything new, we descend more deeply into a profound sense of lost.
What we ask of the tellers of the new story is their voice and their courage. We do not need them to create a massive training program, a global-wide approach, a dramatic style. We only need them to speak to us when we are with them. We need them to break their silence and share their ideas of the world as they have come to know it.
If you carry this story within you, it is time to tell it, wherever you are, to whomever you meet. Brian Swimme compares our role to that of the early Christians. They had nothing but
". . . a profound revelatory experience. They did nothingÑnothing but wander about telling a new story." As with these early believers, Brian encourages us to become wanderers, telling our new story. Through our simple wanderings, we will "ignite the transformation of humanity."
And he leaves us with a promise (from Evolution Extended, Connie Barlow Ed., MIT Press, 1994, p 297):
"What will happen when the storytellers emerge? What will happen when 'the primal mind' sings of our common origin, our stupendous journey, our immense good fortune? We will become Earthlings. We will have evoked out of the depths of the human psyche those qualities enabling our transformation from disease to health. They will sing our epic of being, and stirring up from our roots will be a vast awe, an enduring gratitude, the astonishment of communion experiences, and the realization of cosmic adventure."
What a wonderful promise. I invite you into the telling.
The Promise and Paradox of Community
in The Community of the Future. Jossey-Bass, 1998
Margaret J. Wheatley & Myron Kellner-Rogers
We human beings have a great need for one another. As described by the West African writer and teacher Malidoma Some, we have "an instinct of community." However, at the end of the 20th century this instinct to be together is materializing as growing fragmentation and separation. We experience increasing ethnic wars, militia groups, specialized interest clubs, and chat rooms. We are using the instinct of community to separate and protect us from one another, rather than creating a global culture of diverse yet interwoven communities. We search for those most like us in order to protect ourselves from the rest of society. Clearly, we cannot get to a future worth inhabiting through these separating paths. Our great task is to rethink our understandings of community so that we can move from the closed protectionism of current forms to an openness and embrace of the planetary community.
It is ironic that in the midst of this proliferation of specialty islands, we live surrounded by communities that know how to connect to others through their diversity, communities that succeed in creating sustainable relationships over long periods of time. These communities are the webs of relationships called ecosystems. Everywhere in nature, communities of diverse individuals live together in ways that support both the individual and the entire system. As they spin these systems into existence, new capabilities and talents emerge from the process of being together. These systems teach that the instinct of community is not peculiar to humans, but is found everywhere in life, from microbes to the most complex species. They also teach that the way in which individuals weave themselves into ecosystems is quite paradoxical. This paradox can be a great teacher to us humans.
Life takes form as individuals that immediately reach out to create systems of relationships. These individuals and systems arise from two seemingly conflicting forces: the absolute need for individual freedom, and the unequivocal need for relationships. In human society, we struggle with the tension between these two forces. But in nature, successful examples of this paradox abound and reveal surprising treasures of insight. It is possible to create resilient and adaptive communities that welcome our diversity as well as our membership.
Life's first imperative is that it must be free to create itself. One biological definition of life is that something is alive if it has the capacity to create itself. Life begins with this primal freedom to create, the capacity for self-determination. An individual creates itself with a boundary that distinguishes it from others. Every individual and every species is a different solution for how to live here. This freedom gives rise to the boundless diversity of the planet.
As an individual makes its way in the world, it exercises its freedom continuously. It is free to decide what to notice, what to invest with meaning. It is free to decide what its reaction will be, whether it will change or not. This freedom is so much a part of life that two Chilean biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela advise that we can never direct a living system, we can only hope to get its attention. Life accepts only partners, not bosses, because self-determination is its very root of being.
Life's second great imperative propels individuals out from themselves to search for community. Life is systems-seeking; there is the need to be in relationship, to be connected to others. Biologist Lynn Margulis notes that independence is not a concept that explains the living world. It is only a political concept we've invented. Individuals cannot survive alone. They move out continuously to discover what relationships they require, what relationships are possible.
Evolution progresses from these new relationships, not from the harsh and lonely dynamics of survival of the fittest. Species that decide to ignore relationships, that act in greedy and rapacious ways, simply die off. If we look at the evolutionary record, it is cooperation that increases over time. This cooperation is spawned from a fundamental recognition that one cannot exist without the other, that it is only in relationship that one can be fully one's self. The instinct of community is everywhere in life.
As systems form, the paradox of individualism and connectedness becomes clearer. Individuals are figuring out how to be together in ways that support themselves. Yet these individuals remain astutely aware of their neighbors and local environmental conditions. They do not act from a blinding instinct for self-preservation. Nor do they act as passive recipients of someone else's demands. They are never forced to change by others or the environment. But as they choose to change, the "other" is a major influence on their individual decisions. The community is held in the awareness of the individual as that individual exercises its freedom to respond.
When an individual changes, its neighbors take notice and decide how they will respond. Over time, individuals become so intermeshed in this process of co-evolving that it becomes impossible to distinguish the boundary between self and other, or self and environment. There is a continual exchange of information and energy between all neighbors, and a continuous process of change and adaptation everywhere in the system. And another paradox, it is these individual changes that contribute to the overall health and stability of the entire system.
As a system forms from such co-evolutionary processes, the new system provides a level of stability and protection that was not available when individuals were isolated. And new capacities emerge in individuals and the system overall. Members develop new talents and new abilities as they work out relationships with others. Both individuals and systems grow in skill and complexity. Communities increase the capacity and complexity of life over time.
These complex networks of relationships offer very different possibilities for thinking about self and other. The very idea of boundaries changes profoundly. Rather than being a self-protective wall, boundaries become the place of meeting and exchange. We usually think of these edges as the means to define separateness, defining what's inside and what's outside. But in living systems, boundaries are something quite different. They are the place where new relationships take form, an important place of exchange and growth as an individual chooses to respond to another. As connections proliferate and the system weaves itself into existence, it becomes difficult to interpret boundaries as defenses, or even as markers of where one individual ends.
Human communities are no different from the rest of life. We form our communities from these same two needsÑthe need for self-determination and the need for one another. But in modern society, we have difficulty embracing the inherent paradox of these needs. We reach to satisfy one at the expense of the other. Very often the price of belonging to a community is to forfeit one's individual autonomy. Communities form around specific standards, doctrines, traditions. Instead of honoring, as is common among indigenous peoples, the individual as a unique contributor to the capability of the community, instead of recognizing the community's need for diverse gifts, individuals are required to conform, to obey, to serve "the greater good" of the community. Inclusion exacts a high price, that of our individual self-expression. With the loss of personal autonomy, diversity not only disappears, it also becomes a major management problem. The community spends more and more energy on new ways to exert control over individuals through endlessly proliferating policies, standards, and doctrines.
The price that communities pay for this conformity is exhausting and, for its members, it is literally deadly. Life requires the honoring of its two great needs, not one. In seeking to be a community member, we cannot truly abandon our need for self-expression. In the most restrictive communities, our need for freedom creeps in around the edges, or moves us out of the community altogether. We modify our look and clothing, we create cliques that support our particular manner of being, we form splinter groups, we leave the physical community, we disagree over doctrine and create warring schisms. These behaviors demonstrate the unstoppable need for self-creation, even while we crave the support of others.
Particularly in the West, and in response to this too-demanding price of belonging, we move toward isolationism in order to defend our individual freedom. We choose a life lived alone in order for it to be our life. We give up the meaningful life that can only be discovered in relationship with others for a meaningless life that at least we think is ours. An African proverb says "Alone, I have seen many marvelous things, none of which are true." What we can see from our pursuit of loneliness is the terrible price exacted for such independence. We end up in deep, vacant places, overwhelmed by loneliness and the emptiness of life.
It seems that whenever we bargain with life and seek to satisfy only one of its two great needs, the result is a quality of true lifelessness. We must live within the paradox; life does not allow us to choose sides. Our communities must support our individual freedom as a means to community health and resiliency. And individuals must acknowledge their neighbors and make choices based on the desire to be in relationship with them as a means to their own health and resiliency.
At first glance, the World Wide Web seems to be a source of new communities. But these groups do not embrace the paradox of community. The great potential of a world connected electronically is being used to create stronger boundaries that keep us isolated from one another. Through the Web, we can seek relationships with others who are exactly like us. We are responding to our instinct of community, but we form highly specialized groups in the image of ourselves, groups that reinforce our separateness from the rest of society. We are not asked to contribute our uniqueness, only our sameness. We are not asked to encounter, much less celebrate the fact that we need one another's gifts. We can turn-off our computers the moment we're confronted with the discomfort of diversity. Such specialized, self-reflecting networks lead to as much destructiveness of the individual as any dictatorial, doctrine-based organization. In neither type of group are we asked to explore our individualism while being in relationship with others who remain different. In neither type of group are we honoring the paradox of freedom and community.
In human communities, the conditions of freedom and connectedness are kept vibrant by focusing on what's going on in the heart of the community rather than in being fixated on the forms and structures of the community. What called us together? What did we believe was possible together that was not possible alone? What did we hope to bring forth by linking with others? These questions invite in both our individuality and our desire for relationships. If we stay with these questions and don't try to structure relationships through policies and doctrines, we can create communities that thrive in the paradox.
In our observation, clarity at the core of the community about its purpose changes the entire nature of relationships within that community. These communities do not ask people to forfeit their freedom as a condition of belonging. They avoid the magnetic pull of proscribing behaviors and beliefs, they avoid becoming doctrinaire and dictatorial, they stay focused on what they're trying to create together, and diversity flourishes within them. Belonging together is defined by a shared sense of purpose, not by shared beliefs about specific behaviors. The call of that purpose attracts individuals, but does not require them to shed their uniqueness. Staying centered on what the work is together, rather than on single identities, transforms the tension of belonging and individuality into energetic and resilient communities.
In our own work, we have seen these communities in schools, towns, and organizations. They create themselves around a shared intent and some basic principles about how to be together. They do not get into a prescriptive role with one another. They do not found their community on directives, but on desire. They know why they are together, and they have agreed on the conditions of how to be together. And, very importantly, these conditions are kept to a minimum of specificity. One of the most heartening examples we've encountered is a junior high school that operates as a robust community of students, faculty and staff by agreeing that all behaviors and decisions are based on three rules, and just three rules. These are: "Take care of yourself. Take care of each other. Take care of this place." These rules are sufficient to keep them connected and focused, and open enough to allow for diverse and individual responses to any situation. (The fact that this worked so well in a junior high environment should make us all sit up and take notice!) The principal reported that after the building had to be evacuated during a rain storm, he returned last into the building, and was greeted by eight hundred pairs of shoes in the lobby. The children had decided, in that particular circumstance, how to "take care of this place."
We have also seen businesses and large cities rally themselves around a renewed and clear sense of collective purpose. A chemical plant becomes clear that it wants to contribute to the safety of the globe by its safe manufacturing processes; a city determines that it wants to be a place where children can thrive. These are clarifying messages to hold at the core of the community. This clarity helps every individual to exercise his/her freedom to decide how best to contribute to this deeply shared purpose. Diversity and unique gifts become a contribution rather than an issue of compliance or deviance. Problems of diversity disappear as we focus on contribution to a shared purpose rather than the legislation of correct behavior.
Other problematic behaviors also disappear when a community knows its heart, its purpose for being together. Boundaries between self and other, who's outside and who's inside, get weaker and weaker. The deep interior clarity we share frees us to look for partners who can help us achieve our purpose. We reach out farther and welcome in more diverse voices because we learn that they are helpful contributors to what we are trying to birth. The manager of the chemical plant mentioned above said that he no longer knew where his plant boundaries were, and that it was unimportant to try and define them. Instead, the plant was in more and more relationships with people in the community, the government, suppliers, foreign competitors, churches, and school childrenÑall of whom contributed to the workers' desire to become one of the safest and highest quality plants in the world, a desire which they achieved.
Today, so many of our communities and the institutions that serve them are lost because they lack clarity about why they are together. Few schools know what the community wants of them; the same is true for healthcare, government, the military. We no longer agree on what we want these institutions to provide, because we no longer are members of communities that know why they are together. Most of us don't feel like we are members of a community, we just live or work next to each other. The great missing conversation is about why and how we might be together.
But as lost as we are, there is great hope. Even in our fractured communities, people all the time are in conversations about "Who are we?" and "What matters?" The problem is that these are private conversations occurring around kitchen tables, water coolers, and in restaurants. Seldom do these critical, community-forming questions move into our institutions or the broader community. Yet these are the essential questions from which all our communities give birth to the institutions that are meant to serve themÑschools, agencies, churches, governments.
When we don't answer these questions as a community, when we have no agreements about why we belong together, the institutions we create to serve us become battle grounds that serve no one. All energy goes into warring agendas, new regulations, stronger protective measures against those we dislike and fear. We look for ourselves in these institutions and can't find anyone we recognize. We grow more demanding and less satisfied. Our institutions dissipate into incoherence and impotence. They do serve us, but only as mirrors that reflect back to us the lack of cohering agreements at the heart of our community. Without these agreements about why we belong together, we can never develop institutions that make any sense at all. In the absence of these agreements, our instinct of community leads us to a community of "me" not a community of "we."
Most public meetings, although originating from a democratic ideal, serve only to increase our separation from one another. Agendas and processes try to honor our differences but end up increasing our distance. They are "public hearings" where nobody is listening and everyone is demanding air time. Communities aren't created from such processesÑthey are destroyed by the increasing fear and separation that these processes engender. Such public processes also generate the destructive power dynamics that emerge when people feel isolated and unheard.
We don't need more public hearings. We need much more public listening, in processes where we come together and commit to staying together long enough to discover those ideas and issues that are significant to each of us. We don't have to interpret an event or issue the same, but we do have to share a sense that it is significant. In our experience, as soon as people realize that others around them, no matter how different, share this sense of significance, they quickly move into new relationships with one another. They become able to work together, not because they have won anyone over to their view, but because they have connected in a deeper place, a place we identify as the organizing center or heart of the community.
All of us can reach entirely new levels of possibility together, possibilities that are not available from soap box rhetoric. To achieve this, we need to begin these conversations about purpose and shared significance and commit to staying in them. As we stay in the conversation, people start to work together rather than convince each other of who has more of the truth. We are capable of creating wonderful and vibrant communities when we discover what dreams of possibility we share. And always, those dreams become much greater than anything that was ever available when we were isolated from each other. The history of most community-organizing and great social change movements can be traced back to such conversations, conversations among friends and strangers who discovered a shared sense of what was important to them.
As we create communities from the cohering center of shared significance, from a mutual belief in why we belong together, we will discover what is already visible everywhere around us in living systems. People's great creativity and diversity, our desire for contribution and relationships, blossom when the heart of our community is clear and beckoning, and when we refrain from cluttering our paths with proscriptions and demands. The future of community is best taught to us by life.
Love and Fear in Organizations
National Association of Student Personnel Administrators Newsletter, May 1998
Volume 20, Number 5
Thomas Aquinas, writing in the 13th century, presented a powerful vision of how we humans could be together. He wrote: "We change one another with delight and pleasure." Aquinas believed we change through pleasure and appreciation, through positive energies that inspire us. I like to believe that he also meant that change is delightful. And that life's continuous change is intended to give us delightful surprises.
But his images, and my imaginings about his images, are very different from what I hear today. I hear only the conviction and assertion of the "fact" that humans change through fear, that we change only when forced by serious threat or crisis. In the twentieth century we have changed Aquinas' hopeful statement into: "We change one another through fear and terror."
We have strayed very far from the images of delight and possibility of the 13th century. A few years ago I wrote that the things we feared most in organizations were change, disorder, loss of control. But now I believe that the greatest fear I witness is fear of one another-not just fear of certain individuals, but fear of ourselves as a species, fear of life in general. We assume that people are selfish, resistant to change, dependent, deceiving. We fear what people will do to us if we take away the controls and safeguards we've carefully created. We are bombarded with stories of scams, schemes, and betrayals. We read of wars of ethnic cleansing past and all too present. Our fears seem to be well-justified, and we wonder if we're taking sufficient precautions in this terrorizing world.
Perhaps Aquinas was writing from a simpler time, when it was possible to trust other people, when community truly existed and modern warfare was unknown. But I know this is not the case. The terrors of life in the Middle Ages were just as overwhelming. I believe Aquinas spoke to us from a spiritual perspective beyond the realm of human history, and that his statement applies in all times to all peoples. I also believe it is time to recall ourselves from the fear-filled lives we inhabit and begin to explore again what it would be like if we approached one another through love, with delight and pleasure.
We human beings have a great need for each other. Like all forms of life, from microbes to ecosystems, we need to be together. We cannot exist in isolation. Nothing living lives alone. And we see this need for each other even in the West where we've revered independence and individualism. How many of us today are longing for community, wanting to belong?
It's important to remember that every time we join an organization, community or group effort that we do so in order to accomplish more. People never join together to accomplish less. We want to create, to find more meaning, to contribute, to belong, and we know we can only achieve this by joining with others. So every act of joining, every organizing effort, has powerful and positive energies present at the inception.
Aquinas' dictum has led me to look at my own experience in organizations, to notice where I see people changed not by fear but by love. And once I began looking, I realized that there were many examples testifying to the truth of his statement. I have witnessed the great possibilities that surface whenever two or more people are willing to listen to one another, to be present to one another. It doesn't matter who they are, how adversarial they've been, or what's going on. The simple act of truly listening to another, with respect and curiosity, changes everything.
Recently I was in a group conversation where someone commented, "We have to meet people on their own terms, speak their language." This statement sounded like an obvious truth, and it recalled me to the many years of training on diversity awareness, cultural sensitivity, individual differences, that I and others in that room had experienced. But I heard the statement differently this time, and replied: "We don't have to meet people on their own terms. We simply have to meet people." What I meant is that we have to want to know who that person is, listen to how they describe their life. We have to be curious and respectful.
When we're curious about the story someone is telling us, when we're respectful of them as they tell it, then we are honoring that person. We are welcoming them into a relationship with us. And we're creating the conditions that support our working together. There is something much simpler about good human relationships than we have believed. Whenever a person feels acknowledged, they want to be in a relationship with us. They and we need little else in order to want to work together. I learned this watching the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa. People were welcomed in to tell their experiences under apartheid, and the entire nation listened. As one elderly man said after he recounted the horrors and losses he had endured: "Today I know the whole nation cried my tears with me." He didn't need counseling, or fixing, and he didn't demand monetary reparations for his suffering. He just needed to know that people had listened to him. And just by listening, a community had welcomed him in to the task of reforming a nation.
We spend so much time in complex group processes focused on team building, problem-solving, effective communications, etc. But what happens when we forget about technique and just try to be present for each other? Have you experienced what happens in you and others when we really listen to each other? In my experience, the techniques and methods actually keep us from one another-we stay focused on whether we are doing the technique correctly rather than becoming focused on who is in the room and what they want to say.
Curiosity is a trait we love in children but forget to develop in ourselves. My own commitment to being curious grew as I realized the truth of what I had learned from cognitive science: No two people are capable of seeing the world exactly the same. As I began believing this, my curiosity increased. I expected that everyone would have a different view of what just happened or what something meant. I became curious about their interpretation and less adamant about the validity of my own. And I saw a new capacity develop in groups that were curious. As they expected and explored their differing perceptions, they became able to agree on a concerted course of action. This was quite paradoxical, but over and over I witnessed people able to agree on a common future because they had listened to very different perceptions of their past. In honoring these unique perceptions, they were developing a richer picture of who they were. Simultaneously, they were creating a strong sense of unity for moving towards who they wanted to be.
In focusing on respect and curiosity I am not quite up to Aquinas' description of delight and pleasure. But I believe they are steps on the same path. As we learn to be curious and present, we are letting go of our fear. As our fear dissipates, we enter the path where we are capable of encountering one another with love. And with love, as we have learned elsewhere, all things are possible.
Bringing Life to Organizational Change
Journal for Strategic Performance Measurement, April/May 1998
Margaret J. Wheatley & Myron Kellner-Rogers
After so many years of defending ourselves against life and searching for better controls, we sit exhausted in the unyielding structures of organization we've created, wondering what happened. What happened to effectiveness, to creativity, to meaning? What happened to us? Trying to get these structures to change becomes the challenge of our lives. We draw their futures and design them into clearly better forms. We push them, we prod them. We try fear, we try enticement,. We collect tools, we study techniques. We use everything we know and end up nowhere. What happened?
From A Simpler Way, Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers
We know that it is possible to facilitate successful organizational change. We have witnessed organizations that have changed not only in terms of a new destinationÑnew processes, structures, performance levelsÑbut that simultaneously have increased their capacity to deal with change generally. In these systems, after the change effort, people felt more committed to the organization, more confident of their own contributions, and more prepared to deal with change as a continuous experience.
But we'd like to start by acknowledging the more typical, and depressing, history that's accumulated around several decades of organizational change efforts. We hope that by acknowledging this dismal track record you will feel free to contemplate very different approaches.
In recent surveys, CEOS report that up to 75% of their organizational change efforts do not yield the promised results. These change efforts fail to produce what had been hoped for, yet always produce a stream of unintended and unhelpful consequences. Leaders end up managing the impact of unwanted effects rather than the planned results that didn't materialize. Instead of enjoying the fruits of a redesigned production unit, the leader must manage the hostility and broken relationships created by the redesign. Instead of glorying in the new efficiencies produced by restructuring, the leader must face a burned out and demoralized group of survivors. Instead of basking in a soaring stock price after a merger, leaders must scramble frantically to get people to work together peaceably, let alone effectively.
In the search to understand so much failure, a lot of blame gets assigned. One healthcare executive recently commented that: "We're under so much stress that all we do is look around the organization to find somebody we can shoot." (And the executive quoted is a nun!) It's become commonplace to say that people resist change, that the organization lacks the right people to move it into the future, that people no longer assume responsibility for their work, that people are too dependent, that all they do is whine.
We'd like to put a stop to all this slander and the ill will it's creating in our organizations. We strongly believe that failures at organizational change are the result of some very deep misunderstandings of who people are and what's going on inside organizations. If we can clear up these misunderstandings, effectiveness and hope can return to our experience. Successful organizational change is possible if we look at our organizational experience with new eyes.
There's something ironic about our struggles to effect change in organizations. We participate in a world where change is all there is. We sit in the midst of continuous creation, in a universe whose creativity and adaptability are beyond comprehension. Nothing is ever the same twice, really. And in our personal lives, we adapt and change all the time, and we witness this adaptability in our children, friends, colleagues. There may be more than 100 million species on earth, each of whom displays the ability to change. Yet we humans fail at our change projects and accuse one another of being incapable of dealing with change. Are we the only species that digs in its heels and resists? Or perhaps all those other creatures simply went to better training programs on "Coping with Change and Transition."
For several years, through our own work in an enormously varied range of organizations, we've learned that life is the best teacher about change. If we understand how life organizes, how the world supports its unending diversity and flexibility, we can then know how to create organizations where creativity, change, and diversity are abundant and supportive. If we shift our thinking about organizing, we can access the same change capacities that we see everywhere around us in all living beings. But learning from life's processes requires a huge shift.
It's become common these days to describe organizations as "organic." Assumedly this means we no longer think of them as machines, which was the dominant view of organizations, people, and the universe for the past three hundred years. But do current practices in organizations resemble those used by life? Do recent organizational change processes feel more alive? From what we've observed, "organic" is a new buzz word describing organizational processes that haven't changed. These processes remain fundamentally mechanistic. No where is this more apparent than in how we approach organizational change.
A few years ago, we asked a group of Motorola engineers and technicians to describe how they went about changing a machine. In neat sequential steps, here's what they described:
1. Assign a manager
2. Set a goal that is bigger and better
3. Define the direct outcomes
4. Determine the measures
5. Dissect the problem
6. Redesign the machine
7. Implement the adaptation
8. Test the results
9. Assign blame
Sound familiar? Doesn't this describe most of the organizational change projects you've been involved in? We see only one real difference, which is that in organizations we skip step 8. We seldom test the results of our change efforts. We catch a glimmer of the results that are emerging (the unintended consequences,) and quickly realize that they're not what we had planned for or what we sold to senior leadership. Instead of delving into what the results areÑinstead of learning from this experienceÑwe do everything we can to get attention off the entire project. We spin off into a new project, announce yet another initiative, reassign managers and teams. Avoiding being the target of blame becomes the central activity rather than learning from what just happened. No wonder we keep failing!
Life changes its forms of organization using an entirely different process. Since human organizations are filled with living beings (we hope you agree with that statement,) we believe that life's change process is also an accurate description of how change is occurring in organizations right now. This process can't be described in neat increments. It occurs in the tangled webs of relationships--the networks--that characterize all living systems. There are no simple stages or easy-to-draw causal loops. Most communication and change occur quickly but invisibly, concealed by the density of interrelationships. If organizations behave like living systems, this description of how a living system changes should feel familiar to you.
Some part of the system (the system can be anything--an organization, a community, a business unit) notices something. It might be in a memo, a chance comment, a news report. It chooses to be disturbed by this. "Chooses" is the operative word here--the freedom to be disturbed belongs to the system. No one ever tells a living system what should disturb it (even though we try all the time.) If it chooses to be disturbed, it takes in the information and circulates it rapidly through its networks. As the disturbance circulates, others take it and amplify it. The information grows, changes, becomes distorted from the original, but all the time it is accumulating more and more meaning. The information may swell to such importance that the system can't deal with it in its present state. Then and only then will the system begin to change. It is forced, by the sheer meaningfulness of the information, to let go of its present beliefs, structures, patterns, values. It cannot use its past to make sense of this new information. The system must truly let go, plunging itself into a state of confusion and uncertainty that feels like chaos, a state that always feels terrible. But having fallen apart, having let go of who it has been, the system now is capable of reorganizing itself to a new mode of being. It is, finally, open to change. It begins to reorganize around new interpretations, new meaning. It re-creates itself around new understandings of what's real and what's important. It becomes different because it understands the world differently. It becomes new because it was forced to let go of the old. And like all living systems, paradoxically it has changed because it was the only way it saw to preserve itself.
If you contemplate the great difference between these two descriptions of how change occurs in a machine and in a living system, you understand what a big task awaits us. We need to better understand the processes by which a living system transforms itself, and from that understanding, rethink every change effort we undertake. We'd like to describe in more detail these processes used by life and their implications for organizational change practices.
Every living being--every microbe, every person--develops and changes because it has the freedom to create and preserve itself. The freedom to create one's self is the foundational freedom of all life. One current definition of "life" in biology is that something is alive if it is capable of producing itself. The word is auto-poiesis, from the same root as poetry. Every living being is author of its own existence, and continues to create itself through its entire life span. In the past, we've thought of freedom as a political idea, or contemplated free will as a spiritual concept. But now it appears in biology as an inalienable condition of life. Life gives to itself the freedom to become, and without that freedom to create there is no life.
In our lives together and in our organizations we must account for the fact that everyone there requires, as a condition of their being, the freedom to author their own life. Every person, overtly or covertly, struggles to preserve this freedom to self-create. If you find yourself disagreeing with this statement, think about your experiences with managing others, be they workers, children or anyone. Have you ever had the experience of giving another human being a set of detailed instructions and succeeded in having them follow them exactly, to the letter? We haven't met anyone who's had this sought after experience of complete, robot-like obedience to their directives, so we're assuming that your experience is closer to the following. You give someone clear instructions, written or verbal, and they always change it in some way, even just a little. They tweak it, reinterpret it, ignore parts of it, add their own coloration or emphasis. When we see these behaviors, if we're the manager, we feel frustrated or outraged. Why can't they follow directions? Why are they so resistant? Why are they sabotaging my good work?
But there's another interpretation possible, actually inevitable, if we look at this through the interpretive lens of living systems. We're not observing resistance or sabotage or stupidity. We're observing the fact that people need to be creatively involved in how their work gets done. We're seeing people exercising their inalienable freedom to create for themselves. They take our work and recreate it as their work. And none of us can stop anyone from this process of re-creationÑof tweaking, ignoring, changing the directionsÑwithout deadening that person. The price we pay for perfect obedience is that we forfeit vitality, literally that which gives us life. We submit to another's direction only by playing dead. We end up dispirited, disaffected and lifeless. And then our superiors wonder why we turned out so badly.
You may think this is an outrageously optimistic view of what's going on in organizations, because undoubtedly you can name those around you who display no creative desires and who only want to be told what to do. But look more closely at their behavior. Is it as robot-like as it first appears? Are they truly passive, or passive aggressive (just another term for how some people assert their creativity.) And what are their lives like outside of work? How complex is the private life they deal with daily?
Or look at human history. Over and over it testifies to the indomitable human spirit rising up against all forms of oppression. No matter how terrible the oppression, humans find ways to assert themselves. No system of laws or rules can hold us in constraint; no set of directions can tell us exactly how to proceed. We will always bring ourselves into the picture, we will always add our unique signature to the situation. Whether leaders call us innovative or rebellious depends on their comprehension of what's going on.
The inalienable freedom to create one's life shows up in other organizationally familiar scenes. People, like the rest of life, maintain the freedom to decide what to notice. We choose what disturbs us. It's not the volume or even the frequency of the message that gets our attention. If it's meaningful to us, we notice it. All of us have prepared a presentation, a report, a memo about a particular issue because we knew that this issue was critical. Failing to address this would have severe consequences for our group or organization. But when we presented the issue, we were greeted not with enthusiasm and gratitude, but with politeness or disinterest. The issue went nowhere. Others dropped it and moved on to what they thought was important. Most often when we have this experience, we interpret their disinterest as our failure to communicate, so we go back and rewrite the report, develop better graphics, create a jazzier presentation style. But none of this matters. Our colleagues are failing to respond because they don't share our sense that this is meaningful. This is a failure to find shared significance, not a failure to communicate. They have exercised their freedom and chosen not to be disturbed.
If we understand that this essential freedom to create one's self is operating in organizations, not only can we reinterpret behaviors in a more positive light, but we can begin to contemplate how to work with this great force rather than deal with the consequences of ignoring its existence. We'd like to highlight four critically important principles for practice.
First, when thinking about strategies for organizational change, we need to remember: Participation is not a choice. We have no choice but to invite people into the process of rethinking, redesigning, restructuring the organization. We ignore people's need to participate at our own peril. If they're involved, they will create a future that already has them in it. We won't have to engage in the impossible and exhausting tasks of "selling" them the solution, getting them "to enroll," or figuring out the incentives that might bribe them into compliant behaviors. For the past fifty years a great bit of wisdom has circulated in the field of organizational behavior: People support what they create. In observing how life organizes, we would restate this maxim as: People only support what they create. Life insists on its freedom to participate and can never be sold on or bossed into accepting someone else's plans.
After many years of struggling with participative processes, you may hear "participation is not a choice" as a death sentence to be avoided at all costs. But we'd encourage you to think about where your time has gone in change projects generally. If they were not broadly participativeÑand our definition of "broad" means figuring out how to engage the whole system over timeÑhow much of your time was spent on managing the unintended effects created by people feeling left out or ignored? How many of your efforts were directed at selling a solution that you knew no one really wanted? How much of your energy went into redesigning the redesign after the organization showed you its glaring omissions, omissions caused by their lack of involvement in the first redesign?
In our experience, enormous struggles with implementation are created every time we deliver changes to the organization rather than figuring out how to involve people in their creation. These struggles are far more draining and prone to failure than what we wrestle with in trying to engage an entire organization. Time and again we've seen implementation move with dramatic speed among people who have been engaged in the design of those changes.
But we all know this, don't we? We know that while people are engaged in figuring out the future, while they are engaged in the difficult and messy processes of participation, that they are simultaneously creating the conditionsÑnew relationships, new insights, greater levels of commitment—that facilitate more rapid and complete implementation. But because participative processes seem to take longer and sometimes overwhelm us with the complexity of human interactions, many leaders grasp instead for quickly derived solutions from small groups that are then delivered to the whole organization. They keep hoping this will work—it would make life so much easier. But life won't let it work, people will always resist these impositions. Life, all of life, insists on participation. We can work with this insistence and use it to engage people's creativity and commitment, or we can keep ignoring it and spend most of our time dealing with all the negative consequences.
A second principle also derives from life's need for participation: Life always reacts to directives, it never obeys them. It never matters how clear or visionary or important the message is. It can only elicit reactions, not straightforward compliance. If we recognize that this principle is at work all the time in all organizations, it changes the expectations of what can be accomplished anytime we communicate. We can expect reactions that will be as varied as the individuals who hear it. Therefore, anything we say or write is only an invitation to others to become involved with us, to think with us. If we offer our work as an invitation to react, this changes our relationships with associates, subordinates, and superiors. It opens us to the partnering relationships that life craves. Life accepts only partners, not bosses.
This principle especially affects leader behaviors. Instead of searching for the disloyal ones, or repeating and repeating the directions, she or he realizes that there is a great deal to be learned from the reactions. Each reaction reflects a different perception of what's important, and if that diversity is explored, the organization develops a richer, wiser understanding of what's going on. The capacity for learning and growth expands as concerns about loyalty or compliance recede.
As leaders begin to explore the diversity resident in even a small group of people, life asks something else of them. No two reactions will be identical; no two people or events will look the same. Leaders have to forego any desire they may have held for complete repetition or sameness, whether it be of persons or processes. Even in industries that are heavily regulated or focused on finely detailed procedures (such as nuclear power plants, hospitals, many manufacturing plants,) if people only repeat the procedures mindlessly, those procedures eventually fail. Mistakes and tragedies in these environments bear witness to the effects of lifeless behaviors. But these lifeless behaviors are a predictable response to processes that demand repetition rather than personal involvement in the process. This is by no means a suggestion that we abandon procedures or standardization. But it is crucial to notice that there is no such thing as a human-proof procedure. We have to honor the fact that people always need to include themselves in how a procedure gets done. They may accomplish this by understanding the reasoning behind the procedure, or by knowing that they are sanctioned to adjust it if circumstances change. We all need to see that there is room enough for our input, for us, in how our work gets done.
And again, life doesn't give us much choice here. Even if we insist on obedience, we will never gain it for long, and we only gain it at the cost of what we wanted most, loyalty, intelligence and responsiveness.
A third principle derived from life is: We do not see "reality." We each create our own interpretation of what's real. We see the world through who we are, or, as expressed by the poet Michael Chitwood: "What you notice becomes your life." Since no two people are alike, no two people have exactly the same interpretation of what's going on. Yet at work and at home we act as if others see what we see and assign the same meaning as we do to events. We sit in a meeting and watch something happen and just assume that most people in that room, or at least those we trust, saw the same thing. We might even engage them in some quick conversation that seems to confirm our sense of unanimity:
"Did you see what went on in there!?"
"I know, I couldn't believe what I was seeing."
"Really!"
But if we stopped to compare further, we'd soon discover significant and useful differences in what we saw and how we interpreted the situation.
As we work with this principle, we begin to realize that arguing about who's right and who's wrong is a waste of time. If we engage with colleagues to share perceptions, if we expect and even seek out the great diversity of interpretations that exist, we learn and change. The biologist Francisco Varela redefined organizational intelligence. He said it wasn't the ability to solve problems that made an organization smart. It was the ability of its members to enter into a world whose significance they shared. If everyone in the group thinks that what is occurring is significant (even as they have different perspectives,) then they don't have to convince one another. They can actÑrapidly, creatively, and in concert.
Entering into a world of shared significance is only achieved, as far as we've seen, by engaging in conversations with colleagues. Not debates or oratories, but conversation that welcomes in the unique perspective of everyone there. If we remain curious about what someone else sees, and refrain from convincing them of our interpretation, we develop a richer view of what might be going on. And we also create collegial relations that enable us to work together with greater speed and effectiveness. When any of us feel invited in to share our perspective, we repay that respect and trust with commitment and friendship.
And a very important paradox becomes evident. We don't have to agree on an interpretation or hold identical values in order to agree on what needs to be done. We don't have to settle for the lowest common denominator, or waste hours and hours politicking for our own, decided-on-ahead-of-time solution. As we sit together and listen to so many differing perspectives, we get off our soapboxes and open to new ways of thinking. We have allowed these new perspectives to disturb us and we've changed. And surprisingly, this enables us to agree on a concerted course of action, and to support it wholeheartedly. This paradox flies in the face of how we've tried to reach group consensus, but it makes good sense from a living system's perspective. We all need to participate, and when we're offered that opportunity, we then want to work with others. We've entered into a world whose significance is shared by all of us, and because of that process we've developed a lot of energy for deciding together what to do next.
The fourth principle from life is the best prescription we've found for thinking about organizational change efforts. To create better health in a living system, connect it to more of itself. When a system is failing, or performing poorly, the solution will be discovered within the system if more and better connections are created. A failing system needs to start talking to itself, especially to those it didn't know were even part of itself. The value of this practice was quite evident at the beginning of the customer service revolution, when talking to customers and dealing with the information they offered became a potent method for stimulating the organization to new levels of quality. Without customer inclusion and their feedback, workers couldn't know what or how to change. Quality standards rose dramatically once customers were connected to the system.
This principle embodies a profound respect for systems. It says that they are capable of changing themselves, once they are provided with new and richer information. It says that they have a natural tendency to move toward better functioning or health. It assumes that the system already has within it most of the expertise that it needs. This principle also implies that the critical task for a leader is to increase the number, variety and strength of connections within the system. Bringing in more remote or ignored members, providing access across the system, and through those connections stimulating the creation of new informationÑall of these become primary tasks for fostering organizational change.
These four principles provide very clear indicators of how, within our organizations, we can work with life's natural tendency to learn and change. As we all were taught by an advertisement many years ago, we can't fool Mother Nature. If we insist on developing organizational change processes suited for machines and ignore life's imperative to participate in the creation of itself, then we can only anticipate more frequent and costly failures.
We have been careful to state principles here rather than techniques or step-by-step methods. This is in keeping with our understanding of how life organizes. The organizations that life creates are highly complex. They are filled with structures, behavioral norms, communication pathways, standards and accountabilities. But all this complexity is obtained by an organizing process that is quite simple, and that honors the individual's need to create. The complexity of a living system is the result of individuals freely deciding how best to interpret a few simple principles or patterns that are the heart of that system. These simple patterns of behavior are not negotiable and cannot be ignored. But how they get interpreted depends on the immediate circumstance and the individuals who find themselves in that circumstance. Everyone is accountable to the patterns, but everyone is free to engage their own creativity to figure out what those patterns mean. This process of organizing honors individual freedom, engages creativity and individuality, yet simultaneously achieves an orderly and coherent organization.
From such simple patterns complex organizations arise. Structures, norms, networks of communication develop from the constant interactions among system members as they interpret the patterns in changing circumstances. Individuals make decisions about how best to embody the patterns, and an organization arises. Sophisticated organizational forms appear, but always these forms materialize from the inside out. They are never imposed from the outside in.
In human organizations, we have spent so many years determining the details of the organizationÑits structures, values, communication channels, vision, standards, measures. We let experts or leaders design them, and then strategize how to get them accepted by the organization. Living systems have all these features and details, but they originate differently, from within the system. As we think of organizations as living systems, we don't need to discard our concern for such things as standards, measures, values, organizational structures, plans. We don't need to give up any of these. But we do need to change our beliefs and behaviors about where these things come from. In a living system, they are generated from within, in the course of figuring out what will work well in the current situation. In a machine where there is no intelligence or creative energy, these features are designed outside and then programmed or engineered in. We can easily discern whether we are approaching our organization as a living system or as a machine by asking: Who gets to create any aspect of the organization? We know we need structure, plans, measures, but who gets to create them? The source of authorship makes all the difference. People only support what they create.
Last year we met a junior high school principal who gave us a superb example of creating a complex and orderly system from a few simple patterns. He is responsible for eight hundred adolescents, ages twelve to fourteen. Most school administrators fear this age group and the usual junior high school is filled with rules and procedures in an attempt to police the hormone-crazed tendencies of early teens. But his junior high school operated from three rules, and three rules only. EveryoneÑstudents, teachers, staffÑknew the rules and used them to deal with all situations. The three rules are disarmingly simple: 1. Take care of yourself; 2. Take care of each other; 3. Take care of this place. (As we've thought about these rules, we've come to believe that they might be all we need to create a better world, not just a junior high school.)
Few of us would believe that you could create an orderly group of teen-agers, let alone a good learning environment, from such simple rules. But the principal told a story of just how effective these three rules were in creating a well-functioning school. A fire broke out in a closet and all 800 students had to be evacuated. They stood outside in pouring rain until it was safe to return to the building. The principal was the last in, and he reported being greeted by 800 pairs of wet shoes lined up in the lobby.
Principles define what we have decided is significant to us as a community or organization. They contain our agreements about what we will notice, what we will choose to let disturb us. In the case of these students, wet shoes and muddy floors were something they quickly noticed, something that disturbed them because they had already agreed to "take care of this place." They then acted freely to create a response that made sense to them in this unique circumstance.
In deciding on what to emphasize in this article, we knew that you required even more freedom than these students to design organizational change processes that would work best in your unique situation. Therefore we chose to give you principles to work with, principles that we have found work with life's great capacity for change. As with all principles, once they are agreed upon, they need to be taken very seriously. They are the standards to which we agree to hold ourselves accountable. But clear principles provide only standards for our efforts, they never describe the details of how to do something. They do not restrict our creativity, they simply guide our designs and create coherence among our many diverse efforts. Their clarity serves as an invitation to be creative. Think about how many different approaches and techniques you could create that would be congruent with the four principles we stated. How many different forms of practice could materialize as people in your organization invented change processes that honored these principles?
No two change processes need look the same. In fact this is an impossibility--no technique ever materializes in the same way twice. Nothing transfers unchanged. (If it did, you wouldn't be struggling with the issue of organizational change. You would have found what worked somewhere else and successfully imported it.) But if we hold ourselves accountable to these principles, we can create our own unique change processes confident that we are working with life rather than denying it. We will have been guided by these principles to create processes that take advantage of the creativity and desire to contribute that reside in the vast majority of the people in our organizations.
We'd like to invite you to experiment with this approach and these four principles. As with all good experiments, this means not only that you try something new, but that you watch what happens and learn from the results. Good experimentation is a process of constant tinkering, making little adjustments as the results come in, trying to discover what's responsible for the effects that show up. So for whatever you start in motion, we ask that you watch it carefully, involve many eyes in the observing, and tinker as you go.
One experiment you might try is to give these four principles to a project design team, either one that's just starting, or one that's trying to rescue a change process that's not working well. See what they can create as they hold themselves accountable to these principles. Encourage them to think through the implications of these principles with many others in the organization. Experiment with a design that feels congruent with the principles, and once that design is operating, observe carefully where it needs to be modified or changed. Stay with it as an experiment rather than as the perfect solution.
A second experiment can occur in every meeting, task force or event in your organization. This experiment requires a discipline of asking certain questions. Each question opens up an inquiry. We have learned that if people conscientiously ask these questions, they keep focused on critical issues such as levels of participation, commitment, and diversity of perspectives. Here are four questions we've found quite helpful:
1. Who else needs to be here?
2. What just happened?
3. Can we talk?
4. Who are we now?
The simplicity of these questions may lead you to believe they're not sufficient or important, but think about the types of inquiry they invite. Every time we ask "Who else needs to be here?" we're called to notice the system of relationships that is pertinent to the issue at hand. We're willing to be alert to who's missing, and the earlier we notice who's missing, the sooner we can include them. This question helps us move to broader participation gradually and thoughtfully, as the result of what we're learning about the issue and the organization. It's an extremely simple but powerful method for becoming good systems thinkers and organizers.
Similarly, "What just happened?" is a question that leads to learning from our experience. Since living systems always react but never obey, this question focuses us on what we might learn if we look at the reactions that just surfaced. The question moves us away from blame and instead opens us to learning a great deal about who this system is and what grabs its attention.
When we ask, "Can we talk?" we're acknowledging that others perceive the world differently from us. Imagine leaving a typical meeting where ego battles predominated. Instead of posturing, grumbling, or politicking, what if we went up to those we disagreed with and asked to talk with them. What if we were sincerely interested in trying to see the world from their perspective? Would this enable us to work together more effectively?
"Who are we now?" is a query that keeps us noticing how we are creating ourselvesÑnot through words and position papers, but through our actions and reactions from moment to moment. All living systems spin themselves into existence because of what they choose to notice and how they choose to respond. This is also true of human organizations, so we need to acknowledge that we are constantly creating the organization through our responses. To monitor our own evolution, we need to ask this question regularly. Without such monitoring, we may be shocked to realize who we've become while we weren't watching. And for organizations that put in place a few essential patterns, like that junior high school, everyone periodically needs to review how they're doing. Are individuals and groups embodying the patterns? And are these patterns helping the organization become what people envisioned for it when the patterns were created?
But questions require us to be disciplined in asking them, a discipline we seldom practice. No matter how simple the questions, we most often rush past them. We feel compelled to act rather than to inquire. But by now, many of us in organizations want to turn away from this history of act-act-act which has led to so little learning and so much wasted energy. All other forms of life stay watchful and responsiveÑthey learn so continuously that science writer James Gleick notes that "Life learned itself into existence." Physicist and author Fritjof Capra states that there is no distinction between living and learning, "A living system is a learning system." If we don't begin to seriously focus on learning in our organizations, there is no way we can bring them to life.
Throughout this article, we've stressed the freedom to create that all life requires. We hope that you will feel inspired to exercise your freedom and creativity to experiment with some of the ideas, principles and questions we've noted. We need each other's best thinking and most courageous experiments if we are to create a future worth wanting.
Reclaiming Gaia, Reclaiming Life
in The Fabric of the Future. Conari Press, September 1998
Seven millennia ago, the Babylonians honored the goddess Ishtar. She had led them from the chaos of their origins and brought lawful, loving harmony to their existence.
Queen of Heaven, Goddess of the Universe,
the One who walked in terrible chaos
and brought life by the law of love
and out of chaos brought us harmony.
From chaos She has led us by the hand. . .
(in Chaos, Gaia, Eros, Ralph Abraham, HarperSanFrancisco, 1994,126)
We now walk into a new millennium from a culture that has let go the hand of the creation goddess. But who will lead us through our terrible chaos? Who will bring us to life by the law of love?

Throughout all time and in all societies, this goddess of creation has been known. In some cultures she has been honored, in others reviled, but she is always present at the dawn of creation. In Western thought she appears in Hesiod (about 600 B.C.) as Gaia, one among the creation trinity of Chaos and Eros. It is Gaia who reaches into the void that is Chaos and pulls forth life. It is Gaia who works with the creative impulse that is Eros and creates the world. She is the created universe, the mother of all life, the great partner of chaos and creativity. In modern science, she is planet Earth, a living being who creates for herself the conditions that nourish and sustain life. And in this millennial era, Gaia is us. She is the feminine energy that compels us to care about the future of Earth. She is the feminine sensibility that inspires us to dream of harmony among all beings. She is the feminine voice that yearns to speak through us of the law of love.

I hear Gaia speaking quietly and forcefully through many women these days. But while her message is clear, too many of us question what it means. Instead of celebrating our clarity, instead of understanding that we have gifts of insight that need to be spoken, we ask "Am I crazy?" And some of us feel so strange and disconnected from our society that our self-doubt escalates to: " Am I from another planet?"

The Tibetan teacher Trungpa Rinpoche described a dark time as one in which people forget who they are, lose confidence, and so lack the courage to speak. Courageous acts are born when we can acknowledge our goodness. How then, can we speak for Gaia if we believe we're crazy?

It is time to stop feeling crazy. It is time to acknowledge that we represent the new sanity. This new sanity (which is the ancient teachings of many peoples) tells us how to be with life in a way that blesses, nurtures, and creates. It tells us how to extend our Gaian reach into the genuine chaos of this age and from it secure the wisdom that will transform us.

In my own work, I am seeking to bring the Gaian voice I hear into organizations of all varieties. How can we create organizations worthy of human habitation, where life flourishes and creativity is a delight? How could we organize human endeavor if we understood how our Gaian planet has organized herself? In asking these questions within organizations, I hope to have us realize that we have choice in how we organize, that there are other beliefs and methods available to us that are far more life sustaining than our current practices. I know that I am giving new voice to beliefs that were once widely known. I also know that I am speaking them into a world that effectively deposed and banished them from public speech about three hundred years ago when the image of a clockwork, mechanical universe gained hegemony.

A few years ago, as the Gaian voices competed with those that told me I was insane, I discovered a new role for myself and all those haunted by ancient images of peace and possibility. I discovered that I could describe myself as the teller of a new story, a new cosmic creation story.

I was introduced to the critical nature of this teller-of-new-stories role in reading the work of physicist Brian Swimme. Brian, partnering with Thomas Berry, has spent the past several years developing a new story of the universe. They believe that only by creating a new cosmic story can we usher in a new era of human and planetary health. (see The Universe Story, with Thomas Berry, HarperSanFrancisco, 1992)

Lest you believe that cosmic stories belong only to physicists or theologians, their idea of a cosmic story is one that answers such questions as: What's going on? Where did everything come from? Why are you doing what you do?

Gaian voices answer these questions with a new story that differs in all ways from our current Western cosmology. Because Gaia's story is about life, I know that as women we embody a profound sensibility to this story. And I have come to believe that it is our responsibility to lend our voice and authority to this new cosmic story that Gaia is sharing with and through us. I would like to contrast in some detail the new and the old stories. My hope is that in seeing the great polarities between these two, you will feel that you have no choice but to give courageous voice to the new.

The old story is a story of dominion and control, and all-encompassing materialism. Western culture has been developing this story far longer than three hundred years, but it was in the 17th century, with the advent of modern science, that it became destructively pervasive. Modern science promised that it was within human province to understand the workings of the universe, and to gain complete mastery over physical matter. This promise grew from the image of the universe as a grand, clockwork machine. If the world was a machine, we could understand it through minute dissection, we would engineer it to do what we saw fit, and we would fix it through our engineering brilliance. This hypnotic image of powers beyond previous human imagination gradually crept into everything we looked at: our bodies were seen as the ultimate machines; our organizations had all the parts and specifications to assure well-oiled performance; and in science, where it had all begun, too many scientists confused metaphor with reality and believed life was a machine.

This dream still wields immense power over us. In most endeavors--in science, health, organizational management, self-help--the focus is on creating better functioning machines. For every problem, we quickly leap to technical solutions, even if technology is the cause of the initial problem. Science will still save us, no matter the earthly mess we've created. In our bodies, our greatest ills, perhaps even death, will vanish once we conquer the challenges of genetic engineering. We replace the faulty part, reengineer the organization, install a new behavior or attitude, create a better fit, recharge our batteries. The language and thinking is all machines. And we remain seduced by this image because it's the only vision that promises us we can conquer life's cyclical nature, our one hope of escape from Gaia's incessant demands for creation and destruction.

This story of complete dominion over matter was given life by control's faithful partner, fear. We seek to control that which we fear. When it resists our control, we become even more afraid. We seek to find other, more successful means of controlling it. We become entangled in a cycle of exerting control, failing to control, exerting harsher control, failing again. The fear that arises from this cycle is notable in many of us. It is especially notable in our organizations. Things aren't working as we had hoped, our control is failing, but we know of no other way to proceed. The world becomes ever more fearsome as we realize the depths of our ignorance and confront our true powerlessness. Yet it is from this place, from an acknowledgment of our ignorance and lack of power, that the call can go out for a new story.

But the old story has further dimensions worth noting. This story has had a particularly pernicious effect on how we think about one another, and how we approach the task of organizing any human endeavor. When we conceived of ourselves as machines, we gave up most of what is essential to being human. We created ourselves devoid of spirit, will, passion, compassion, even intelligence. Machines have none of these characteristics innately, and none of them can be built into its specifications. The imagery is so foreign to what we know and feel to be true about ourselves that it seems strange that we ever adopted this as an accurate description of being human. But we did, and we do. A colleague of mine, as he was about to work with a group of oil company engineers, was warned that they had "heads of cement." He cheerfully remarked that it didn't matter, because they all had hearts, didn't they? "Well," they replied, "we call it a pump."

The engineering image of ourselves has led to organizational lives where we believe we can ignore the deep realities of human existence. We can ignore that people carry spiritual questions and quests into their work; we can ignore that people need love and acknowledgment; we can pretend that emotions are not part of our worklives; we can pretend we don't have families, or health crises, or deep worries. In essence, we take the complexity of human life and organize it away. It is not part of the story we want to believe. We want a story of simple dimensions: people are machines and can be controlled to perform with the same efficiency and predictability.

It is important to recognize that in our experience, people never behave like machines. When given directions, we insist on putting our unique spin on them. When told to follow orders, we resist in obvious or subtle ways. When told to accept someone else's solution, or to institute a program created elsewhere, we deny that it has sufficient value.

When we meet with such non-mechanical responses, we've had two different options. We can criticize our own leadership, or we can blame everyone else. If we as leader are the problem, perhaps it's due to poor communication skills; perhaps we aren't visionary enough; maybe we chose the wrong sales technique. If our colleagues (or children, or friends) are the problem, it must be that they lack motivation, or a clear sense of responsibility, or it could be that this time we've just been cursed with an obstinate and rebellious group. With so much blame looking for targets, we haven't stopped long enough to question our basic beliefs about each other. Are expectations of machine-like obedience and regularity appropriate when working with other people?

Trying to be an effective leader in this machine story is especially exhausting. The story say that he or she is leading a group of lifeless, empty automatons who are just waiting to be filled with vision and direction and intelligence. The leader is responsible for providing everything: the organizational mission and values, the organizational structure, the plans, the supervision. The leader must also figure out, through clever use of incentives or coercives, how to pump energy into this lifeless mass. Once the pump is primed, he or she must then rush hither and yon to make sure that everyone is clanking along in the same direction, at the established speed, with no diversions. It is the role of the leader to provide the organizing energy for a system that is believed to have no internal capacities for self-creation, self-organization, or self-transcendence.

As I reflect on the awful demands placed on leaders by the old story, I wonder how anyone could survive in that job. Yet the mechanistic story has created roles for all of us that are equally deadly. It has led us to believe that we, with our unpredictable behaviors, our passions, our independence, our creativity, our consciousness - that we are the problem rather than the blessing. In fact, our rebellious and untrustworthy natures are the very reason we need to create organizations as we do. How else could we structure such recalcitrance into vehicles of efficient production?

In this story, such key human traits as uniqueness, free will, and creativity pose enormous problems. Machines are built to do repetitive functions that require no thought and minimal adjustment. Conformity and compliance are key values. Creativity is unwanted, because it is always surprising and therefore uncontrollable. If we tolerate creative expressions, this leads to unmanageable levels of diversity. A machine world is willing to sacrifice exploration for prediction. Guaranteed levels of performance are preferable to surprising breakthroughs. In our machine organizations, we try to extinguish individuality in order to reach our goal of certainty. We trade uniqueness for control, and barter our humanness for petty performance measures.

It is one of the great ironies of our age that we created organizations to constrain our problematic human natures, and now the only thing that can save these organizations is a full appreciation of the expansive capacities of us humans.

So it is time for the new story. Our old one, with its alienating myths, is eating away at us from the inside, rotting from its core. Fewer of us can tell it with any conviction. Increasing numbers of us have heard the Gaian voice and seen in our experience ways of being together that celebrate and affirm life. More and more we are in conversations where we speak of the great forces of life-love, purpose, soul, spirit, freedom, courage, integrity, meaning. The new story is being born in these conversations. We are learning to give voice to a different and fuller sense of who we really are.

The new story is a tale of the primal trinity of Gaia, Chaos and Eros. Once our machine glasses have been set aside, we can see life's ebullient creativity and life's great need for other life. We see a world whose two great organizing energies are the need to create and the need for relationships. We see a world where there is no such thing as an independent individual, and no need for a leader to take on as much responsibility as we've demanded in the past.

As I develop some of the major themes of this new story of life, I draw first on the work of modern science. However, science is only the most recent voice. We hear Gaia's story in primal wisdom traditions, in today's indigenous tribes, in most spiritual thought, and in poets old and new. It is a story that has never been forgotten by any of us, and that has been held for us continually by many peoples and cultures. Yet for those of us exhausted by the old mechanistic tale, it feels new. And it certainly opens us to new discoveries about who we are as people, as organizations, and as women.

For me, one of the most wonderful contrasts of the old and new stories came from thinking about a passage I read in Kevin Kelly's book, Out of Control (Addison-Wesley, 1994). As he reached for language to describe life, he moved into sheer exuberance. (I always pay attention when a scientist uses poetry or exuberant language-I know that something has touched him or her at a level of awareness that I don't want to ignore.) Kelly was trying to describe the ceaseless creativity that characterizes life. He said that life gives to itself this great freedom, the freedom to become. Then he asked, "Becoming what?" and went on to answer:

Becoming becoming. Life is on its way to further complications, further deepness and mystery, further processes of becoming and change. Life is circles of becoming, an autocatalytic set, inflaming itself with its own sparks, breeding upon itself more life and more wildness and more 'becomingness.' Life has no conditions, no moments that are not instantly becoming something more than life itself.

Kelly's passionate description of Gaian processes that inflame, breed more life and wildness, and create more deepness and mystery, stands in stark contrast to the expectations we have held for one another. Contrast Kelly's description of life with the lives we describe when we design an organizational chart. The contrast between the two is both funny and sobering. Could we even begin to tolerate such levels of passion and creativity in our organizations? But can we survive without them?

In the 1960's, the great American poet A.R. Ammons told the same story in different and precise language (Tape for the Turn of the Year, W. W. Norton and Company, Inc. 1965) :
Don't establish the
boundaries
first
the squares, triangles,
boxes
of preconceived
possibility,
and then
pour
life into them, trimming
off left-over edges,
ending potential:
let centers
proliferate
from
self-justifying motions!

In both recent science and poetry we are remembering a story about life that has creativity and connectedness as its essential themes. As we use this new story to look into our organizational lives, it offers us images of how we could be together that are both startling and enticing. It offers us images of organizations where our diversity--our uniqueness--is essential and revered. It offers us an arena big enough to embrace the full expression of our infinitely creative human natures. And for the first time in a long time, it offers us the recognition that we humans are, in the words of physicist Ilya Prigogine, "the most striking realization of the laws of nature." We can use ourselves and what we know about ourselves to understand the universe. By observing with new eyes the processes of creation in us, we can understand the forces that create galaxies, move continents, and give birth to stars. No longer intent on describing ourselves as the machines we thought the universe to be, we are encouraged now to describe the universe through the life we know we are.

As we look at life through the lens of human nature and human desire, we are presented with some wonderful realizations. Our own desire for autonomy and creativity is reflected in all life. Life appears as boundlessly creative, searching for new possibilities and new capacities wherever it can. Observing the diversity of life forms has become a humbling experience for many biologists. At this point, no one knows how many different species there are, or where the next forms of life will appear, except that now we even expect them to appear elsewhere in our solar system.

Life is born from this unquenchable need to be. One of the most interesting definitions of life in modern biology is that something is considered alive if it has the capacity to create itself. The term for this is autopoiesis-self-creation--from the same root as poetry. At the very heart of our ideas about life is this definition that life begins from the desire to create something original, to bring a new being into form.

As I have read about and observed more consciously the incredible diversity of life, I have felt witness to a creativity that has little to do with the survival struggles that we thought explained everything. Newness appears not for simple utilitarian purposes, but just because it is possible to be inventive. Life gives to itself the freedom to become because life is about discovering new possibilities, new forms of expression. Two Chilean biologists, Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, observe that life responds not to "survival of the fittest," but to the greater space of experimentation of "survival of the fit." Many designs, many adaptations are possible, and organisms enjoy far more freedom to experiment than we humans, with our insane demand to "Get it right the first time."

The freedom to experiment, to tinker oneself into a form of being that can live and reproduce, leads to diversity that has no bounds. In my own telling of the Gaian story, I believe that the very purpose of life is to explore newness, that newness is a primary value embraced by all life, a primary force that encourages life into new discoveries. The need and ability to create one's self is a force we see quite clearly in human experience, but which we have greatly misunderstood in our organizational lives.

The second great force to add to this cosmic story is that life needs other life. Life needs relationships in order to exist. Gaia is not lonely. It is impossible to look into the natural world and find a separated individual. As an African proverb states: "Alone, I have seen many marvelous things, none of which were true." Biologist Lynn Margulis expresses a similar idea 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. Organisms shape themselves in response to their neighbors and their environments. All respond to one another, co-evolving and co-creating the complex systems of organization that we see in nature. Life is systems-seeking. It seeks organization. Organization is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Self-organization is the powerful force by which Gaia created herself through relationships, creating all the living systems we see. She knows how to organize from the inside out, from partnering with neighbors rather than from imposition and control.

These self-organizing systems have the capacity to create for themselves the organizations that we thought had to be provided to them. Self-organizing systems create structures and pathways, networks of communication, values and meaning, behaviors and norms. In essence, they do for themselves most of what we believed we had to do to them. Rather than thinking of organization as an imposed structure, plan, design, or role, it is clear that in life, organization arises from the interactions and needs of individuals who have decided to come together. We see the results of these relationships in the forms that arise; but it is important, especially because we are so easily seduced by material forms, to look past these manifestations to the desire for relationship that gave birth to the forms.

It is easy to observe the clash of the old and new stories in many places, but one arena where it is painfully visible is in organizations that we create to fulfill some special purpose, some important call. People came together in response to the call; they joined because they knew that more was possible by organizing together than by staying alone. Their dream of contribution required an organization to move it forward. In their desire to find meaning in life, to bring more good into the world, to seek out others, they are bearing witness to the new story.

But the clash with old beliefs and images occurs as soon as we embark on the task of creating an organization. We move back to machine ideas about structures, roles, designs, leaders. We create organizations from the outside, imposing these limiting designs on the rich desires of those who have come together. We sever relationships by creating boxes; we ignore meaning by focusing on procedures. Over time, the organization that was created in response to a deep call becomes a rigid structure that impedes fulfilling that call. People come to resent the organization they created, because now it is a major impediment to their creativity, to their faith, to their purposeful dreams.

Gaia holds out different images of organization - she teaches us that we, when we join together, are capable of giving birth to the form of the organization, to the plans, to the values, to the vision. All of life is self-organizing and so are we. But her new story also details a process for organizing that stands in shocking contrast to the images of well-planned, well-orchestrated, well-supervised organizing. I can summarize Gaia's organizing process quite simply: Life seeks organization, but it uses messes to get there. Organization is a process, not a structure. The process of organizing is difficult to chart because it happens in many places, simultaneously, within messy and expanding webs. It involves creating relationships around a shared sense of purpose, exchanging and creating information, learning constantly, paying attention to the results of our efforts, co-adapting, co-evolving, developing wisdom as we learn, staying clear about our purpose, being alert to changes from all directions. Living systems give form to their organization, and evolve those forms into new ones, because of exquisite capacities to create meaning together, to communicate, and to notice what's happening. These are the capacities that give any organization its true liveliness, that support life's desire to self-organize.

In the Gaian story, we are introduced to a world where life gives birth to itself in response to two powerful forces, the need to create one's self as an exploration of newness, and the need to reach out for relationships with others. I could similarly describe these as the force of Chaos, where creativity and freedom abound, and the force of Eros, where we are impelled to create through attraction. These forces never disappear from life. Even if we deny them, we can never extinguish them. They are always active, even in the most repressive human organizations. Life can never stop asserting its need to create itself, and life never stops searching for other life.

We fail to acknowledge these unstoppable forces of life whenever we try to impose direction and control. But life always pushes back against our demands for obedience. When this happens, instead of learning about life, we tend to see others "difficult" behaviors as justification for a more controlling style. I believe that most of the failures and discontents in our organizational lives can be understood as the result of this denial of life's forces, and the pushing back of life against a story that excludes them.

As an example of these competing forces, think about how many times you have engaged in conversations about "resistance to change." I have participated in far too many of these, and in the old days as a consultant, when I still thought that it was me who was "managing" change, my colleagues and I always were thoughtful enough to plan a campaign to overcome this resistance. Contrast this view that humans resist change with Kelly's images of life as "further processes of becoming and change . . . circles of becoming, inflaming itself with its own sparks, breeding upon itself more life and more wildness." Who's telling the right story? Do we, as a species, dig in our heels while the rest of life is engaged in this awesome dance of creation? Are we the only problem, whereas the rest of life participates in something wild and wonderful?

The old story asserts that resistance to change is a fact of life. In a world that sought stability and control and feared chaos, change has always been frightening. But Gaia has always partnered with Chaos and Eros. Resistance is not a fact of life, but evidence of an act of insult against life. Life is in motion, constantly creating, exploring, discovering. Newness is its desire. Nothing alive, including us, resists these great creative motions. But all of life resists control. All of life pushes back against any process that inhibits its freedom to create itself.

In organizations of the old story, plans and designs are constantly being imposed. People are told what to do all the time. As a final insult, we go outside the organization to look for answers, returning with experts that we offer up as great gifts. Yet those in the organization can only see these external and imposed solutions as insults. Their creativity has been dismissed, their opportunity to discover something new for the organization has been denied. When we deny life's need to create, life pushes back. We label it resistance and invent strategies to overcome it. But we would do far better if we changed the story and learned how to invoke the resident creativity of everyone. We need to work with these insistent creative forces or they will be provoked to work against us.

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." There is no better indicator of the daily but unrecognized contributions made by people than when a municipal union decides to "work to rule." These unions are prohibited from going on strike. But they have developed an effective form of protest against problematic working conditions. They work only according to the rule book. They only follow policies and job descriptions. Even though the rule books and policy manuals were designed to create productive employees, as soon as they take them literally, cities cease running, effective civil functioning stops. What they demonstrate so forcefully is that no organization can function on the planned contributions of its members. Every organization relies intensely on its members going beyond the rules and roles. The organization relies on its members to figure out what needs to be done, to solve unexpected problems, to contribute in a crisis situation. But although organizations depend on this self-organizing activity, leaders seldom acknowledge it.

We also deny these system-seeking forces when we narrow people to self-serving work, when we pit colleagues against one another to improve performance, when we believe people are most strongly motivated by promises of personal gain. If we deny people's great need for relationships, for systems of support, for work that connects to a larger purpose, they push back. They may respond first by embracing competition, but then lose interest in the incentives. Performance falls back to pre-contest levels, in both children and adults. In organizations driven by greed, people push back by distrusting and despising their leaders. In organizations that try to substitute monetary rewards for a true purpose, people respond with apathy and disaffection.

It is possible to look at the negative and troubling behaviors in organizations today as the clash between the forces of life and the forces of domination, between the new story and the old. Once we realize that we cannot ever extinguish these creative forces, that it is impossible to deny the life that lives in our organizations, we can begin to search for new ways of being together.

We who live in the new story can help others understand themselves differently by the way we are with them. We can trust their humanness; we can welcome the surprises they bring to us; we can be curious about our differences; we can delight in their inventiveness; we can nurture them; we can connect them to one another. As Gaia has trusted us, we can trust them to create wisely and well. We know they have the best interests of our organization and our community at heart; we know they want to bring more good into the world.

We who hold this story feel both its beauty and its promise. What might we create if we lived our lives closer to the spirit of life? What might our organizations accomplish if they trusted and called on that spirit? I want us to be telling this story in every organization we engage with. When we hear the old story, from a boss, a counselor, a politician, I want our voices to emerge with what we know to be true. I want us to stop being persuaded away from the deeper realities we know. I want us to feel the new sanity that we hold within us, and to give it voice.

We have been given a new story. When it is time for a new story to emerge, holding onto the past, whether from self-doubt or fear, only intensifies our dilemma. We experience daily the failures of the old story, and if no one voices an alternative, we descend into a profound sense of lost.

So what is asked of us, the tellers of the new story, is our voice and our courage. We do not need to create a massive training program, a global-wide approach, a dramatic style. We only need to speak our story when we are with others. We need to break our silence and share the Gaian vision we have come to know.

If this story has been given to you, it is time to tell it, wherever you are, to whomever you meet. Brian Swimme compares our role to that of the early Christians. They had nothing but ". . . a profound revelatory experience. They did nothing-nothing but wander about telling a new story." As with these early believers, we need only become wanderers, telling our new story. Yet through our simple wanderings, we will "ignite the transformation of humanity."

And Swimme leaves us with this promise (from Evolution Extended, Connie Barlow Ed., MIT Press, 1994, p 297):

What will happen when the storytellers emerge? What will happen when 'the primal mind' sings of our common origin, our stupendous journey, our immense good fortune? We will become Earthlings. We will have evoked out of the depths of the human psyche those qualities enabling our transformation from disease to health. They will sing our epic of being, and stirring up from our roots will be a vast awe, an enduring gratitude, the astonishment of communion experiences, and the realization of cosmic adventure.

What a wonderful promise. Gaia has invited us into the telling.
What Do We Measure and Why? Questions About The Uses of Measurement
Journal for Strategic Performance Measurement, June 1999
Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers
And still they come, new from those
nations to which the study of that
which can be weighed and measured
is a consuming love.
W.H. Auden

We live in a culture that is crazy about numbers. We seek standardization, we revere precision, and we aspire for control. The very ancient and dominant belief of Western culture is that numbers are what is real. If you can number it, you make it real. Once made real, it's yours to manage and control. We increasingly depend on numbers to know how we are doing for virtually everything. We ascertain our health with numbers. How many calories or grams should I eat? What's my cholesterol reading? We assess one another with numbers. What's your I.Q.? What's your GPA? Your Emotional Intelligence? And of course we judge organizational viability only with numbers. What's the customer satisfaction rating? Inventory turns? ROI? P/E ratio?

It is numbers and only numbers that define and make visible what is real. This is the "hard stuff," the real world of management- graphs, charts, indices, ratios. Everyone knows that "you can only manage what you can measure." The work of modern managers is to interpret and manipulate these numeric views of reality. The desire to be good managers has compelled many people to become earnest students of measurement. But are measures and numbers the right pursuit? Do the right measures make for better managers? Do they make for stellar organizations?

As we look into the future of measurement, we want to pause for a moment and question this number mania. We'd like you to consider this question. What are the problems in organizations for which we assume measures are the solution?

Assumedly, most managers want reliable, high quality work. They want commitment, focus, teamwork, learning, and quality. They want people to pay attention to those things that contribute to performance.

If you agree that these are the general attributes and behaviors you're seeking, we'd like to ask whether, in your experience, you have been able to find measures that sustain these strong and important behaviors over time. Or if you haven't succeeded at finding them yet, are you still hopeful that you will find the right measures? Do you still believe in the power of measures to elicit these performance qualities?

We believe that these behaviors are never produced by measurement. They are performance capabilities that emerge as people feel connected to their work and to each other. They are capacities that emerge as colleagues develop a shared sense of what they hope to create together, and as they operate in an environment where everyone feels welcome to contribute to that shared hope. Each of these qualities and behaviors-commitment, focus, teamwork, learning, quality--is a choice that people make. Depending on how connected they feel to the organization or team, they choose to pay attention, to take responsibility, to innovate, to learn and share their learnings. People can't be punished or paid into these behaviors. Either they are contributed or withheld by individuals as they choose whether and how they will work with us.

But to look at prevailing organizational practice, most managers seem consistently to choose measurement as the route to these capacities. They agonize to find the right reward that can be tied to the right measure. How long has been the search for the rewards that will lead to better teamwork or to more innovation? And haven't we yet learned that any measure or reward only works as an incentive in the short term, if at all. Ironically, the longer we try to garner these behaviors through measurement and reward, the more damage we do to the quality of our relationships, and the more we trivialize the meaning of work. Far too many organizations have lost the path to quality because they have burdened themselves with unending measures. How many employees have become experts at playing "the numbers game" to satisfy bosses rather than becoming experts at their jobs? The path of measurement can lead us dangerously far from the organizational qualities and behaviors that we require.

But measurement is critical. It can provide something that is essential to sustenance and growth: feedback. All life thrives on feedback and dies without it. We have to know what is going on around us, how our actions impact others, how the environment is changing, how we're changing. If we don't have access to this kind of information, we can't adapt or grow. Without feedback, we shrivel into routines and develop hard shells that keep newness out. We don't survive for long.

In any living system, feedback differs from measurement in several significant ways:
1. Feedback is self-generated. An individual or system notices whatever they determine is important for them. They ignore everything else.

2. Feedback depends on context. The critical information is being generated right now. Failing to notice the "now," or staying stuck in past assumptions, is very dangerous.

3. Feedback changes. What an individual or system chooses to notice will change depending on the past, the present, and the future. Looking for information only within rigid categories leads to blindness, which is also dangerous.

4. New and surprising information can get in. The boundaries are permeable.

5. Feedback is life-sustaining. It provides essential information about how to maintain one's existence. It also indicates when adaptation and growth are necessary.

6. Feedback supports movement toward fitness. Through the constant exchange of feedback, the individual and its environment coevolve towards mutual sustainability.

As we reflect on the capacities that feedback can provide, it seems we are seeking many similar attributes in our organizations. But we haven't replicated the same processes, and therefore we can't achieve the same outcomes. There are some critical distinctions between feedback and measurement, as evident in the following contrasts.

Some Important Distinctions
Feedback Measurement
Context dependent One size fits all
Self-determined; the system choose what to notice Imposed. Criteria are established externally.
Information accepted from anywhere Information in fixed categories only
System creates own meaning Meaning is pre-determined
Newness, surprise are essential Prediction, routine are valued
Focus on adaptability and growth Focus on stability and control
Meaning evolves Meaning remains static
System co-adapts System adapts to the measures

If we understand the critical role played by feedback in living systems, and contemplate these distinctions, we could develop measurement processes that support the behaviors and capacities we require, those that enhance the vitality and adaptability of the organization. To create measures that more resemble feedback, we suggest the following questions. We use them as design criteria for any measure or measurement process:

Who gets to create the measures? Measures are meaningful and important only when generated by those doing the work. Any group can benefit from others' experience and from experts, but the final measures need to be their creation. People only support what they create, and those closest to the work know a great deal about what is significant to measure.

How will we measure our measures? How can we keep measures useful and current? What will indicate that they are now obsolete? How will we keep abreast of changes in context that warrant new measures? Who will look for the unintended consequences that accompany any process and feed that information back to us?

Are we designing measures that are permeable rather than rigid? Are they open enough? Do they invite in newness and surprise? Do they encourage people to look in new places, or to see with new eyes?

Will these measures create information that increases our capacity to develop, to grow into the purpose of this organization? Will this particular information help individuals, teams, and the entire organization grow in the right direction? Will this information help us to deepen and expand the meaning of our work?

What measures will inform us about critical capacities: commitment, learning, teamwork, quality and innovation? How will we measure these essential behaviors without destroying them through the assessment process? Do these measures honor and support the relationships and meaning-rich environments that give rise to these behaviors?

If these questions seem daunting, we assure you they are not difficult to implement. But they do require extraordinary levels of participation-defining and using measures becomes everyone's responsibility. We've known teams, manufacturing plants, and service organizations where everyone knew that measurement was critical to their success, and went at the task of measuring with great enthusiasm and creativity. They were aggressive about seeking information from anywhere that might contribute to those purposes they had defined as most important to their organization, such things as safety, team-based organization, or social responsibility. Their process was creative, experimental, and the measures they developed were often non-traditional. People stretched and struggled to find ways to measure qualitative aspects of work. They developed unique and complex multivariate formulas that would work for a while and then be replaced by new ones. They understood that the right measurements gave them access to the information they needed to prosper and grow. But what was "right" kept changing. And in contrast to most organizations, measurement felt alive and vital in these work environments. It wasn't a constraint or deadening weight; rather it helped people accomplish what they wanted to accomplish. It provided feedback, the information necessary for them to adapt and thrive.

Being in these workplaces, we also learned that measurement needs to serve the deepest purposes of work. It is only when we connect at the level of purpose that we willingly offer ourselves to the organization. When we have connected to the possibilities of what we might create together, then we want to gather information that will help us be better contributors.

But in too many organizations, just the reverse happens. The measures define what is meaningful rather than letting the greater meaning of the work define the measures. As the focus narrows, people disconnect from any larger purpose, and only do what is required of them. They become focused on meeting the petty requirements of measurement, and eventually, they die on the job. They have been cut off from the deep well-springs of purpose which are the source of the motivation to do good work.

If we look closely at our experience of the past few years, it is clear that as a management culture, we have succeeded at developing finer and more sophisticated measures. But has this sophistication at managing by the numbers led to the levels of performance or commitment we've been seeking? And if we have achieved good results in these areas, was it because we discovered the right measures, or was something else going on in the life of the organization?

We would like to dethrone measurement from its godly position, to reveal the false god it has been. We want instead to offer measurement a new job--that of helpful servant. We want to use measurement to give us the kind and quality of feedback that supports and welcomes people to step forward with their desire to contribute, to learn, and to achieve. We want measurement to be used from a deeper place of understanding, the understanding that the real capacity of an organization arises when colleagues willingly struggle together in a common work that they love.
Servant-Leadership and Community Leadership in the 21st Century
Keynote Address, The Robert K. Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership annual conference, June 1999
Well, it's wonderful to stand up here and see all of you here. I guess I spoke here in '95 and it was in smaller groups of earnest seekers who were trying to figure out this thing called servant leadership. To see probably double the number of people here makes me feel very grateful to you for coming. I want to say that as I travel around the world and as I do get to talk to just about every variety of organization that I can imagine, I feel impelled to tell you that the world needs you. Not only that, the world is waiting for you. And this is a very critical time where we're balanced between promise and peril. Obviously we're all choosing for the promise. And this is the time when if we don't figure out what's happening...

(Phone ringing) Do I need to take that? It's amazing how we don't know how to turn these phones off when we need to. (laughing) It's probably a plan by Sprint to increase our phone usage. (laughing)

What I would like to do this morning, I just wanted to offer you some of the thoughts I'm having, about how natural servant leadership is. And I hope that in giving you my thoughts, that you leave here with a stronger belief, that you represent the future. And that without you, this future will not happen. I hope that in my words, I give you more courage, more clarity, and a greater sense that this a worldwide movement your engage in and not just some strange ideas that happen to appeal to you. This really is a movement in a direction of being able to create a future that we all want. I feel a strong imperative. I feel the peril of this moment, that if we don't learn how to come together differently, in our organization, in our communities, in our families. If we don't learn how to come together differently, then we are doom. Now this is said a little more elegant by Gary Snyder, the American poet. He wrote this in the sixties, that's rather depression to me because he had already given up by then. And here we are at the millenium. But he called this poem, For the Children.

The rising hills. The slopes of statistics lie before us.
The steep climb of everything going up, up as we all
go down. In the next century they say our valleys and
pastures, we can meet there in peace, if we make it.
To climb these coming crest, one word to you, to you
and your children. Stay together, learn the flowers,
go light. Stay together, learn the flowers, go light.

I believe that is our work. I want to talk about each of those things. One of the strange things going on at the end of this millenium in western cultural is that we have become, I believe victims of many different beliefs. I'm only going to talk about two of them today. The first is the belief that we can ignore time. The belief that we can negotiate with time, that we have in fact forgotten about things like natural rhythms, about cycles, about change, as part of the natural process. And instead we believe that it's a straight trajectory into the future, and we can go as fast as we please. Of course this moves us away from nature, from rhythm, from a sense of place, and we are really struggling with this. I believe that our current effort to try and ignore time and growth and stages and cycles. I believe it is truly driving us crazy.

Well, Pablo Neruda, many years ago also, so even given you now prophets, who spoke a long time ago to us. But he wrote this poem, probably in the '60s. He was asking us to stop. This is a bit of familiar scene. Lawrence Vanderpost, the Great South African writer, photographer, philosopher, said that things had gotten so serious in the world that he really fear for us. And when asked, he just died two years ago in his nineties. Someone asked him, "Well, what would you recommend, Sir Lawrence? What would you recommend that we do?" He said, "I would declare a year of silence." And Pablo Neruda is saying the same thing, but for this purpose. He said, "Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still. For once on the face of the earth, let's not speak in any language. Let's stop for one second and not move our arm so much. It would be an exotic moment. Without rush, without engines, we would all be together in a sudden strangeness. If we were not so single minded, in keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing, perhaps..." (this is the part of this poem I love.) "Perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves, and with threatening ourselves with death. Perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves with death."

Now since I'm a practical person, I'll imagined now that the advice you're going to take from what I said so far is to go back into your organizations and tell everyone to shut-up. (laughing) That is not what I'm saying. I'm on a slightly higher philosophical plane right now, okay. (laughing) But I do want us to complicate the fact that as we go faster and faster on this great trajectory toward the future, that is only making us sad. That is time for us as leaders to realize we cannot create the future we want by increasing the speed of change, by increasing the hurriedness and the franticness. And at some point, this where I become revolutionary. At some point, it's up to us to say, "We must take time to think. We must take time to reflect." I think this is one of the most courageous acts a servant leader can do right now, is to attempt to slow things down, so that people can think about what there doing. It's a revolutionary act to reflect these days. It's not in our job description. Luckily it's in our species description. What frustrates me so much is understanding the great gift of human consciences and the ability to notice and to reflect and to learn. And then to see how we are pretending that is not a gift to the planet. And instead of celebrating and honoring and trying to raise up this capacity for self awareness and reflection. We simply say we're too busy.

Now I'm going to talk about servant leadership is natural, and I want to tell you a story I heard on NPR, must have been last fall when there were so many terrible hurricanes. There was a geologist being interviewed. He was a beach geologist, so his field of study was beaches and sand and the like. And at the time he was being interviewed, there was a storm. One of the large hurricanes was pounding the outer bank off the Carolinas. And he was being interviewed about what hurricanes do to beaches. Now, we all know what hurricanes do to beaches and beach houses and such. We feel they're very destructive, right? They destroy homes and take down power lines and take away even sand, and whole beaches disappear in a hurricane. So this interviewer was talking to this beach geologists about this hurricane going on. And then this is what got my attention. The geologists said, "You know I can't wait to get out on those beaches again once these storms have passed. And I hope to get out there in the next 24 hours." And the interviewer said, "What do you expect to find out there?" and I was listening, and I thought he was going to talk about all the destruction he was going to find. What he said really surprised me. He said, "I expect to find a new beach." Now wouldn't it be wonderful if we could be in the same relationship with life as that beach geologist, where we would look for newness rather than predictability, where we would look to see what just happened rather than agonize that what we wanted didn't happen? You know the theme of this conference is navigating the future and one of the things I'm struck by is I haven't the faintest idea what the future is. How do you navigate towards something when you don't know what that something is? That question I will answer, by the way.

Back to the beach, however. So much of our focus right now is against meanness and against surprise. These are the other elements of life that are inescapable. When you look at anything in the living world, all you see is newness and creation. The scripture "Behold, I make all things new," feels to me like a biological statement these days. It's constant newness. But as a leader, as someone who is trying to help an organization move to the future, you have to ask yourself what is your position towards newness, towards creativity. So often, we are surprised by newness in a way that makes it impossible for us to welcome it. We actually see newness as an affront to our plans. We see other people's creativity as an affront to our leadership, and this is a very dangerous place if we're trying to be a servant leader because we are trying to encourage life. I just want to say that part of the job description of a servant leader for me is that we have to be those who welcome newness, who look to be surprised rather than are fearful of surprise, who look for difference rather than try to ask people to conform and to move into all those wonderful boxes of our org charts. And this is something we each need to contemplate. What is our relationship to surprise and to newness? What is our relationship to creation? That's the bigger question.

Could you give me a glass of water down there, please? Thank you.

Now the other big stumbling block of our time is not just time and our resistance to newness. It's this strange belief that we exist as individuals separated from one another. This is the dominate belief, I believe, in Western society. In Africa, in any communal or indigenous society, we see the other end of the spectrum, which is a belief only in community. But somewhere in there, there's got to be a new balance. I believe it's up to us to discover how we use our individual creativity as a gift to the whole and how we move away from this, what Einstein called, the belief in our separate existences is what Einstein called an "optical delusion." You know, I look at it. You and I could see 1,200 separate individuals or I can look out at you and try and re-see, try and remember that we are all connected. In Buddhism, in Tibetan Buddhism, the root of all suffering comes from our belief that we are not connected. The source of suffering is the believe that we are independent actors. So in... we know this in every spiritual tradition. It's just that we in the West created this great mythos that you and I exist as individuals and that the purpose of our life, the purpose of our life is to grow into who we are for ourselves and not for others. I was very struck. I was re-reading a little bit of Greenleaf's work on the plane yesterday, and I was very struck by his understanding that servant leadership starts as a feeling, a desire to serve others that then becomes a commitment to move that desire into practice, to actually take on the great courageous task of serving others. But it starts first with a desire, with a feeling. This is of course very similar in Hinduism and in Buddhism of the notion of the bodhisattva, which is, which was just recently defined to me. I love this definition: "One whose heart leaps out at human suffering and desires to help alleviate it. One whose heart leaps out." And of course, and this is the real advice. The work of being a servant leader then once one's heart has leapt out, the work is to be courageous enough to keep your heart open. And not to be so overwhelmed by insult or failure or pain or suffering that you close up your heart and walk back and say, "No. No. No. That's too much. I can't deal with this now." Certainly, one of the great struggles of right now, every week is that there is something that goes on that requires our heart to leap out and to try and connect with human suffering. If it's Littleton, if it's in Kosovo, if it's in Sudan, if it's in Nigeria, if it's in Rwanda. There are many opportunities for our hearts to leap out, but I'm personally finding that being asked so often to extend my compassion around the world makes me very tired and quite overwhelmed. And therefore, I'm more in touch with what was also described to me, and it's clearly in Greanleaf's writing. If we're going to serve other people, it takes enormous courage. It takes enormous courage to keep our heart open and to believe that we are big enough to hold that much suffering. So you have not signed up for an easy responsibility, but I don't think you signed yourself up in your heads, anyway. You signed up to explore servant leadership because you're heart leapt out at some moment towards your community or towards a fellow human being. Now that is the great gift that is given to us, that we have hearts that were willing to open and now the real courageous act is to figure out how on earth to keep them open because the world only confronts us with more suffering, not with less.

Eudora Welty had a wonderful description, she was an American Southern writer. She had a wonderful description of her work. She said, "My continuing passion is to part a curtain that invisible veil of indifference that falls between us and that blinds us to each other's presence, each other's wonder, each other's human plight." This veil of indifference is what you are about. To part this curtain, to move it back and to say in any organization, in any setting, "There is more here. There is more capability. There is more talent. There is more creativity. There is more humaneness here in these people than others have seen."

In this great myth of individualism, in this great myth of individualism, we have created a culture of people who are often selfish, who are often self-serving, who are often greedy, who are often indifferent to each other's presence, wonder or human plight. But it feels imperative for me to say that the people we are faced with now, those negative behaviors of cynicism, and anger, and withdraw, and paralysis - which are worldwide in my experience - those negative behaviors are not who we are. And it's not those negative behaviors that made your heart leap out. Whenever your heart leapt out, and you knew you needed to serve, that was a moment to recall because at that moment, you knew the truth about human nature. You knew who we are. And the motivation to be a servant leader is always, in my experience, from the recognition of who we really are. Beyond the cynicism, beyond the dependency, beyond the paralysis, beyond workers and colleagues and communities who don't know how to talk to each other anymore, beyond all of that you knew at some point that in the human being, there is enormous capacity. And you wanted to help bring that capacity forth. Now, it's interesting that I'm putting this in the past tense, isn't it? I'm struck by that right now. I'm trying to recall you to the moment when things were most clear, but obviously I'm assuming that they aren't as clear now. And it is my experience that as we set out on this journey to be a servant leader in this future that is unknown, there are so many pitfalls. There are so many black holes along the way that you can forget, "Why in God's name did I ever take this on?" And for me, the work is always to recall the clarity I had that lead me into anything. And that clarity is always a profoundly spiritual moment, of the recognition of the truth of something. And in this case, I believe that the clarity that was spiritual, the truth that you recognized was that human beings are not by nature selfish, greedy, angry or cynical. You must have seen the truth of us to be sitting here today. And even if you are not feeling the truth of who we are as a species here today, I'm asking you to recall that moment so you can bring it forward. This is who I think we are as a species. I think one of the great gifts of humanity to the planet which unfortunately we're just not demonstrating very clearly, but the great gift of who we are to the planet, it is not only that we are self-reflective, not only that we have consciousness. Those are big, but it's not all.

We are by nature, a species that seeks intimacy. There's a new book by a biologist called, The Intimacy of Love or The Biology of Love and it's his belief that the reason you and I even learn developed language was because we wanted to be together. So it's a great impulse, and this is Aberto Maturano that I'm quoting now. "The great impulse in human evolution was a desire to be together." That's what led us to figure out how to talk, how to speak, how to communicate. And then the other great desire when you see these together, you see how wonderful we are. The other great desire is that we have a need to make meaning of things. We're constantly looking. It doesn't matter who you are, unless you're dead, you constantly seek to understand why. So we have this great impulse for meaning. We have this great desire and need to be together and we have this great gift of consciousness. And it is each of those desires that are available through servant leadership and that have been denied through every repressive controlling form of leadership. If we'd been into the command and control, "I'll tell you what to do," the enormous dishonoring that's involved in that approach to leadership is something I feel acutely. And I know that other people feel that. In response to being dishonored through command and control leadership, by being put into a box, by being told what to do... in response to all of that, people become what we have now. People become angry. People become cynical. People become depressed. People become paralyzed. We created those bad behaviors we didn't recognize who we were. So much of our lives right now are leading us away from each other. The focus on individualism, the focus on careers, the focus on self-servingness, the inability to simply sit on a porch - I'm going to sound real old-fashioned here - but to sit together to notice each other's wonder, each other's presence, each other's human plight. We don't have time. And I believe that it is this focus that we don't have time, this belief we don't have time, this belief that we don't need each other, this belief that we can make it own our own, that there really is such a thing as an individual... I believe this is what is killing us.

There is a wonderful song from Nigeria that I will not sing because I can't remember the melody, but the lyric is... it's about individualism. The lyric goes, "Oh, to be an individual is a very bad thing. Ah! To be an individual is very bad thing. Oh, God! Oh, God! Please, God, don't make me an individual." So I believe that Greenleaf knew so much, was accessing so much what I would call 'internal wisdom' that if we're looking for ways of leading and the criteria of a successful servant leader is that out of those that we serve are healthier and wiser and freer and autonomous and perhaps even want... they loved our leadership so much that they want to serve others also. I believe that Greenleaf and many great spiritual teachers were simply signaling to us that we are naturally a species that wants to be together, that needs to be free, that needs to be autonomous and that needs and will naturally tend towards its own health. All of life, all of life is life affirming. All of life seeks its own health. It doesn't need us to do it and I believe more and more for people in organizations that people don't need us to make them healthy. People need us as leaders to trust that their healthfulness is in them already. And people need us as leaders to figure out the processes by which people can reconnect with each other. If you believe that the health is already there, then your task as a leader becomes figuring out how to evoke it. If you believe that the pathology is the only thing that's there, then you move into a very directive form of leadership where you're trying to fix people or give them the benefit of your wisdom. But at the fundamental level, now this comes the fourth century China, Chong Su said - and I think this is a great definition of a servant leadership. It just happens to be 2,400 years old. He said, "It is more a matter of believing the good than of seeing it as the fruit of our efforts." This is something again for you to consider. To what extent in the exercise of your own leadership are you trying to evoke, elicit, bring forth the good that you know is there? Because that's the great gift. That's the gift of... that Jesus certainly gave to us, that Mohammed gave to us, that great spiritual leaders give to us. The belief that we are good and that we can be responsible for our own healing. So much of what we do in organizations is completely counter to what I just defined as good leadership. So much of what we have defined as effective leadership in organizations is finding the program, the right training manual, the right technique and forcing people. We don't think we're forcing them, but we are. Forcing them to go through these. And it is such a dishonoring that what I notice everywhere is that people respond to it as the major that it is. "So you're telling me I have to be different? You're telling me I'm not smart enough to have created this myself? You're telling me I have to do this?" Greenleaf talked about people feeling freer and autonomous. These are natural conditions. We need to feel free. We need to feel free. To choose, to decide, to participate. We need you as leaders out there believing that there is good in us and that it's your task to figure out how do I bring it forth? I have myself been working with a definition of leadership which is right now, because people are so battered and bruised, and people feel so badly about themselves and people feel tired and so stressed and this is... Sometimes it's a terrifying time to realize the emotional and physical distress we're in as a culture right now. But I now see a leader, you, need to be the person who has more faith in people than they do in themselves. More faith in people's capacity than they do in themselves because people have lost their way. People have lost their sense of themselves. A great Tibetan teacher, Tran Paul Rein Po Shay said that "it is a dark time when people lack courage because they don't know who they are." And if we think that we are this depressed, stressed, paralyzed group of people, how on earth could we have the courage to change the world? Where would we find courage if we believed that we are such a bad group of people? So this is going back to what I was saying earlier for you as the leader to remember what you saw, the goodness that you saw in people that called you to be a servant. If you can remember that, now was the time now to raise up that vision of our goodness in your community and in your families, with your colleagues, with your employees. You are the one who must hold the vision of other people's goodness for them until they rediscover it. I feel that is also a critical need for leaders. Now, this is old stuff. I mean, we always knew that great teachers were those who saw more in us than we saw in our young selves, and I'm just saying that now the need for that is even stronger because people are so battered and bruised these days.

Now, while I've been really impressed by Greenleaf's spiritual depth, I think that that's the thing I was most impressed with last night, I realized that he's talked about how spirit emanates from within. And for those of us leading organizations now or being in organizations trying to be leaders. When we don't know what the destination is, for me, the real work is to lead from within, but not just from within you. Not from your spirits but I realized last night that when an organization has a spirit, this is not about spirituality in work. When an organization knows its spirit, it can lead itself from within just as we can lead ourselves from within as servant leaders. So then I was in the question, which I've actually been in for many years now, is... well, what's the source of organizational spirit. I'm going to assume that the need is the same whether I'm speaking of one individual or 40,000 workers. What is it that gives an organization its spirit? And it's from that center place then, that centering place of spiritual richness and energy that an organization can navigate any future, just as at an individual level we can only navigate the chaos because we know who we are. There's a wonderful description of the president of the Flexor Institute, Robert Layman. Somebody on his board or staff described his leadership in this way. They said, "He doesn't know where we're going, but he knows how to get us there." That is a great description of leadership in these times. For me, the 'how to get us there' is to make sure that as an organization we have strong awareness, strong consciousness of self. Who are we? What are we trying to do? It's... the need is to develop not a clear map that we navigate on, not a strategic plan, not a new org chart. The real work is to return to the center where our spirit emanates from. (end of side one)

... more than that. We trivialized those terms. So I want at least the imagery to be similar to how we feel about our own spiritual centers. I want it to feel that allowed and that necessary. So it's not about writing the right vision statement. It's not about putting up a beautiful piece about our mission. It's about how do we be in conversation to evoke this rich place of spirit. How can we as an organization or community be together in conversations about why we're doing this work? How can we come together to dwell in the rich territory of meaning making? Now one of my longings in the past few years is that the desire to serve others is a natural impulse and that any time people in an organization are given the chance to dwell in this deep center of meaning, they always reach out. They don't move in. They reach out. They embrace more of the world. I believe the natural direction of life is out. Love is extending, not contracting. So the natural flow in our relationships in towards each other. It just we've really, in this culture, forced people to contract, to be fearful of one another. So if the natural direction is out, to embrace, to open, to bring in more, here's a few little examples of that. And you can think about this in your own experience, especially if you're in a for-profit institution where we think this impulse doesn't matter. We think that the people who work for corporations don't care about the whole because if they cared about the whole, they'd be like those of us in non-profits who are just bearing the brunt of society's problems. But I'm finding even in the strangest industries, that when people are given the chance to write a mission statement, to talk about the purpose of their work, they've taken the world.

So here's my most recent favorite story. I have lots of them; I'll tell you two. One is that at one point I said, "You know, even if you make dog food, you want it to mean something for humanity." And there was someone who made dog food in the room at the time. I didn't know that until he came up. But he said in one of their plants they had asked employees to write their own mission statement and it began with "pets contribute to human health." Okay? They took it immediately out into the world. Now, much more recent than that, is the learning I got from Hewlett Packard's Research and Development Division which was 800 people or so who several years ago now wanted to reformulate, reorganize themselves around a stirring, you know, sense of purpose. They original sense of purpose was "We will be the best R&D facility in the world." That's a good American kind of 'we'll be number one.' They did a superb, a very participative process on describing something that took three years of really collecting people's stories and finding out what was the meaning of working at Hewlett Packard in research and development for 800 people and feeding that back to everybody. They did a lot of very creative things. But in the second year, there was a woman who stood up in one meeting and said, "I'm sorry. I just don't get charged up by becoming the best research facility in the world. But I could get a lot of energy if we were striving to become the best research facility for the world." Now, some people might have thought, "Well, isn't that cute." You know, or "Just like a woman." But here's what happened next. Her words went to another employee's heart, and he was a graphic designer for Hewlett Packard. So he went back to his shop and he created just for himself, he created a poster that captured being the best R&D facility for the world. And in this poster, it's the original founding garage, you know, every computer company started in a garage. You know that. So it's a single structure and Hewlett and Packard are standing outside the garage looking in at their new baby, their new creation. But what's inside the garage is not a computer. What's inside the garage is the planet. And it's just luminous. Now, they had 50,000 requests for that poster in a company that doesn't have that many employees. This so resonated it didn't matter about class, race, gender. This resonated because we as human beings have a desire to serve. And this is an impulse I simply encourage you to trust is there. You are not the only ones who are trying to act from a sense of spirit that is emanating from within. Most people in your community or your organization want their work to be grounded from the same sense of call, from the same ground of energy, which is purpose, spirit, service. These are natural to human beings. You can trust that. It may take you a few months to discover it in certain people because we are very bruised, but you can trust that it is what called you is an impulse that is also calling people in every form of organization. It is what calls us together as a species or as a race.

Now there's just one other thing that I want to say. I'm just recently discovered something and it was from looking up some very ancient teachings and my own experience. And it's why I love Eudora Welty's little description so much. What I'm starting to notice is that in the midst of suffering, in the midst of terrifying circumstances, in the midst of modern organization when we actually find one other, when we see one other, when we notice the humanity - each other's wonder, each other's presence, each other's plight - when we actually see each other, the experience is always one of joy. The circumstances don't seem to matter. This is the most hopeful thing thought I've been in for a long time. The circumstances don't matter. The suffering isn't what's critical. It's that the suffering might us to see one another. And in the moment when we see one other, we have a profoundly human experience which is the experience of joyous recognition.

Now, what I have found hopeful about this, and I really hope I keep believing this, but what I have found hopeful about this that it has changed what I'm looking for in my work. I'm not looking to end the ills of the world. I am not believing that by anything I do, I can eliminate human suffering. I am not believing even that it's going to get better. But I realize that if I'm on the search to really find and see human beings, that I will have the experience of a lifetime, that I will feel blessed, independent of the circumstances, I will have seen you and in seeing you, I'm going to see the Sacred. I'm going to see the Divine and that is always an experience that is joyful. Now, if that is true, that the source that sustains us, the sustenance is finding each other, then this is where as leaders we really need to rethink what we're doing because it would take us from being fixed on activities to fix things to processes that bring us together. You're real work would be - I think it already is for many of you - to figure out how to bring people together and to trust them that they will find their own healing. But the work is first finding each other. There's a little snippet of a poem by William Statford. He called this poem A Ritual To Read To One Another, and in it he starts it by saying:

If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't
know the kind of person you are, then a pattern that
others made may prevail in the world. The pattern
that others made may prevail in the world and following
the wrong god home we may miss our star.

Okay. There are many patterns out there about leadership, about people, about motivation, about human development. There are many patterns out there. The essential pattern that I'm trying to discover right now... the essential pattern is that when we are together, more becomes possible. When we are together, joy is available. In the midst of a world that is insane, that will continue to surprise us with new outrages... in the midst of that future, the gift is each other. And we have lived with a pattern that has not told us that. We have lived with a pattern with a false god that has said, "We're in it for ourselves. It's a dog-eat-dog world out there. It's nature read in truth. It's nature read in tooth and claw. Only the strong survive and you can't trust anybody." That's the pattern that's operating in most organizations if you scratch the surface. The pattern that called you to be a servant leader, the god, the "god you're following home" is actually the god of who we are as a species. We have need for each other. We have a desire for each other, and more and more I believe that if as Gary Snider said, "The real work is to stay together." We are not only the best resource to move into this future. I believe more and more we are the only resource.

Now, it's really interesting. This is my last Greenleaf thing I noticed last night. In his later work on religious leaders he changed the description of the consequences of servant leadership. He gave up the word 'autonomous' and talked about feeling at peace. That's very significant to me. It's not that we're trying to encourage people's autonomy, but when we work as servants to others, we actually in ourselves and in them, will feel more at peace. Because if anything that's peaceful for me signals that that's our natural state. So I think Greenleaf was really on to something there that I have also found strongly in my work. As we come together, as we come together, we are able to experience joy and even beyond joy we are able to experience peace. So we need to figure out how to be together. For me, that is the essential work.

I'm going to close by reading something that is in the book called Stories Of God, An Unauthorized Biography by John Shay. It's written in 1978. This is a description of our time and it's a description of I believe what our work needs to be. He wrote:

When we reach our limits, when our ordered worlds collapse, when we cannot enact our moral ideals,
when we are disenchanted it is then that we often
enter into the awareness of mystery. Our dwelling
within mystery is both menacing and promising. A
relationship with exceeding darkness and undeserved light. In this situation with this awareness we do a
distinctively human thing: we gather together and
tell stories of God. We tell stories of God to calm
our terror and hold our hope on high.

And I believe with all my heart that it is up to us to hold this hope on high through the stories we are holding of one another. Ralph Nader said that the best way to control people is to lower their expectations. And I'm saying that it is time for us to raise our expectations to these new heights which Greenleaf so beautifully sought and you have already seen. And to realize that the real work is to follow the right god home, and that the right god home is in each other. So many blessings on your journey as we move into this time of peril and hope.

Thank you very much.
It Starts With Uncertainty
Shambala Sun, November 1999
Margaret Wheatley & Pema Chodron
Margaret Wheatley: I see the essence of my work as becoming comfortable with uncertainty, which is actually a chapter title in my book, Leadership and the New Science. I came to that work initially through science, through an understanding of chaos as having a deeper order revealed in it, and as a person who had worked in organizations a lot.

I remember the great revelatory moment I had when I was writing my first book that order and control are two different phenomena. In the Western leadership tradition, we believe that order is only available through the control that we exert. But I realized that order is available through different processes that have nothing to do with our own authorship--that this world is in fact exquisitely ordered, but not necessarily for our own purposes. The Western tradition is to play God with the world, assuming that nothing happens unless we make it happen.

We feel we have no support from natural processes, no support from life, and that we can only make the world the way we want it by the force of our own effort. That's a great deception in Western thought, and it's been a hindrance in leadership practices. I like to quote Chuang-tzu, from the third century BCE, who had a very different approach to leadership. He said it's more a matter of believing the good than of seeing it as the result of our effort.

So as leaders, do we believe we are participating in a world that knows how to organize itself? Do we realize we are work-ing with people who have great reservoirs of goodness, commitment and creativity? Or do we, in the traditional Western model, feel that if there's good in the organization, it's only because of our own qualities of leadership? I have realized over time that the real role of a leader is not to control but to mid-wife-to evoke those qualities of commitment, compassion, generosity and creativity that are in all of us to start with.

It's time to drop our illusions of control and certainty, say Margaret Wheatley, author of Leadership and the New Science, and Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron. They discuss how organizations can acknowledge their confusion and trust in the goodness of the underlying order.

Pema Chodron: Meg, I was electrified by your article " Consumed By Either Fire or Fire," because while it talks about personal journey, the implications for leadership are profound. Here is the question that came up for me. You talk about the need for leaders to trust the goodness of people and not feel they have to control things. It seems to me, though, that this means the employees themselves have to have a lot of trust in their own goodness, and they have to have the inner strength that allows them not to freak out in the face of insecurity and uncertainty.

I would guess that the traditional leadership policies you're trying to change come from the fact that people are so afraid of paradox, so afraid of uncertainty. It takes a lot of bravery even to consider that uncertainty is not a threat, that in fact it's creative and powerful.

I spend a lot of time in my own teaching proclaiming that truth, and it makes me realize again and again how it comes back to the individual journey of mindfulness. It requires being able to look bravely at yourself without running away from what you see, because resting with the ugliness, the chaos and the confusion in yourself is the path to happiness and cre-ativity and flexibility.

To me, the point where people get stuck is exactly here. They have so little trust in their ability to rest with negativity and uncertainty that whenever they detect a hint of paradox or not knowing, they become afraid and do all kinds of conformist, fundamentalist things to become secure again.

Margaret Wheatley: In your book When things Fall Apart you quote Trungpa Rinpoche as saying that this is a dark time when people lose faith in themselves and so lack courage. To me, that's a very dear statement of what's going on now, because we are at a point where we feel very badly about who we are as a species. There is all this self-loathing and the messages we give each other are filled with what's wrong with us. Whether it's at the individual or organizational level, we're focused on pathology and use a lot of very negative terms to describe our experience.

Then if that self-loathing is combined with a culture that emphasizes control, it holds you accountable for making things work all the time-without failing, without feeling confused or overwhelmed by uncertainty. We hold each another accountable for achievements that are in fact impossible, because we can't pretend that chaos doesn't erupt in our lives and that we have it all figured out. We just can't pretend that. But our organizations insist on that illusion and make us feel badly for not being able to live up to it. These world views converge on us and we're left loathing ourselves and feeling overwhelmed.

"Leaders are so afraid of paradox, so afraid of uncertainty. It takes a lot of bravery even to consider that uncertainty is not a threat, that in fact it's creative and powerful. "

Yet I also know people have a clear recognition that most of us are good and want to serve others. We know compassion is available in our selves and that we will experience compassion from others. So many people are realizing that the only way to go through this increasingly crazy time is to focus on ourselves not in a narcissistic way, but understanding that the source of peace and the place to find rest is within.

Pema Chodron: The thing that intrigues me is how society and organizations can encourage the things that meditation fosters at the individual level. It was very much Trungpa Rinpoche's vision that we work at both the individual and community levels. He talked a lot about enlightened society-about creating communities that foster this trust in the goodness of human beings. We think too
small; we are confined by our beliefs, and one of the main beliefs that confines us is in our own inadequacy, our own imperfection. Before you can truly know what compassion is, you have to develop equanimity towards that which is threatening, disagreeable or fearful. Equanimity and compassion don't come from transcending these things; they come from moving closer to what scares you, threatens you, causes you to become aggressive and selfish, and so forth.

This requires a lot of courage, but I find that's a message people can accept. Interestingly, the idea of developing courage doesn't seem to trigger people's inadequacies. I think they know they have some courage. The problem is they think they're supposed to be courageous in facing the outside world, whereas what is so profoundly transformative is the courage to look at yourself. It's the courage to not give up on yourself, even though you do see your aggression, jealousy, meanness, and so on. And it turns out that in facing these things, we develop not self-denigration but compassion for our shared humanity. One of the things you ask in your article is, how did the shadow disappear in our pursuit of looking for the light? How is it that the shadow just disappeared, when things are actually so unpredictable and surprising? We have to realize that these very things are the seeds of loving-kindness towards oneself and real compassion for others.

Margaret Wheatley: One of the things I've learned from science is that what's true at one level is true at other levels. So if processes are true at the level of the individual, we are going to find they also work at the level of community, organization or nation. For example, I see these same processes at work at the national level in South Africa. Their effort to face the truth of apartheid through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been a powerful teacher to me.

The process started with the whites saying, well, we won't listen because they're going to distort the truth for their own advantage and we'll have no control over it. Instead, what happened was that as the victims of torture came forward, as mother after mother spoke about the loss of her child or husband, it became a shared national experience of listening to people's human stories. And over time it allowed the whites to see the humanity of black South Africans, to see that they experienced the same sense of loss, the same grief as they did. To see them as human was a profound shift in the national sensibility, because any form of terrible treatment such as apartheid depends on denying the humanity of the victims.

What I learned from this is that first of all we need to listen to one another's stories. We really need to acknowledge the other's experience as they present it to us, and out of that comes the possibility of a different relationship. When we are aware of the other's humanity, so much becomes possible in terms of working with each other.

Pema Chodron: This is what I have been discovering again and again. We assume that by moving closer to suffering we would spiral down, but it's amazing what a source of inspiration it is to face it together. It surprises us that the darkness is a source of inspiration.

Margaret Wheatley: The experience of facing ourselves at the individual level also helps us be together differently at a societal level. What I'm finding is that independent of any explicit spiritual basis, when people in organizations are able to tell the truth of their experience to each other, it addresses the questions of who really we are in an organization and what we are really learning. What do I feel about how this team is working, truthfully? What have I learned today about doing this project? There has been so much avoidance of being together in our humanity in our organizations that we don't ask these kinds of questions. But I find it's truly transformative when we start telling the truth to one another, including our mistakes, including our confusion. We summon something deep in all of us any time we speak together about the truth of our experience of being human. Like you, Pema, I think people want to be courageous. We really want to be more noble, and we want to speak for the things we see and the things we believe. This doesn't have to be grounded in any spiritual practice, but it always takes people there. Whether it's in a government office, a meditation center or a large corporation, whenever we can truly encounter one another in all of our humanity, we get past the illusion that everything works accord-ing to plan and we never feel uncertain. This is the great impris-onment we're trying to find our way out of, and one way to do it is to speak truthfully to one another about our experience. Then we experience a great recognition of being in the presence of other human beings. Whether it's through suffering or joy, what we're really seeking is that moment of recognizing another human being. That's always joyful in some way.

Pema Chodron: This is what I would consider a spiritual journey, although it doesn't have to have any of the religious labels. When people are courageous enough to express their experience-their inspiration as well as their disappointment and failure-that's the basis of awakening, of spiritual awakening. Of course, our experience is colored by our own take on reality.

Margaret Wheatley: Yes, until you get to the enlightened state.

Pema Chodron: But even when we're talking about the enlightened state, the path still seems to be one of waking to each moment as honestly as we can, and being willing to communicate with other people without feeling shame about exposing our defects. Because when we are willing to expose our defects, we expose some kind of heart to other people. Curiously enough, people respond more to our honesty about our imperfections than they do to our perfections. When we're honest about our difficulties with a project, or with another individual, or whatever, everyone in the room sort of resonates with the bravery of someone who's courageous enough to express their pain. It's so fascinating that that's what inspires people.

Margaret Wheatley: The experience of really listening to another human being is the source of our willingness to love them. Someone just gave me a t-shirt that says, "You can't hate someone whose story you know." That works at every level. The difficult issues in our society will not be resolved until we can listen to people's experience of things like racism and sexism-just listening without trying to defend ourselves.

"Uncertainty is more appropriate to a world that is so perplexing to us. When people hear that they relax, and what comes next is the possibility of courage."

In organizations, we're blinded to the power of honest communication because we fear it will take us down the road of guilt and accusations, that it will fracture our relationships rather than heal them. We really don't want any more meetings because all we've done for years is accuse and yell at each other, trying to push our own agenda through this very dense resistance. We can't see the power of these very simple processes that would bring us to this great place of opening to one another. Yet when we finally realize the truth of who we are, and really hear people's stories, it truly changes our capacity to be together.

The first thing that arises when we open up to each other is a great sigh of relief. We realize that we're not the only one who feels bewildered. When we hear that nobody knows the answer any more, that none of the old ways work, that we don't know what the new way is, then confusion has a higher value than certainty. Uncertainty is more appropriate to a world that is so perplexing to us. When people hear that, they relax

Pema Chodron: Because that's their experience.

Margaret Wheatley: That's their experience, so they feel confirmed. And what comes next is the possibility of courage. Instead of blaming ourselves because we're the only one who doesn't get it, we realize we're all dwelling in the confusion of modern-day life. I certainly see this in myself-I am able to trust myself more because I've had the recognition that what's called for is simply to notice how confusing and chaotic life is.

That allows the really big questions to surface. People everywhere are asking profoundly spiritual questions-about being together more with other human beings, about their lives having meaning beyond the criteria we've been given of success, money and material goods.

"We have to realize that we're not going to gain sanction from our present institutions. That's why courage is even more required. We're actually being quite revolutionary here."

I feel these questions arising from the planet in many different places as we come to the end of a world view that has led us into a particularly vacuous place. It is a world view that has kept us apart, and I'm beginning to think that how we can come together as human beings is the real question we face. In the program I took with you, Pema, you said that the root of suffering is the illusion of our separateness. That we've forgotten that we're all interrelated.

I do feel that's the root of suffering in this culture. This culture has torn us apart from one another and only supported us in our individual quests for things that are not in themselves satisfying. We're coming to the end of that now. We're realizing how empty we are, and I think we have courage to understand how far we've drifted from who we are as human beings, and to realize we can learn again how to be together.

In fact, a lot of people do know how to be together, but it's a skill that hasn't been considered important or given any status in our society. It's actually been dismissed as insignificant and soft and fuzzy. So courage is what we need, and the source of that courage is recognizing that the questions, doubts and desires that move in me move in everyone else as well.

Pema Chodron: When I think about the kind of teaching you're giving, Meg, and the Buddhist and Shambhala teachings I've been privileged to receive, I realize that if we look back--I'm sixty-three, so let's say sixty-three years ago--there were only a few people who would have been able to hear these teachings. Most people would have thought them strange and been in no way attracted to them.

Now we're seeing a vast audience of people from all backgrounds who are hungry for these kinds of teachings. The curious inspiration for this is recognition of how unpredictable our future is, which is actually encouraging courage. Something like the Y2K bug has people everywhere talking about how the future is totally unpredictable, and many of them are hearing the teaching of moving towards what scares us, of not being afraid of unpredictability. In fact, unpredictability is the norm, and as you say, it becomes a higher value than security. It's fascinating to me that the times are such that people's belief systems are actually changing. People are thinking bigger.

Of course there's also the opposite reaction, an increase in fundamentalism among those who seek refuge in certainty, but I'm more struck by the hunger for the positive message - the creative capacity of resting with unpredictability. Unpredictability and interdependence are two truths that people are more and more able to hear. Hearts are more open to the fact that life is an unending surprise.

The whole globe is shook up, so what are you going to do when things are falling apart? You're either going to become more fundamentalist and try to hold things together, or you're going to forsake the old ambitions and goals and live life as an experiment, making it up as you go along.

My question is how organizations can lead us not toward some predictable goal, but toward a greater and greater capacity to handle unpredictability, and with it, a greater capacity to love and care about other people.

Margaret Wheatley: Many of us within large organizations are awakening to the awareness that life is uncertain and that we do make it up as we go along. But these aren't the usual management principles (laughs). There are very powerful forces that have no interest in this kind of awakening. I believe that's part of the gift of being alive right now. We have a wonderful opportunity to transform our relationships and our awareness of life. It's about creating a whole new world view, and I would say, even moving beyond that to emptiness. But we have to realize that we're not going to gain sanction from our present institutions. That's why courage is even more required. We're actually being quite revolutionary here. The world is going to continue to tell people who feel this awakening that they're crazy, so we might as well realize that what we are seeking is quite revolutionary in these times. It is part of a great swelling up on the planet of a desire for transformation. I don't know if I want to say it's big work, but it feels fundamental, in the good sense of returning to the foundations that truly support us.
Consumed by Either Fire or Fire: Journeying with T.S. Eliot
Journal of Noetic Science, November 1999
Margaret Wheatley©
For too long, I have lived in the world wanting to change it. This has been an impossible stance. It intensifies normal desires to contribute something to the human condition into crusades that are doomed to disappoint. I have gradually weaned myself from this posture, I think, because it is just too exhausting and unsatisfying to maintain.

As I've traveled on this road that I made hard, I've had many essential friends. Including T.S. Eliot. I cannot avoid him. Time and again I get absorbed in the relentless weaving of paradox and imagery in Four Quartets. Many times I have used Eliot to provoke my own experience-to understand what I've learned about this work of wanting the world to be different, better. Eliot shines brilliant beams of light on the path I've been exploring. He names sensations that now lie deep in my body, sensations I experienced as I discovered how best to direct my energy and passion. Sensations that began as pain or wonder, that now sometimes sleep quietly within as wisdom gained, questions answered.

As I was reading him yet again recently, I began copying those passages that always leap out at me. Certain lines endure as an meaningful chronicle of my experience, expressed in his voice far beyond my own capacity for expression. I became engaged in a dialogue with myself (undoubtedly the easiest kind to have) about why these lines keep attracting me.

I know that we notice what we notice because of who we are. We create ourselves by what we choose to notice. Once this work of self-authorship has begun, we inhabit the world we've created. We self-seal. We don't notice anything except those things that confirm what we already think about who we already are. But I've always appreciated the thought of I. A. Richards who described a good reader as "a mind paying attention to itself." Using the terms of his field of semantics, he speaks of what meditative traditions call the observer self. When we succeed in moving outside our normal processes of self-reference and can look upon ourselves with self-awareness, then we have a chance at changing. We break the seal. We notice something new.

So I'm wondering now what newness I might notice as I go back into The Four Quartets. If I contemplate those descriptions of his world that I chose to notice, will I then see mine differently? I want to follow Eliot's lead on this journey. I want to enter the endless spiral of his paradoxes to see what I will see. And from this, I hope to enlarge the paradoxes I embrace as I draw the circle of self.

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

East Coker III

I choose to begin with this passage not because of its profound paradox, but because it begins with humor and frustration. I want to appreciate these emotions that are frequent companions of paradox. I relate to his repetition, because I find myself on many different podiums, repeating myself. 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?

I lose my patience. I wonder where all the learning is going, why it isn't showing up in new beliefs, new practices. Patience is my greatest challenge. (Well, actually, the challenge is compassion, from which patience arises.) So I try to relearn patience from the true exemplars, those spiritual teachers past and present who spend their whole ministries being repetitious. They never accuse us of being stupid or stubborn. 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 repetition is tedious. Feeling truth new and vibrant each time it is voiced. Loving people so well that giving voice energizes the speaker long past normal human endurance.

Well, maybe.

What are the truths that Eliot must keep repeating? He follows with a timeless description of the path by which truth is obtained. Pure paradox, a path that jostles us continually with its demands. A path that requires no less than the total loss of certainty and identity. "A condition of complete simplicity, (Costing not less than everything)" he says at the very end of the Quartets. The way of no ecstasy, the way of ignorance and not-knowing, the path of dispossession and the dissolution of self that opens us to life.

Many years ago when I was first beginning to write of new science, I was well-guided. In one trenchant phrase, the journey ahead was described to me as a journey "of wonder and not-knowing." I have remained clear about that, and perhaps in contradiction to Eliot, I have found that wonderment, which opens us to new truth, is often accompanied by something a bit like ecstasy. Astonishment is fun; people love the experience. Wonder seems to return us to our innocence. We enter into a state of delight-show us something else strange and preposterous so that we can laugh and exclaim. In this innocent state, we are willing to give up our self-concepts and glimpse into the unknown with new eyes. Ever since I began noticing the effects of wonder, I've tried to lead people to a place where they could encounter this astonishing world and grin with delight. If I could do that, I learned they would willingly follow me elsewhere in thought.

But the rest of the journey is just as Eliot describes it. He is, after all, repeating the paradoxes of Jesus, of Buddha, of Lao Tzu. If you would save your life, you must lose it. If you would thrive in the new world, you must dissolve your old form. Letting go is the only path to safety. Surrounded by so much truth, it's a puzzle how we ever came to deny it. Did we ever really believe we could proceed through life by growing all the time, new and improved at every turn? How did the shadow disappear from our pursuit of the light? When did we forget that "there must be opposition in all things." When did we stop acknowledging the great space for discovery that is created by the opposing poles of paradox?

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope for hope
would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without
love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
East Coker III

Eliot extends his hand and asks us to dance into the emptying stillness that truth places on our path. We cannot approach truth from who we are. We think too small. We are confined and confining in our beliefs. A few years ago, feeling imprisoned by the beliefs I was promulgating passionately to myself and to the world, I imagined creating a year-end ritual. I've never done it in all the glorious pomp and pageant I imagined, but the ritual is "The Bonfire of Beliefs." At least once a year, can I take those ideas and beliefs I most cherish and try to see the world without them? "For hope would be hope for the wrong thing. . .for love would be love of the wrong thingÉ" Give up what I believe-these truths are too small for me to perceive what I truly seek. Open to something much wilder, although that too will become tame. Do this over and over, until I ring inside from hollowness and emptied faith. Except the faith I learn in the waiting. Real faith.

We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
East Coker V

The journey is the accumulation of stillness. Patience. Emptiness. The union that I seek is not of my creation. The self I have created impedes union. Stillness must be learned, and the endless time in which I learn it is filled with doubts and desolations. Stillness often feels like abandonment. Why isn't Spirit communicating with me? What have I done to deserve such a stony, cold silence? How do I avoid filling with new terrors the emptiness that terrifies me?

Yet the wave cry and the wind cry want to fill the silence. Life is our comforter. When I stop the self-absorption, when I can pause a moment to gaze on what's around me, I experience this comfort. I feel the movement of forces that exist beyond me, but which willingly carry me with them. I don't experience nature's elemental energies of wind, movement, or mountains cast high into the sky as hostile. In that, I may be lucky-never to have been overwhelmed by gales or floods. When I lift my head into the wind, or commune with a mountain, I do so as a participant. I feel this planet as an expression of the life that moves in me and everyone. Often, Nature is my most comforting companion. She invites me to remember that I am necessary to creation.

But only if I discipline myself to stop looking inward. Only if I remember that the communion I seek is everywhere around me, waiting for me to notice its presence. It is another intensity and it cries out for us.

And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfillment.
Little Gidding I

Here is Life's great gift-unending surprise. And it's other gift-Life's inherent orderliness. We are not adrift in a purposeless universe. We are not the byproduct of a Darwinian accident that felt lucky because we were the ones to survive. I used to challenge MBA students with the question, "Do you think your life's purpose is something you create or discover?" They always wheedled out of it by answering, "Both." This may be true, but I feel that Viktor Frankl was right when he said that "meaning precedes being." I know we each have a unique contribution that is necessary for the whole of us to thrive. I know our gifts are required. I don't know where these gifts originate, but I know what they feel like. I feel joyful when I yield to their expression.

Yet Eliot cautions us about something I also know to be true. 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. After a while we find ourselves expired-we played God with our lives and lost the source of all inspiration, the breath of life.

This is a real dilemma. How do we attend to our purpose while holding the humility that we do not create it? Once we catch a glimmer of what it might be, how do we avoid taking over as creator? It gets even more complicated. How do we avoid getting ego-seduced by the specific manifestation of our gifts? Is it possible to live in the humility of knowing that our purpose, as clearly as we self-define it, is but "a husk of meaning"? The task is really to become superb listeners. Heidegger wrote that waiting, listening, was the most profound way to serve God.

Can we live into the presence of purpose, never hoping for a straightforward answer but inviting in always the great mystery that gives rise to our questions?

You are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.
Little Gidding I

To this place, listening carries us. Whatever we conceive our work to be, in the end we know that we are only, infinitely, serving the place of prayer. I used to believe my work was about organizations and life inside them. Then a bit later I thought I was charged with changing the dominant worldview of Western thought. Notice how my scope increased as my ego gained a surer footing. Then one day, in a sunny patch of jungle in the Yucatan, I leaned against a small but perfect Mayan ruin while my two sons swam in a shadowy cave pool. Faced with jungle growth and sun, and the cold stones of yet another attempt at civilization, I knew that my work was, as is everyone's, about reclaiming Life. All of us are struggling together toward a time when the human spirit can find more room for itself in the societies we create. We are all participating in enlarging the spaces in which we together dwell, so that they might hold more of the greatness of each of us.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
Little Gidding IV

I lose my breath reading this passage. Do I experience the demands of Love as an intolerable shirt of flame? I know I feel there is no escape from this path, but I don't yet know that this path leads only to fire. I do, more and more, feel as my companions those from all centuries who followed the blinding path of Love, who willingly donned the shirt of flame and wore it to their martyrdom. Recently I've been reflecting on how strange we are, my generation, to believe we can help birth a new world without it affecting our career progress. I'm aware of how little courage our lives have required of us. But Life keeps raising the stakes.

When I thought the opposition to my work was in the person of a controlling boss, it seemed I might maneuver my way past him or her. When I thought the opposition originated from a lack of evidence for how much we all benefit from inclusive, inviting workplaces, it seemed I might create change by rational argument. When I thought the work was about shifting a world view and welcoming in life's great creative capacities to our human lives, it seemed I had a lot of support from the planetary community of living beings. They were making their case-I needed merely to direct attention to what they were doing.

But Love is not satisfied by logic. It may be that we'll accomplish this latest revolution with grace, that we'll marshal the powers of non-violence and people will willingly surrender their ideas and their power because they too are tired of the violence and the impotence. But maybe not. Maybe the only route to Love is fire, or fire. I don't know this, but I do know that I have had to surrender to this as the great possibility. I have had to confront whether I am willing, if asked, to forego the life that holds me so securely and comfortably. And I don't know what I have answered, because Life hasn't yet asked me. I believe I have recognized the shirt of flame, but will I be asked to wear it?

But Eliot has moved past my question. He has put my queries to rest. He has illuminated my path and assured me of the journey. I have learned what we are engaged in and how we must be together.

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under
conditions
That seem unpropitious.
But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
East Coker V

This is the knowing that resolves paradox, that puts an end to questions. Shall I say it again? I shall say it again. We do what we are called to do because we feel called to do it. We walk silently, willingly, down the well-trodden path still lit by the fire of millions. And the rest, I know now, is not our business.
Disturb Me, Please!
The Works: Your Source to Being Fully Alive, Summer 2000
If we are people exploring the unknown, if we are to be the pioneers and discoverers of the new world, then I'd like us to notice the presence of some essential but unusual companions. One of our greatest friends on this journey of discovery is a very strange ally--disturbance. It feels important to me to highlight disturbance's role as a friend because I have come to see certainty as a curse. This was not a realization that came easily to me. I, like most of you, was raised in the traditions of Western schooling. Knowing the right answer was always rewarded. Intelligence was equated with how well I did on tests, and most tests were about knowing the right answer. Later, as a leader, I was promoted for my certainty-I had the vision, I knew how to get there, and people would follow me based on how well I radiated that certainty, how well I disguised my fears.

But everything has changed since those sweet, slow days when the world seemed knowable and predictable, when we actually knew what to do next. The growing complexity of our times makes certainty about any move or any position much more precarious. And in this networked world where information moves at the speed of light and "truth" mutates before our eyes, certainty changes and speeds off at equivalent velocity.

But in spite of these new realities, it is very difficult to surrender certainty-our positions, our beliefs, our explanations. These things lie at the core of our identity-they define us as us. Yet in this strange new world, I believe we can only succeed in understanding and influencing this world if we are able to think and work together in new ways. Our most cherished beliefs, our greatest clarity must be offered up. We won't necessarily have to let go of everything we believe and know, but we do have to be willing to let them go. We have to be interested in making our beliefs and opinions visible so that we can consciously choose them or discard them.

There's another reason that our certainty needs to be surrendered. We live in a dense and tangled global system. Inside this complex and interconnected world, everyone has a different vantage point. It is true biologically that there is no one else exactly like us. But we are less sensitive to the fact that we each see things differently. Because everyone sits in a different place in the systems of work, community, and individual lives, we will each see the world from a unique vantage point. As complexity grows, we need more colleagues, not fewer, to describe to us what they see, what it looks like from their perspective.

The very complexity of life ensures that no one person can explain what is going on to everyone else, or assume that their point of view is the right one. We can look at this complexity as a new Tower of Babel, where we can't hear each other because of so much diversity. Or we can look at it as an invitation to come together and truly listen to one another-listen with the expectation that we will hear something new and different, that we need to hear from others in order to grow and survive.

The need to relinquish our certainty lies at the heart both of modern science and ancient spirituality. From the science of Complexity, Ilya Prigogine tells us that, "The future is uncertain. . .but such uncertainty lies at the very heart of human creativity." It is uncertainty that creates the space for invention. We must let go, clear the space, leap into the void of not-knowing, if we want to discover anything new.

In Tibetan Buddhism, "the root of happiness" lies in the acceptance that life is uncertain. If we expect life to change, we have an easier time of letting go. We won't hold on quite so long to what has worked in the past, and we'll resist grasping painfully for temporary securities. Only in our relationship with uncertainty are we able to flow gracefully with life's inevitable cycles and to experience true happiness.

Every mystical spiritual tradition guides us to an encounter with Mystery, the Unknowable, the Numinous. If spirit lives in the realm of the mysterious, then certainty is what seals us off from the Divine. If we believe that there is nothing new to know about God, then we cut ourselves off from the very breath of life, the great rhythms of spirit that give rise to newness all the time.

Now why am I telling you all this? Because I believe our own need for certainty is as destructive to our human relationships as it is with the relationship we seek with the Divine. And because I believe that so much more is possible if we can be together and consciously look for the differences, those ideas and perspectives we find disturbing. Instead of sitting in a group and looking for confirmation, what is possible if we listen for disturbance? Instead of looking for safety in numbers and noting those who feel like allies or fellow travelers, what might we create if we seek to discover those whose insights are the most different from ours? What if, at least occasionally, we came together in order to change our mind?

In graduate school, I had one professor who encouraged us to notice what surprised or disturbed us. If we were surprised by some statement, it indicated we were assuming that something else was true. If we were disturbed by a comment, it indicated we held a belief contrary to that. Noticing what disturbs me has been an incredibly useful lens into my interior, deeply held beliefs. When I'm shocked at another's position, I have the opportunity to see my own position in greater clarity. When I hear myself saying "How could anyone believe something like that?!" a doorway has opened for me to see what I believe. These moments of true disturbance are great gifts. In making my beliefs visible, they allow me to consciously choose them again, or change them.

What if we were to be together and listen to each other's comments with a willingness to expose rather than to confirm our own beliefs and opinions? What if we were to willingly listen to one another with the awareness that we each see the world in unique ways? And with the expectation that I could learn something new if I listen for the differences rather than the similarities?

We have this opportunity many times in a day, everyday. What might we see, what might we learn, what might we create together, if we become this kind of listener, one who enjoys the differences and welcomes in disturbance? I know we would be delightfully startled by how much difference there is. And then we would be wonderfully comforted by how much closer we became, because every time we listen well, we move towards each other. From our new thoughts and our new companions, we would all become wiser.

It would be more fruitful to explore this strange and puzzling world if we were together. It would also be far less frightening and lonely. We would be together, brought together by our differences rather than separated by them. When we are willing to be disturbed by newness rather than clinging to our certainty, when we are willing to truly listen to someone who sees the world differently, then wonderful things happen. We learn that we don't have to agree with each other in order to explore together. There is no need to be joined together at the head, as long as we are joined together at the heart.
Maybe You Will Be The Ones: To My Sons and Their Friends
in Imagine: What America Could Be in the 21st Century. Rodale Books, June 2000
I am on Lake Powell in the Southwest United States, drifting along the borders of Utah and Arizona, thinking about America's next fifty years. I am floating in deep redrock canyons that are several hundred millions of years old. Whenever I look up from my computer, I see awesome slickrock wantonly displaying its entire evolutionary history. These rocks are here today because the beaches of ancient seas were compressed into sedimentary rock that formed into thousands of layers that were then uplifted by massive earth upheavals to form these towering red mountains, which were then carved into canyons by relentless rivers only ten million years ago. I tell you this just to keep things in perspective.

Lake Powell highlights more than evolutionary time-it was created by human imagination wedded to unwavering arrogance. In the 1950s, American engineers proceeded to dam up several canyons and rivers in order to produce electricity, create reservoirs, and develop recreational areas. Lake Powell was created by flooding Glen Canyon; next on the list to be dammed was the Grand Canyon (!). We were spared that incomprehensible act because of public outrage at the loss of Glen Canyon.

Lake Powell is a dramatic testament to the troubling American impulse to use our technology and daring to coerce nature to our own purposes, our belief that the planet is here for whatever use we can make of it. And while the redrocks of Powell speak to the planet's history of creative forces, they also alert us to the ahistoric moment we occupy now. For the first time, the consequences of our acts affect the entire planet, all peoples and all beings. As I imagine what the next fifty years might bring, I know that we either will have learned to be responsible planetary stewards of our human creativity, or have wreaked unimaginable havoc with our only home.

We have never been here before. Human imagination has given us powers unlike anything in the past. Our immediate challenge is to deal with the consequences of human imagination, and to use this special gift of the human species on behalf of all life. (But whatever happens to us, the rocks will continue their cycles of emergence and disintegration.)

Human imagination thrives in the United States; we entice everyone to our shores by its magical lure. As a nation, we have given the world many things, but our keen defense of individual freedom has allowed imagination to soar and to explore the limitless sky of human creativity. No where else have I experienced the boundless sense of possibility that is so easily available in Americans. We are the most optimistic nation on earth, and people risk everything to get here so that they might breathe in this great space of possibility.

During the next fifty years, we need to keep making this gift of human imagination available to the world. But our particular challenge as a nation is to use our creativity to embrace and support every living thing, not just a few of us. We will need to both raise and resolve this question: How will we use our gifts of human imagination? Who do we need to be?

Lake Powell is not my only companion as I think about this question. I am spending the week on a 54' houseboat with thirteen teen-age boys between the ages of 15 and 20. Lest you doubt my sanity or survivability, know that I learned a long time ago that my teen-age sons move as a clan, comfortable and happy only when surrounded by friends. This vacation was planned for the clan, not our family, and I am having a wonderful time on this houseboat in this redrock landscape tuning into life as seen by strong, creative, young American men.

The next fifty years depends on our young men and young women. In fifty years, they will be 65 to 70 years old. I expect they will not even know what "retirement" means-that concept will have long disappeared by then. This America I am trying to imagine is really theirs to create. What they do in the next five decades will be the determinant. The world they will have created by then will be the world their grandchildren inherit.

As soon as I realize that I am surrounded on this houseboat by one of the generations responsible for the future, I put aside my notes and ask if we can talk. Some are already gathered in the cabin and I ask them to tell me what they imagine for the future, when they are 65, what do they hope the world will be? Within minutes of beginning this conversation, other boys flock in, and soon all thirteen teen-agers are gathered around. For the next hour I just listen to them, honored that they want to be in this conversation with me. I revel in how intent they are, how no one drifts out of the room, how much they love being asked their views on something this big and important, how most of them have very strong views about the future, how they're in this conversation with each other, not just me.

This is what I hear them say: They want less hate. They fear for the planet. They want robots to do dull work. They want schools to stop being so awful. They expect pure (electronic) democracy by then. They want to stop violence. They want to stop being desensitized by the media to violence, suffering, warfare. They want families, they want to be loving, supportive parents. They want to stop taking America for granted.

I ask them what do you hope for? They reply: I want to know I've given my best, no matter what. I want a lot less negativity. I want the Second Coming of Christ. I want to know that I have encouraged another human being. I want children. I'm afraid to have children. I want something to happen that will unite us as humans-maybe this will happen if we make contact with extraterrestrials. I want to end the greed of corporations. I want to teach my family good values. I believe one person can make a difference, like Gandhi did. I don't think one person can do anything. I want us to stop being hypocrites and to take responsibility for our own behavior.

Who are these children, these thirteen beings camped in a houseboat among ancient redrocks looking into the future they will help create? They are wonderfully American-among these thirteen is one South African immigrant, one first generation American with parents from Argentina and the Cherokee and Chickasaw nations, many of northern and southern European descent, one with Choctaw nation ancestors, and one descendent of U.S. General and President, Ulysses S. Grant. President Grant's descendent has had a very difficult life and is in foster care; many of the others (including my two sons) are children of divorce. Socioeconomic status ranges from struggling to make ends meet to easy affluence.

And they are representative of America in other ways. We all agree that we are living the American paradox. We know the things we do are destructive to the planet, or use too many of the world's resources, and yet we can't stop living the life we live. We want to help the environment, but every day of this vacation, we're burning up thirty gallons of carbon-based fuels to play on our jet skis. We want a world that works for all, but we willingly consume far too much of the world's resources as evident in our daily three bags of garbage. We know that the Earth is running out of critical resources such as water, but we ourselves run out of water on the boat because we don't appropriately monitor our usage. We want everyone in this world to enjoy a better life, but we can't stop ourselves from living the good life which we know is destructive to others.

One other thing I notice about them, not only in this conversation, is the quality of their relationships. Instead of the anticipated contesting, competing, and generally-expected macho behavior, I observe consistent levels of support and concern. When one young man freezes on a cliff, paralyzed by vertigo, three others work with him patiently and lovingly to help him down. Vertigo strikes him a second time on another hike, and again I witness an intense desire to help him. These incidents are never brought up, never thrown in his face.

And they don't even notice how different they are from earlier generations when competition kept us separate from each other. At night, they sit on the roof of the boat and write music together. There's no sense of individual ownership. One person develops a musical theme, others chime in with their instruments, and the banter back and forth is playful, excited, complementary to each other.

They love to create together-I watch them composing together, coaching each other, teaching each other, admiring each other's talents. I admire their talents also. One is a genius at creating websites; several are musicians; two are writers; four of them play high school football and are strong athletes. All in all they are funny, talented, and astonishingly convivial-with me, each other, and any adults who will pause to talk with them.

These young people not only care about each other; I am surprised by their sensitivity to human psychology. They seem to know what's going on at deeper levels; they use this awareness to explain each other's motivation--why any one is doing what he's doing. When any two start arguing or get angry at each other, there are others who step forward to help them work it out. I'm amazed at how well they process things-listening to all sides, figuring out ways to move into new behaviors, creating compromises. They are far more skilled than many adults I know.

Most of these children are embodiments of American optimism-they believe in themselves, each other, and the future. But surprisingly, they do not seem to act from the same fierce nationalism that has plagued many earlier generations, including mine. Their hearts are more wide open. The world they know is much smaller than the one I grew up in. They are connected to children all over the world through a global teen culture of music, movies, and sports. Many of us have (quite rightly) decried the loss of local cultures and the Americanization of the planet, but when I observe how easily my sons talk with teens they meet in Brazil or Zimbabwe or Europe, I realize something good is happening as well. They don't have the concept of "foreigner." Their world isn't filled with strangers-they can instantly talk about a musician or a movie and have an energetic conversation where cultural differences dissolve. They live in a world that feels connected, not Americanized. It is impossible to motivate them by calling for traditional patriotism.

In the fifty years these children have to create something new, they can't create anything but a networked, boundaryless world. My generation has tossed these words around, but these kids live it. Even when they develop into "tight" groups, cliques, and gangs, they know there's a very big world out there that is as close as their music, TV, or computer screen.

So are my boat companions a "normal" group of teen-agers, those to whom I have entrusted America's and the planet's future? I hope so. I think these kids are quite typical, and I feel extraordinarily privileged to have lived with them so intimately for six days. Here is what I want to say to them. Thank you for letting me see you.

Thank you for being people that it's fun to be with, to think with, to dream with. Thank you above all for not taking at face value what my generation has believed and tried so hard to teach you. We would have you believe that the world is ruled by competition, that only the strong survive, that you must look out always and only for yourself, that to survive in this world you must practice deceit, greed, selfishness, and violence. We haven't taught you about honor, sustainability, community, or compassion. We failed to show you how to be wise stewards of the earth, how to care for one another, how to resolve conflicts peacefully, how to enjoy others' creativity as well as your own.

Yet miraculously, you are learning these things! These more humane capacities have captured your attention, more than our incessant messages to the contrary. Maybe you're reacting to watching your parents compulsive pursuit of self-interest and individualism. Maybe you're expressing the fundamental need of humans to be together. (As a species, for eons we humans have struggled to live together more than we have fought to be apart.)

I am excited that you seem to be figuring it out for yourself. I only want to encourage you in the direction you're already moving. If you pay attention to certain strengths you already have, then I believe that the future we talked about is truly possible.

Here is one strength I see. You know how to enjoy each other's gifts. You don't feel diminished by each other's talents. You take delight if one of you is a great guitarist, one writes terrific songs, one doesn't like music but loves computers, one plays sports, one plays computer games. You don't need to be alike. You seem to know that your diverse talents are your collective strength. I love how you revel in your diversity-this is something that other generations never figured out. If you keep reveling in how individual uniqueness adds to your collective ability, you will have moved past one of the most troubling issues of this time, this year 2000 when there are more than sixty wars going on in only 230 nations. Maybe you will be the ones to help all humans take the leap into the great gift of human diversity.

Another strength. You need each other. I believe we adults have inadvertently helped you here-we have ignored you, denied you, seen you as a problem. You learned to stay together because other generations couldn't or wouldn't invite you to join them. You learned to support each other when older people withdrew from you. (Outside of Columbine High School, you huddled in each others arms, guiding each other into sudden adulthood in a world where violence was random, but did make sense.)

I believe you understand more about the terrors of separation than I do-you experience so much violence, so much stereotyping, so much exclusion, that you must know that feeling separate does terrible things to the human spirit. I hope you can carry that awareness with you into adulthood-I hope you are the ones that hold onto each other and refuse to move into the competitive space of feeling better than, feeling different from, feeling holier than. To succeed where all we others have failed, you will have to hold onto your present sense of outrage over exclusion, and turn that anger into compassion. You will have to keep your hearts open rather than contract them. You will have to help rather than judge the kids all around you who choose to protect themselves by forming exclusionary groups. I hope you remember, as you said on the boat, that "you can't solve violence with more violence."

Another strength. You love creating and you claim that freedom. You do not tolerate nearly as much confinement, rules, repressive structures as I and your parents did. You walk away from disrespectful employers, boring work, uninteresting activities. As parents, we have been quick to criticize you-we fear you have no work ethic, no standards, no values. But you make me hopeful, because your refusal to conform and comply might save you from being diminished. I see you standing up for who you are, I see you reclaiming the freedom and respect that every human spirit requires if it is to flourish. If you are successful here, you will have claimed a future where many more people feel welcome to offer their unique creative gifts.

Here is something I'm not sure you know. These three strengths must work together. Things go terribly wrong when only one is emphasized. Many generations and civilizations have failed because they supported only one of these essential aspects of human nature. In America, we have fought to develop and sustain individual freedom, and we have ended up with a litigious society where everyone knows their "rights", but few know how to be in community. Many indigenous cultures honor the diversity of individual gifts, but hold those gifts as belonging to the community. Individuals are not free to express themselves as they might want; they are there to serve the community, not themselves. Many societies know the human need to be together, but they build up their collective by separating themselves, drawing hard barriers between themselves and others. This is the world you grew up in, a world populated by enemies and strangers, where ethnic wars, genocides, and border conflicts predominate.

And now it's your turn to experiment with the mystery of human society. What will be its next form? You may be the ones who learn how to weave these three strengths together, a swirling spiral of our unique gifts, our desire for community, and our need for individual freedom. If you figure this out, we will move forward as a planetary community where people experience what it means to be fully human. I believe this is the next evolutionary leap of our species-how to take our diversity, our personal freedom and our creativity, and use it to create a planetary community where all life can flourish. No generation before you has figured this out, but we've chronicled our experiences and they are there to help you.

None of these three human strengths is particular to Americans--they are common human longings-but because you are maturing in America, you have the gift of freedom and opportunity to explore them, to observe them, to learn from others. In that way you are unique, and if you succeed, you will be creating a new world for all, not just for Americans. And I know you already know that.

In fifty years, maybe you'll be back on Lake Powell, being with the redrocks. If the lake is still here functioning as a healthy ecosystem, that will be the first sign that you have succeeded. And if you are still friends who want to be together, that will be the sign that you have truly succeeded.

You may be the ones. I pray that you are.


This article was written for Imagine: What America Could be in the 21st Century (Rodale Books, 2000), a collection of original essays from leading authors, academics, and activists on their visions of a better America, and what can be done to turn these visions into reality. Imagine, which was edited by Marianne Williamson, will be available this November wherever books are sold. All author proceeds go to the Global Renaissance Alliance, a nonprofit network of citizen groups interested in spiritual-based activism.
Turning to One Another
Keynote Address: Kansas Health Foundation 2000 Leadership Institute, Spring 2000
"At some time in your life," Dr. Wheatley said in her keynote address launching the Kansas Health Foundation's 2000 Leadership Institute, "your heart leapt out and you had no choice but to work with children." As the audience nodded its agreement, Dr. Wheatley observed that trying to act on this choice has become very problematic. Her remarks, she said, would address this issue by suggesting how to effectively organize our compassion.

In the past, our compassion has been organized into separate, specific programs, each tackling a different issue. Showing a typical organization chart, Dr. Wheatley described the ways a compassionate impulse tends to be organized: one agency to take care of single mothers, another for children with disabilities, and so on.

This approach can be found in many different sectors. For example, Dr. Wheatley described getting lost recently driving to an appointment in a vast medical campus. Within a mile, she drove by a cardiac care unit, a spinal center, a hand center, and a kidney center. Each organ and limb seemed to have its own building, bringing home to Dr. Wheatley the many ways in which complex problems are divided into specific responsibilities. This approach pays little or no attention to the whole entity or to the connections among these seemingly separate parts.

Another current example is the proliferation of relief agencies in Kosovo, now numbering 480. The presence of so many relief agencies springs from compassion for the plight of the refugees in Kosovo, and yet these separate efforts have unintended and unwelcome consequences. For example, Dr. Wheatley explained, local food prices have escalated as the various relief agencies have purchased food for their many workers in local markets, placing these items out of reach of local residents. Now, relief agencies are importing food to feed local citizens - in response to a problem to which they themselves contributed. "You would all have a story of equal craziness," Dr. Wheatley observed, again drawing nods of agreement and rueful smiles from the audience, "where in attempting to help, you created some problem you never thought of, some unintended consequence."


Coming Together

Just as our body parts cannot be separated into heart, lung, and hand buildings, Dr. Wheatley said, the concerns of the populations we are trying to serve cannot be separated. "We can't continue to believe that you can best give your gift - your compassion - to children by being in this kind of structure," she said. Instead, people are realizing that we must re-weave connections and come back together.

"Does the agency, organization, or system you are in allow you to deliver as much compassion as you want?" Dr. Wheatley asked. "I would bet the answer is no." Indeed, she said, people in all types of work tend to enter their field with some type of dream - a sense of hope that by their labor, they will contribute to the benefit of some group in society. Citing examples as diverse as workers in dog food manufacturing plants and high technology research labs, Dr. Wheatley suggested that most of us really do want to work for each other. "It's in us, in everybody," she said. "It may be buried, but it is in us."

Dr. Wheatley asked the Leadership Institute participants to call out their dreams of what they might accomplish, at the time they took on their current professional positions. Responses included making a difference on behalf of the business community, improving child care quality, energizing good teachers, and integrating young people back into the community. Dr. Wheatley pointed out that no one mentioned fame or fortune. Instead, she said, "what brings you together is your compassion -- your dream of how to make a difference for good.


" Learning from the Flowers

Dr. Wheatley read a poem by Gary Snyder, For the Children:

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.
To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

- Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island

The poem, written in the 1960s, anticipated the 21st century very well, in Dr. Wheatley's opinion. "Most poets and artists," she noted, "have a 30-year leap on us. They see what's coming."

In contrast to the poem, Dr. Wheatley said, we have tended to think of ourselves as machines. Like the medical center buildings, we have ripped ourselves into parts because the imagery of machines suggests that if we take out one malfunctioning part out and fix it, we can fix the entire machine. "The imagery of the machine," Dr. Wheatley explained, "says that if there's a problem, you can isolate it and replace it and everything will work well." We do this all the time in organizations, she continued. When something goes awry in an organization, we look for someone to blame - a board member, a law, a team, a department. This approach usually does not work, but it does have a silver lining: it forces us to become aware of all the other parts. In other words, it forces us to become systems thinkers.

Dr. Wheatley then showed a complicated chart, ironically titled "Emerging Regional Integrated Network: A Simplified Example." Indeed, Dr. Wheatley noted, if any of us tried to chart the people we call, the networks and individuals that influence us, it would look similarly messy and complex. "This is the world we're all trying to make sense of," she said, "trying to deliver our compassion."

It is no longer enough to simply say that relationships are important. A good part of effective work, Dr. Wheatley said, is knowing exactly who is in each box on such a chart. As former American Red Cross President Elizabeth Dole put it, "When the river is rising and it's 2:00 a.m., that's not the time to start a relationship." The relationship has to be there first. "If you don't have the web or fabric of good, trusting relationships," Dr. Wheatley said, "You can't suddenly pick up the phone and say, 'I need you.'"

"Relationships are not only primary, but are the only way we can operate now," she concluded.


Passion First; Structure Later

Dr. Wheatley quoted essayist Roger Rosenblatt:
"The best in art and life comes from a center - something urgent and powerful, an idea or emotion that insists on its being. From that insistence, a shape emerges and creates its structure out of passion. If you begin with a structure, you have to make up the passion, and that's very hard to do."

Dr. Wheatley pointed out that this is exactly the opposite of what most of us have been taught. Our failures, she believes, stem from our inability to understand this process. Usually, Dr. Wheatley suggested, we sit alone or perhaps with a small group and create something - a program, a response, a new policy, a statement. Our passion is in it; we know it is important for our agency and we devote our best efforts to it. Then what happens? We take the finished product and give it to a colleague. Instead of kudos, enthusiasm, and action, we are met with indifference, at best. "We don't pick up other people's work and express gratitude," Dr. Wheatley explained, "not because we're selfish and uncreative or don't have good work ethics. It's because we are creative individuals and as a precept for all life - not just humans - we will only support what we create."

This is the same point that Roger Rosenblatt made. We can't expect to create structure first, and then pour people's passion into it. Yet we do this all the time. We call it getting buy-in, enrolling people, selling to the board of directors. "The best in art and life starts from your passion," Dr. Wheatley said, "but instantly welcomes in other people's passion." Out of that passion, she continued, a structure will emerge - but it starts first and foremost with people coming together and sharing their concerns.


The Power of Conversation

Dr. Wheatley described several examples of structure following passion. One was the story of a friend whose determination to help a Vietnamese orphanage began with a phone call to hospitals in search of an incubator. This quest mushroomed, within a matter of weeks, into a shipment of four 40-foot containers of medical equipment to Vietnam - including not one but 12 incubators.

The history of social movements is full of similar examples, Dr. Wheatley observed. Poland's powerful labor movement, Solidarity, began with only 9 people and grew to 9 million people within 3 weeks - and that was before e-mail. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) grew from an individual mother's grief to a national movement. "We completely underestimate the power of human conversation to change the world," Dr. Wheatley said.

Margaret Mead's famous quote is repeated often, Dr. Wheatley said, because it is so true:
"Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has."

For Dr. Wheatley, this is one of the messages of Gary Snyder's advice to learn the flowers. "One of the things we need to learn," she said, "is that very great change starts from very small conversations, held among people who care." But talking about what really matters - the issues that really concern you - requires courage. "Forget about the politics or the staff person who is driving you crazy," Dr. Wheatley advised. "What are the things you really have deep, abiding concern for? What is it you really have some passion for? If you go into that question for yourself, you will find the energy to go forward." The conversation should not be based on complaint, Dr. Wheatley added, but should be based on both passion and a sense of hope.


Asking "What's Possible?" and "Who Cares?"

In most organizations, we are trained to ask, "What's wrong?" and "How can we fix it?" This is a demoralizing process, and a typical one. Instead, Dr. Wheatley said, she has learned to ask two very different questions: "What's possible here?" and "Who cares?" When we ask "Who cares?", we invite in others who are also passionate about an issue. And when we ask "What's possible?", it opens us up to unprecedented creativity. Dr. Wheatley's friend searching for an incubator to send to Vietnam did not hang up the phone when the first hospital she called said it had no extra incubators to donate. Instead, by asking "What's possible here?", she was able to secure other medical equipment that was useful to the orphanage staff. This openness, in turn, led to a much broader contribution than a single incubator - and, ultimately, to the structure to support that contribution.


The Future, Waiting to be Born

"You're trying to deliver your compassion, which knows no bounds, but are trying to deliver it within a very bounded society," Dr. Wheatley pointed out, sympathetically. Despite these obstacles, she noted that finding new ways of delivering our compassion is up to each of us. "You can do that any time you extend past your organizational boundary and ask someone else in. Collaborate around passion, not around fixed policy," she suggested, by asking the revolutionary but absolutely necessary questions: "What's possible?" and "Who cares?"

In closing, Dr. Wheatley offered a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, written over a century ago:

You must give birth
to your images.

Fear not the
strangeness you feel.

The future must enter
you...

Long before it
happens.

"Every time your heart leaps out and you want to serve better," Dr. Wheatley concluded, "that's the future, speaking through you."
Bringing Schools Back to Life: Schools as Living Systems
in Creating Successful School Systems: Voices from the university, the field, and the community. Christopher-Gordon Publishers, September 1999
We speak so easily these days of systems -- systems thinking, systems change, connectivity, networks. Yet in my experience, we really don't know what these terms mean, or their implications for our work. We don't yet know how to act or think about this new interconnected world of systems we've created. Those of us educated in Western culture learned to think and manage a world that was anything but systemic or interconnected. It was a world of separations and clear boundaries: boxes described jobs, lines charted relationships and accountabilities, roles and policies described the limits of what each individual did and who we wanted them to be. Western culture became very skilled at describing the world with these strange, unnatural separations.
We also believed that by using these approaches, we could control everything. From manipulating the weather to stopping aging and death, we have hoped that science would eventually give us complete power over life and all its processes. At the organizational level, we have striven for a similar level of control. We want to be able to make people, communities, and entire organizations act according to our plans and directives. We want strong, take-charge leaders who know exactly what's going on, have all the answers, and who inspire us with their vision. If only we could find such a leader, we say that we would do whatever we were told.
By now, most of us have been in organizations and lives that have revealed to us the foolishness of these assumptions. No matter how well we plan, how carefully we analyze a situation, or how strong a leader we find, we don't succeed nearly as often as we need to. We put more and more effort into planning and leadership approaches that seem only to lead us farther and farther away from our goals and aspirations. We have suffered from the unending fads that, like great tidal waves, crash down on our schools, creating more destruction than growth. As the most recent wave recedes, we look over our organizations and see debris scattered everywhere-relationships torn apart, survivors struggling to come up for air, ideas and plans tossed askew.
In corporations, fads have failed in exactly the same manner, creating great wreckage. Corporations are no better than any other sector at knowing how to create needed changes, even though we still look to them for the next new idea. It's usually shocking for those in education to realize that not only schools are failing miserably, but so is every major institutional form, whether public or private, for profit or for public benefit. In recent years, many corporate CEOs have reported that up to 75% of their major change initiatives failed to create the results promised. This is a startling record of failures-how many of us in education would garner support for a project or curriculum that was successful only 25% of the time?
I. We need to shift our worldview
So what are we to do? Is there any source that can teach us how to create change in these large and complex systems we've created? Many years ago, Joel Barker popularized the notion of paradigms or worldviews, those beliefs and assumptions through which we see the world and explain how it works. He stated that when something is impossible to achieve with one paradigm or worldview, it can be surprisingly easy to accomplish with a new worldview. In my own work, I have found this to be delightfully true. For several years, my partner, Myron Kellner-Rogers and I have been looking at organizations through the lens of living systems, rather than the traditional one of organizations as machines. Machine thinking has been the dominant paradigm of western culture and science for over three hundred years. Almost all approaches to management and organizational change have used mechanistic images. We build organizations piece by piece, engineering them for efficiency, detailing ahead of time who will do what and how the organization will respond. We believe in simple cause and effect, and that it is possible to fix any problem by identifying the faulty part (or person). As soon as we replace that one errant part, everything will work fine.
But this 21st century world of complexity and turbulence is no place for the mechanistic thinking of the past. We are confronted daily by events and outcomes that surprise us. Nothing moves slowly enough for us to make sense of the world using any analytic process we were taught. And the complexity of modern systems cannot be understood by separating issues into neat boxes and diagrams. In a complex system, it is impossible to find simple causes that explain our problems, or to know who to blame. A messy tangle of relationships has given rise to these unending crises. We need a different worldview to guide us in this new world of continuous change and intimately connected systems that reach around the globe.
Fortunately, we live inside a daily demonstration of the capacity of complex systems to change, flex, and grow in effectiveness. For four to five billion years, life has been developing its infinite variety. Life continues to startle scientists with its diversity and resiliency, showing up in the coldest and hottest habitats, places where science thought no life could ever exist. Myron's and my work has benefited immensely from studying the processes by which living systems form, adapt, and sustain themselves. We have found life to be a rich source of ideas and wisdom for how we humans can approach the challenge of creating schools or any complex system that has the capacity to grow and change yet remain purposeful and effective over time.
In life, systems are a naturally occurring phenomenon. All life organizes into networks, not neat boxes or hierarchies. Wherever you look in the natural world, you find only networks, not org charts. These networks are always incredibly messy, dense, tangled, and extraordinarily effective at creating greater sustainability for all who participate in them. All living systems are webs of relations spun into existence as individuals realize that there is more benefit available to them if they create relationships than if they stay locked in narrow boundaries of self-interest. Unending processes of collaboration and symbiosis characterize life. These relationships of mutual benefit lead to the creation of systems that are more supportive and protective of individuals than if they had tried to live alone. It's important to remember that nothing living lives alone. Life always and only organizes as systems of interdependency.
Until the advent of western ideas originating in the 17th century, almost all human thought and spiritual traditions had described life in terms of interdependency and connectedness. But the machine imagery that has grown in strength for three hundred years has succeeded in creating modern society with an entirely different imagery. Dense webs of connections have been replaced with pre-designed organization charts that neatly detail who should be connected to whom. And we quickly forgot that life knows how to organize itself, that organization also is a naturally occurring phenomenon. We stopped seeing life Ôs great capacity for self-organization and came to believe that if we didn't do the organizing, then nothing would get done. Without us, there would be disastrous chaos. In western culture, we gradually came to believe that without our efforts, everything would fall apart, and we lost sight of the many processes by which life gives birth to order. In our blindness, we developed processes that failed to work with life, and as a result, we have been unsuccessful in learning how to work well in this changing and evolving universe. It's ironic to notice how our many attempts to impose order have created just the opposite effect, more disorder. And our continuing failures at trying to change people and organizations are teaching us that our mechanistic approaches are truly flawed.
It is time to wake up to the fact that we live in an interconnected world, embedded in a fabric of relationships that requires us to pay attention to the dynamics of systems, not isolated individuals, buildings, or events. As we try now to leave behind our rusting machine-image concepts of organization, it is a relief to notice that we are surrounded by great teachers-not management experts or texts or fads-but life itself, the natural world which is adept at change, unfathomably complex, and filled with systems that support increasing diversity.
I'd like to share a few of the change principles evident in living systems, and then describe ways to use these in organizational change efforts.
II. How life self-organizes and changes
A living system forms itself as it recognizes shared interests.
Although systems are naturally occurring, they do not form at random. A living system forms itself as it recognizes shared interests. A system is created when individuals realize they have neighbors, and that they would do better to figure out how to live together than to try and destroy each another. Thus, systems form through collaboration, from a realization that you need another in order to maintain your life. If you think you can make it on your own, or that you don't need your neighbor, why would you bother to struggle to find ways that are mutually supportive? The recognition that individuals need each other lies at the heart of every system. From that realization, individuals reach out, and seemingly divergent self-interests develop into a system of interdependency.
At the human level, with our great need for relationships and meaningful lives, systems are similarly created. We seek to connect with and work with those whose self-interest seems to include our self-interest. We affiliate with those who share a similar sense of what is important. When you apply this dynamic to public education, it instantly reveals a major dilemma. Is a school system really a system? Systems are never just a result of geography, and it isn't district lines drawn on paper that creates a school system. Systems arise, they take form because people choose to affiliate together, because they realize that in order to get what is important to them, they must extend themselves and work with others.
But in public education, how many members of a geographically-determined school district share a core of beliefs about the purposes of education? Most districts contain a wide spectrum of beliefs about the role of education. There are those who believe that education should support the talented elite, which includes their child. Those who view education as the foundation of a pluralistic society where education should open doors for all. Those who believe in a rich life of the mind. Those who want their children taught only the values of their parents or church.
The startling conclusion is that most school systems aren't systems. They are only boundary lines drawn by somebody, somewhere. They are not systems because they do not arise from a core of shared beliefs about the purpose of public education. In the absence of shared beliefs and desires, people are not motivated to seek out one another and develop relationships. Instead, they co-inhabit the same organizational and community space without weaving together mutually sustaining relationships. They co-exist by defining clear boundaries, creating respectful and disrespectful distances, developing self-protective behaviors, and using power politics to get what they want.
Yet everyone who participates in a school district is a living being, responding to the same dynamics that characterize all other life. Within the artificial boundary lines and well-defended territories, people are self-organizing into real systems, reaching out to network with those who share similar beliefs or aspirations. (This dynamic is clearly evident in the Charter school movement.) Many small systems are created within the artificial system of a district. It is these real systems that become instantly visible when we try to change the artificial one. They often startle us with the ferocity by which they confront and impede our efforts. But it is these real systems we must work with, and the dynamics that give them birth, if we want to affect change.
For change to occur, there must be a change in meaning.
People, like all life, only change when they allow an event or information to disturb them into voluntarily letting go of their present beliefs and developing a new interpretation. Nothing living changes until it interprets things differently. Change occurs when we let go of our certainty-our beliefs and assumptions-and willingly create a new understanding of what's going on.
Here's what the process of change looks like in a living system. (As you read this, you might compare and contrast it to the organizational change processes you've experienced.) Someone in the system notices something (the system is defined by shared meaning, not size, so for human systems it could be a team of two, a school, a community, an ethnic group within a nation state.) What they notice might be in a memo, a chance comment, a news report. The source doesn't matter; what is important is that a member of the system chooses to be disturbed. "Chooses" is the important word here because the freedom to be disturbed belongs to the individual. If that individual freely chooses to take notice, he/she brings the information into their system and circulates it through its networks.
Once inside these dense webs of relationships, an initially small disturbance circulates rapidly and grows as it is passed back and forth. As different parts of the system hear of it, interpret it, and change it, the disturbance grows and mutates. It becomes quite distorted from the original information, but as it circulates, it develops greater meaning. If it keeps travelling in the network, it finally becomes so important that it cannot be ignored. The whole system now sits up and takes notice. We've all had this experience, probably many times. A casual or offhanded comment tossed out in a meeting gets picked up by someone in the organization, and suddenly we're in the midst of a firestorm of opinions, emotions, and rumors. Or something distressing happens in a school that is so disturbing that everyone wakes up to the realization that things are not as they seemed.
At this point, when the disturbance has swelled to great intensity, change is at hand. The system has been knocked completely off-balance; it can't make sense of the disturbance by relying on past practice or beliefs. This point of disequilibrium is the point when change is finally possible. The system can no longer avoid the need to let go of its current beliefs, structures, patterns, values. It must abandon the meaning it used to construct its world. It plunges into a state of confusion and uncertainty, of chaos, (a state that always feels terrible.) But because it falls apart, the system now is capable of reorganizing itself into a new mode of being. It is changing because it understands the world differently. It reorganizes itself from new interpretations, new meaning. It re-creates itself from new understandings of what's important. For change to occur, there must be a change in meaning.
Every living system is free to choose whether it will change or not.
It is impossible to coerce a living system to change in any direction but the one it chooses for itself. We never succeed in directing or telling people how they must change. We can't succeed by handing them a plan, or pestering them with our interpretations, or relentlessly pressing forward with our agenda, believing that volume and intensity will convince them to see it our way. One of the essential and elemental characteristics of all life is freedom, the freedom to see the world and interpret things as the individual chooses. It doesn't matter whether it's bacteria or humans, the freedom to self-determine is intrinsic to all life. You can't boss life around, no matter how small it is. You can scream and holler as much as you want, but if it doesn't regard what you're saying as important, the organism will just ignore you and go on with it's own life. (In this way, all life behaves like teen-agers.) All change is voluntary, both in direction and timing. It is always initiated by the individual by its own choice.
We always exercise this freedom on behalf of our selves. We choose what to notice and how to respond based on what we think will help us. We are striving all the time to maintain and preserve our identity, who we are, who we want to be. This process is called self-reference-we interpret the world through who we are. Although much of our behavior is habitual and unconscious, these patterns of behavior always originate from a belief that by doing this, or not doing that, we will best support ourselves. We choose to do what we do because we believe it is the best way to maintain the self that we think we are.
Everything alive interprets its world through its self, and must be free to determine its own responses. It is impossible to impose anything on life. Every living being must participate in anything that affects it. We can't act on behalf of any individual or group of people. Nobody can figure out what's best for somebody else. If leaders or task forces refuse to believe this, and go ahead and make plans for us, we don't ever just sit by passively and do what we're told. We still get involved. But we then act from the sidelines, from wherever we've been told to sit and wait. We exercise our need for involvement through ignoring, resisting, or sabotaging all plans and directives that are imposed on us.
One school superintendent reported wryly how he learned that his committee approach to curriculum development wasn't working. Every summer, he would appoint a group of four or five teachers from each discipline to develop materials for the coming year. He was pleased with their products and often commented on their creativity. Sometime during the late autumn, as the superintendent made site visits, he would ask teachers how they liked the new materials. It took him too many years, he said, to realize that the only teachers using the materials were those members of the committee that had created them.
This is not an unusual experience for any of us. How many strategic plans, policy manuals, and curricula materials collect dust on our shelves because we were not involved in their creation? Confronted by so much evidence, we could have learned long ago what life always teaches us: People only support what they create. We must always participate in the development of those things which affect us.
To create a healthier system, connect it to more of itself.
Living systems contain their own solutions. When they are suffering in any way-from divisive relationships, from lack of information, from declining performance-the solution is always to bring the system together so that it can learn more about itself from itself. Somewhere in the system there are people who have already figured out how to resolve this problem. They are already practicing what others think is impossible. Or they possess information which, if known more widely, would help many others. Or as a particular group that has been negatively labeled or stereotyped, they are far more capable than anyone knows.
To make a system healthier, we need simply to connect it to more of itself. This means meeting together with those we have excluded or avoided, those we never dreamed were part of our system of shared interest. Most often, people deep inside a school building don't realize how many others-parents, community employers, public officials-feel connected to them. When those who have been excluded to the periphery get to meet with those inside the system, it is always a wonderful surprise to everyone to see how much they share in common and how many of them want the same thing.
It is crucial to remember that, in organizations, we are working with webs of relations, not with machines. Once we recognize organizations as webs, there is a lot to be learned about organizational change from contemplating spider webs. Most of us have had the experience of touching a spider web, feeling its resiliency, noticing how slight pressure in one area jiggles the entire web. If a web breaks and needs repair, the spider doesn't cut out a piece, terminate it, or tear the entire web apart and reorganize it. She reweaves it, using the silken relationships that are already there, creating stronger connections across the weakened spaces.
At this time in our history, we are in great need of processes that can help us weave ourselves back together. We've lost confidence in our great human capabilities, partly because we've been using organizational processes that have treated us as machines. We've ended up separated and divided, fearful and distrusting of one another. We need processes to help us reweave connections, to discover shared interests, to listen to one another's stories and dreams. We need processes that take advantage of our natural ability to network, to communicate when something is meaningful to us. We need processes that invite us to participate, that honor our creativity and commitment to the organization.
Principles for how life self-organizes and changes
• A living system forms itself as it recognizes shared interests
• For change to occur, there must be a change in meaning
• Every living system is free to choose whether it will change or not
• To create a healthier system, connect it to more of itself
II. Working with life's capacity to change
If our intent is to help a school system move forward and create change for itself, we need to take these four principles very seriously. We have exhausted ourselves and our resources trying to force schools and people to change. (And this is true of all other institutions as well.) I'd like to describe how using these principles can dramatically change our approach to organizational change.
The first work is to discover what's meaningful
I've come to believe that both individual and organizational change start from the same need, the need to discover what's meaningful to them. People will change only if they believe that a new insight, a new idea, or a new form is important to them. If it is a school system or community interested in changing, this search for new meaning must be a collective activity to discover whether a community of shared interests actually exists.
To put this into practice has required significant changes on my part. Now, my first work with a group is to learn who they are, what they find meaningful. I can never learn this by listening to self-reports, or taking the word of a few people. I discover what's meaningful to them by noticing what issues and behaviors get their attention. What topics generate the most energy, positive or negative? I have to be curious to discover these answers, constantly letting go of my assumptions and stereotypes. And I have to be working with them, not sitting on the side observing behavior or interviewing individuals. If we're together in the process of doing actual work, the true identity of the group always becomes visible, and I know that it's the real thing, not a fantasy image.
In identifying meaningful issues, I assume that even in the presence of a group or collective identity, I will discover multiple and divergent interpretations for everything that occurs. I try to put ideas, proposals, and issues on the table as experiments to see what's meaningful to people rather than as recommendations for what should be meaningful. I try to stay open to the different reactions I get, rather than instantly categorizing people as resistors or allies (although this is not always easy). I listen actively for diversity rather than agreement, and gradually, I'm even learning to welcome it. It has been fascinating to notice how many interpretations the different members of a group can give to the same event. I am both astonished and confident that, as new science teaches, no two people see the world exactly the same.
Discovering one another as colleagues
However it gets done, discovering what is meaningful to a person, group, or organization is the first essential work. We discover this by working together, thinking together, conversing together-with curiosity, patience, and the expectation of diverse stories. But through this process of exploring diverse interpretations, we oftentimes discover a unifying center or energy that makes the work of change possible. We begin to recognize that there is a sufficient amount of shared interests that we could be a system.
Discovering shared interests always changes people's relationships for the better. If we recognize a shared sense of injustice or a shared dream, magical things happen to our relationships; we open to each other as colleagues. Past hurts and negative histories get left behind. People step forward to work together. We don't hang back, we don't withdraw, we don't wait to be enticed. We seek each other out, eager to discover others who might help. The call of meaning, the importance of the problem, sounds louder than past grievances or our fears that we don't know how to have an impact. If we can discover something important to work on together, we figure out how to do the work, together.
I've been humbled to see how a group comes together as it recognizes its mutual interests. Working together becomes possible because they have discovered a shared meaning for the project that is strong enough to embrace them all. Held together in this rich center of meaning, people let go of many interpersonal difficulties, and work around traditional hindrances. They become a true system-they know they need each other. They are willing to struggle with relationships and figure out how to make them work because they realize this is the only path to achieving their aspirations.
I've worked with a number of faculties torn apart by the impact of technology. The more technologically eager faculty accuse the reticent ones of being out of date and resistant to change-they berate their colleagues for not climbing on the technology bandwagon. I always suggest that a different conversation is needed. What if we stop assuming that technology's value to a teacher is self-evident? What if we stop assuming that anybody who doesn't adopt new technology is an antiquated Luddite whose only interest is to stop the march of progress? If we give up those assumptions, we can begin a different conversation, one that helps us connect to one another and learn more about what we each find meaningful in our profession. We need to step back from the technology issue and ask one another what called us into teaching. We listen to the aspirations that are voiced. And what we always hear is that most of us went into teaching for noble purposes-we wanted to make a difference in the lives of young people, we were excited to help kids learns.
If we have this conversation first, we discover one another as colleagues. We realize we want very similar things. We realize that the person we had judged as dead-on-the-job still carries a passion for learning. Or that the teacher who belittles students still cares about them. Now we can talk about technology. How might computers assist colleagues to become more effective at their craft? How might technology make it easier to do the work they have defined as meaningful? If those links are made, then colleagues log-on to email, and use the computers sitting on their desks to enhance student learning. And if they don't, we still know them now as colleagues, not problems.
This process of inquiring together about the meaning of our work also helps us stop the labeling behavior that is far too prevalent these days. We are quick to assign people to a typology and then dismiss them, as if we really knew who they were. As we frantically try to implement changes we know are crucial to our organization's survival, we tend to hunt for scapegoats. We notice only those who impede our good plans--all those "resistors," those stubborn and scared colleagues who cling to the past. (We label ourselves also, but more generously, as "early adopters" or "cultural creatives." )
I was recently given a T-shirt with a wonderful motto printed on the back: "You can't hate someone whose story you know." But these days, in our crazed haste, we don't have time to be curious about who a person is, or why they're behaving as they do. Listening to colleagues describe the meaning they ascribe to their work is always transformative, and often moves them out of our "enemy" category. We move past the labels and notice another human being who wants to make some small contribution to something we care about. We discard the divisive categories and want to work together. How else but through our joining can we create the change we both want to see in the world?
Living networks are great communicators
I have also learned to appreciate the incredible communicating power of living networks when information is meaningful to them. Meaningful information lights up a network, and moves through it like a windswept brush fire. Meaningless information, in contrast, smolders at the gates until somebody dumps cold water on it. The capacity of a network to communicate with itself is truly awe inspiring; its transmission capability far surpasses any other mode of communication. But a living network will only transmit what it decides is meaningful. I have watched information move instantaneously across great distances in a global company; I have watched information in four color graphics die before it ever came off the printer. To use a network's communication capacity, we must notice that its transmission power is directly linked to the meaningfulness of the information.
Meaning behaves like energy. It doesn't behave in mechanistic ways. Therefore, we can abandon many of our mechanistic assumptions about what is required for organizational change. We don't have to achieve "critical mass", we don't need programs that "roll-out" (or over) the entire organization, we don't need to train every individual or part, we can stop obsessing if we don't get the support of the top of the organization. Instead, we can work locally, finding the meaning-rich ideas and processes that create energy in one area of the system. If we succeed in generating energy in one area, then we can watch how our other networks choose to notice what we're doing. Who lights up and takes notice? Where have our ideas traveled to in the organizational web? If we ask these questions, we learn who might be ready to take up this work next. Myron describes his approach to organizational change as: "Start anywhere and follow it everywhere."
Everybody must be involved
During the past several years, I've often learned the hard way that participation is not an option. As organizational change facilitators and leaders, we have no choice but to figure out how to invite in everybody who is going to be affected by this change. Those that we fail to invite into the creation process will surely and always show up as resistors and saboteurs. But I haven't become insistent on broad-based participation just as a means to avoid resistance, or to get people on board as supporters of the change effort. I've learned that we can't design anything that works if we don't have the whole system involved in its creation. None of us is smart enough these days to know what will work inside these dense networks we call organizations. It's impossible to know what's going on inside any system. We can't see what's meaningful to people, or even understand how they get their work done.
I know from experience that most people are very smart-they have figured out how to make things work when it seemed impossible, they have invented ways to get around roadblocks and dumb policies, they have created their own networks to support them and help them learn. But rarely is this visible to the organization until and unless people are brought into problem-solving and organizational change processes and invited to contribute what they know. The complexity and density of systems require that we engage the whole system just so we can harvest the invisible intelligence that exists throughout the organization.
Fortunately, during the past ten years there has been a great deal of pioneering work on how to engage whole systems in changing themselves. There is now quite a lot of evidence for how well these processes work. What still seems to be lacking is our commitment to involving everybody. We keep hoping we don't need to-that if we design a good plan, people will accept it because of its merits. We haven't yet absorbed the simple truth that every living being, every colleague, maintains the right to determine whether he/she will change. We can't force anybody to change. We can only involve them in the change process from the beginning, and see what's possible. If change becomes meaningful to them, they will change. If we want their support, we must welcome them as co-creators. People only support what they create.

Learning to work with living systems
Shifting our approaches to organizational change, so that we are working with life's change dynamics, is a gradual process that requires high degrees of watchfulness, patience and generosity. No one is able to act in new ways just because they want to. Everyone gets yanked back to old ways of doing things, especially when we feel tense or confused. In our own work, Myron and I have found that we need first to work with a group to define their design principles. These are always some variation of the four principles presented in this article. We've also learned that the group needs to keep alert to their process, their learnings, and how the change effort is unfolding and emerging. To do this, we develop questions that everyone commits to asking regularly, and with discipline. Here are some examples of the questions we use, but it's more important to create your own, and then hold yourself responsible as a group to the discipline of asking them frequently. Such questions allow you to notice those things that are critical to your success.

1. Who else needs to be here to do this work?
2. Why are we doing this? Is the meaning still clear?
3. How is the meaning changing?
4. Are we becoming better truth-tellers with each other?
5. Is information becoming more open and easier to access?
6. Are we trying to impose anything?
7. Are we becoming more alert to what's going on, right now?
8. Are we learning to partner with confusion and chaos as opportunities for real change?

Learning to trust life's self-ordering process

I have to admit that the greatest challenge for me and those I work with lies not in adopting new methods, but in learning to live in this process world. It's a completely new way to be, unlike anything I was taught. I'm learning to participate with things as they unfold, to expect to be surprised, to enjoy the mystery of it, and to surrender to how much I don't know and can never know. These were difficult lessons to learn. I was well-trained to create things-plans, events, measures, programs. I invested more than half my life in trying to make the world conform to what I thought was best. It hasn't been easy to give up the role of master creator and move into the dance of life.

But I've gradually learned there is no alternative. As our dance partner, life insists that we put ourselves in motion, that we learn to live with instability, chaos, change, and surprise. We can continue to stand immobilized on the shoreline, trying to protect ourselves from life's insistent storms, or we can begin moving. We can watch our plans be washed away, or we can discover something new.

Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of the martial art of Aikido, was a small man who could turn back the onslaughts of opponents many times his weight and size with movements that were imperceptible. He appeared to be perfectly centered, anchored to the ground in an extraordinary way. But this was not the case. His ability came not from superior balance, but from superb levels of self-awareness. As he described it, he was quicker to notice when he was off-balance, and faster at returning to center.

He perfectly describes how to work in harmony with life rather than to resist it. First, we must know what "center" feels like. As individuals and as organizations, we must know who we are, our patterns of behavior, our values, our intentions. The ground of our identity and experience must feel familiar to us; we must know what it feels like to stand in it. But we don't expect that we will be perfectly balanced at that center point all the time. We know that we will drift into the wrong activities or be thrown off-balance by life's chaos. But we also will know when we've moved off too far, and be able to recall ourselves more quickly to who we want to be.

The second quality that Sensei Ueshiba highlights is a quality of attention that keeps us participating in the moment. The changing nature of life insists that we give more attention to what is occurring right in front of us, right now. We can't hide behind our plans or measures. We need to become curious about what's really going on, what just happened. The present moment overflows with information about ourselves and our environment. But so many of those learnings fly by unobserved because we're preoccupied with our images of how we want the world to be.

Being present in the moment doesn't mean that we act without intention or flow directionless through life without any plans. But in an unpredictable world, we would do better to look at plans and measures as processes that enable a group to discover shared interests, to clarify its intent and strengthen its connections to new people and new information. We need less reverence for the plan as an object, and much more attention to the processes we use for planning and measuring. It is attention to the process, more than the product, that enables us to weave an organization as flexible and resilient as a spider's web.

As we learn to live and work in this process world, we are rewarded with other changes in our behavior. I see that we become gentler people. We become more curious about differences, more respectful of one another, more open to life's surprises. It's not that we're either more hopeful or pessimistic, but we are more patient and accepting. I like to believe we become this way because we're willing to work with life on its terms. Although life's dance looked frantic from the outside, difficult to learn and impossible to master, our newfound gentleness speaks to a different learning. Life is a good partner. Its demands are not unreasonable. A great capacity for change lives in everyone of us.
Innovation Means Relying on Everyone's Creativity
Leader to Leader, Spring 2001
Innovation has always been a primary challenge of leadership. Today we live in an era of such rapid change and evolution that leaders must work constantly to develop the capacity for continuous change and frequent adaptation, while ensuring that identity and values remain constant. They must recognize people's innate capacity to adapt and create-to innovate.

In my own work I am always constantly and happily surprised by how impossible it is to extinguish the human spirit. People who had been given up for dead in their organizations, once conditions change and they feel welcomed back in, find new energy and become great innovators. My questions are, How do we acknowledge that everyone is a potential innovator? How can we evoke the innate human need to innovate?

The human capacity to invent and create is universal. Ours is a living world of continuous creation and infinite variation. Scientists keep discovering more species; there may be more than 50 million of them on earth, each of whom is the embodiment of an innovation that worked. Yet when we look at our own species, we frequently say we're "resistant to change." Could this possibly be true? Are we the only species-out of 50 million--that digs in its heels and resists? Or perhaps all those other creatures simply went to better training programs on "Innovation for Competitive Advantage."

Many years ago, Joel Barker popularized the notion of paradigms or worldviews, those beliefs and assumptions through which we see the world and explain its processes. He stated that when something is impossible to achieve with one view of the world, it can be surprisingly easy to accomplish with a new one. I have found this to be delightfully true. Now that I understand people and organizations as living systems, filled with the innovative dynamics characteristic of all life, many intractable problems have become solvable. Perhaps the most powerful example in my own work is how relatively easy it is to create successful organizational change if you start with the assumption that people, like all life, are creative and good at change. Once we stop treating organizations and people as machines, and stop trying to re-engineer them, once we move into the paradigm of living systems, organizational change is not a problem. Using this new worldview, it is possible to create organizations filled with people who are capable of adapting as needed, who are alert to changes in their environment, who are able to innovate strategically. It is possible to work with the innovative potential that exists in all of us, and to engage that potential to solve meaningful problems.

We are gradually giving up the dominant paradigm of western culture and science for over 300 years-that of the world and humans as machines. Almost all approaches to management, organizational change, and human behavior have been based on mechanistic images. When we applied these mechanical images to us humans, we developed a strangely negative and unfamiliar view of ourselves. We viewed ourselves as passive, unemotional, fragmented, incapable of self-motivation, disinterested in meaningful questions or good work.

But the 21st century world of complex systems and turbulence is no place for disabling and dispiriting mechanistic thinking. We are confronted daily by events and outcomes that shock us and for which we have no answers. The complexity of modern systems cannot be understood by our old ways of separating problems, or scapegoating individuals, or rearranging the boxes on an org chart. In a complex system, it is impossible to find simple causes that explain our problems, or to know who to blame. A messy tangle of relationships has given rise to these unending crises. To understand this new world of continuous change and intimately connected systems, we need new ways of understanding. Fortunately, life and its living systems offer us great teachings on how to work with a world of continuous change and boundless creativity. And foremost among life's teachings is the recognition that humans possess the capabilities to deal with complexity and interconnection. Human creativity and commitment are our greatest resources.

For several years, I have been exploring the complexities of modern organizations through the lens of living systems. But rather than question whether organizations are living systems, I've become more confident about stating the following: the people working in the organization are alive, and they respond to the same needs and conditions as any other living system. I personally don't require any deeper level of clarity than this. But I'd also like to note that one of the gifts of understanding living systems is that it soon becomes evident that Life's processes apply both to individuals and systems. The dynamics of life are "scale-independent"-they are useful to explain what we see no matter how small or large the living system.

The new worldview of organizations as living systems rather than machines offers many principles for leadership. Each of these principles has affected my work in profound ways. Together they allow leaders to accomplish our greatest task -- to create the conditions where human ingenuity can flourish.


Meaning engages our creativity

Every change, every burst of creativity, begins with the identification of a problem or opportunity that somebody finds meaningful. As soon as people becomes interested in an issue, their creativity is instantly engaged. If we want people to be innovative, we must discover what is important to them, and we must engage them in meaningful issues. The simplest way to discover what's meaningful is to notice what people talk about and where they spend their energy.

In my own work with this principle, I've found that I can't learn this just by listening to managers' self-reports, or by taking the word of only a few people. I need to be working alongside a group or individual to learn who they are and what attracts their attention. As we work together and deepen our relationship, I can then discern what issues and behaviors make them sit up and take notice. As we work together, doing real work, meaning always becomes visible. For example, in meetings, what topics generate the most energy, positive or negative? What issues do people keep returning to? What stories do they tell over and over? I can't be outside the process, observing behaviors or collecting data in traditional ways. I've also learned that I notice a great deal more if I am curious rather than certain.

In any group, I know that I will always hear multiple and diverging interpretations. Because I expect this, I now put ideas, proposals, and issues on the table as experiments to see what's meaningful to people rather than as recommendations for what should be meaningful to them. One of my favorite examples of how easily we can be surprised by what others find meaningful occurred among healthcare professionals who were trying to convince parents of young children to use seatbelts. But these parents were from a traditional, non-Western culture. They did not see the act of securing their child to a seat as protective of the child. They saw it as invoking the wrath of God. Strapping in a child was an invitation to God to cause a car accident.

I've learned how critical it is to stay open to the different reactions I get, rather than instantly categorizing people as resistors or allies. This is not easy--I have to constantly let go of my assumptions and stereotypes. But when I listen actively for diversity rather than agreement, it's fascinating to notice how many interpretations the different members of a group can give to the same event. I am both astonished and confident that no two people see the world exactly the same.


Depend on Diversity

Life relies on diversity to give it the possibility of adapting to changing conditions. If a system becomes too homogenous, it becomes vulnerable to environmental shifts. If one form is dominant, and that form no longer works in the new environment, the entire system is at risk. Where there is true diversity in an organization, innovative solutions are being created all the time, just because different people do things differently. When the environment changes and demands a new solution, we can count on the fact that somebody has already invented or is already practicing that new solution. Almost always, in a diverse organization, the solution the organization needs is already being practiced somewhere in that system. If, as leaders, we fail to encourage unique and diverse ways of doing things, we destroy the entire system's capacity to adapt. We need people experimenting with many different ways, just in case. And when the environment then demands a change, we need to look deep inside our organizations to find those solutions that have already been prepared for us by our colleagues.

There is another reason why diversity lies at the heart of an organization's ability to innovate and adapt. Our organizations and societies are now so complex, filled with so many intertwining and diverging interests, personalities, and issues, that nobody can confidently represent anybody else's point of view. Our markets and our organizations behave as "units of one." What this means is that nobody sees the world exactly the same as we do. No matter how hard we try to be understanding of differences, there is no possibility that we can adequately represent anybody else. But there is a simple solution to this dilemma. We can ask people for their unique perspective. We can invite them in to share the world as they see it. We can listen for the differences. And we can trust that together we can create a rich mosaic from all our unique perspectives.


Involve everybody who cares

Working with many kinds of organizations over the past several years, I've learned the hard way that building participation is not optional. As leaders, we have no choice but to figure out how to invite in everybody who is going to be affected by change. Those that we fail to invite into the creation process will surely and always show up as resistors and saboteurs. But I haven't become insistent on broad-based participation just to avoid resistance, or to get people to support my efforts. I've learned that I'm not smart enough to design anything for the whole system. None of us these days can know what will work inside the dense networks we call organizations. We can't see what's meaningful to people, or even understand how they get their work done. We have no option but to ask them into the design process.

I know from experience that most people are very intelligent-they have figured out how to make things work when it seemed impossible, they have invented ways to get around roadblocks and dumb policies, they have created their own networks to support them and help them learn. But rarely is this visible to the organization until and unless we invite people in to participate in solution-creation processes. The complexity and density of organizations require that we engage the whole system so we can harvest the invisible intelligence that exists throughout the organization.

Fortunately, during the past ten years there has been pioneering work (by Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff, Robert Jacobson, Kathy Dannemiller, and many others) on how to engage large numbers of people in designing innovations and changing themselves. Yet even in the presence of strong evidence for how well these processes work, most leaders till hesitate to venture down the participation path. Leaders have had so many bad experiences with participation that describing it as "not optional" seems like a death sentence. But we have to accept two simple truths: we can't force anybody to change. And no two people see the world the same way. We can only engage people in the change process from the beginning and see what's possible. If the issue is meaningful to them, they will become enthusiastic and bright advocates. If we want people's intelligence and support, we must welcome them as co-creators. People only support what they create.


Diversity is the path to unity

All change begins with a change in meaning. Yet we each see the world differently. Is it possible to develop a sense of shared meaning without denying our diversity? Are there ways that organizations can developed a shared sense of what's significant without forcing people to accept someone else's viewpoint?

There is a powerful paradox at work here. If we are willing to listen eagerly for diverse interpretations, we discover that our differing perceptions somehow originate from a unifying center. As we become aware of this unity in diversity, it changes our relationships for the better. We recognize that through our diversity we share a dream, or we share a sense of injustice. Then, magical things happen to our relationships. We open to each other as colleagues. Past hurts and negative histories get left behind. People step forward to work together. We don't hang back, we don't withdraw, we don't wait to be enticed. We actively seek each other out because the problem is important. The meaningfulness of the issue sounds louder than past grievances or difficulties. As we discover something whose importance we share, we want to work together, no matter our differences.

I've been humbled to see how a group can come together as it recognizes its mutual interests. Working together becomes possible because they have discovered a shared meaning for the work that is strong enough to embrace them all. Held together in this rich center of meaning, people let go of many interpersonal difficulties, and work around traditional hindrances. They know they need each other. They are willing to struggle with relationships and figure out how to make them work because they realize this is the only path to achieving their aspirations.


People will always surprise us

Perhaps because of the study of human psychology, perhaps because we're just too busy to get to know each other, we have become a society that labels people in greater and greater detail. We know each other's personality types, leadership styles, syndromes, and neurotic behaviors. We are quick to assign people to a typology and then dismiss them, as if we really knew who they were. If we're trying to get something done in our organization, and things start going badly, we hunt for scapegoats to explain why it's not working. We notice only those who impede our good plans--all those "resistors," those stubborn and scared colleagues who cling to the past. We label ourselves also, but more generously, as "early adopters" or "cultural creatives."

I was recently given a T-shirt with a wonderful motto on the back: "You can't hate someone whose story you know." But these days, in our crazed haste, we don't have time to get to know each others' stories, to be curious about who a person is, or why she or he is behaving a particular way. Listening to colleagues-their diverse interpretations, their stories, what they find meaningful in their work -- always transforms our relationships. The act of listening to each other always brings us closer. We may not like them or approve of their behavior, but if we listen, we move past the labels. Our "enemy" category shrinks in population. We notice another human being who has a reason for certain actions, who is trying to make some small contribution to our organization or community. The stereotypes that have divided us melt away and we discover that we want to work together. We realize that only by joining together will we be able to create the change we both want to see in the world.


Rely on Human Goodness

I know that the only path to creating more innovative workplaces and communities is to depend on one another. We cannot cope, much less create, in this increasingly fast and turbulent world without each other. If we try and do it alone, we will fail.

There is no substitute for human creativity, human caring, human will. We can be incredibly resourceful, imaginative, and open-hearted. We can do the impossible, learn and change quickly, and extend instant compassion to those who are suffering. And we use these creative and compassionate behaviors frequently. If you look at your daily life, how often do you figure out an answer to a problem, or find a slightly better way of doing something, or extend yourself to someone in need? Very few people go through their days as robots, doing only repetitive tasks, never noticing that anybody else is nearby. Take a moment to look around at your colleagues and neighbors, and you'll see the same behaviors --people trying to be useful, trying to make some small contribution, trying to help someone else.

We have forgotten what we're capable of, and we let our worst natures rise to the surface. We got into this sorry state partly because, for too long, we've been treating people as machines. We've force people into tiny boxes, called roles and job descriptions. We've told people what to do and how they should behave. We've told them they weren't creative, couldn't contribute, couldn't think.

After so many years of being bossed around, of working within confining roles, of unending reorganization, reengineering, down-sizing, mergers and power plays, most people are exhausted, cynical, and focused only on self-protection. Who wouldn't be? But it's important to remember that we created these negative and demoralized people. We created them by discounting and denying our best human capacities.

But people are still willing to come back; they still want to work side by side with us to find solutions, develop innovations, make a difference in the world. We just need to invite them back. We do this by using simple processes that bring us together to talk to one another, listen to one another's stories, reflect together on what we're learning as we do our work. We do this by developing relationships of trust, where we do what we say, where we speak truthfully, where we refuse to act from petty self-interest. These processes and relationships have already been developed by many courageous companies, leaders, and facilitators. Many pioneers have created processes and organizations that depend on human capacity and know how to evoke our very best.

In my experience, people everywhere want to work together, because daily they are overwhelmed by problems that they can't solve alone. People want to help. People want to contribute. Everyone wants to feel creative and hopeful again.

As leaders, as neighbors, as colleagues, it is time to turn to one another, to engage in the intentional search for human goodness. In our meetings and deliberations, we can reach out and invite in those we have excluded. We can recognize that no one person or leader has the answer, that we need everybody's creativity to find our way through this strange new world. We can act from the certainty that most people want to care about others, and invite them to step forward with their compassion. We can realize that "You can't hate someone whose story you know."

We are our only hope for creating a future worth working for. We can't go it alone, we can't get there without each other, and we can't create it without relying anew on our fundamental and precious human goodness.
The Real Work of Knowledge Management
IHRIM Journal, April-June 2001, Volume 5, Number 2, pp.29-33
We really do live in the Information Age, a revolutionary era when the availability of information is changing everything. Nothing is the same since the world was networked together and information became instantly accessible. Information has destroyed boundaries, borders, boxes, distance, roles, and rules. The availability of information has dissolved the walls of repressive governments, secretive executives, and is creating the greatest mass empowerment of all time. Because of access to information, we are in new relationships with everyone: with medical doctors (we go to the web and learn more than they do,) with car salesmen (we know the real sticker price,) and with leaders of all kinds (we know when they walk their talk). The worldwide web has created a world that is transparent, volatile, sensitive to the least disturbance, and choked with rumors, misinformation, truths, and passions.

This webbed world has changed the way we work and live. 24/7 is one consequence of instant access and the dissolution of boundaries. We no longer have clear lines between work and private life-if the cell phone is on and there's a phone jack available, bosses and colleagues expect us to be available. Increasingly, it's impossible to "turn off," to find time to think, to take time to develop relationships, to even ask colleagues how they're doing.

Information has changed capitalism and the fundamental character of corporate life. Corporations now play in the global casino-- focused on numbers moment to moment, suffering instant losses or gains in trading, merging to look powerful, downsizing to look lean, bluffing and spin doctoring to stay in the game. In this casino environment, long-term has disappeared, thinking for the future is impossible, and developing an organization that will still be around in 20 years seems like a sentimental and wasteful activity.

These are only a few of the profound changes created by the Information Age. A September 2000 study by a futures group from the U.S. Military summed it up this way: "The accelerated pace and grand breadth of information exchange is arguably beyond comprehension and certainly out of control. With so much information to choose from, each day it becomes harder to determine what is real, right, and relevant to peoples' lives." (italics added. Beyond the Precipice-Amid Waves of Change: Strategic Scouts Explore the Future. ASAF Institute for National Security Studies and the Air University.)


Knowledge Management is a survival skill

In this time of profound chaos and newness, we still have to do our work. But what is our work? For those in human resources information management, there is relentless pressure to find ways for technology and people to support organizations through this tumultuous time. Organizations need to be incredibly smart, fast, agile, responsive. They need to respond and make smart decisions at ever-increasing speed, even as the unintended consequences of speedy decisions flare up in a nanosecond and keep leaders focused only on fire-fighting. The old days of "continuous improvement" seem as leisurely as a picnic from the past. In this chaotic and complex twenty-first century, the pace of evolution has entered warp speed, and those who can't learn, adapt, and change moment to moment simply won't survive.

Many of these organizational needs are bundled together today under the banner of Knowledge Management. The organization that knows how to convert information into knowledge, that knows what it knows, that can act with greater intelligence and discernment-these are the organizations that will make it into the future. We all know this: our organizations need to be smarter. Knowledge Management (KM) therefore should be something eagerly accepted by leaders, it should be an incredibly easy sell. Yet KM appears at a time when all organizations are battered and bruised by so much change, entering the Information Age after decades of fads, by investments in too many organizational change efforts that failed to deliver what was promised. These experiences have exhausted us all, made many cynical, and left others of us worried that we'll never learn how to create organizations that can thrive in this century.

Unlike past organizational change efforts, Knowledge Management is truly a survival issue. Done right, it can give us what we so desperately need-organizations that act with intelligence. Done wrong, we will, like lemmings, keep rushing into the future without using our intelligence to develop longer-term individual and organizational capacity. To continue blindly down our current path, where speed and profits are the primary values, where there is no time to think or relate, is suicidal.


Beliefs that prevent KM

How can we ensure that KM doesn't fail or get swept aside as just the most recent fad? How can we treasure it for the life-saving process it truly could be? For Knowledge Management to succeed, we will need to lay aside these dangerously out-of-date beliefs:
• Organizations are machines. This belief becomes visible every time we create separate parts--tasks, roles, functions--and engineer (and reengineer) them to achieve pre-determined performance levels. It is the manager's role to manage the parts to achieve those outcomes. Strangely, we also act as though people are machines. We attempt to "reprogram" people with new training and technology, hoping that, like good robots, they will go off and do exactly what they're told. When people resist being treated as dumb machines, we criticize them as ;"resistant to change."
• Only material things are real. A great deal of our efforts focus on trying to make invisible "things" (like knowledge, commitment, trust, relationships) assume material form. We believe we have accomplished this when we assign numbers to them. This belief combines with the next one;
• Only numbers are real. (This belief is ancient, dating back to the sixth century BC.) Once we assign a number to something (a grade in school; a performance index; a statistic,) we relax and feel we have adequately described what's going on. These two beliefs reinforce this one;
• You can only manage what you can measure. We use numbers to manage everything: ROI; P/E ratios; inventory returns; employee morale; staff turn-over. If we can't assign a number to it, we don't pay it any attention. To keep track of increasingly complex measurements, we turn to our favorite new deity, which is the belief that;
• Technology is always the best solution. We have increasing numbers of problems, which we try to solve using technology. But this reliance on technology actually only increases our problems. We don't notice that the numeric information we enter in a computer cannot possibly describe the complexity of the experience or person we are trying to manage. By choosing computers (and numbers) as our primary management tool, we set ourselves up for guaranteed and repeated failures.

All of these beliefs show up strongly in Knowledge Management. We're trying to manage something-knowledge-that is inherently invisible, incapable of being quantified, and born in relationships, not statistics. And we are relying on technology to solve our problems with KM-we focus on constructing the right data base, its storage and retrieval system, and assume we have KM solved.

The Japanese approach KM differently than we do in the west. The differences in approaches expose these Western beliefs with great clarity. In the West, we have focused on explicit knowledge-knowledge one can see and document-instead of dealing with the much more important but intangible realm of "tacit" knowledge, knowledge that is very present, but only observable in the doing, not as a number. American and European efforts have been focused on developing measures for and assigning values to knowledge. Once we had the numbers, we assumed we could manage it, even though more and more people now acknowledge that "Knowledge Management" is an oxymoron.

Current approaches to KM in the west demonstrate that we believe the following: knowledge is a thing, a material substance that can be produced, measured, catalogued, warehoused, traded, and shipped. The language of KM is littered with this "thing" thinking. We want to "capture" knowledge; to inventory it; to push it into or pull it out from people. One British expert on KM, David Skyrme, tells that in both Britain and the U.S., a common image of KM is of "decanting the human capital into the structural capital of an organization." I don't know how this imagery affects you, but I personally don't want to have my head opened, my cork popped, my entire body tilted sideways so that what I know pours out of me into an organizational vat. This prospect is not what motivates me to notice what I know, or to share it.

These language choices have serious implications. They reveal that we think knowledge is an entity, something that exists independent of person or context, capable of being moved about and manipulated for organizational advantage. We need to abandon this language and, more importantly, the beliefs that engender it. We need to look at knowledge-its creation, transfer, and very nature-with new eyes. As we rethink what we know about knowledge and how we handle the challenges of knowledge in organizations, our most important work is to pay serious attention to what we always want to ignore: the human dimension.

Think, for a moment, about what you know about knowledge, not from a theoretical or organizational perspective, but from your own experience. In myself, I notice that knowledge is something I create because I am in relationship -relating to another person, an event, or an idea. Something pulls me outside of myself and forces me to react. As I figure out what's going on, or what something means, I develop interpretations that make sense to me. Knowledge is something I create inside myself through my engagement with the world. Knowledge never exists independent of this process of my being in relationship with an event, an idea, or another person. This process is true for all of us: Knowledge is created in relationship, inside thinking, reflecting human beings.

From biology, it is evident that we are not the only life form that engages in knowledge creation. Everything alive learns and creates knowledge for its survival. All living beings pay exquisite attention to what's going on in their environment, with their neighbors, offspring, predators, and even the weather. They notice something, and then decide whether they need to adapt and change. Living beings never engage in this process of noticing-reacting--changing because some boss tells them to do it. Every form of life is free to decide what to pay attention to and how to respond. This freedom lies at the heart of life, each species deciding how it will respond to its neighbors and current conditions, and then living or dying as a result of its decisions.

This same autonomy describes us humans, but we tend to find it problematic, if we're the boss. We give staff detailed directions and policies on how to do something, and then they, like all life, use their autonomy to change it in some way. They fine-tune it, they adapt it to their unique context, they add their own improvements to how the task gets done. If we're the one in charge however, we don't see this behavior as creativity. We label it as resistance or disobedience. But what we are seeing is new knowledge. People have looked at the directive, figured out what would work better in the present context, and created a new way of doing it, one that, in most cases, stands more chance of success.

I experienced just such evidence of this knowledge creation process a few months ago as I sat on an airport commuter bus and listened as the driver trained a newly hired employee. For thirty minutes I eavesdropped as she energetically revealed the secrets and efficiencies she had discovered for how to get to the airport in spite of severe traffic or bad weather. She wasn't describing company policy. She was giving a non-stop, virtuoso performance of what she had invented and changed in order to get her customers to their destination. I'm sure her supervisor had no idea of any of this new knowledge she'd been creating on each bus ride.

But this bus driver is typical. People develop better ways of doing their work all the time, and we also like to brag about it. In survey after survey, workers report that most of what they learn about their job, they learn from informal conversations. They also report that they frequently have ideas for improving work but don't tell their bosses because they don't believe their bosses care.


Some principles that facilitate KM

Knowledge creation is natural to life, and wanting to share what we know is humanly satisfying. So what's the problem? In organizations, what sends these behaviors underground? Why do workers go dumb? Why do we fail to manage knowledge? Here are a few principles that I believe lead to answers to these questions.

1. Knowledge is created by human beings. If we want to succeed with KM, then we must stop thinking of people as machines. Instead, we must attend to human needs and dynamics. Perhaps if we renamed it "Human Knowledge" we would remind ourselves of what it is and where it comes from. We would refocus our attention on the organizational conditions that support people, that foster relationships, that give people time to think and reflect. We would stop fussing with the hardware; we would cease trying to find more efficient means to "decant" us. We would notice that when we speak of such things as "assets" or "intellectual capital" that it is not knowledge that is the asset or capital. People are.

2. It is natural for people to create and share knowledge. We have forgotten many important truths about human motivation. Study after study confirms that people are motivated by work that provides growth, recognition, meaning, and good relationships. We want our lives to mean something, we want to contribute to others, we want to learn, we want to be together. And we need to be involved in decisions that affect us. If we believed these studies, and created organizations that embodied them, work be far more productive and enjoyable. We would discover that people can be filled with positive energy. Our organization would be overwhelmed by new knowledge, innovative solutions, and great teamwork. It is essential that we begin to realize that human nature is the blessing, not the problem. As a species, we are actually very good to work with.

3. Everybody is a knowledge worker. This statement was an operating principle of one of my clients. If everybody is assumed to be creating knowledge, then the organization takes responsibility for supporting all its workers, not just a special few. It makes certain that everyone has easy access to anyone, any where in the organization, because you never know who has already invented the solution you need. The Japanese learned this and demonstrated it in their approach to KM. I learned it on that bus ride.

4. People choose to share their knowledge. This is an extremely important statement, and the operative word is "choose." Most KM programs get stuck because individuals will not share their knowledge. But it's important to remember that people are making a choice to not share what they know. They willingly share if they feel committed to the organization, believe their leaders are worth supporting, feel encouraged to participate and learn, and if they value their colleagues. Knowledge sharing is going on all the time in most organizations. Every organization is filled with self-organized Communities of Practice, networks that people spontaneously create among colleagues to help them work more effectively or to help them survive the current turbulence. These communities of practice are evidence of people's willingness to learn and to share what they know. But the organization must provide the right conditions to support people's willingness. Some of these necessary, non-negotiable conditions are:
• people must understand and value the objective or strategy;
• people must understand how their work adds value to the common objective;
• people must feel respected and trusted.
• people must know and care about their colleagues;
• people must value and trust their leaders.

If we contrast this list to the current reality in most organizations, it becomes obvious how much work is needed to create the conditions for effective KM. The work of KM would be so much easier if this list of conditions wasn't true. But it is a proven list, with more than enough case studies and research to validate it. If we don't vigorously undertake creating these conditions as the real work of KM, then we might as well stop wasting everyone's time and money and just abandon KM right now.

5. Knowledge management is not about technology. This would seem obvious from the preceding statements, but it feels important to stress because we modern managers are dazzled by technical solutions. If people aren't communicating, we just create another website or on-line conference; if we want to harvest what people know, we just create an inventoried data base; if we're geographically dispersed, we just put videocams on people's desks. But these technical solutions don't solve a thing if other aspects of the culture-the human dimension-are ignored. A few years ago British Petroleum successfully used desktop videocams to facilitate knowledge sharing among their offshore oil drilling rigs. But this wasn't all they did. They also worked simultaneously to create a culture that recognized individual contribution, and moved aggressively to create a bold new vision that employees could rally behind (BP became "Beyond Petroleum.)

And many other organizations have learned from experience that if they are want productive teams, they must bring people together in the same space several times a year. They're learning that in the absence of face-to-face meetings, people have a hard time sharing knowledge. It's important to remember that technology does not connect us. Our relationships connect us, and once we know the person or team, then we eagerly use the technology to stay connected. We share knowledge because we are in relationship, not because we have broader band width available.

6. Knowledge is born in chaotic processes that take time. The irony of this principle is that it demands two things we don't have: a tolerance for messy, non-linear processes, and time. But creativity is only available when we become confused and overwhelmed, when we get so frustrated that we admit we don't know. And then, miraculously, a perfect insight appears suddenly. This is how great scientists achieve breakthrough discoveries, how teams and individuals discover transforming solutions. Great insights never appear at the end of a series of incremental steps. Nor can they be commanded to appear on schedule, no matter how desperately we need them. They present themselves only after a lot of work that culminates in so much frustration that we surrender. Only then are we humble enough and tired enough to open ourselves to entirely new solutions. They leap into view suddenly (the "Aha" experience,) always born in messy processes that take time.

In the United Kingdom, Anderson Consulting has listed self-awareness and reflection as critical leadership skills. Some companies have created architectural spaces to encourage informal conversations, mental spaces to encourage reflection, and learning spaces to encourage journal writing and other reflective thought processes. These companies are trying hard to reclaim time to think in the face of prevailing tendencies for instant answers and breathless decision-making. They don't always succeed-warp speed continues its demands and people have less time to use their journals or sit in conversation-friendly architecture.

We have to face the difficult fact that until we claim time for reflection, until we make space for thinking, we won't be able to generate knowledge, or to know what knowledge we already possess. We can't argue with the clear demands of knowledge creation-it requires time to develop. It matures inside human relationships. Relationships and creativity are always messy and inherently uncontrollable.

Although we live in a world completely revolutionized by information, it is important to remember that it is knowledge we are seeking, not information. Unlike information, knowledge involves us and our deeper motivations and dynamics as human beings. We interact with something or someone in our environment and then use who we are-our history, our identity, our values, habits, beliefs-- to decide what the information means. In this way, through our construction, information becomes knowledge. Knowledge is always a reflection of who we are, in all our uniqueness. It is impossible to disassociate who is creating the knowledge from the knowledge itself.

It would be good to remember this as we proceed with Knowledge Management. We can put down the decanting tools, we can stop focusing all our energy on database designs, and we can get on with the real work. We must recognize that knowledge is everywhere in the organization, but we won't have access to it until, and only when, we create work that is meaningful, leaders that are trustworthy, and organizations that foster everyone's contribution and support by giving staff time to think and reflect together.

This is the real work of Knowledge Management. It requires clarity and courage-and in stepping into it, you will be contributing to the creation of a far more intelligent and hopeful future than the one presently looming on the horizon.
Restoring Hope to the Future Through Critical Education of Leaders
Margaret J. Wheatley ©2001

Published in Vimukt Shiksha, a Bulletin of Shikshantar--The People's Institute for Rethinking Education and Development, Udaipur, Rajasthan, India, March 2001 An abridged version has been published in Non-Profit Quarterly, Boston, MA. Fall 2001.
This is a dark age, when everything must justify its existence in terms of how it benefits the economy. The economy is no longer seen as the means to create just and good societies; it has become the end in itself. Nowhere is this clearer than in the field of education. We educate students so they can get jobs; we collect statistics that demonstrate the monetary benefits of education to the individual; we increasingly focus schools and higher education on training, teaching those subjects defined as important by the workplace. As with all other aspects of modern life in the era of globalization, education has become just one sector of the economy.

But stretching back over millennia, education has always been the means to change society, to create new ideas and practices, and therefore new futures. And in the 20th century, the practice and theory of Critical Education emerged as a powerful demonstration of how education, used with the poorest, could develop the skills and understanding needed to change their world. Quite recently, as I've been increasingly distressed over how education everywhere is being usurped by the economy, I have returned to the work of Paulo Freire, Cesar Chavez, and other Latin American revolutionary thinkers. They have helped me determine what I can do to try and reverse the destructive and dehumanizing trajectory created by the New Economy. I would like to describe how their inspiration has materialized in the work that I now do.

When I feel brave enough to say it (which I do now) my new work is to create a populist revolution among leaders everywhere. I, with many talented and exceedingly dedicated colleagues around the world, are working to establish leadership circles in local communities everywhere. We believe that as leaders meet regularly and talk about their practice, their concerns, their hopes, that they will develop enough clarity and courage to stand up to the pressures of globalism and act as leaders who support and nourish the human spirit and all life.

It's important for me to state at the outset that we have a rather revolutionary definition of "leader." We believe that a leader is anyone who wants to help at this time. We meet these people everywhere-of all ages and in all communities and professions. It can be a mother who wants her children's school to change; a local nurse who wants clean water in the many villages she serves; a teen-ager who refuses to wear the clothing of a corporation that uses sweat shops; a corporate executive who wants to stop unethical practices or the day-to-day disregard of the needs of employees; a farmer who wants to preserve traditional farming methods.

These new leaders are appearing at an increasing rate in local communities around the world. They each are motivated by a desire to change some aspect of their world. They are not motivated by self-interest or greed. They want to help others. But they often feel isolated and alone. Few of them realize their concerns and generosity are shared by an increasing number of people. And it is difficult to act with courage when you feel you're the only one.

Isolation is one barrier to courageous action. Time is a second one. In most countries, time is evaporating. Technology has played a large role in this, speeding up human interactions to the speed of light, even though we can't, as living beings, work any faster than the speed of life. In highly technological societies, leisure time and private life are fast eroding by the ever-invading demands of cell phones, e-mail, and the assumption that workers should be available 24/7. In societies where technology is not yet so invasive, the very complexity and multiplicity of problems that confront leaders is destroying their time to deal well with any one issue.

Under the relentless pressure of time vanishing, we are losing many essential capacities of being human: the time to think and reflect; the time to be in relationships; the time to develop trust and commitment. In essence, we are forfeiting our unique human qualities in exchange for speed.

There is at least one other great destructive force at work globally, and that is the American management model. Leaders everywhere, no matter what their culture or tradition, are pressured to focus on numeric measures of efficiency and narrow measures of success, i.e. growth and profit-making. These practices are not sufficient to create a healthy and robust workplace or planet. American businesses that only focus on these narrow goals fail as well. As these too-narrow measures roll out around the world, they create the conditions for large-scale destruction of cultures, habitats, and the human spirit. Yet few local leaders can withstand the pressure to be "modern" and so they forfeit their own experience and wisdom about what works best within their own traditions and practices. It isn't just pop culture and fast food that is creating a monoculture across the planet; it's also the spread of one management model, a model that is inherently destructive of life.

Paula Freire said that "reality doesn't change itself." If this is an accurate portrait of today's reality, then we-people everywhere--must be the agents of change. We need to create the conditions where we can think, where we can notice what's going on, and where we develop companions for the work that is required. It is the opportunity to develop these conditions for critical education and action that energizes me now. Our initiative is called: "From the Four Directions: People Everywhere Leading the Way." And this is what we do.

In local communities everywhere, leaders are invited (by a small group of local hosts) to meet regularly to think together, develop clarity about their practices and values that work to affirm and sustain people, and to support each other's courageous acts. Each circle is a site for critical education. People become more knowledgeable about what is going on in their world, and they develop new strategies for how to influence their world. They teach one another, relying on their experience and compassion. Over time, these local circles become good communities of practice-leaders emerge with greater skills to affect change in their world, wherever they are called to be leaders. Working locally, we act as a global leadership development effort, raising the standards of effective leadership in thousands of communities and changing the global definition of what good leadership means.

For these circles to give birth to new ideas, new courage, and new companions for the journey, we use the simple and ancient practice of good human conversation. We provide support for how to create the conditions for meaningful and deepening conversation. We also insist that these leader circles include as diverse a mix of people (age, gender, organizational type) as is possible in that community. A core value of From the Four Directions is that "we depend on diversity." We know that people need to be talking to one another again, across all the boundaries and hurts that have been created. And we know also that new solutions are only available when new people are in the conversation. Most communities in the world struggle with diversity-be it ethnic, religious, gender or age-based. In every circle, in every country, we strive to gently open the boundaries and extend welcome to those formerly excluded. We want to help reweave the broken bonds that are a major dilemma of all societies.

Our second core value is: "We rely on human goodness." We believe that the solutions needed at this time are not at all technical, but profoundly human. We will find the answers to complex issues, and we will find the courage to push back against the destructive practices of globalism, only if we find each other. In this time when there is growing evidence for human badness, there is the growing need to rely on the fact that most people, no matter their culture or physical conditions, have goodness in them. They, we, want to live with other people in more harmonious and humane ways. We develop greater clarity in leaders everywhere about human potential and the positive impulses that motivate people-the search for meaning, the need for good relationships, the opportunity to grow and contribute to others.

The focus of conversation in a From the Four Directions circle is leadership-those values and practices that are life-affirming rather than life-destroying. We aspire to support changes in the leadership of local communities everywhere, developing leadership practices at the local level that can restore hope to the future. But we also aspire to change the direction of our global future. We want to create a global voice on behalf of those practices and values that nourish and sustain the human spirit and all life. To achieve this, we are relying on a change theory taught to us by other living systems.

In nature, change doesn't happen from a top-down, strategic approach. There is never a boss in a living system. Change happens from within, from many local actions occurring simultaneously. When these local actions learn about other local actions, their own activity is strengthened. But even more is available. As local groups network together, they can suddenly, and always surprisingly, emerge into a global force. This global force is far stronger than the sum of the parts, and it is also different than the local actions that gave birth to it. These global forces are the result of emergence, and they are known as emergent phenomena. Always they possess great power, and always they are a surprise.

Globalism is a perfect example of an emergent phenomenon. No one planned it. It emerged from many local actions on the part of corporations and nation states, actions available in the absence of laws and policies for a new, inter-national environment. Globalism organized around only a few values--those of growth and profit-making. And suddenly, we live in the midst of its powerful pressures, organizing societies and organizations in ways that few people want, and that only a very few are benefiting from.

Once an emergent phenomenon has appeared, it can't be changed by working backwards, by changing the local parts that gave birth to it. You can only change an emergent phenomenon by creating a countervailing force of greater strength. This means that the work of change is to start over, to organize new local efforts, connect them to each other, and know that their values and practices can emerge as something even stronger.

From the Four Directions seeks to use emergence intentionally. Now that many local circles are up and running, we are beginning to network them together, experimenting with multiple ways of doing that. When a leader circle in Montevideo, Chile discusses the same issue as a circle in New Delhi, or when a Zimbabwean circle talks with a Danish circle about their experience with citizen democracy-we know that such connections have a powerful impact on personal leadership behavior.

We also believe that as people realize the problems they face are shared by others in different parts of the globe, that they instantly recognize these as systemic issues. There is no better way for people to become skilled systems thinkers than to realize their problem is not unique to them, but is affecting many others in diverse parts of the global system. One outcome of From the Four Directions is to create thoughtful and practical systems thinkers around the world.

Our greatest intent is to create a global voice for change in the practices and values used in all types of organizations everywhere. To create such an emergent phenomenon, we consciously connect circles to one another, publicize our efforts, and soon hope to host regional, in-person conferences, and engage in any other means of developing good, meaningful connections.

Using the great goodness of many, and actively developing the critical thinking and relational skills that make us human, we intend to astonish the world with what becomes possible when we nourish and sustain the human spirit.
Relying on Human Goodness
Shambala Sun, Summer 2001
We have a great need to rely on the fact of human goodness. Human goodness seems like an outrageous "fact." Everyday we are confronted with mounting evidence of the great harm we so easily do to one another. We are numbed by frequent genocide, ethnic hatred, and individual violence committed daily in the world. In self-protective groups, we terrorize each other with our hatred. Of the 240 or so nations in the world, nearly one-fourth of them are at war.
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. Many of us are more withdrawn and distrustful than ever. Yet this incessant display of what’s worst in us makes it essential that we believe in human goodness. Without that belief, there really is no hope.
There is nothing equal to human creativity, human caring, human will. We can be incredibly generous, imaginative, and open-hearted. We can do the impossible, learn and change quickly, and extend instant compassion to those in distress. And these are not behaviors we keep hidden. We exhibit them daily. How often during one day do you figure out an answer to a problem, invent a slightly better way of doing something, or extend yourself to someone in need? Very few people go through their days as dumb robots, doing only repetitive tasks, never noticing that anybody else needs them. Look around at your colleagues and neighbors, and you’ll see others acting just like you--people trying to be useful, trying to make some small contribution, trying to help someone else.
In these times of turmoil, we’ve forgotten who we can be and we’ve let our worst natures prevail. Some of these bad behaviors we created because we treat people in non-human ways. We’ve taken the very things that make us human–our emotions, our imagination, our need for meaning–and dismissed them as unimportant. We’ve found it more convenient to treat humans as replaceable parts in the machinery of production. We’ve organized work around destructive motivations–greed, self-interest, competition.
After years of being bossed around, of being told they’re inferior, of power plays that destroy lives, most people are exhausted, cynical, and focused only on self-protection. Who wouldn’t be? These negative and demoralized people are created by the organizing and governance methods in use. People cannot be discounted or used only for someone else’s benefit. If obedience and compliance are the primary values, these destroy creativity, commitment, and generosity. Whole cultures and generations of people have been deadened by such coercion.
But people’s reaction to coercion tells us a great deal about the goodness of the human spirit. The horrors of the twentieth century show us the worst of human nature, and the very best. How do you feel when you hear stories of those who wouldn’t give in, those who offered compassion to others in the midst of personal horror, those who remained generous in the face of torture and imprisonment? The human spirit is nearly impossible to extinguish. Few of us can listen to these stories and remain cynical. We are hungry for these tales–they remind us of what it means to be fully human. We always want to hear more.
Noticing our beliefs about human goodness is not a philosophical inquiry. Our beliefs are critical influences for what we do in the world. They lead us either to action or retreat. Courageous acts aren’t done by people who believe in human badness. Why risk anything if we don’t believe in each other? Why stand up for anyone if we don’t believe they’re worth saving? Who you think I am will determine what you’re willing to do on my behalf. You won’t even notice me if you believe that I’m less than you are.
Trungpa Rinpoche taught the relationship between our beliefs about each other and the willingness to act courageously. He defined our present historic time as a dark age because we are poisoned by self-doubt and thus become cowards. In his teachings and work, as Pema Chodron describes them, he aspired to bring about an era of courage in which people could experience their goodness and extend themselves to others.
Oppression never occurs between equals. Tyranny always arises from the belief that some people are more human than others. There is no other way to justify inhumane treatment, except to assume that the pain inflicted on the oppressed is not the same as ours. I saw this clearly in South Africa, after apartheid and during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. In those hearings, white South Africans listened to black mothers grieving the loss of their children to violence, to wives weeping for their tortured husbands, to black maids crying for the children they left behind when they went to work for white families. As the grief of these women and men became public, many white South Africans, for the first time, saw black South Africans as equally human. In the years of apartheid, they had justified their treatment of blacks by assuming that the suffering of blacks was not equal to theirs. They had assumed they were not fully human.
What becomes available to us when we greet one another as fully human? This is an important question as we struggle through this dark time. We need everybody’s creativity, caring, and open hearts to find our way. In my own organization, we’ve been experimenting with two values that keep us focused on what’s best about us humans. The first value is "We rely on human goodness." In conversations even with strangers, we assume they want from their life what we do from ours: a chance to help others, to learn, to be recognized, to find meaning. We have not been disappointed.
Our second value is "We assume good intent." Instead of developing a story about another’s motivation, we try to stop the storyline from developing, and simply assume that there must be a good reason why they just did something hurtful or foolish. It takes mindfulness to stop the stream of judgments that pour from our lips, but when we can stop them, we’ve been well rewarded. People’s motives usually are good, even when they look hurtful or stupid. And if we pause long enough to ask them what they intended, there’s another benefit--we develop a better relationship with them. Working together becomes easier.
I encourage you to try these simple practices, or any others you might invent. For these dark times to end, we need to rely as never before on our fundamental and precious human goodness.
Can We Reclaim Time to Think?
Shambhala Sun September 2001
Margaret Wheatley
As a species, we humans possess some unique capacities. We can stand apart from what's going on, think about it, question it, imagine it being different. We are also curious. We want to know "why?" We figure out "how?" We think about what's past, we dream forward to the future. We create what we want rather than just accept what is. So far, we're the only species we know that does this.

As the world speeds up, we're forfeiting these wonderful human capacities. Do you have as much time to think as you did a year ago? When was the last time you spent time reflecting on something important to you? At work, do you have more or less time now to think about what you're doing? Are you encouraged to spend time thinking with colleagues and co-workers?

In this turbo speed culture, we've begun to equate productivity with speed. If it can be done faster, we assume it's more productive. A recent trend in some companies is to hold meetings standing up. These meetings (or perhaps they should be called "football huddles," are touted as more productive, but the only measure used is that they take less time. If people are kept standing, the meeting ends sooner. No one measures the productivity of these meetings by asking whether people have developed wiser solutions, better ideas, or more trusting relationships.

If we can pause for a moment and see what we are losing as we speed up, I can't imagine that we would continue with this bargain. We're giving up the very things that make us human. Our road to hell is being paved with hasty intentions. I hope we can notice what we're losing-in our day-to-day lives, in our community, in our world. I hope we'll be brave enough to slow things down.

But I don't believe anybody is going to give us time to think. We have to reclaim it for ourselves.

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. Paulo Freire used critical thinking as a non-violent approach to revolutionary change. First In Brazil, and then in many poor communities around the world, he taught poor people how to think about their lives and the forces that were impoverishing them. Nobody believed that exhausted and struggling poor people could become intelligent thinkers. But it is easy for people to develop this capacity when they see how thinking can save their life and the lives of those they love.

Our lives are not as desperate as those poor, and we may not notice that we're losing the possibility of a fully human life. To see whether you're losing anything of value to yourself, here are some questions to ask yourself: Are my relationships with those I love improving or deteriorating? Is my curiosity about the world increasing or decreasing? What things anger me today as compared to a few years ago? Which of my behaviors do I value, which do I dislike? Generally, am I feeling more peaceful or more stressed? Am I becoming someone I admire?

If answering those questions helps you notice anything in your life that you'd like to change, you will need time to think about it. But don't expect anybody to give you this time. You will have to claim it for yourself.

No one will give it to you because thinking is always dangerous to the status quo. Those benefiting from the present system have no interest in your new ideas. In fact, your thinking is a threat to them. The moment you start thinking, you'll want to change something. You'll disturb the current situation. We can't expect those few who are well-served by the current reality to give us time to think. If we want anything to change, we are the ones who have to reclaim time to think.

In addition to claiming time to think, it's helpful to notice that in American culture, thinking is not highly prized. In our frenzy to make things happen, to take action, we've devalued thinking and often view it as an impediment to taking action. We talk about needing to get things done NOW; we've created a dualism between thinking and acting, between "being" and "doing." Personally, I find this dualism to be both dangerous and nonsensical.

There is no distance between thinking and acting when the ideas mean something to us. When we look thoughtfully at a situation and understand its destructive dynamics, we act to change it. Whenever we think and develop ideas that can change their lives, we act. We don't sit around figuring out the risks or waiting until someone else develops an implementation strategy. We just start doing. If an action doesn't work, we try something different. Governments and organizations struggle with implementation-inside any bureaucracy there's a huge gap between ideas and actions. But this is because we don't care about those ideas. We didn't invent them, we know they won't really change anything, and we won't take risks for something we don't believe in. But when it's our idea, a result of our thinking, and we see how it might truly benefit our lives, then we act immediately on any promising notion.

Taking time to think about those things that might truly change our lives always provides us with other gifts. Determination, energy, and courage appear spontaneously when we care deeply about something. We take risks that are unimaginable in any other context. Here's how Bernice Johnson Reagon, a gifted singer and song writer, describes her own and others fearless acts during the Civil Rights Movement. "Now I sit back and look at some of the things we did, and I say, 'What in the world came over us?' But death had nothing to do with what we were doing. If somebody shot us, we would be dead. And when people died, we cried and went to funerals. And we went and did the next thing the next day, because it was really beyond life and death. It was really like sometimes you know what you're supposed to be doing. And when you know what you're supposed to be doing, it's somebody else's job to kill you." (in Lovingkindness, Sharon Salzburg, p. 151)

Most of us don't have to risk life and death daily, but we may be dying a slow death. If we feel we're changing in ways we don't like, or seeing things in the world that make us feel sorrowful, then we need time to think about this. We need time to think about what we might do and where we might start to change things. We need time to develop clarity and courage. If we want our world to be different, our first act needs to be reclaiming time to think. Nothing will change for the better until we do that.

"Partnering with Confusion and Uncertainty"
Shambhala Sun November 2001
Margaret Wheatley
Most people I meet want to develop more harmonious and satisfying relationships--in their organizations, communities, and personal lives. But we may not realize that this desire can only be satisfied by partnering with new and strange allies-uncertainty and confusion. Most of us weren't trained to like confusion or to admit when we feel hesitant and uncertain. In schools and organizations, value is placed on sounding assured and confident. People are rewarded for stating opinions as if they're facts. Quick answers abound; pensive questions have disappeared from most organizations. Confusion has yet to appear as a higher order value, or a behavior that organizations eagerly reward.

And as life continues speeding up (adding to our confusion,) we don't have time to be uncertain. We don't have time to listen to anyone who expresses a new or different position. 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 soundbites that confirm our position. Gradually we become more certain, but less informed, and far less thoughtful.

We can't continue on this path if we want to act more intelligently, if we want to find approaches and solutions to the problems that plague us. The world now is quite perplexing. We no longer live in those sweet, slow days when life felt predictable, when we actually knew what to do next. In this increasingly complex world, it's impossible to see most of what's going on. The only way to see more of the complexity is to ask many others for their perspectives and experiences. Yet if we open ourselves to their differing perceptions, we will find ourselves inhabiting the uncomfortable space of not knowing.

It is very difficult to give up certainty-these positions, beliefs, explanations define us and lie at the core of our personal identity. Certainty is a lens to interpret what's going on and, as long as our explanations work, we feel a sense of stability and security. But in a changing world, certainty doesn't give us stability; it actually creates more chaos. As we stay locked in our position and refuse to adapt and change, the things we hoped would stay together fall apart. It's a traditional paradox expressed in many spiritual traditions: By holding on, we destroy what we hope to preserve; by letting go, we feel secure in accepting what is.

I believe that this changing world requires much less certainty, and far more curiosity. I'm not suggesting we let go of our beliefs, only that we become curious about what someone else believes. As we open to the disturbing differences, sometimes we discover that another's way of interpreting the world actually is essential to our survival.

The global system we inhabit is dense and tangled. We each live in a different part of this complexity. And, no two people are identical. Therefore, it's impossible for two people to see things exactly the same. You can test this out for yourself. Take any event that you've shared with others (a speech, a movie, a current event, a major problem) and ask your colleagues and friends to describe their interpretation of that event. I think you'll be amazed at how many different explanations you'll hear. You'll end up with a rich tapestry of interpretations much more interesting than your single one.

I find that the first step to becoming curious is to admit that I'm not succeeding in figuring things out alone. If my solutions don't work as well as I'd like, if my explanations of why something happened don't feel sufficient, I take these as signs that it's time to begin asking others about what they see and think. I try to move past the lazy and superficial conversations where I pretend to agree with someone else rather than inquire seriously into their perspective. I try and become a conscious listener, actively listening for differences.

There are many ways to sit and listen for the differences. Lately, I've been listening for what surprises me. What did I just hear that startled me? This isn't easy-I'm accustomed to sit there nodding my head as someone voices what I agree with. But when I notice what surprises me, I'm able to see my own views more clearly, including my beliefs and assumptions.

Noticing what surprises and disturbs me has been a very useful way to see invisible beliefs. If what you say surprises me, I must have been assuming something else was true. If what you say disturbs me, I must believe something contrary to you. My shock at your position exposes my own position. When I hear myself saying "How could anyone believe something like that?" a light comes on for me to see my own beliefs. These moments are great gifts. If I can see my beliefs and assumptions, I can decide whether I still value them.

If you're willing to be disturbed and confused, I recommend that you begin a conversation with someone who thinks differently than you do. Listen as best you can for what's different, for what surprises you. Try and stop the voice of judgment or opinion. Just listen. At the end of this practice, notice whether you learned anything new. Notice whether you developed a better relationship with the person you talked with. If you try this with several people, you might find yourself laughing in delight as you realize how many unique ways there are to be human.

We have the opportunity many times a day, everyday, to be the one who listens to others, curious rather than certain. And the greatest benefit that comes to those who listen is that we develop closer relationships with those we thought we couldn't understand. When we listen with less judgment, we always develop better relationship with each other. It's not differences that divide us. It's our judgments that do. Curiosity and good listening bring us back together.

Sometimes we hesitate to listen for differences because we don't want to change. We're comfortable with our lives, and if we listened to anyone who raised questions, we'd have to get engaged in changing things. If we don't listen, things can stay as they are. But most of us do see things in our life or in the world that we would like to be different. If that's true, we have to listen more, not less. And we have to be willing to move into the discomfort of uncertainty and confusion.

We can't be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion; cherished interpretations must dissolve to make way for the new. Of course it's scary to give up what we know, but the abyss is where newness lives. Yet if we move through the fear and enter the abyss, we rediscover we're creative.

As the world grows more strange, perplexing and difficult, I don't believe most of us want to keep struggling through it alone. I can't know what to do from my own narrow perspective. I know I need a better understanding of what's going on. I want to sit down with you and talk about all the frightening and hopeful things I observe, and listen to what frightens you and gives you hope. I need new ideas and solutions for the problems I care about. I know I need to talk to you to discover those. I need to learn to value your perspective, and I want you to value mine. I expect to be disturbed, even jarred, by what I hear from you. I expect to feel confused and displaced-my world won't feel as stable or familiar to me once we talk.

One last thing. As I explore partnering with confusion and uncertainty, 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.
Listening as Healing
Shambhala Sun, December 2001
Margaret Wheatley
You are reading this in December, but I have written this just a few days after September 11th, 2001. I have tried to imagine what the world feels like now, two months later, what else might have happened, what has changed, how each of us feels, if we are more divided or more connected. In the absence of a crystal ball, I look to the things I believe to be true in all times and for most situations. And so I choose to write about one of these enduring truths: great healing is available when we listen to each other.

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. If we can do that, we create moments in which real healing is available. Whatever life we have experienced, if we can tell our story to someone who listens, we find it easier to deal with our circumstances.

I have seen the healing power of good listening so often that I wonder if you've noticed it also. There may have been a time when a friend was telling you such a painful story that you became speechless. You couldn't think of anything to say, so you just sat there, listening closely, but not saying a word. And what was the result of your heartfelt silence, of your listening?

A young black South African woman taught some of my friends a profound lesson about listening. She was sitting in a circle of women from many nations, and each woman had the chance to tell a story from her life. When her turn came, she began quietly to tell a story of true horror--of how she had found her grandparents slaughtered in their village. Many of the women were Westerners, and in the presence of such pain, they instinctively wanted to do something. They wanted to fix, to make it better, anything to remove the pain of this tragedy from such a young life. The young woman felt their compassion, but also felt them closing in. She put her hands up, as if to push back their desire to help. She said: "I don't need you to fix me. I just need you to listen to me."

She taught many women that day that being listened to is enough. If we can speak our story, and know that others hear it, we are somehow healed by that. During the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa, many of those who testified to the atrocities they had endured under apartheid would speak of being healed by their own testimony. They knew that many people were listening to their story. One young man who had been blinded when a policeman shot him in the face at close range said: "I feel what has brought my eyesight back is to come here and tell the story. I feel what has been making me sick all the time is the fact that I couldn't tell my story. But now it feels like I've got my sight back by coming here and telling you the story."

Why is being heard so healing? I don't know the full answer to that question, but I do know it has something to do with the fact that listening creates relationship. We know from science that nothing in the universe exists as an isolated or independent entity. Everything takes form from relationships, be it subatomic particles sharing energy or ecosystems sharing food. In the web of life, nothing living lives alone.

Our natural state is to be together. Though we keep moving away from each other, we haven't lost the need to be in relationship. Everybody has a story, and everybody wants to tell their story in order to connect. If no one listens, we tell it to ourselves and then we go mad. In the English language, the word for "health" comes from the same root as the word for "whole". We can't be healthy if we're not in relationship. And "whole" is from the same root word as "holy."

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. Archbishop Desmond Tutu describes this era as a time of "radical brokenness" in all our relationships. Anywhere we look in the global family we see disconnection and fear of one another. As one example, how many teen-agers today, in many lands, state that no one listens to them? They feel ignored and discounted, and in pain they turn to each other to create their own subcultures. I've heard two great teachers, Malidoma Somé from Burkino Fasso in West Africa, and Parker Palmer from the United States, both make this comment: "You can tell a culture is in trouble when its elders walk across the street to avoid meeting its youth." It is impossible to create a healthy culture if we refuse to meet, and if we refuse to listen. But if we meet, and when we listen, we reweave the world into wholeness. And holiness.

This is an increasingly noisy era-people shout at each other in print, at work, on TV. I believe the volume is directly related to our need to be listened to. In public places, in the media, we reward the loudest and most outrageous. People are literally clamoring for attention, and they'll do whatever it takes to be noticed. Things will only get louder until we figure out how to sit down and listen. Most of us would welcome things quieting down. We can do our part to begin lowering the volume by our own willingness to listen.

A school teacher told me how one day a sixteen year old became disruptive-shouting angrily, threatening her verbally. She could have called the authorities-there were laws to protect her from such abuse. Instead, she sat down, and asked the student to talk to her. It took some time for him to quiet down, as he was very agitated and kept pacing the room. But finally he walked over to her and began talking about his life. She just listened. No one had listened to him in a long time. Her attentive silence gave him space to see himself, to hear himself. She didn't offer advice. She couldn't figure out his life, and she didn't have to. He could do it himself once she had listened.

I love the biblical passage: "Whenever two or more are gathered, I am there." It describes for me the holiness of moments of real listening. The health, wholeness, holiness of a new relationship forming. I have a T-shirt from one conference that reads: "You can't hate someone whose story you know." You don't have to like the story, or even the person telling you their story. But listening creates a relationship. We move closer to one another.

I would like to encourage us all to play our part in the great healing that needs to occur everywhere. Think about whom you might approach--someone you don't know, don't like, or whose manner of living is a mystery to you. What would it take to begin a conversation with that person? Would you be able to ask them for their opinion or explanation, and then sit quietly to listen to their answer? Could you keep yourself from arguing, or defending, or saying anything for a while? Could you encourage them to just keep telling you their version of things, their side of the story?

It takes courage to begin this type of conversation. But listening, rather than arguing, also is much easier. Once I'd practiced this new role a few times, I found it quite enjoyable. And I got to learn things I never would have known had I interrupted or advised.

I know now that neither I nor the world changes from my well-reasoned, passionately presented arguments. Things change when I've created just the slightest movement toward wholeness, moving closer to another through my patient, willing listening.

note to editor: I'd like to add the following reference to the end of this article. This column is adapted from Wheatley's new book: Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, January 2002.


It's An Interconnected World
Shambhala Sun, April 2002
Margaret Wheatley©

The dense and tangled web of life-the interconnected nature of reality--now reveals itself on a daily basis. Since September 11th, think about how much you've learned about people, nations, and ways of life that previously you'd known nothing about. We've been learning how the lives of those far away affect our own. We're beginning to realize that in order to live peacefully together on this planet, we need to be in new relationships, especially with those far-distant from us.

When my children were small, I had a refrigerator slogan that read: "If mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy." Perhaps that was my children's first lesson in systems thinking. We adults are learning this too. If others don't feel safe, we aren't safe. If others are struggling, we experience the consequence of their struggle. If others are poor, no matter how wealthy we are, we experience the consequences of their impoverishment.

Many great teachers have been trying to teach us this for thousands of years. Buddhism teaches that any one thing is here because of everything else. The great American naturalist, John Muir, commented that if we tug on any one part of the web of life, we get the whole web. But in spite of such timeless and ancient wisdom, we've been very slow to learn the lesson.

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. Think of all the lines and boundaries that exist: organizational charts, job descriptions, nation states, ethnic identities. These rigid boundaries have been a means to control people and events. The neat lines define what goes on inside each box, and the natural messiness of interconnectedness disappears-at least on paper. We run the world by these boxes. People are rallied to war by reinforcing the box of national or ethnic identity. At work, people are told which box they occupy on an organization chart. If they step outside the box with a idea or criticism, they're punished or ignored. Over time, people seek the protection of their box. They know what is, and what is not their job.

I had a powerful experience with this self-protective work attitude shortly after the first Anthrax incident. Anthrax first appeared in Palm Beach County, Florida. A friend of mine is a judge at the Palm Beach courthouse. Her secretary noticed that someone else had been at her desk; papers were disturbed, things moved around. Given the danger from Anthrax and other possible threats, the judge immediately called in building security. The security guard blandly told her that it was not his job to secure the secretary's office. "My job is to secure the judge's chambers, that's all." He could not be convinced otherwise. He knew his box, and remained oblivious to this new world where danger knows no boundaries.

But I do not fault this security guard. He, like so many of us, had been given this message by his supervisors. He, like so many of us, had learned to lie low, not make waves, do what you're told, and then use his job description as a way to avoid being blamed. Most organizations, because they manage by the boxes, have created millions of withdrawn, dependent, frightened, and cynical employees.

This is now a huge problem, because our safety and future depend upon whether each of us can step outside the boxes and participate intelligently in a complex world of interconnections. Here are a few hard truths about living and working within a complex system that I hope we can learn in time: In a complex system, there is no such thing as simple cause and effect. There's no one person to blame, or to take the credit. We have yet to learn this. Watch how, in any crisis or success, people immediately step up to assign blame or to take all the credit. Why has crime decreased over the past few years? Police say its more police; judges say it's due to tougher sentences; parents say it's because of better parenting; teachers, economists, social workers, elected officials. . . Everyone believes it's because of their singular contribution. No one wants to share the truth that it was everyone's contribution, interacting in inexplicable ways, that gave birth to the success.

In order to incorporate this sensibility, we need to abandon the neat lines of cause and effect. And we need to notice the reality of a second fact about complex systems: Focusing makes things fuzzier. The more we study a complex phenomenon, the more confused we are bound to become.

Few of us like to feel confused, or be confronted by messiness. But interrelated phenomenon-Life-is very messy. The longer we study a system, the more complex it becomes. This is incredibly frustrating. Our attempts at understanding (reading the reports, listening to different commentaries, thinking about the issue) only serve to drag us into further complexity. Instead of clarity, we experience only more uncertainty. What gave rise to modern terrorism? What will make airports more secure? What leads to smarter students? Safer communities?

I believe that our very survival depends upon us becoming better systems thinkers. How can we learn to see the systems we're participating in? How can we act intelligently when things remain fuzzy? Where do we intervene to change something when we can't determine a straightforward cause and effect relationship? What kinds of actions make sense when we're confused and confronted with increasing uncertainty?

Here are a few principles I've learned. Start something, and see who notices it. It's only after we initiate something in a system that we see the threads that connect. Usually, someone we don't even know suddenly appears, either outraged or helpful. We didn't know there was any connection between us, but their response makes the connection clear. Now that they've identified themselves, we need to develop a relationship with them.

Whatever you initiate, expect unintended consequences. Every effort to change a system creates these, because all the interactions can't be seen ahead of time. Probably the most visible example of unintended consequences, is what happens every time humans try to change the natural ecology of a place. Fertilizer is introduced to farm fields without noticing how rain water connects fields to oceans. Over time, we've got bountiful crops, but fewer fish. I know one corporation that created a Museum of Unintended Consequences. They wanted to notice all the impacts of any organizational change effort. When we're willing to look at unintended consequences, they teach a great deal about how a system operates.

Reflect, often. If we take time to notice what just happened, we learn how the system operates. Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful. It's amazing to me how much we do, but how little time we spend reflecting on what we just did.

Seek out different interpretations. Run ideas by many different people, to see things through their unique perception. 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.

Look for insights to emerge out of messiness. Puzzling and messy situations often lead us to flee. Either we grab onto an easy answer, or decide to take actions that have no rational. But confusion can create the condition for intuitions and insights to appear, often when we least expect them. Once they appear, we can trust them and use them as the basis for action.
Leadership In Turbulent Times Is Spiritual
Margaret J. Wheatley ©2002
Why has the topic of spirituality entered our organizational and professional lives? In the past several years, spirit and work have come together in many interesting questions. Is work a spiritual endeavor? Do we have a sense of vocation or calling? Can we bring our soul to work? Is it valid to even ask that question? Are leaders strengthened by faith in a higher power? Should good leaders act as "servant leaders" in the tradition of spiritual teachers or Jesus?

I don't think it accidental that questions from the domain of spirituality have moved into leadership. In fact, I think it's an unavoidable consequence of this time of turbulence. As our world grows more chaotic and unpredictable, we are forced to ask questions that have, historically, always been answered by spiritual traditions. How do I live in uncertainty, unable to know what will happen next? How do I maintain my values when worldly temptations abound? What is the meaning of my life? Why am I here at this time? Where can I find the courage and faith to stay the course?

Humans have sought answers to these questions for as long as we've been conscious and reflective. It is a fundamental human characteristic to ask "Why?" We are able to stand outside our immediate circumstances and look forward into the future, and to look backward and interpret the past. No matter how poor or desperate we are, we always need to know why things are happening. Every culture has its rituals and spiritual practices to answer the question "why?"

As our age has become more chaotic and complex, we've turned for answers to the real god of Western culture, science. We've asked scientists to explain to us how to deal with uncertainty, chaos, and catastrophes. We've hoped that the mathematics of complexity science would help us get a grip on the complexity of our organizations. We've wanted chaos science to reduce our fear of living in chaotic times, to teach us how to stop the unpredicted events that suddenly destroy lives and futures. We want the science of chaos to not just explain chaos, but give us tools for controlling the chaos.

But of course, this god of Science can only fail us. Chaos can't be controlled; the unpredictable can't be predicted. Instead, we are being called to encounter life as it is: uncontrollable, unpredictable, messy, surprising, erratic. One of my own spiritual teachers commented once that, "the reason we don't like Life is that it behaves like life."

Many people have a spiritual practice and rely on it to help them succeed as leaders and work colleagues. But in a more subtle form, I hear spiritual thinking whenever anyone talks about their work as a vocation or call. The notion of "vocation" comes from spiritual and philosophical traditions. It describes work that is given to us, that we are meant to do. We don't decide what our vocation is, we receive it. It always originates from outside us. Therefore, we can't talk about vocation or calling without acknowledging that there is something going on beyond our narrow sense of self. It helps remind us that there's more than just me, that we're part of a larger and purpose-filled place.

Even if we don't use the word vocation, most of us yearn to experience a sense of purpose to our lives. People often express the feeling of life working through them, of believing there's a reason for their existence. I always love to hear a young person say that they know there's a reason why they're here. I know that if they can hold onto that sense of purpose, they'll be able to deal with whatever life offers them. We avoid being overwhelmed and discouraged by knowing there's a meaning to our lives. The stronger our sense of vocation, the more resilient and courageous we are. And we can only develop a sense of purpose or vocation from believing in a power and order greater than our own.

Another frequent indication of spiritual thinking is the commonly heard comment: "There are no accidents." If nothing happens accidentally, if we believe in synchronicity, then where does that order come from? That is a question only answered by spiritual thinking.


Leaders today face spiritual challenges

I believe that leaders today are faced with enormous challenges, most of them not of their own doing. As times grow more chaotic, as people question the meaning (and meaninglessness) of this life, people are clamoring for their leaders to save and rescue them. Historically, we've too often given away our freedom and chosen dictatorship over uncertainty. People press their leaders to stop the chaos, to make things better, to create stability. And even leaders who would never 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 and give answers to dilemmas that have no answers. No leader can achieve this, and it is always liberating to realize that.

Leadership through command and control is doomed to fail. No one can create sufficient stability and equilibrium for people to feel secure and safe. 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 in these difficult times.


The essential work of leaders

Here are some principles that describe essential perspectives, beliefs, and work for leaders now. Each of these comes from spiritual thinking and traditions.

Life is uncertain. How can a leader help people understand that change is just the way it is? In Buddhist thought, the source of real happiness comes from understanding this fact. Instead of holding on to any one thing or form, we learn to expect that it will change. We become willing to move on rather than cling desperately to old practices. As a leader, it doesn't help to accuse people of being resistant to change. We all are. But when leaders give people time to reflect on their personal life experiences, they notice that they've changed many times in their life. They know how to do this. They also may notice that at those times when they've "let go", they haven't died.

Life never stops teaching us about change. As leaders, hopefully we can be gentle guides and coaches so that people discover their own life's wisdom.

Life is cyclical. Poet David Whyte has noted: "If you think life is always improving, you're going to miss half of it." Life is cyclical- we pass through different moods, we live through seasons, we have times of rich harvests and times of bleak winter. Life uses cycles to create newness. We move from the old to the new only as we pass through the cycle of chaos. We need to let go of the old (which always feels terrible,) before new life and capacity can arise. Instead of fleeing from the fearful place of chaos, or trying to rescue people from it. leaders need to help people stay with the chaos, help them walk through it together, and look for the new insights and capacities that can emerge.

In Christian traditions, times of chaos have been called "dark nights of the soul." In our present culture, we call these "clinical depressions." (I prefer the spiritual term.) In the dark night, we feel devoid of meaning, totally alone, abandoned by God. But this is the condition for rebirth, for a new and stronger self to emerge. You probably have walked through many dark nights and I encourage you to think how you changed, what new capacities you possessed when you emerged back into the light.

Meaning is what motivates people. There is nothing that motivates we humans more than meaning. I've seen many disillusioned and depressed staff groups develop high levels of energy and insight when they were asked to think about the meaning of their work. Consultant Kathy Dannemiller always asks groups to think about how the world will change because of the work they're doing. In such brutal times as these, when good work gets destroyed by events and decisions far beyond our influence, when we're so overwhelmed with tasks that we have no time to reflect for even a moment, it is very important that the leader create time for people to remember why they're doing this work. What were we hoping to accomplish when we started this? Who are we serving by doing this work?

I have always been astonished by the deep meaning people ascribe to their work. Most people want their work to serve a greater good, to help other people. People who make dog food reflect that "pets contribute to human health." Manufacturers of toxic chemicals in West Virginia want to do their work safely in order, "to make the world safe." We have an easier time of remembering the meaning of our work in certain professions, such as healthcare, education, and non-profits. But we seldom have time, especially in these professions, to pause for a moment and reconnect with the initial idealism and desire to serve that led us into our profession. But our energy and rededication is only found there, in our ideals.

Service brings us joy. Over the years, I've interviewed people who participated in disaster relief. I've always been astonished to notice that no matter how tragic and terrible the disaster, they always spoke of that experience with joy. They've led me to realize that there is nothing equal to helping other people. In service, we discover profound happiness. We all witnessed this in the days after September 11th. A comment that still brings tears to my eyes was made by a survivor who said: "We didn't save ourselves. We tried to save each other."

The joy and meaning of service is found in every spiritual tradition. It was once expressed very simply to me. "All happiness in the world comes from serving others; all sorrow in the world comes from acting selfishly."

Courage comes from our hearts. Where do we find the courage to be leaders today? The etymology of the word courage gives us the answer. Courage comes from the old French world for heart (coeur). When we are deeply affected, when our hearts open to an issue or person, courage pours from hearts. Please note that courage does not come from the root word for analysis, or for strategic planning. We have to be engaged at the heart level in order to be courageous champions. As much as we may fear emotionalism, leaders need to be willing to let their hearts open, and to tell stories that open other peoples' hearts.

We are interconnected to all life. Every spiritual tradition speaks about oneness. So does new science. As leaders, we act on this truth when we're willing to notice how a decision might affect others, when we try and think systemically, when we're willing to look down the road and notice how, at this moment, we might be affecting future generations. Any act that takes us past the immediate moment, and past our self-protective ways, acknowledges that there's more to life than just us. I learned a wonderfully simple way to think about our actions from a woman minister. She told how anytime she makes a decision, she asks herself: "Is this decision going to bring people together? Will it weave a stronger web? Or will it create further disintegration and separation?" I like to ask another question as well. In what I am about to do, am I turning toward others, or turning away? Am I moving closer, or am I retreating from them?

We can rely on human goodness. This is the first value of The Berkana Institute, where I serve as president. We rely on the great generosity and caring of humans. We know that there's more than enough human badness in the world, but that badness only pushes us to rely even more on human goodness.

In your own leadership, what qualities of people do you rely on? I believe in these dark times that we can only rely on the hope, resiliency, and love that is found in the human spirit. Many people through history have suffered terribly. Those we remember and admire-Helen Keller, Nelson Mandela, Ann Frank, war veterans, Holocaust survivors, cancer survivors-demonstrate what is best about us. We love to hear their stories because they illuminate what is good about being human. Vaclev Havel, President of the Czech Republic, says that hope is not a result of the condition of our lives. It is fundamental to being human. (The state motto of South Carolina is similar: "If I breathe, I hope.")

We need peace of mind. All spiritual traditions teach us ways to find peace of mind and acceptance. In the research on mind-body health, cultivating peace is a prerequisite for health. And who do we like to be around? Do we seek out angry or peaceful people? Do we find relief in noise or in quiet? As leaders, we need to find ways to help people work from a place of inner peace, even in the midst of turmoil. Frantic activity and fear only take us deeper into chaos. I've observed the power of starting a meeting with two minutes of silent contemplation. Or, when the meeting gets heated, of asking people to stop talking and just be silent for a few minutes. It's amazing how differently we come back into the fray if we've had those moments to pause. Few of us want to work as crazily as we do; most of us hate meetings where tempers boil over. Brief moments of silence can work wonders-silence is truly the pause that refreshes. Educator Parker Palmer tells of his discomfort at working in a Quaker organization, where they observed five minutes of contemplative silence before the start of every meeting. At one meeting, when there was a particularly difficult issue on the agenda, he was relieved to hear the leader announce that because of this serious issue, that today they would not spend the first five minutes in silence. But then, to his dismay, he heard her announce, "Instead, we'll take twenty minutes for silence."


Attending to your personal spiritual health

I'd like to offer just a few simple practices that I personally can't live without if I'm to maintain a sense of focus and peace as a leader.

1. Start your day off peacefully. I've raised a large family, so I laugh as I state this. But I've learned that I can't expect to find peace at work. However peaceful I am as I enter the office, that's probably my peak peaceful experience of the day. So I have a strong motivation to find peace before work. There are many ways to cultivate peace at the start of your day. You can drive to work in silence. Or listen to a particularly soothing piece of music. You can reflect on a spiritual phrase or parable. You can take a few minutes to just sit, either meditating or focusing on a lovely object. You can look for something beautiful outside your window. As your day grows crazier, it helps to know what peace feels like. Sometimes you can even recall that feeling in the midst of very great turmoil.
2. Learn to be mindful. Anytime you can keep yourself from instantly reacting, anytime you can pause for just a second, you are practicing mindfulness. Instead of letting your reactions and thoughts lead you, you step back and realize you can choose your reaction. Instead of being angry, you hesitate for a moment and realize you have other responses available. Instead of saying something hurtful, you pause and give yourself more options.
3. Slow things down. If you can't slow down a group or meeting, you can at least slow down yourself. I've learned to notice how I'm sitting. If I find myself leaning forward, moving aggressively into the discussion or argument, I force myself to sit back in the chair, even for just a moment. If I find my temper rising, I slow down and take just one deep breath. These are small things, but they yield big results.
4. Create your own measures. We all would prefer to be better people. We don't like to be angry, fearful, or to be creating more problems for other people. But how can we know when we're succeeding in becoming people we respect? What are our personal measures? Some people create a measure such as telling fewer lies, or speaking the truth to people more often. Some notice how they are more patient, or angry less often. I also use the question of "am I turning toward or away" as a personal measure of good behavior.
5. Expect surprise. We're old enough now to know that life will keep interrupting our plans and surprising us at every turn of the way. It helps to notice this wisdom that we've been forced to accumulate. Surprise is less traumatic once we accept it as a fact of life.
6. Practice Gratefulness. Most of us have been taught this, but how often do you take time, daily, to count your blessings? The wonder of this process is that as we take this daily inventory, we grow in gratefulness. We start to notice more and more-people who helped us, grace that appeared, little miracles that saved us from danger. The daily practice of gratefulness truly changes us in wonderful ways. And when you develop the practice of expressing your gratefulness to colleagues, your relationships improve dramatically.

I believe, because you are human, that you've already experienced the powers, fears and joys that I've described. It is more important to access your own wisdom than to seek advice from anyone else. Life is a consistent teacher. It always teaches the same lessons. Change is just the way it is. Peace is not dependent on circumstances. We are motivated by meaning. We want to express our love through service. And when we believe that, as leaders, we are playing our part in something more purposeful than our small egos can ever explain, we become leaders who are peaceful, courageous, and effective.
Supporting Pioneering Leaders as Communities of Practice
How to Rapidly Develop New Leaders in Great Numbers
Margaret J. Wheatley ©2002

What time is it?

Do you ever stand back and try to see the big picture, the view from 50,000 feet of what's going on in organizations, communities, the world? From up there, how would you describe these times? Is it a time of increasing economic and political instability, of growing divisiveness and fear, of failing systems and dying dreams? Is it a time of new possibilities, of great examples of hope, of positive human evolution, of transformation? Are we succeeding in solving major problems, are we creating more? Is it any of these things, is it all of these things?

It's important to think about how we answer this question, because that answer affects our choice of actions. If we think that, generally, things are working, that at present we're going through a difficult but temporary downturn, then we don't question current systems or their operating assumptions. Instead, we work hard to revive and improve them. We support initiatives and programs focused on process improvements, developing present systems to work more effectively and more efficiently.

If we believe that the old system cannot be repaired, if we expect to see only more system failures, then the work is not to fix. Instead, support needs to be given to radically different processes and methods, new systems based on new assumptions. The work becomes not process improvement but process revolution.

I frequently think about this question of what time is it. My answer is that we are living in a period when many of our fundamental beliefs and practices no longer serve us or the greater world. Worse than that, they are causing great harm and disabling us from being effective sponsors and facilitators of healthy change. I believe that the longer we continue to use familiar Western beliefs and practices, the more impotent we become to create the world we want.

We have caused many messes in the world, many of them unintentional, because we acted on beliefs and assumptions that could never engender healthy societies. We wove the following beliefs into our practices: that humans are motivated by selfishness, greed, and fear. That we exist as individuals, free of the obligation of interdependence. That hierarchy and bureaucracy are the best forms of organizing. That efficiency is the premier measure of value. That people work best under controls and regulations. That diversity is a problem. That unrestrained growth is good. That a healthy economy leads naturally to a healthy society. That poor people have different motivations than other people. That only a few people are creative. That only a few people are willing to struggle for their freedom.

These beliefs are not true and they have created intractable problems that cannot be solved within current systems of thought and practice. The destructiveness of these beliefs materializes in the major problems afflicting local communities around the globe, problems that persist and grow in spite of years of attempts to solve them: loss of cultures, ecological degradation, poverty, deteriorating health, war and dislocation, economic disempowerment of nations, accrual of power and wealth into fewer hands. While millions of people are working earnestly to solve these problems, and billions of dollars are poured into efforts to reverse the destruction, we need to take an honest look at whether our current approaches work. I believe that we are living out Einstein's well-known maxim: "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it."


Where have all the leaders gone?

There is a well-noted and alarming trend reported throughout the world--a desperate shortage of good leaders and talented professionals. These shortages appear at a time when the world is reeling from years of failed leadership. Leaders either have struggled valiantly with ineffective means, such as bureaucracy and command and control, or they have held onto power through brutal and corrupt means.

We are not yet free of this legacy of bad leadership, of abuses of power and profound disrespect for the human spirit. As this era grows more turbulent, some leaders are becoming desperate in their grasp for power. Daily, we learn of greater corruption, more extremes of abuse, more belligerent behaviors on the part of leaders.

Many individuals and organizations, in increasing numbers, are attempting to intervene to resolve the most pressing problems of this time: health, human rights, poverty, hunger, illiteracy, environmental issues, democracy. Far too many of these well-intentioned efforts are subverted by the lack of talented leadership. Money for projects disappears because of mismanagement, inexperience, or corruption. Change efforts fail because of inappropriate implementation processes. In developing countries we say there's a leadership vacuum. In developed countries, we ask, "Where have all the leaders gone?"

So the need for new leaders is urgent. We need new leadership in communities everywhere. We need leaders who know how to nourish and rely on the innate creativity, freedom, generosity, and caring of people. We need leaders who are life-affirming rather than life-destroying. Unless we quickly figure out how to nurture and support this new leadership, we can't hope for peaceful change. We will, instead, be confronted by increasing anarchy and societal meltdowns.

Thus, new leadership becomes a central and pressing challenge of our time.


The story of CIDA City Campus

Recently I met a remarkable young South African leader, Taddy Blecher. Together with his colleagues, and many professionals who volunteer their time, he has created the most amazing university in Johannesburg--CIDA City Campus. In existence for just two years, CIDA already serves 1200 students from the poorest rural areas in South Africa. Soon, CIDA will double in size with the admission of the next class of one thousand students. This entering class was chosen from several thousand applicants, and the selection was done entirely by present students.

Taddy has an unshakable belief in the potential of people: "Everyone is a leader and needs to be cherished for that." At CIDA, thousands of young students are developing as new leaders for South Africa. Nothing about CIDA resembles traditional models of education. Instead, they rely on the deep communitarian values of Africa. One thousand students take the same class and the same exams at the same time. They live together in formerly elite, now abandoned hotels in downtown Johannesburg. They advise each other, look out for each other, go job hunting together, sing together, cook together. They live, work, and study as a community. In this community, no one struggles alone and no one succeeds at the expense of another. CIDA students out-perform traditional students academically and in the work place, and radiate belief in themselves and their potential to serve their nation.

They also know how to manifest their leadership with exponential power. When I visited CIDA, I met a group of thirty students who had been specially trained in AIDS awareness education, and then gone back to their rural villages to teach their communities about HIV/AIDS. Each student had pledged to visit with one thousand people. They had just returned from this week-end effort, and proudly announced that they had brought AIDS education to 300,000 villagers in four days. Another group was about to be trained to educate local people in how to handle their money, credit, and banking.

The enthusiasm and joy that radiates in CIDA stand in stark contrast to other educational institutions. But rather than treat CIDA as an interesting exception to the norm. I want to illuminate them as representative of our future. The young leaders developing at CIDA demonstrate how powerful their idealism can be when held in community, how serving others is a source of joy and energy, how together we might possibly change the world. No one at CIDA acts in isolation. Working together in supportive community, each develops their unique skills and capacity as a leader. And they sustain their enthusiasm for leadership at a time when the problems faced by their nation and the African continent are overwhelming and seemingly without solution.


The new leaders are already here

Not only at CIDA, but everywhere there are aspiring leaders who have a firm commitment to lead in new ways, to not repeat the mistakes and abuses of the past. They exist in all communities, clear in their resolve to lead differently. They often say that leadership has chosen them, that it is their vocation to lead at this time. But they are trying to forge new leadership while living in countries and communities characterized by either corrupt leaders or well-intentioned bureaucrats. From whom can they learn new ways? Who are their mentors? How can they quickly learn alternative modes of leadership? And if they've grown up under oppression and colonialism, told for centuries that they're worthless and powerless, how do they let go of that conditioning and truly empower themselves as leaders?

I believe that the old leadership paradigm has failed us and that our current systems will continue to unravel. This has changed what I do and who I choose to support. I no longer spend any time trying to fix or repair the old, or to improve old leadership methods. I spend all of my time now supporting those giving birth to the new, those pioneering with new approaches to organizing and leading. In communities all over the world, there are many brave pioneers experimenting with new approaches for resolving the most difficult societal problems. These new leaders have abandoned traditional practices of hierarchy, power, and bureaucracy. They believe in people's innate creativity and caring. They know that most people can be awakened to be active in determining what goes on in their communities and organizations. They practice consistent innovation and courage-wherever they see a problem, they also see possibility. They figure out how to respond. If one response doesn't work, they try another. They naturally think in terms of interconnectedness, following problems wherever they lead, addressing multiple causes rather than single symptoms. They think in terms of complex global systems and yet also understand this world as a global village.

Presently, many organizations and individuals are engaged in supporting these new leaders, often known as social entrepreneurs. However, the majority of these efforts support these leaders at the level of the individual, awarding them fellowships and scholarships, bringing them from their own communities to study at universities, foundations, and leadership programs. But as yet, no one has determined how best to develop these new leaders in the large numbers that are needed. If we are to resource our communities with new, life-affirming leadership, we need a very different model for how to educate and nourish leaders at a new level of scale.


The challenges of paradigm pioneers

While those who want to support new leaders are struggling with the dilemma of scale, individual leaders face very challenging conditions. They act in isolation, often criticized, mocked, or ignored by the prevailing culture. They have no way of knowing there are many more like them, pioneers struggling with new ways of leading. It is a constant struggle to maintain focus and courage in the midst of such criticism and loneliness.

And, there are other challenges for these pioneers. These arise from the dynamics of paradigm shifts and how people generally behave when confronted with a new world view.

New leaders must invent the future while dealing with the past.
In speaking with these new leaders, it is very clear that they refuse to carry the past into the future. They do not want to repeat the mistakes of the past having, in many cases, personally suffered from ineffective or brutal leadership. They want to work in new ways, but these new ways of organizing, the new processes for implementing change, have yet to be developed. It is their work to invent them, and so they do double duty. They must simultaneously invent a new process or organizing form, and also solve the problems created by past practices.

It is difficult to break with tradition
It is not easy to invent the new. It is difficult to break free of the training, history, and familiar practices of the prevailing culture. New leaders certainly know that bureaucracy doesn't work, that corruption destroys communities, that aid administered from the top down most often fails. They refuse to repeat these practices, but they, like all of us, have been raised in these traditional ways. Past habits of practice exert strong pressures. When crises mount and people feel fearful and overwhelmed, we default back to practices that are familiar, even if they are ineffective.

Supporters want them to look familiar
Those with the means to support new leaders often complicate their pioneering work by wanting them to use familiar and traditional leadership processes. Those with resources often feel it too risky to support experiments with new practices. It feels safer to ask for traditional strategic plans, business plans, measurements, and reports, no matter what the context of the initiative. On the surface these seem to be important skill sets, but there is now substantial research demonstrating the failure of these methods to produce desired results in the most traditional of organizations. Perhaps supporters are risk-averse, perhaps they are unaware that these methods don't work. Whatever the reason, sponsors insist that pioneering leaders conform to the past. Resources are not available unless new leaders can demonstrate competency in familiar leadership practices, even those that have consistently failed to achieve sustained change.

And when resources are scarce, and competition grows among different projects, it is easy for pioneers to lose their way. Against their best judgment of what works in their community, they agree to comply with procedures and practices they know can't succeed. Over time, they fail, not from lack of vision or willingness to experiment, but because they have been held back from those experiments. We destroy these pioneers by insisting that they conform to the mistakes of the past.

There is no room for failure
As pioneers, it is impossible to get it right the first time. No one has yet drawn accurate maps--explorers learn as they go. The maps that pioneers create will make it easy for large populations to migrate easily to the future, but their own explorations require great sacrifice and constant learning. Our present culture doesn't support this kind of experimentation. We want right answers quickly; we ask people to demonstrate success early in their ventures. We evaluate them based on short-term measures. We seldom give adequate time for the explorations and failures that are part of mapping a new territory. Instead of offering additional resources to their explorations and experiments, we abandon them in favor of safer projects that employ familiar, flawed means.


We want them to fail
This is the greatest, unspoken difficulty pioneering leaders encounter. Society does not want them to succeed. To acknowledge their success means we will have to change. We will have to abandon the comfort of our familiar beliefs and practices. People naturally flee from such changes and thus, even as the old ways fail, we hold onto them more fiercely and apply them more zealously.

In his seminal work on paradigms, Thomas Kuhn described the behavior of scientists when confronted with evidence that pointed to a truly new world view. (see The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1996, 1974) When the new evidence clearly demonstrated the need for a change in paradigms, scientists were observed working hard to make the evidence conform to their old worldview. In defense of the old, they would discard or reinterpret the data. (This was always done unconsciously.) And in the most startling instances, they actually would be blind to the new information-even with the data in front of them, they literally could not see it. For them, the new did not exist.

When the paradigm is changing, it is common to experience each of these dynamics. How often do we see an innovative approach, and then characterize it as traditional? How often do we observe new leadership practices and deny their existence? How often do we treat their successes as anomalies or as exceptions to the norm? How difficult is it for us to acknowledge them for what they are, radical departures from tradition, the first trail markers of our way to the future?

Mohammed Junus, the founder of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and pioneer of micro-lending to the poor, tells the story of trying to get support from traditional bankers for his first loans to poor people. Dr. Junus wanted to loan very small amounts of money (often not more than a few dollars) to give Bangla people the means to start their own businesses. Whatever evidence he presented, the bank's reply was always the same: "The poor are not credit worthy." Frustrated, he then loaned his own money to the poor, and was paid back on time. But the bank's response was the same. Even after several years of successful lending to the poor, Dr. Junus was still greeted with the same old belief, "The poor are not credit worthy." He realized that no matter how much evidence he might accumulate to demonstrate the contrary, the banks would never see his evidence nor change their beliefs. (Grameen has since loaned millions to the poor, and developed a model for micro-lending that is used worldwide.)


Learning occurs in community

Because of the world's pressing leader shortage, and these paradigm-shift dynamics, there is an urgent need to support, strengthen, and nurture pioneering new leaders. They are eager learners, willing to try new approaches, hungry for methods and ideas that will work. Yet traditional approaches to leadership development are woefully inadequate to meet their learning needs.

Fortunately, research and work done on both adult learning and on "communities of practice" offer solutions to this leadership development challenge. Two quite different approaches-one from working with the poor in Brazil, the second from working with global corporations--come together to mark a clear path.

The first is the pioneering work of Paulo Freire. Working among the poorest of the poor in Brazil, Freire developed the practice and theory of Critical Education. (See Pedagogy of the Oppressed, ) He demonstrated that people who had never learned to read could quickly develop skills of literacy and complex reasoning if those skills would help them improve their lives. If they learned to think critically about the forces creating their poverty, they quickly learned the skills and analytic tools that could help relieve their condition.

Freire's work has since been substantiated by many others, in a wide variety of cultures and populations. The essential lesson is this: When people understand the forces creating the adverse conditions of their life, and how they might change those forces, they become eager and rapid learners. They are capable of learning sophisticated skills that far surpass traditional assumptions about their intellectual capacity. And they learn these skills faster than anyone would have thought possible.

The second body of practice and research is that of "Communities of Practice." This work has been pioneered in modern corporations, where training needs and efforts at knowledge management consume billions of dollars. Some core questions have been: How can people most quickly learn new skills? How is knowledge developed and shared within an organization? The concept "community of practice" was developed to illuminate that learning is a social experience. We humans learn best when in relationship with others who share a common practice. We self-organize as communities with those who have skills and knowledge that are important to us. Etienne Wenger, a pioneer in this field (see, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity, 1998), states: "Since the beginning of history, human beings have formed communities that accumulate collective learning into social practices-communities of practice. Tribes are an early example. More recent instances include the guilds of the Middle Ages that took on the stewardship of a trade, and scientific communities that collectively define what counts as valid knowledge in a specific area of investigation. Less obvious cases could be a local gardening club, nurses in a ward, a street gang, or a group of software engineers meeting regularly in the cafeteria to share tips."

Communities of practice demonstrate that it is natural for people to seek out those who have knowledge and experience that they need. As people find each other and exchange ideas, good relationships develop and a community forms. This community becomes a rich marketplace where knowledge and experience are shared. It also becomes an incubator where new knowledge, skills, and competencies develop. In corporations, many of the core competencies (the core skills that are the organization's unique strengths) develop within these informal, self-organized communities, not from any intentional strategic or development strategy.

The literature on communities of practice is filled with stunning examples of how workers learn complex skills in rapid time when seated next to those who have the skill. And of how workers reach out electronically across the globe with a question to colleagues, and receive back immediate, expert advice that resolves a crisis or dilemma.

These two very different fields-Critical Education and Communities of Practice-teach the same lessons. People learn very quickly when they have a need for the skills and information. If it will change their lives, if it will help them accomplish what is important to them, everyone can become a good learner. We learn complex competencies and knowledge in a matter of weeks, not months or years. And people learn best in community, when they are engaged with one another, when everyone is both student and teacher, expert and apprentice, in a rich exchange of experiences and learnings.


Supporting and sustaining new leaders

There is important work to be done to effectively support and nurture the pioneering new leaders that are appearing everywhere. It is possible to strengthen and develop these leaders in great number if we work from a new unit of scale, that of communities of practice rather than individuals. It is in these communities that learning accelerates and healthy and robust practices develop quickly.

There are four key areas of work that can support the development of new leadership-in-community. Each of these four areas describes work for foundations, NGOs, governments-all organizations focused on supporting new leadership as the means to create sustainable change.


I. Name the Community

Pioneering leaders act in isolation, unaware that they are part of a broader community. They act on intuition and experience, struggling to not revert to the practices of the past. They feel alone and strange, often criticized, even ridiculed, by their community. They bear such labels as idealists, dreamers, innocents, for believing that they can lead in new ways, solve entrenched problems, and create sustainable progress.

All this changes when they learn that they are part of a community, that there are many more like them. They gain confidence and courage. They find new energy to stay in the challenges and struggles of pioneering the new.

The community they belong to is a community of practice, not of place. The community forms among people acting from the same values and visions. Their practices are varied and unique, but each practice develops from a shared set of values. In this way, the community is very diverse in its expression, and very united in its purpose.

Only certain organizations --those who observe many communities or nations and who see more of the whole--have sufficient scope to name this community. It is never identified by those engaged in the day-to-day work in their separate communities.


II. Connect the Community

In nature, if a system is in distress, the solution is always to connect it to more of itself. As the network of relationships is rewoven and strengthened, the system processes new information and becomes healthier. A human community becomes stronger and more competent as new connections are formed with those formerly excluded, as it brings in those who sit on the periphery, as communication reaches more parts of the system, and as better relationships are developed.

We live in a time when connecting across distances has become much easier. Technology facilitates the formation of communities of practice, through dedicated websites, on-line conferences, list serves. But technology is only a supplement to necessary human and intimate connections, including gatherings of the community, publications specific to the community's interests, exchanges of people and resources.

Members of the community are too busy to develop the connections that would assist them. Again, those who have the privilege of seeing the whole of the community need to support multiple ways for members to connect with one another.


III. Resource the Community

Communities of practice need to be nourished with many different resources. They require ideas, methods, mentors, processes, information, technology, equipment, money. Each of these is important, but one great gap is that of knowledge-knowing what techniques and processes are available that work well. For example, they may be leading a community development process, yet know nothing of new means to engage the whole community, or new processes for valuing all of a community's assets. Without this knowledge, they either reinvent the wheel, or latch too quickly onto whatever process they hear about, even inappropriate or substandard ones.

To bring good resources to eager learners is such a simple and powerful means to promote the learning and practices of these pioneers. And these new leaders are already highly efficient users of resources--they've been stretching meager means for years.


IV. Illuminate and Interpret the Community

There is a critical need to tell the stories of this community, to get public attention for their efforts. Remember how difficult it is for any of us to see a new paradigm, even when it's right under our noses. People, if they even notice them, are most likely to see these new pioneers as inspiring and temporary deviations from the norm. It takes time, attention, and a consistent media focus for people to see them for what they are, examples of what's possible, of what our new world could look like. To develop this level of public awareness requires skillful working with the media.


Berkana's experience with this fourfold approach

This model emerged from the work of The Berkana Institute during the past two years. We didn't design the model, we just noticed that it was an accurate description of the work we found ourselves doing. For example, we'd been working with a global network of younger leaders, Pioneers of Change. (www.pioneersofchange.net) Some of their members had participated in our initiative, From the Four Directions, where we support the creation of on-going conversations among local leaders in many countries. (www.fromthefourdirections.org) We had noted a trend among some of the pioneers-they were intent on establishing leadership learning centers in their own communities. They either were dreaming of how they might do this, or were already engaged in creating an organized response to the needs of their communities for new leaders. A group of them serendipitously found themselves together at a meeting, most of them unaware of the dreams they shared. In fact, a few of them commented on how they'd been hesitant to express their idea of a leadership center because it felt too strange. Two staff from Berkana were present at that meeting, and were quick to "name the community." We then entered into conversation with them as to what they needed, and how we might best support them with connections and resources. Since that time in July 2001, Berkana and Pioneers of Change have partnered in supporting six new leadership centers developing in Croatia, England, India, Mexico, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. We've held gatherings for those initiating these centers, provided on-line conferencing, information, mentors-and most recently, partnerships (that will include financial support ) between our U.S. From the Four Directions leadership circles and these centers.

There are two other communities of practice that Berkana has named and is now supporting. These include a broad community of practice among African leaders who are giving birth to a new, African-based form of leadership; and a global community of practice among those using circle/council/conversation processes for societal change.


The power of this approach

We live in a time when coalitions, alliances, and networks are growing. People have created many networks, and some are now creating networks of networks. These networks will be essential for successful change, but they are not as intentional as is a community of practice. Exchanges among members of a network tend to be less focused and more dependent on how and when individuals choose to engage with those in the network.

Communities of practice develop from a need to do one's work more effectively. Because there is such a great need to connect with other members of the community, their work together can emerge quickly as a body of new competencies and methods that spread rapidly throughout the community. Therefore, facilitating communities of practice among pioneering leaders is a deliberate strategy to speed-up the emergence of new ways of organizing, of new global leadership practices that affirm rather than destroy life.

Emergence is life's process for taking local actions to achieve global impact. In nature, change never happens as a result of top-down, pre-conceived strategic plans, or from the mandate of any single individual or boss. Change begins as local actions spring to life simultaneously around the system. If these changes remain disconnected, nothing happens beyond their own locale. However, if connected, then local actions can emerge as a powerful influence at a more global or comprehensive level. (Global here means that the system operates at a larger scale, not necessarily the entire planet.) These powerful emergent phenomena appear suddenly and, most often, surprisingly. Think about how globalization and corporate power suddenly came to dominate, or how the Berlin Wall suddenly came down. Emergent phenomena always exert much greater power than the sum of their parts, and they always posses unique qualities that are different from the local actions that engendered them.

Emergence happens through connections. Therefore, any process that can catalyze connections becomes the means to achieve change at a global level. We are working intentionally with this powerful process when we name, connect, resource, and illuminate communities of practice. Inside these communities, leaders learn quickly, create new practices, and feel supported in their pioneering work. And through emergence, their relatively small, local efforts can become a global force for change, powerful enough to create the world we all desire, a world where the human spirit flourishes as the blessing, not the problem.


About the author: This article was written by Margaret Wheatley, based on long conversations and work with a number of colleagues, including (alphabetically) Manish Jain, Cire Kane, Marianne Knuth, Carole Schwinn, Bob Stilger, Tenneson Woolf and the Berkana Wisdom Board.
Speaking our Suffering
Margaret Wheatley ©2002

Speak the truth in a million voices. It is silence that kills Catherine of Siena (14th century)

In Western culture, it is common to keep our pain to ourselves. The greater the suffering, the more we tend to withdraw. We've been taught to do this, to bear trauma privately, to keep it inside, and to just get on with life. And we who have not suffered trauma directly often act in ways that keep the suffering ones silent. We don't want to hear their stories because we won't know what to say. When others voice their pain-their grief, their loss, their despair-we believe we must somehow fix it or make it go away. We believe we must respond with a solution, that it's not enough to just listen.

These are cultural burdens of growing up in Western society. We want to make life smooth and comfortable, to have life constantly improving. If something goes wrong, we internalize it as our fault. If someone shares their burdens, we think we have to fix them. We've lost the processes and rituals by which people grieve together, where we come together not to change life, but simply to experience it. We have forgotten how to walk through life--with its great cycles of darkness and chaos followed by rebirth and light--together.

We're experiencing this now with those most affected by Sept. 11th. Too many relief workers, widows, corporate workers, and children have gone silent, bearing their traumas alone. Perhaps they don't know how to talk about their experiences or to put words to the searing emotions they feel. Perhaps they are trying to spare those around them from the pain of knowing how they feel. Perhaps they have gone silent as a gift of love to the rest of us, not wanting us to suffer as they are suffering.

I don't know if this is why those suffering are so silent. But I believe that we who didn't suffer directly must find ways to evoke their stories and end the silence.

We don't save others by being silent. The tragic irony is that we create more trauma in those we are trying to spare. Parents that keep quiet in order to shield their children end up creating deep emotional scars in their children. In research done on the second generation of Holocaust survivors--the children of those who survived the death camps--the impact of silence became clear. If parents had spared their children and never told them the details of the horror they had experienced, the children grew up depressed and, in some cases, suicidal. Children know the secrets of their parents. They intuit that something very important is not being shared. They have no means to interpret the feelings that something is terribly wrong. So, as children do, they assume responsibility for these bad feelings. As they mature, this self-loathing manifests as depression and, sometimes, self-destruction. The antidote for these children is to hear the stories, to break the silence. If they are adults and their parents have died, they need to hear the stories from other survivors of their parent's generation.

There are other reasons we must find ways to break the silence. When people tell their stories, they are capable of healing themselves. The act of telling our story, and feeling that we are being listened to, is one of the simplest ways to heal. A young South African woman taught a profound lesson about listening. She was sitting in a circle of women from many nations, and each woman had the chance to tell a story from her life. When her turn came, she began quietly to tell a story of true horror--of how she had found her grandparents slaughtered in their village. Many of the women were Westerners, and in the presence of such pain, they instinctively wanted to do something. They wanted to fix, to make it better, anything to remove the pain of this tragedy from such a young life. The young woman felt their compassion, but also felt them closing in. She put her hands up, as if to push back their desire to help. She said: "I don't need you to fix me. I just need you to listen to me."

That's all we need to do: listen. Not judge, not recommend, not fix. Just listen, bearing witness, keeping our hearts open. Parker Palmer said this beautifully: "The soul doesn't need to be fixed or saved. It needs to be received." (Spirituality and Health article on We all became contemplative on Sept. 11, ** Editor: please find exact quote.)

What can we do to receive those among us who are suffering? What can we do to invite them to tell their stories and reveal their sorrow? Here are just a few suggestions:

We can expect that triggering events, such as the 1st year anniversary, will stir up deep emotions. We can make sure we are available for those anniversaries, and offer ourselves as quiet companions, available to listen.

We can share our own vulnerability as a means to prime others to share theirs.

If someone does begin to tell their story, we can restrain ourselves from commenting, advising, or interrupting. We can exercise the discipline of good listening, and the faith that that is sufficient for healing. It doesn't help to say "I know just how you feel" or "I had that experience once also." The discipline is to just sit there with our hearts open, absorbing their story into our being.

It helps to visualize the story siting there in the space between us. The story is what it is, it doesn't require comments or interpretation.

At the end of the story, we can express our gratitude that it was shared. And we can offer to listen again, to another story when it needs to be told.

If we are able to be good listeners, we will discover that it is possible for people to heal themselves. During the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in South Africa, many of those who testified to the atrocities they had endured under apartheid spoke of being healed by their own testimony because they knew the nation was listening. A young man who had been blinded when a policeman shot him in the face at close range said: "I feel what has brought my eyesight back is to come here and tell the story. I feel what has been making me sick all the time is the fact that I couldn't tell my story. But now it feels like I've got my sight back by coming here and telling you the story."

May the silence be broken so that those most wounded may heal.
Stressed Out Kids
Margaret Wheatley ©2002
Recently, I've been noticing many disturbing indicators from the lives of American children. Here are just a few incidents that I've noted.

A New Jersey school system decided to give all children one free night with no scheduled activities. They had to plan for this six months in advance.

Elementary school children are developing back and neck problems normally not seen until adulthood. These physical ailments are caused by their school backpacks. The packs often weigh about twenty pounds; the children often weigh about 60 pounds.

Fourteen hundred college students died this past year as a consequence of binge drinking. Out-of-control college drinking on campuses has become so serious that Congressional hearings have been held about it.

My thirteen year old granddaughter explained to me how she needs to know her weekly schedule, otherwise she can't cope with the anxiety and develops headaches.

By themselves, each of these incidents might mean nothing, but together they paint a disturbing picture. I believe they are indications of the fact that children's lives have become miniature versions of our own adult lives. We seem to be acculturating our children to be constantly busy, to be burdened by schedules, to become so stressed that they seek inappropriate ways to release that stress. Long before they start school, children develop schedules of their own, moving from one coordinated activity or program to another We no longer have to wait till adulthood in order to feel over-committed and overwhelmed.

I don't know if there's a solution to this frenzy of activity amongst all ages. But I believe we should notice what's happening to our children. How comfortable are our children with unstructured time? Do they experience moments of quiet, of just being in the moment? How do they feel when their plans fall apart? What's their response to boredom and loneliness?

Lest I sound like a crabby old lady, let me tell you why I started noticing these things. I spend a great deal of time with teen-agers, partly because I have two at home, and partly because they're both in the same rock band, and I often travel to concerts and clubs where they're performing. I also have thirteen grandchildren. And my work brings me into daily contact with many adults in different professions and work places. During the past few years, I've watched the levels of stress, anxiety, conflict and craziness keep rising in all these different age groups.

There are many indicators of rising stress. In America and Europe, sleeping disorders are on the rise, rage and abuse are on the rise. More diseases are appearing that are linked to nervous conditions. One European health survey predicted that within the next twenty years, the leading causes of death would be from diseases of the heart and of the nervous system. And stress and anxiety have invaded the lives of children. Teachers report greater anxiety in students. Some of this is a manifestation of their parents' stress; some of it is caused by the demands placed on kids. Increasingly, greater numbers of children are medicated in order to quiet them down, and to help them stay focused.

From what I observe, American society is speeding up to such a frenzied state that any day now, I expect to witness a human being exploding in front of me. And when this frenzy starts to affect our children, when we seem unconsciously to be creating them in our own image, I get worried. It's been a slow creeping change in our children's lives, another example of the boiled frog who didn't notice the water temperature rising. When did it become normal for kids to have so many commitments in their lives that they require their own schedules and day planners? When did we develop the expectation that kids should do so many activities: school work, organized league sports, school clubs, music, dance or sports lessons, paying jobs, and active social lives? It's no wonder that many high school students report they stay up doing homework until after midnight. Homework is the last obligation at the end of a day of non-stop activities. And parents of young children are encouraged to get them involved in structured programs and lessons even before they begin school. (Let me confess--I had one son in swimming lessons at six months. One daughter-in-law teaches music and rhythm to children one to three years of age.)

Most parents I know are not happy with keeping pace with their kids demanding schedules. Early evenings and week-ends are spent shuttling kids to their soccer or Little League games or school activities. It's no wonder we can't wait for them to be able to drive. But even if we want to slow things down and give our kids some relief, most of them don't want it.

As hassled and fatigued as our kids may be, they've grown dependent on feeling busy. They've learned to schedule their days down to the minute in order to fit in everything. They don't like or know what to do with down time. Several of the students interviewed in New Jersey found that the free evening given to all kids in their community was boring. They felt confined by "free" time.

So changing our kids' lives is very complex. They don't know what they're missing. And peer pressure is real. Therefore, we can't act individually as parents and insist that only our kids participate in fewer activities. If we ask them to withdraw from "normal" activities, they'll only feel strange and different, and alienated from us as parents. The community in New Jersey realized that this was a community issue and made an attempt to address it at that level.

Because this is a community issue, I believe we need to start the conversation with other parents, and with school administrators. If we share our own experiences, we can help each other notice what's going on. Then together we can determine what we might initiate as a community to ease up on our kids. I hope we don't have to wait until our children reach adulthood for them to discover, as we may have done, that a healthy life requires peaceful moments, and that being present in the moment is a wondrous skill.

I hope we can teach them that plans are not the answer to all of life's needs, that there is truth to the old joke that if you want to make God laugh, just present your plans. I hope we can teach them to expect moments of chaos when everything falls apart, and to dance with those moments rather than fear them. I hope we can teach them to not be afraid of boredom and loneliness, so that they stop grasping after entertainment, drugs, or alcohol to fill the void. Loneliness, boredom, restlessness-these are conditions of being human. No matter how much we deny them or run from them, they always return. As we mature, hopefully we learn that we don't need to fill the emptiness, that we can just sit with it and it will pass.

But I wonder how my children are learning these fundamental life lessons.
Silence is the Problem
Shambhala Sun November 2002
Margaret Wheatley ©
Eight hundred years ago, Catherine, a woman living in Sienna Italy who was later to become a saint, stated: "Speak the truth in a million voices. It is silence that kills." Her words haunt me today, as I notice how much silence there is, and how it is growing around the world. Here are just a few examples:

At an international peace conference in Croatia, participants were asked: What keeps you from speaking up for peace?

At an educator's conference in the U.S., a well-known champion of public education confronted his audience with three important issues that no one was talking about, behavior he dubbed as "our great silences."

In Europe, many people express remorse that their nations stayed silent as war in the Balkans escalated. Why didn't they act to prevent the atrocities and massacres of the Bosnian war? (The United Nations issued a formal apology two years ago for its failure to prevent the massacre in Szrebinitsa.[sp?])

In Africa, both Europe and the U.S. have expressed regret for not intervening in Rwanda to stop the slaughter of millions.

In a rural Kenyan village, a young African woman dying of AIDS wonders why America is so silent on the AIDS pandemic. She asks her sister who lives in Seattle: "Does anybody know that we're dying?"
Why is silence moving like a fog across the planet? Why is it growing in us as individuals, even as we learn of more and more issues that concern us? Why do we fail to raise our voice on behalf of things that trouble us, and then regret what we didn't do? As I've watched the silence grow in myself and others, I've noticed a few reasons for the silence, but none of these are entirely sufficient as explanations.

We don't know how to talk to each other anymore. Even in nations where there is a strong tradition of citizen participation, people have stopped talking to one another about the most troubling political issues. A Danish woman explained that political correctness made people fearful to engage in conversations about the influx of immigrants that is forcing Denmark to give up its homogenous culture and deal with diversity and inclusion. She explained that since reasonable people failed to talk about this issue, right wing splinter groups have developed, marketing fear-based, exclusionary solutions. As she described this behavior, it felt like an accurate description of what's happened in many democratic societies. The silence of thoughtful people creates a vacuum filled by extremism.

We're overwhelmed by the amount of suffering in the world. It's impossible to notice what's going on in the world during this dark age without feeling overwhelmed and helpless. There are very few true solutions. Most solutions only result in more complex problems, and every act of compassion is countered by more acts of aggression and greed. The sheer number of problems, and their unending nature and global scale, has pushed many of us into silence. It is too much to bear, and so we choose numbness over involvement.

People feel more powerless now than at any time in recent history. Recently I was in a conversation with twenty-five people, ages 22 to 60, from fifteen different countries. I was saddened to hear that all but one of us shared the same experience --we do not feel represented by our governments, and we feel powerless to change this. Decisions are being made in our name that we absolutely disagree with. (Only one person in this conversation felt they were living in a country where democracy was gaining strength, and that was The Netherlands.) As one young leader from England now living in Holland remarked: "I see all these decisions being made by men in ties. I feel so f----- angry. I see the youth not being heard, getting pissed off and going to the streets in protest, and look at what happens to them!"

We're afraid of what we might lose if we speak out. A young Ecuadorian environmentalist working for her government described how she couldn't get support from local environmental organizations because they were afraid they might lose their government funds. The U.S. educator who named "our great silences" noted that educators fear the loss of funding or favors if they question current policies. In the sixties, this was called "being coopted," forfeiting one's integrity and principles in order to stay on the good side of those in power. Since then, cooptation seems to have become more more prevalent, just more subtle. We hesitate to challenge those who offer us employment, funds, or respectability. We want to see change, justice, peace, but delude ourselves into thinking these can occur with no cost to ourselves.

We've convinced ourselves that what is happening elsewhere doesn't affect us. Perhaps we're still denying our interconnectedness, believing that things happening far away do not threaten us. Or perhaps we're grasping for whatever personal benefits we can while we still have time, sensing that things are only getting worse.

I've had a personal experience with silence and giving voice. I became committed to being aware of my silence several years ago when I was working with a colleague from South Africa. It was just eighteen months after the elections that brought Mandela and black South Africans to power. My friend, like many white South Africans, was just then learning the details of apartheid, the system under which he, as a white, had prospered while millions had suffered so horribly. As more and more atrocities were revealed, his 27 year old son came to him one day and asked: "How could you not have known what was going on? How could you not know?" I was sitting in the comfort of a conference room in America when I heard this story. But the questions pierced right through me. I knew in that moment that I never wanted to be in the position of my friend, that I never wanted to be confronted by my own children or grandchildren.

Since then, I do not always speak up for all the issues and problems that disturb me. I give voice to some and not for others. I can't pretend that I make rational choices, where I "choose my battles." Sometimes I am just too tired to care, sometimes I lack courage, sometimes I notice that others have picked up that cause and I don't have to. But at least I now notice when I remain silent, and am more conscious that silence is a choice I make. I'm learning that silence is not the absence of action, but another form of action. And I hold myself accountable for that.

The 18th century historian Edmund Burke said it clearly: "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." I hope that I am doing what I can, although it may not be enough. And if my grandchildren one day come to me and ask, "Why didn't you do something" at least I will be able to tell them what I did.
What did you hope America would have learned from September 11?
Tikkun Magazine Fall 2002
Margaret Wheatley ©
In July, I had the great privilege of asking this question to a group of twenty-four people from fifteen countries. They ranged in age from 22 to 66 although the majority were in their twenties and thirties. They lived throughout Europe (several were from Eastern Europe), North America and South America. The setting was an 11th century, crumbling castle in Slovenia. We sat in a circle, surrounded by strong fortress walls made more interesting by decay, looking out over the peaceful and fertile plains of Hungary. As we gathered in circle, I was surprised by how grateful they were that I had invited them into this conversation. As one young man said: "I've been desperately wanting to have this conversation with an American, but no one has wanted to talk with me." Here are several things they said:

The opportunity was lost for other countries to partner with America. After the initial outburst of volunteerism in America (which everyone admired,) and other nations readiness to leap in and support America, the U.S. chose to go it alone and become the world's policeman. The possibilities for openness and collaboration gave way to a campaign against evil waged in isolation. Some of the eagerness to partner with the U.S. came from a desire not to repeat the sins of the past. "Europe jumped in to help so quickly because we are filled with remorse for what we didn't do to prevent the massacres in Bosnia." "Germany was hoping that America would do its dirty work so it wouldn't have to."

America is consumed by a great myth. The story that has gripped the U.S. is the classic one found in science fiction and many myths. "A few good people must fight great evil, overcoming all odds to triumph." After 9/11, Americans asked "Why do they hate us?" The answer given was that "They hate our freedom." In this story, America is the brave and determined defender of freedom-loving people for the entire planet. A young leader from England and Pakistan who had just returned from the States described this story as "internally consistent. It has its own logic that you can't argue with." A young Slovenian woman added that many Americans, even before September 11th, believed that all people were envious of them. But for her, the term "American" is pejorative.

America has nothing to learn. This theme kept circling through our conversation--it is a source of great frustration and emotion. Why doesn't America listen to anyone else? Why isn't America asking for other opinions? Why is it so arrogant and shut off from the world? How can Americans believe they have nothing to learn from the rest of us? A European who noted how, in Europe, you can't avoid meeting those from other countries, gently asked: "How can we help Americans become curious to meet others?"

What goes around comes around. A young leader from Ireland spoke of the financial support Irish-Americans had given over the years to Irish terrorist groups. ""Your money has been responsible for the deaths of over 3000 people in Ireland." A young Ecuadorian woman spoke of the impact of current U.S. policies in Colombia against cocaine growers. "People are fleeing to Ecuador, causing great problems for us. I believe in part because of U.S. policies in this area, that things are going to continue to get worse over the next five years." Many in the room found these two examples consistent with their experience of U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II.

As the conversation deepened, it moved into an exploration of our shared grief for what is happening in the world. I was saddened to hear that all but one of us felt that we were not at all represented by our governments, and felt powerless to change this. Decisions are being made in our name that we absolutely disagree with. (Only one person felt they were living in a country where democracy was gaining strength, and that was The Netherlands.) As one young leader from England now living in Holland remarked: "I see all these decisions being made by men in ties. I feel so f----- angry. I see the youth not being heard, getting pissed off and going to the streets in protest, and look at what happens to them!"

These expressions of shared powerlessness helped shift us into a conversation about our own capacities. What was the role we wanted to play in this world, right now? We spoke about the new story we wanted to help birth, shifting the storyline from violence, greed and economics to compassion and humane values. Some, who had just heard the Dalai Lama speak in the Balkans, quoted him as saying, "War is out of date." A woman from Bulgaria asked if we could start to make something ourselves and not wait any longer for organized efforts to solve these problems. One young leader urged us to "Be your own leader, work with your own fears. Choose to live your life honoring and serving life."

Together we explored how we might move out of the debilitating sadness and fear we so often feel. The Bulgarian woman noted that we each need to transform our own violence and fear, in our own way. "There is no once recipe for doing this." A young European encouraged us to go into the depths of our despair, for there we would find our most empowering moments. An older woman commented, "It's better to show the sadness behind the anger. We are sad that the connection between us has been broken."

There was one last comment about America. A physician and mother from Mexico expressed her fear for the influence that America was having on her children being raised in Mexico. She did not want her children to become Americans, because she found us to be lonely, fearful, and disconnected from our spiritual natures. Very quietly she said: "We need to help bring spirit back to those humans who have forgotten that they're part of us."

As a troubled American, I can only say "Amen".
The Servant -Leader: From Hero to Host
An Interview With Margaret Wheatley © 2002

On November 15, 2001, Larry C. Spears, CEO of the Greenleaf
Center for Servant-Leadership in Indianapolis, and John Noble,
Director of the Greenleaf Centre-United Kingdom, met with
Margaret Wheatley in Indianapolis, Indiana. What follows is a record of the
conversation that took place.

Larry Spears: Do you recall when you first encountered Robert Greenleaf ’s writings
and any remembrances of your initial impressions?

Margaret Wheatley: I’ve been trying to remember. I think it was through
Max DePree. What I enjoy most about Greenleaf ’s work is realising that
every time I go back, I read something that feels completely new and relevant.
And each time I’ll read a paragraph or an article it suddenly feels completely
contemporary and relevant and it’s different from what I noticed last time. In
that way his work stays very contemporary and exceedingly relevant. I think
that’s the mark of a great thinker. It’s not just that he was a visionary and saw
the need for the servant as leader. It’s truly great concepts and ideas that are
timeless and fundamental. That’s what I enjoy most. Every time I pick up
anything of his to read I realise that I’m going to be surprised again. It’s not
the same old thing.

Larry Spears: Is there any particular thought or idea about servant-leadership
that has struck you as a source of wisdom or importance?

Margaret Wheatley: I was recently struck by Greenleaf ’s admonition to “do
no harm.” I’ve been saying to a number of colleagues that doing no harm is
becoming exceedingly difficult. It’s not just about doing good, it’s actually
avoiding harm. We don’t see the consequences of our actions. America is in
the midst of a huge “wake up call” about what is the cost to the rest of the
world for us to be living the life we are living. It isn’t about terrorist activity;
it’s about noticing that we put an extraordinary demand on the rest of the
world for resources and energy, and that our way of life does not work well
for most other people because of the demands we put on them. So that’s what
I’ve been feeling about “doing no harm”—we don’t even know what we’re
doing that’s causing harm. I know Greenleaf wrote that in a much simpler
time, but I was really struck by that this time through.

Larry Spears: In light of the events of September 11th have you any thoughts as
to what servant-leadership has to offer to the world today that might be useful, and
what we who are involved in this work may be thinking positively about?

Margaret Wheatley: That’s a very important question. I have been asking:
“What is the leadership the world needs now and what are we learning about
leadership from actually being followers?” By this I mean some of us who
have been leaders are now followers, watching our government and our military
trying to lead us. What are we learning about all this? I think the questions
are writ large. “What are you learning now that you are a follower?
What makes for effective leadership?”

Now more than ever, we have to fundamentally shift our ideas of what
makes an effective leader. We have to shift them away from this secretive,
command and control, “we know what’s best.” We have to leave all that
behind, even though it may be effective in the moment. I’m certainly learning
that there are different needs at different times when you are a leader.
Different styles, different modalities. But what I find in servant-leadership
that I still find missing in the world is this fundamental respect for what it
means to be human. And I think that right now the greatest need is to have
faith in people. That is the single most courageous act of a leader. Give people
resources, give them a sense of direction, give them a sense of their own
power and just have tremendous faith that they’ll figure it out.

We need to move from the leader as hero, to the leader as host. Can we
be as welcoming, congenial, and invitational to the people who work with us
as we would be if they were our guests at a party? Can we think of the leader
as a convenor of people? I am realising that we can’t do that if we don’t have
a fundamental and unshakeable faith in people. You can’t turn over power to
people who don’t trust. It just doesn’t happen. So what I think I’m learning
from September 11th is that it’s possible that people really are motivated by
altruism, not by profit, and that when our hearts open to each other we
become wonderful. The level of compassion and gentleness that became
available, taking a little more time with each other, all of that, I think, has
shown me the things that I have treasured for a long time in people. But I
think it’s very clear, and so we have an opportunity to notice how good we
are. If you don’t have faith in people, you can’t be a servant. I mean, what
are you serving? If you’re not serving human goodness, you can’t be a servant.
For me it’s just that simple. There is no greater act on the part of the leader
than to find ways to express that great faith in people.

The other part about the timelessness of servant-leadership is, what do
you do if you can’t control events? There is no longer any room for leaders to
be heroes. I think one really needs to understand that we have no control,
and that things that we have no control over can absolutely change our lives.
I think it will take a little while for Americans to really accept that there is no
control possible in this greater interconnected world. There are lots of things
we can do to prepare, but there is no control. One of the great ironies right
now is that no matter how good you were as a business before September
11th and no matter how skilled you were at planning, and no matter how
skilled you were at budgeting, everything’s shifted. The only way to lead
when you don’t have control is you lead through the power of your relationships.
You can deal with the unknown only if you have enormous levels of
trust, and if you’re working together and bringing out the best in people. I
don’t know of any other model that can truly work in the world right now
except servant-leadership.

Even within the military, command and control is not what’s making it
work right now, and it hasn’t for a long time. I was just reading about a huge
fiasco with the Delta Force as they went into Afghanistan at the start of our
military action there October 2001. Instead of their normal procedure,
which is to operate as small teams, and work in quiet and stealth they were
parachuted in—100 of them—because that’s how central command decided
they should be used. And they were furious, absolutely furious! They nearly
got killed, they got out by the skin of their teeth, and they had several casualties.
They exclaimed, “You can’t do this to us! We know how to fight. You
can’t create these huge theatrical events and you can’t have centralised control
and expect us to do our job.” So, even under the façade of command and
control, one of the things I’ve always noticed in the military is that it works
on the basis of deep relationships, long-term training and relying on every
individual soldier—especially in special operations. I can’t think of any other
model than servant-leadership that works in times of uncertainty. Our time
is now!

John Noble: What were the markers in your life, the people and events that have
shaped your thinking and helped to get you to where you are now?

Margaret Wheatley: The list of people changes depending on where I am
right now in my life. But I do believe that there were seminal events, there
were a few moments that I will always remember. And the reason I don’t want
to go for people is that the list keeps changing. Just now, the people who
inform me most are the earlier historians, like Otto Spengler and Arnold
Toynbee, who had this organic theory of civilizations as living beings, which
is quite similar to how I’m feeling about this time in history. It’s one of
decline, the winter of Western civilization.

In terms of events I think that the one that is still really pertinent to me
was when I realized that as consultant, no matter what we did, we really didn’t
succeed. I was working as consultant to a large consultancy firm and
asked them to recall a successful engagement and what made it work. I realized
that people couldn’t, and if they did it was one little event in a long
stream of work. I’ve had the same experience of feeling completely frustrated
and I wrote about this in Leadership and the New Science. I think it was
that realization that opened me to asking if there might be another way of
looking at all of this? That’s when I really started looking back to my former
discipline, science. I feel very grateful to have studied what I studied so that
at one point I could bring it all together. I was comfortable reading science
and loved the scientific imagination and also had the historical imagination
and love of literature, and loved to be in philosophical questioning. And all
of those weren’t connected for me until I grew to notice that they could be
connected. What I’m doing now is not anything I actually created. It really
does feel like the work I’ve been prepared to do.

John Noble: Over the last few years we have increasingly heard the phrase “spirituality
in the workplace”. What does that phrase mean to you and where have
you seen spirituality in the workplace particularly epitomized?

Margaret Wheatley: For a long time I was terrified by the phrase, the combination
of spirituality and the workplace. I was afraid of how we might use
spirituality rather than simply honoring the fact that people are spiritual
beings, people have spirit. This is not even a religious viewpoint. There is
such a thing as the human spirit. It’s an awareness that people have something
beyond the instrumental or the utilitarian. People have deep yearnings, a
quest for meaning, and an ability to wonder. This is a non-religious view of
what spirituality might mean.

When did we forget this, about being human? When did human beings
become so instrumentally viewed, and when did we start to see ourselves as
objects, just to be filled with information and sent to work? When did we
lose that awareness? It’s just mind-boggling if you think about it. I feel the
same sort of puzzlement at the whole focus on emotional intelligence now.
When did we forget this? It really shows you the bizarre side of our Western
civilisation, that we have to relearn what is so obvious in other cultures.

When spirituality became connected with the workplace in the 1990’s
it was initially just another way to motivate people. There were many of us
saying, “be careful here”. Because, if the only reason a boss is going to
acknowledge that someone has a spiritual life is to figure out how to get more
work out of them, and if they don’t get more work out of them, are they then
going to forget the fact that we all have spirit?

Then we had a nice shift to the idea that if you don’t acknowledge that
people have spirit, you really can’t have a productive workplace. It wasn’t using
spirit for productivity; instead, it was acknowledging who the person is, who
the whole person is. Now I see our spirit in the questions we’re asking. People
are questioning the meaning of life. The meaninglessness of just working
harder, consuming more, becoming disconnected from your children, these
large questions have started to well up in people. We do all have spirits.

In terms of organizations, I look to see those organizations that describe
back to me a real understanding of what is a human being. They don’t have
to use the words “soul” or “spirit”, but I get from them that they have a deep
appreciation of fundamental creativity and caring, that they really rely on the
wholeness of the people who work there. I haven’t seen it in a lot of large corporations
recently. Even those that had those strong values, they’ve been
whipped around in the past year. But I consistently hear this from smaller
manufacturing companies. I’ve had some wonderful conversations with those
folks because they really understand and rely on the people who work there.
They do all sorts of innovative things without consciously talk about spirituality
in the workplace. What they talk about is human beings. That’s more
than enough for me! You know, if we can just understand what it means to
be human then that brings in our spirits.

John Noble: “It’s a Wonderful Life” has been a favorite film of mine for as long as
I can remember, and George Bailey a personal hero. How did you make the connection with servant-leadership and how did you set about making that wonderful
video?

Margaret Wheatley: Well, I have to give credit to the producer, who didn’t
know a lot about servant-leadership and just said to me “I think this movie is
about servant-leadership”. I just said, “Please let me write this”. It was interesting
for me knowing the lens they were going to use to go into that movie,
which I hadn’t really watched carefully—it’s always on at Christmas. I think
it came at the right time because I was into my own developing awareness of
how confining it was to believe we knew what our life purpose was, and I had
just written about that in what was a sort of spiritual autobiography.

I got into the film having already had that awakening in my own consciousness,
that you really need to stay available to life and to what life wants
you to do. When I looked at the movie, it was just such a great teacher for me,
personally, about what it’s like to be present and respond to the needs of people
as they come to you. To be able to see that at the end of your life there was
direction, there was guidance, but the only way you were aware of the guidance
was to just surrender. And, of course, that’s the highest spiritual practice.

Larry Spears: Can you elaborate a little on some of the qualities that George Bailey
has as a servant-leader?

Margaret Wheatley: What’s interesting about George Bailey is his unintentional
servant-leadership, which is also spontaneous and from the heart. I
think it’s an interesting question for any of us if we just felt free to go where
our hearts led us in the moment. How do we respond to someone instead
of hiding behind a role or some old rule—this is something that I think Jim
Autry’s poetry really captures. If, in a workplace, and someone comes to you
with a deep need and you can only respond with, “Well, this is the policy.”
Or, “I’m sorry. I’d love to make an exception, but if I make an exception for
you I’d have to make an exception for everybody.” It’s just one of the most
crippling phrases and thoughts we have in our society. You know, we just
can’t seem to respond at the level of the individual. We think that if we do,
everyone else will be angry at us or want the same thing, yet it’s not how life
is at all. It is about what George Bailey did, that individual response, in the
moment where he let his heart open and lead him. And when you do that
you don’t actually feel that you are sacrificing something. It’s really interesting
that when you are responding as your heart leads you, you are actually
deeply satisfied even though, as in the case of George Bailey, it led him to an
entirely different life. It didn’t lead him away from Bedford Falls, and it didn’t
lead him out into the world. His heart just kept him responding to current
crises at home. But I don’t think in those moments that we experience
it as sacrifice. We experience it as very fulfilling always to just respond to a
person who needs something.

What I see in organizations are the boxes of our understandings of who
we can be for each other. And those boxes in our organizations, which are
also boxes of the psyche, really make it impossible for most people to act
spontaneously the way George Bailey did, to just help when help is needed.
When there’s a crisis of any kind, whether it’s a crisis like in that movie, or in
real life like the crisis we’ve recently gone through, we don’t see people hesitating
to figure out how to serve. People don’t hesitate; they just hope that
what they’re doing at a very instantaneous and spontaneous level will help
somebody else.

What I think about crises is that it’s an easy opportunity to see how
good we are, spontaneously. But if you look at life in organizations. it’s amazing
how fear-based they are, so that we are afraid of spontaneity. We are
afraid of people’s spirits, actually. We are afraid that if we give people any
room they’ll go off on some crazy direction with the work. I encounter this
all the time. A manager will say, “We can’t just give people choice here, we
can’t give people enough room to define meaningful work for themselves
because God knows what they’ll do.” We always assume that they’ll take the
organization in a completely different direction. We are so afraid of each
other that we want to box it into a plan, to a job description. And the loss of
that, what we lose with that fear of each other, is extraordinary.

I am frequently struck by the great tragedy of how we have constructed
work, the great loss. We’ve made it so hard to be in good relationships, we’ve
made it so hard for people to contribute, we’ve made it so difficult for people
to think well of themselves and then we say, “As a leader I’ll come and I’ll
pump you up and I’ll give you my vision, I’ll make you feel we can do it.”
But it’s not based on a deep love of who people are, a deep respect. As a
leader, how do you pump up what has been killed?

I actually had an experience of this on a symbolic level. I was with a
group of nuns in a chapel and one of them fainted, and before the medics
came (apparently this was not unusual, because she had some sort of condition)
nobody panicked. They called 911, but before help got there we just
sat there in prayer for this person as other sisters went up and held her—it
was all very gentle. And then the medics rushed in and they had oxygen and
they had defibrillators, all sorts of high tech equipment, and they surrounded
this woman and just started clamping machines on to her body and then
pumping in oxygen. I thought they were blowing up a balloon!

The symbology of it for me is that we are in our organizations and we’ve
actually created a lot of death and destruction and a complete loss of people’s
confidence in themselves. Leaders don’t have confidence in people. And then
we rush in with this high tech machinery, and just try and pump up people
and motivate them with a new initiative or a new computer system or a new
leadership vision. But what goes on in organizations is often not based on
people being human. It’s based on people being objects to be used for the
accomplishment of goals of a very utilitarian kind.

“Whom do we serve as leaders?” I’ve asked that question of a lot of people.
Whom do we serve? We are serving human beings. That is a radical
shift in this culture at this time. But we are serving human beings, and the
best way to know who another human being is, is to notice yourself fully,
what you need, what’s meaningful to you, what gives you heart in your work.
If we could just notice our own humanness it would be a very big step forward
to being able to relate to other people. If we are a leader, especially if we
notice our own humanness, we notice that we have spirit, we notice that we
have questions of meaning. I think all of the work that is done in helping
leaders to wake up to their own humanity and their own spirituality is very
essential work. It also keeps us away from using servant-leadership as the next
instrument of control.

Larry Spears: There’s one more theme in “It’s a Wonderful Life” that strikes me.
There is a Quaker phrase, “Speaking truth to Power”. Have you found ways in
your work to encourage people to lovingly confront the people in power when
things are not right and need to be addressed, but in a way that also honors those
in power as human beings?

Margaret Wheatley: I have. In the past I have relied on processes that would
allow people to listen to each other, and I haven’t relied on what I would rely
on now, which is personal courage. I was just reading a survey of 50,000
workers in which half of them said they’d never dream of speaking up at
work. And we are dealing with many, many years now of people having tried
to give voice to their concerns and then being met with rebuff or ridicule or
being told, “It’s not your job!” And so we have had now for a long time an
incredibly dependent work force that is quite hostile. So we get Dilbert!
Dilbert is the best representative of our deep cynicism for all those years of
disrespect and maltreatment. People say to themselves, “Well, I’m not going
to tell them anything, because they don’t listen and they’re a bunch of idiots,
and I tried and it didn’t work.” We have our own internal conversation that
keeps us from stepping forward. But then as employees we just get angrier
and angrier and sometimes that erupts at meetings. This sometimes happens
if there’s a leader who says, “Well, I really want to find out what the pulse of
the organization is. I’m going to start doing breakfast meetings”. And then
all they get is grief from people. I think it’s one of the worst things you can
advise a leader to do, especially if you know there’s all that pent up anger.

What I found works is if I can shift the content of the conversation and
the dynamic, so as to move it from cynicism and anger to something more
helpful. To do this, I change who is in the conversation. If the organization
is struggling with something, and it’s stayed within a certain level of employ-
ees and the boss, or we are trying to think through an issue but it’s just our
small little team; whenever we’re stuck, then is the time to invite people in
that aren’t normally included. It’s the simplest solution but it’s so powerful.
It’s actually a biological principle, which is when a living system is suffering
and in ill health, the way to create more health is to connect it to more of
itself. You create feedback loops from different parts of the system. It works
at the level of our own bodies as a living system in that if we’re suffering from
some disease it doesn’t help to just treat the symptom, we have to look at our
whole life and look for information from other parts of our system. What are
our sleeping patterns, what is our anxiety level, what’s our exercise level? It
doesn’t work to look at just the one problem. We need information from our
whole system. This same activity also works brilliantly in organizations, to
bring in customers, to bring in students, to bring in congregants, to bring in
the people we think we don’t need to hear from. Usually we fear hearing from
them, because we believe we’ll only hear complaints and anger. But in fact
when you create more diversity, more plurality in the conversation, people
step forward and demonstrate that they too care about the organization.. As
a process I rely on this now to an extraordinary degree. If we are in a certain
pattern, if we are angry with each other, if we can’t figure out how to solve the
problem, bring in new voices. And then all the dynamics shift and you get
really useful information that helps you then to see the problem differently.

I have a great belief in the power of whole systems, getting the whole system
in the room. And it changes us from being angry and rigid: it changes us
as individuals to realizing that, “Wow, I never thought of that!” “Gee, do you
really see it that way?” We’re going through that at a national level right now.
I mean, there are new voices in the room. We’re learning a lot about Islam, we’re
learning a lot about oil and Arab-U.S. relations, we’re learning a lot about
globalization. We have available now a lot more information that can really
help us change our minds, as long as we are willing to be in that conversation.

If you want to change the conversation you change who’s in it. That
doesn’t mean that you have to coach people on how to be empathic presenters
to a leader. You don’t have to coach a leader on how not to get angry if
someone’s giving them terrible feedback. You just get out of those intensely
personal and confrontational moments because you have a lot of new voices
in the room. And people really do get interested as soon as they realise there
is a fundamentally different perspective available. Most people actually get
interested in that. I have been in hierarchical situations where the voice that
shocked everyone with its perspective was a young woman. A new employee,
female, who suddenly said something and everyone went “Wow!” I’ve
also seen it happen in faculties when we listen to students for the first time,
or we listen to the people who hired our graduates. You never know where
these comments are going to come from. They’re usually so shocking that
people are humbled and climb down off their soapboxes.

I want very much to say something about personal courage. One of the
things that is sorely lacking in our lives is a necessary level of courage to stand
up against the things we know are wrong, and for the things we know are
right. There has been a kind of complacency—it feels more fear-based to
me—where people, especially in organizations, are too afraid to speak up and
we have become, I believe, moral cowards in a way. We give all sorts of reasons
why we can’t speak up. There are so many grievances in organizations
that I think people have developed a sense of helplessness about it, and I
understand that feeling of helplessness and saying, “I would never speak up.”
But I also live with an awareness that if we don’t start speaking up we are
going down a road that will only lead to increased devastation, and destruction.
Edmund Burke said “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is
for good men to do nothing.” Julian of Norwich said, “We must speak with a
million voices: it is the silence that kills.”

I think we’re in that place right now, and what I find personally so
uncomfortable is that as much as I want to raise my own voice on behalf of
several different issues, I notice that I feel more powerless than at any time in
my life. I think that’s part of the tension of this time, realizing that we have
to lift our voices for the things that we believe in, whether it’s inside an organization,
or as a nation or as a planetary community. We feel that there are
serious things that require our voice, and yet we also feel that it may not make
a difference. That’s the place I’m in every day right now. The other forces at
work are exceedingly more powerful. I wonder whether we can rally ourselves
as people around the things we care about, and really make the change. The
essence of my work right now is based on that belief that we can get active in
time, but I also realize that this is a time when there are exceedingly strong
countervailing forces from our leaders. For example, leaders pursuing aggression
as the solution, or business still wanting to maintain its hegemony in the
world without assuming responsibility for broader needs, or America still
believing it can act in isolation; can we raise our voices on behalf of a different
form of capitalism, a different form of compassion in our foreign policy,
a different form of leadership in our organizations? I know if we don’t raise
our voices I can predict the future and it’s very dark. If we do raise them, well,
it has worked in the past. I am hopeful that it will work now, but I’m not
nearly as certain as I’d like to be.

John Noble: In Leadership and the New Science you said that vision could no
longer be the prerogative of the leader or CEO and increasingly vision would have
to be the shared vision of everyone in an organization. From your experience are
you seeing that happening?

Margaret Wheatley: The deeper theory under those statements was that
vision was a field and that fields are those invisible forces that shape behavior.
I find a lot more credence is being given to the understanding that there are
fields we can’t see, invisible influences that affect behavior. People would have
called that far-out thinking before, but I find that people are much more open
to that today than ten years ago. Creative vision is a powerful influence in
shaping our behavior and you don’t need to specify a lot of controls or roles
if you have vision. People can do what they think is right and it will lead to a
very coherent organization that is moving in concert towards achieving it’s
vision. I have certainly come across a number of organizations that are working
that way now, but I’ve also experienced in the last year or two that we’ve
been in an enormous leap backwards organizationally since times started to
get uncertain. And now we’ll just have to wait and see whether this level of
uncertainty leads us forward into new ways of leading, or even further backward
into command and control.

One of the possibilities is that try as we might we will realise that command
and control just doesn’t work because you can’t control! We might be
learning that. But recently, I have seen an enormously retrogressive movement
in organizations based on fear, based on a weakening economy, based
on what I think is a normal human reaction that when you get scared, you go
backward; you default to what didn’t work in the past! The power of vision
to rally people or to give people a reason to live, to work hard and to sacrifice,
we are seeing that at the national level right now. I don’t necessarily think
we’re seeing it in its best form. It’s true that in human experience, “if there is
no vision the people perish”, and whether there’s a scientific explanation for
that, or a spiritual explanation—I’d be just as happy these days with the spiritual
definition—which is that a vision gives us a sense of possibility, a vision
gives us a sense of working for something outside our narrow, self-focused efforts
and therefore it rallies us at our deep human level to be greater than we are.

I’m happier with that explanation than field theory, and the reason I’m
happier with it is that it is much more focused on what are the capacities in
being human and how we can bring these forth. Science helps people be
comfortable with that, and feel a little more trusting that you can create order
through having a clear vision. But the next part of that is just as important.
Once you have a clear vision you have to free people up. This is where autonomy
comes in. People need to be free to make sense of the vision according to
their own understandings and their own sensitivity to what’s needed. If you
combine the sense of great purpose and human freedom, if you can combine
a vision that brings out the best of who we are and then gives us the freedom
in how we’re going to express that, that is how things work, in my experience.

John Noble: I previously worked for an organization where I once suggested that
the leaders should begin to stand aside and ask the next generation of leaders for
their vision and then begin to work with that in order to create a new future. My
thought was that the current leaders could assume the role of stewards, supporters,
servants. It didn’t happen. Have you come across an organization that has
worked in this way?

Margaret Wheatley: Yes. It was the U.S. Army, under General Gordon R.
Sullivan. I am in absolute support of what you were trying to do. When
General Sullivan was Chief of Staff, which was in the early to mid 90s, he said
he spent 50% of his time thinking about the future and how to create an
army for the world that was not yet known. He did simulations, he did think
tanks, he did all sorts of scenario planning on what would the world be like
and how could you create the army and technology to defend it. He had to
think 15 years ahead, minimally. He was really pushing out as far as he could
see, using very good minds. So I did find that kind of thinking in the armed
services. Then the marines got into it seriously, and the air force did, too.
But I think it’s the only place I’ve seen it.

What I see in common contrast to that is organizations where to even ask
younger people what their vision is feels like a breach of cultural norms like
“They should be respecting us! ” “Who are they? They don’t know anything!”
This is what I run into when I ask educators to involve students. We don’t
look to our younger generations as a source of any kind of wisdom and partly
I think that’s because, as a culture, we so fear dying and we so fear aging.
You created the role of elder there, and you were asking the senior people to
become wise people who would be acting in service to the next generation.
That’s really counter cultural in the West. You could have found support for
that in most other cultures, but not in the West where we have so feared
aging. As one of my African friends says, “You call your elders elderly, and
that’s part of the problem!” To actually ask leaders to think of themselves as
elders and stewards for the future is a radical proposition. I think it’s very
important work and I’m not surprised it didn’t go anywhere because of the
weight of the culture.

One of the things I’ve been quite intrigued by is the number of younger
leaders I have encountered who are college age, who are now intent on training
high school kids to be leaders. They’re not even looking to us anymore!
They’d love it if we talked to them, but they acutely feel the need to steward
younger people. I find that quite remarkable. I’ll tell you why it’s so difficult,
I think, in the corporate arena. Maybe our short-term focus is shifting now,
and one of at least the temporary consequences of September 11th is the realization
that you just can’t spin these organizations for the short term, because
you don’t even know what the short term is. But when General Sullivan
retired from the army and went to serve on corporate boards, he was dismayed
that nobody was thinking about the future. He said they’d spend hours
figuring how to get the stock price up by half a penny yet nobody was talking
about how to develop the next generation of leaders.

I think it’s for us to develop inter-generational collaboration. You were
suggesting something much stronger than that. But just to call in the voices
of the future into our present deliberations is not happening enough, and yet
it is one of the most powerful things. Once you get people into these intergenerational
conversations it is so inspiring for everyone to be talking with
each other. It’s the right work, but very difficult to do.

Larry Spears: In Leadership and the New Science you wrote, “Love in organizations
is the most potent source of power we have available.” What do you think
that servant-leaders inside our many organizations can do to unleash love in the
workplace?

Margaret Wheatley: It’s simple; just be loving! Why has expressing love
become such a problem when it’s a fundamental human characteristic? This
is where I think we have over analyzed and over complexified something that
is known to everyone alive. Babies know how to unleash love. It’s all about
our relationships and being available as a human, rather than as a role. It’s
about being present and being vulnerable and showing what you’re feeling.
You know, we don’t want to reveal who we are. Even the best of leaders try
to be objective, rather than relational, and that’s supposedly adding value to
our work lives if we treat each other objectively. But it’s again one of those
huge things we get wrong. You can’t have love if you can’t have relationships,
and you can’t have relationships with one another if you have this curse of
something called being objective or, one size fits all as a policy, or having to go
by the manual. I can feel the fear that so many of us have that, “Well, if it’s
not objective, we couldn’t possibly live in the messiness and the intimacy that
would come about by treating each human being as their own unique self.”
But I think that objectivity makes it impossible to be loving. Objectivity
doesn’t allow love, because love takes you to intimacy and uniqueness and
very personal territory. We need to get away from the belief that you can run
an organization using what are called objective measures or objective processes,
which are actually just completely de-humanized. The fear of love in
organizations is that it makes your life as a leader far more complex. But it
also makes you much more effective.

I was just listening a few days ago to a woman who had recently retired
as the chief of the Calgary Police Force and she talked about what it took to
be personally available and present for each of those officers, so that she was
always embodying the values, finding ways for them to embody the values,
and believe in the values and become the kind of police officers they wanted
to be. She worked from a very clear perspective that it’s not the corporate values
that count, it’s whether people can enact their personal values inside the
corporation. I thought that was a brilliant re-thinking of that. She would
work with everyone on what they were trying to accomplish and the values
they were trying to bring forth. And from those, of course, you get a wonderful
corporate culture and very strong values. But she kept saying that this
was enormously time-consuming and was very difficult work that required
her to be there all the time. And so I understand why leaders don’t want to
go down this love path or the relationship path, because it requires so much.
But that’s where I think you have to want to believe in people. I believe on
September 11th there were numerous corporate leaders who suddenly realized
that people really were the most important thing to them, even though
an hour before they’d been working a system that ignored human concerns.
But then they got the wake up call of their life. When I said that you have to
want to believe, you really have to want to have relationship, and there are an
awful lot of people in our workplaces, not just leaders but whole professions,
who have never wanted relationships. They’ve wanted the work, and hopefully
we are now realizing, most of us, how important relationships are.

Larry Spears: For many, serving others is inextricably tied to their own sense of
spirituality. Are there practices you have found useful in terms of how we can better
develop our own servant’s heart?

Margaret Wheatley: Well, I think first I would just underline where you’re
focused, which is we do need practices to develop this, and I would say the
“this” we need practices for is to open our hearts. For most people it’s not
something you can rely on as spontaneously occurring. For some it is but,
especially if you’re in the workplace, your heart gets pretty hardened. You
shut down, or you just find that you can’t express your love and compassion
and so you take it elsewhere. So, even if you start out with a naturally open
heart and a generous spirit towards others, there are many, many structures
and processes in modern work and modern life that actually close us down.
So we do need a practice to maintain an open heart.

I am a strong believer in meditation personally, but I think any process by
which you withdraw from the world and focus on your own inner grounding
is useful. For some people, that’s running; for some people, it’s playing tennis.
I can get very similar grounding when I horseback ride, because you can’t
lose your attention for too long without losing your seat! For some people it’s
walking, or flower arranging. Whatever it is, it’s just to notice what it is that
revives your sense of feeling grounded, present, and peaceful. I have often felt
that I need to leave my room peaceful in the morning because I don’t expect
it to get any more peaceful while I’m out doing work. So that’s the first discipline
— practicing what gives you your grounding and your peace, and to
not let it slip away. The world just keeps pulling at you and I find that every
so often I have to say, “OK, Meg. Just notice you’re spending less time cultivating
your peacefulness and let’s get back to serious practice.” People of any
religious order know the value of a routine to one’s practice, whether it’s a
daily liturgy or a daily practice. Whatever it is, it’s the routinization that really
helps over time. So, it’s not just episodic, or only when you feel like it. Your
whole being benefits from knowing every morning you’re going to pray or
run or whatever. So, I find it needs to be rouitinized.

Once I decided that the work was really how to keep my heart open,
that led me to a number of practices beyond my own meditation, although
some of the meditations I work with now are traditional practices to keep
your heart open. One of the ones I’ve loved the most is to realise that when
I am suffering, whatever it is— whether it’s anger, fear, feeling discounted or
treated rudely or whatever— I remember that the experience I’ve just had is
an experience that millions of people around the world have, just by virtue of
being human. If I’m sitting in a hotel room one night feeling lonely, just for
a moment I might reflect that, “Just like me, there are millions of people
around the world feeling lonely at this very moment.” This practice has been
an extraordinary gift, of going from your personal experience outward to the
human experience. Your own private experience is being felt by countless
other human beings, and somehow this changes the experience from personal
pain and anxiety to your heart opening to many others. And then when I
see someone else I think, “You’re feeling just the way I do.” That practice has
opened my heart more than any other single practice and has made me feel
part of the human experience and the human family.

Larry Spears: What do you find most compelling about Buddhist practice?

Margaret Wheatley: What I find to be enormously helpful about a Buddhist
perspective on life is that it really isn’t a religion. It is actually just a way to
live your life. I have my own very eclective theology. I was raised Christian
and Jewish, so I started out with that eclecticism, and Buddhism has really
introduced me to the day-to-day practices that I feel have really opened my
heart and made me far more understanding and gentle. And, what is more
important to me, it has made me far less likely to condemn quickly and far
more willing to be in the presence of suffering and not to run from it. And
to bear witness, to just be with whatever’s going on and not to be afraid of it.
All of that is not a theology, it’s a practice. In my new book [Turning to One
Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, Berrett-Koehler,
2002] there’s this very strong influence about the practice and I have a whole
section on bearing witness—of just being with another person’s experience
and not having to fix it, or counsel someone away from their grief. It’s actually
very fulfilling, and it takes the stress off when you stop feeling that you
have to fix people’s human experience. You just have to be there. These are
capacities I didn’t have, but now have, since I started doing these practices.

I have found that many Buddhist practices have helped me be with people
differently and have changed my expectations of what needs to happen if
I’m just with someone. Just being with someone has become really important
rather than saying the right phrase or the right word that will fix it. Now,
the irony of this is that I’m still a public speaker who gets up on stage allegedly
to say things that will fix things, and yet what I’m finding – and I’ve heard
this from other speakers as well – is we are realising it’s who we are when we
are up there, and not what we’re saying. And so I very much want to be the
presence of peace and possibility for people. I feel that is something I can be,
and have been, and in order to be that I need to experience peace fairly regularly
from this much deeper place which is available to me through my different
practices. I think that the central work of our time is how to be together
differently. Can we live together with our hearts open, with our awareness
that we can’t stop suffering, that we can certainly be with it differently? Can
we notice where we are causing harm and try at least to do no harm? And
can we be together without fear of what it’s like to be together, to really just
not be afraid to be with other people? That would be a huge step forward for
a lot of us. And we’re all crying for it, we’re all crying to be together in more
loving ways because this is what it is to be human. So many of us were overwhelmed
by the experiences of September 11th, but we saw people being
together without the divisions that had separated them moments before.
Buddhism is a series of practices that keep my heart open and keep me being
present, rather than fleeing from what is day-to-day life. In that way I think
it has also saved my life.

John Noble: In many organizations the word “change” has become a noun rather
than a verb and all too often phrases such as “You are afraid of change” are used
to hurt each other. When you have encountered this in organizations how have
you addressed the problem?

Margaret Wheatley: There’s a wonderful quote from a contemporary
Buddhist who said, “Change is just the way it is!” I’ve worked a lot and written
quite a bit on how we are actually responsible for creating resistance to
change. I don’t know who said it first but, “We don’t resist change; we resist
being changed.” Most organizations fail to involve people in the design of
change, in the re-design of organizations, or they don’t involve people soon
enough or substantially enough. What we get is something that is predictable
in everything that is alive, from bacteria on up. When you do something to
another living being, that being has the freedom to decide whether it’s even
going to notice what just happened or what somebody has done. So, the first
freedom is you choose whether you notice or not. And the second freedom is
you are then completely free to choose your reaction to it. You can’t impose
change on anything alive. It will always react, it will never obey. This is one
of the principles I’ve embraced for many years. Life doesn’t ever obey, and yet
we still think in organizations that we’ll find the perfect means, the perfect
vision, the perfect writing, the perfect Powerpoint presentation to get people
to say, “Great! This is just perfect!” And instead, what people do is change
the plan, file it away and never look at it again, or modify it. We look at all
that and we say they are resisting change, but they’re not. They’re responding
like all life does—they are reacting. And they’re actually being quite creative.
I’ve asked people to just look at that dynamic which is so fundamental.

We get in organizations and we forget about that dynamic which we all
know so well and we say, “I’ll tell you what to do and you’ll do it.” And it
doesn’t happen. I must have asked this of tens of thousands of people, “Can
you think of a time in your experience when you gave another human being
a set of directions and they followed them perfectly?” And in the few cases
where people have followed the directions perfectly I’ve asked, “Did you actually
like that person?” Because those people are robots, those people aren’t
there. We’ve destroyed their spirits. If they do just what we say we have killed
the spirit. And we don’t like being around those people. We have a profound
disrespect for people who act like automatons, even though, if you look at
most managers, they still think they want an automatic obedient response.
So, if life doesn’t obey but it always reacts, then the other principle from that
is that if you want people to support something they have to be involved in
its creation. This has been a very old maxim in the field of organizational
behavior, that people support what they create. I say that people only support
what they create.

What this means for any organizational change process, most of which
have been appallingly disruptive and have failed, (we now know that almost
80% of them fail) is that they should make sure that they only use participative
processes. That doesn’t mean having everyone involved in every decision,
but just to be thoughtful and creative about how we are going to bring along
everybody and involve people at different points so that this truly is owned
by everyone, because it’s their creation. It’s a no-brainer; these things work!
I find when I speak about participation people still think that I mean everybody
in the room doing all of the work at the same time. But it’s not that.

I’ve worked with small teams of employees and charged them with, how
are you going to involve everyone in your network, everyone in your department?
And they are much more creative! They’ll do TV shows, they’ll actually create
simulations to put people through the same experience that they have just
had. They’re enormously creative. I’ve also found, over time, that when
you’ve charged a small group of employees with making sure that everyone
knew about it, that the whole organization seemed to pay attention, and then
it was very easy for people to know about it. I also work with the principle
that participation is not a choice. If you don’t get people involved, you’re just
breeding resistance and sabotage that you’ll then spend months or years trying
to overcome.

Larry Spears: Leadership and the New Science is generally considered to be one of
the most important books on leadership to be published in the last decade or longer.
Did you have a sense when you were writing it that you were on to something?

Margaret Wheatley: I didn’t have a sense of what I was on to. I didn’t really
understand that I was presenting an entirely different world view. I
thought it would be easier to convince people of the shifts that would need
to take place because I didn’t know it was about changing a world view, and
changing a world view takes a long, long time. The original 1992 edition had
a lot of questions, but as far as I can remember I hadn’t the faintest idea what
this work would mean. I just wrote it because it felt like the work I was supposed
to be doing. I can’t remember now who I was while I was writing it.
I can remember some of the fear and hesitation, experimenting with a new
voice as a writer, and all of that, but I don’t remember what I thought.

Larry Spears: Was your move to Utah significant in the writing of Leadership
and the New Science?

Margaret Wheatley: It was absolutely tied to that book coming forth. I told
my friends in Massachusetts that had I stayed there I’d have written deep,
introspective works in the tradition of some writers there and I realized, retrospectively,
that I needed the open space. The West for me is freedom, and
the wilderness is for me the deepest experience of harmony. I live in the
wilderness—or it’s at my back. I had no idea why I was moving to Utah at
the time. I think it was just to be liberated into life, really, into the experience
of what is space and wilderness and sky. And also just the incredible
beauty of Utah. The red rocks of Utah are still my most sacred place to go.
Again, I had no idea of why I was going—it felt really weird—but now it feels
like, “Of course! That was it!”.

John Noble: Your new book is entitled, Turning to One Another—Simple
Conversations to Restore Hope for the Future. What led you to choose the subject
of conversation?”

Margaret Wheatley: Actually, I didn’t choose the subject of conversation. I
chose the action of turning to one another, and conversation is the simplest
way to do that. To actually be willing to listen and talk to other human beings
is the way throughout time that we have thought together, and dreamed
together. The simple act of conversation seems so far removed from our daily
lives now, and yet we all have a vague memory of what it was like. Since
September 11 we have been profoundly different conversationalists and felt
the need to talk to each other and to be together. So I rely on the ancientness
and primalness of human beings being together, and being together through
this act of listening and talking as a way for us to surface, or to develop,
greater awareness of how we are reacting to what’s going on in the world.
Therefore, hopefully, from that greater awareness of what we care about, what
we’re talking about or struggling with at a very personal level, we will become
more activist. We will become more intelligent actors to change the things
we think need changing.

That idea is based on a more recent tradition in Paulo Freire’s work
called critical education which is, you create the conditions for change by educating
people to the forces and dynamics that are causing their life. You can
start that work through conversation, (or through literacy training as Freire
did.) In conversation, people can become more aware of what their life is,
whether they’re happy, what they might do to change it. Then people do
become activists, because it’s their life, and their children’s lives that are affected.
Those are the deeper underlying threads that led me to write the book,
which is different from anything I’ve written before. It’s not written just for
leaders or people in organisations. I wrote it for the world. I don’t mean that
to sound pretentious, it’s just that the people I work with now are in so many
different countries, all ages, and I just kept them in my imagination when I
was writing, and I wanted to make sure that it didn’t assume anything except
our common humanity and our common desires for a world that does truly
work for all of us. A world that is based on our common human desires for
love and meaning from work and a chance to contribute.

The other piece that truly informed this was my experience with the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, which was life-changing
for me. I only attended it once but followed the proceedings every time
I was in South Africa during its three year history. And the one day that I
went was unbelievably impactful. It was when the parents of a young
American Fulbright scholar who had been murdered, Amy Biel, were present.
Their daughter had been slain in one of the townships after driving into a
very angry crowd. Her parents were there listening to the description of her
death by her killer, and they were sitting next to the mother of the killer, sitting
two rows in front of us. It was an experience you don’t normally have in
your life, one of such forgiveness, and violence, and repentance. The primary
thing I learned in observing the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings
was that the power of speaking your experience is what heals you. The
power of feeling we are heard is what heals us. It made bearing witness a
much easier act. I don’t have to fix the person—I just have to really listen. And
from that experience I started to see it in so many different settings how,
when we truly listen to people, they can heal themselves. My trust in conversation
is that it also allows that level of listening, and there are other people
who have written specifically about conversation. I am using the process
to restore hope to the future; that was the underlying theme. I wrote it in
March, 2001 and I had no idea of what was to come on September 11th. But
I could already see that the future was looking pretty hopeless, and I had a lot
of people saying, “What’s this mean, restore hope to the future?” And now we
all know.

Larry Spears: Do you have any words of hope or advice for servant-leaders around
the world?

Margaret Wheatley: Well, a few phrases come to mind from a wonderful
gospel song, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” This is the time for
which we have been preparing, and so there is a deep sense of call. Servantleadership
is not just an interesting idea, but something fundamental and vital
for the world, and now this is the world that truly needs it. The whole concept
of servant-leadership must move from an interesting idea in the public
imagination toward the realisation that this is the only way we can go forward.
I personally experience that sense of right timeliness to this body of
work called servant-leadership. I feel that for more and more of us we need
to realise that it will take even more courage to move it forward, but that the
necessity of moving it forward is clear. It moves from being a body of work
to being a movement—literally a movement—how we are going to move this
into the world. I think that will require more acts of courage, more clarity,
more saying this has to change now. I am hoping that it will change now.

Margaret Wheatley Bio
Margaret (Meg) Wheatley writes, teaches, and speaks about radically new
practices and ideas for how we can live together harmoniously in these chaotic
times. She has worked for nearly thirty years in organizations of all types,
on all continents, and is a committed global citizen. Her aspiration is to help
create organizations and communities where people are seen as the blessing,
not the problem. She is president of The Berkana Institute, a charitable global
foundation supporting life-affirming leaders around the world. Since
2000, Berkana’s initiative, “From the Four Directions: People Everywhere
Leading the Way,” has been organizing conversations among people in their
local communities in over thirty countries. These conversation circles have
inspired many local leaders to take action in their communities. Berkana supports
their activities with many different types of resources. These local leaders
are also linked together as a worldwide web of life-affirming leaders. For
more information, see www.berkana.org.

Meg has been an organizational consultant since 1973, as well as a professor
of management in two graduate business programs. She received her
doctorate in organizational behavior from Harvard University, an M.A. in
systems thinking from New York University, and has been a research associate
at Yale University. She has been a public school teacher and administrator
in inner cities, and a Peace Corps Volunteer in Korea. She has been recognized
by several awards and honorary doctorates.

Meg’s work appears in two award-winning books, Leadership and the
New Science (1992, 1999) and A Simpler Way (1996), plus many videos and
articles. Her latest book is titled, Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations
to Restore Hope to the Future (2002). Meg's next book, Finding Our Way, Leadership for an Uncertain Time, will be released in January 2005. She is a powerful advocate for servantleadership and has contributed articles to two Greenleaf Center anthologies,
Focus on Leadership: Servant-Leadership for the 21st Century (2002) and Insights
on Leadership: Service, Stewardship, Spirit, and Servant-Leadership (1998). Meg
was a featured presenter at The Greenleaf Center’s annual international conferences
in 1995 and 1999, and she served as distinguished speaker at The
Greenleaf Center’s annual Leadership Institute for Higher Education from
2000-2002.

Booklet 7
The Servant-Leader:
From Hero to Host
AN INTERVIEW WITH
MARGARET WHEATLEY
The Greenleaf Center for Servant-Leadership
Indianapolis
Dream World
A prose poem
Margaret Wheatley ©2002
I am dreaming the world. This world is an illusion. It is not as it appears.
A wise one tells me this, so I dutifully recite the mantras.
"It will help you awaken," I am told.

In a moment of inattention, I scrape my index finger. It's a small cut, really nothing, but it throbs painfully. It hurts enough to keep me awake that night. How strange this tiny break in flesh exposes the full pulse of my body. No statistic (only .003% of my body surface,) describes its impact.

Small cuts.

I'm standing at a newsstand. Time magazine has a special issue, "Can the Earth be saved?" We humans have changed the climate and now the planet is responding to our arrogance with violent weather. Another weekly magazine features "Botox," the new government-approved drug that can change the face of America. It deadens facial muscles and eliminates wrinkles. To look younger, all we have to do is numb ourselves.

The world is an illusion. It is not as it appears.
Can a planet be saved by the numb at heart?

I'm driving behind a big black truck. It's been "lifted"--raised high on its chassis by big tires and super suspension. The chrome bumper and wheels glitter with exuberance. Inside are three teen-age boys, riding high, torsos dancing together to music I can't hear. I love watching them as we cruise down the road. They remind me of how it feels to own the world, those moments when it's all working just for you. A minute later, I am weeping. The world is not as it appears.

I'm sitting on the caked and dusty surface of a reservoir that has lost much of its water to drought. The wind raises only dust and I feel gritty from the inside out. I notice green growth on the dried surface, but when I stoop to see it, I realize it's not leaves, but a type of algae, the first plants to appear when earth emerged from fire.

The sun sinks low and rose-colored hills appear in the east. Warmed by their radiance, I glance at those fishing along the shore. Are they too soothed by this light? They seem focused on casting artificial flies onto the water a few feet in front of them. I turn and face west. The world is on fire! Cirrus clouds flame passionately, burning at sun's departure. I am watching the world dying. I am told this (who is telling me?) In the great turnings of life, this is the age of destruction. There is nothing to do but surrender. Gracefully. Even in death, Life will be beautiful. I am stunned by this message. I hope it is an illusion.

It is night and I am sitting on the edge of my gentle bed. I open a jar of African honey butter and begin my evening ritual. Slowly I massage cream into my pedicured feet-first the soles, then the toes, then the cuticles. From the jar's label, I learn that this cream has been gathered for me by the labor of women in Zambia and Ghana. I read that my purchase creates work for them and income for their families. I do not know how they harvest honey in Zambia or make the cream in Ghana. But I do know African women, many of them. Often I have stared at their feet noting the muscular calluses from never wearing shoes, the flaking skin from never using cream.

In the peace of my bedroom, I imagine them in theirs. I know there is no comparison, not in comfort, not in security, not in fatigue. As the creme soaks into my soles, I picture them in fields, gathering the means for my life to remain soft. They cannot imagine my life. I know them well enough to know I cannot imagine theirs.

At a conference center in the U.S. where I sometimes work, I am told of the African women leaders who come there to attend meetings. Always, they are given their own bedrooms and not paired up with a room-mate. This is offered to them as a gift. It's the first time they've ever had a room of their own.

I am dreaming the world. It is not as it appears. Yet I know that I spend more on a morning cup of coffee than half the world has available to live on for that entire day. Three billion people living on nothing as I walk dreamily into Starbucks.

I am dreaming the world. It is not as it appears. Yet I know that 35,000 children die each day from starvation as I watch the cooking channel. I learn to make small cuts in the peel of a cucumber to shape it as a rose. To cut open a mango so the fruit is revealed. To slice an onion so it doesn't make me cry.

But I want to cry. For the world I am dreaming.

I turn off the television and burrow into my pillows. In Zambia just now, the women are rising from their crowded beds. Soon they will walk on hard feet into the bush, carrying basket crowns through the high grass. They will find where bees have hidden the honey this day.

I awake and clean my favorite coffee pot. The metal filter slices the skin under my thumb nail, but this cut doesn't throb the way my last one did.

It is late afternoon in my world. The sun is still shining. The wind picks up the dust of drought and it becomes difficult to see. There are still a few hours left before the sun illuminates this dust and sets the world on fire. In Africa, my sisters are sleeping now. They too are dreaming the world. It is not as it appears.

I leave them sleeping to go draw my bath. I have been camping and my feet are a mess. I will scrub them clean and rub away the young calluses. Then I will massage them with African honey butter. In my dream, I do not know where my softened soles will lead me.
When Change is Out of Our Control
Published in Human Resources for the 21st Century (Wiley, 2003)
Margaret Wheatley ©2002
Uncertain Times

In June, 2002, the Chief Financial Officer of Oracle Corporation, spoke on prospects for the second half of the year. His comments were radically different than the upbeat statements typical of one in his position: "We are hoping for a revenue recovery in the second half of the year. But I said that same thing six months ago and I have lost confidence in my ability to predict the future." In his humility, this CFO described the new world of the 21st century--this interconnected planet of increased uncertainty and volatility. 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. We are just beginning to experience what it is like to operate in a global environment of increasing chaos, of events beyond our control that have a devastating impact on our internal operations and culture.

The business news is filled with stories of the perils of interconnectedness. One country suffers economic problems, and analysts are quick to say that their problems will not affect other countries. Then we watch as an entire continent and those beyond are pulled into economic recession by the web of interdependence. Or we read how the actions of a few corrupt executives bring down an entire company (and industry), even though tens of thousands of people work there with integrity.

Interconnected systems are always this sensitive. Activities occurring in one part of the system always affect many other parts of the system. The nature of the global business environment guarantees that no matter how hard we work to create a stable and healthy organization, our organization will continue to experience dramatic changes far beyond our control. For example, Continental Airlines had spent years developing a strong culture. "Our employees believe in this company and will do anything for our president." (All quotes in this article are from personal interviews conducted in July, 2002 by the author.) But then came September 11th, and Continental, like all airlines, suddenly found its entire industry and business model at risk.

There is no company, industry, or nation that is immune to these potentially devastating system effects. One executive in a large corporation commented: "It was always dysfunctional, but it was working. Now it's not. It's a different feeling than years ago. Now we can't influence outcomes. We're 'at the top' but feeling that things are being 'done to' us." Another executive said simply: "What used to work, doesn't. The old strategies don't work."

When so much is beyond our control, when senior leaders reveal their own feelings of powerlessness, what skills can we call upon to successfully maneuver and survive the turbulence?

New organizational dynamics

In an era of increasing uncertainty, new organizational dynamics appear and old ones intensify at all levels of the organization. It is important to notice how these new dynamics affect employees, leaders, and core operating functions.

Employee behaviors

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. It becomes more difficult to work together, and nearly impossible to focus on the bigger picture. And there are physiological impacts as well. Stress deprives the human brain of its ability to see patterns. People become reactive and lose the capacity to understand their work as part of a larger system. We also have difficulty with memory and become forgetful. And then there are the physical manifestations of sleeplessness, restlessness, sudden anger and unpredictable tears.

Obviously, each of these has negative consequences on work behaviors for individuals and teams. As people experience their growing incapacity to get work done well, they often blame themselves for failing to produce. One woman executive expressed that, "So many good people are failing at the changes they're committed to."

Pressure on Leaders

Because of increased fear, many people turn to leaders with unreasonable demands. We want someone to rescue us, to save us, to provide answers, to give us firm ground or strong life rafts. We push for a strong leader to get us out of this mess, even if it means surrendering individual freedom to gain security. But the causes of insecurity are complex and systemic. 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."

It is critical that leaders resist assuming the role of savior, even as people beg for it. This can be extremely difficult as people grow more fearful and fragile. Sophisticated emotional skills are required, especially if people have been directly affected by external events. In these cases, the leader must simultaneously struggle to provide emotional support while also working to maintain decent levels of productivity. If the leader has also been personally affected by recent organizational challenges, it becomes very difficult to inspire confidence. As one woman leader asked: "How do you maintain credibility when you (as the leader) are not sure you want to be there?"

Core Functions

It wasn't long ago that companies engaged in five year strategic planning. Those sweet, slow days seem very distant now. Many of the primary functions of business, and of Human Resources--planning, forecasting, budgeting, staffing, individual development plans-only worked because we could bring the future into focus, because the future felt within our control. Shortly after September 11th, the CEO of a major technology company reported that it was impossible to do a reliable budget for the coming year, even though they had a very good record at budget forecasting in the past. His proposed solution for dealing with so much uncertainty was to submit five alternative budget scenarios to his board.

It is important to note how many people in organizations have honed their skills at predicting or anticipating the future. Businesses have depended upon and rewarded their expertise. But now these skills can be a liability. They may lull the organization into a false sense of security about a predictable future and thereby keep people from staying alert to what's going on around them in the present. Yet even though they may be a liability, often such experts are charged with bringing stability back to the organization. The organization may clamor for new planning tools and processes, and push hard on planning staff to find new modes of prediction. Such staff often suffer severe burn-out 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."

The Great Paradox

I have painted a fairly grim picture of these new organizational dynamics spawned by tumultuous times. However, there is a great paradox that points to the hopeful path ahead. It is possible to prepare for the future without knowing what it will be. The primary way to prepare for the unknown is to attend to the quality of our relationships, to how well we know and trust one another. In New York City and Oklahoma City, as well as many other disaster situations, people had engaged in emergency preparedness drills prior to having to deal with the real thing. Working together on these simulations, they developed cohesive, trusting relationships and inter-agency cooperation. They had only prepared for simpler disasters, but when terror struck, they knew they could rely on each other. Elizabeth Dole, when President of the American Red Cross, said that she didn't wait until the river was flooding at two in the morning to pick up the phone and establish a relationship.

When people know they can rely on each other, when there is a true sense of community, it is amazing how well people perform. This was the experience of the community of Halifax, Nova Scotia on September 11th. Forty-two planes were grounded at their small airport, and eight thousand distressed and stranded passengers suddenly appeared on their doorstep. The community's open-hearted response transformed the city, and led to relationships with strangers that will last a lifetime. "It was one of those times when nothing was planned but everything went so smoothly. Everybody just kind of pulled together."

New Organizational Capabilities

In order to counter the negative organizational dynamics stimulated by stress and uncertainty, we must give full attention to the quality of our relationships. Nothing else works, no new tools or technical applications, no redesigned organizational chart. The solution is each other. If we can rely on one another, we can cope with almost anything. Without each other, we retreat into fear.

There is one core principle for developing these relationships. People must be engaged in meaningful work together if they are to transcend individual concerns and develop new capacities. Here are several ways to put this principle into practices.

Nourish a clear organizational identity. As confusion and fear swirls about the organization, people find stability and security in purpose, not in plans. Organizational identity describes who we are, the enduring values we work from, the shared aspirations of who we want to be in and for the world. When chaos wipes the ground from beneath us, the organization's identity gives us some place to stand. When the situation grows confusing, our values provide the means to make clear and good decisions. A clear sense of organizational (and personal) identity gives people the capacity to respond intelligently in the moment, and to choose actions that are congruent with each other. Times of crisis alway display the coherence or incoherence at the heart of our organization. Are we pulling together, or rushing off in many different directions? Are people's actions and choices congruent with the stated values, or are they basing their decisions on different values. If they are using different values, are these the true albeit unspoken values, the real rules of the game?

It is crucial to keep organizational purpose and values in the spotlight. The values come to life not through speeches and plaques, but as we hear the stories of other employees who embody those values. It is important to use all existing communication tools, and invent new ones, to highlight these personal experiences. In the year following September 11th, United Airlines communicated this type of story twice weekly as one means to support employees during very difficult times.

Focus people on the bigger picture. People who are stressed lose the ability to recognize patterns, to see the bigger picture. And as people become overloaded and overwhelmed with their tasks, they have no time or interest to look beyond the demands of the moment. Therefore, it is essential that the organization sponsor processes that bring people together so that they can learn of one another's perspectives and challenges. If the organization doesn't make these processes happen, people will continue to spiral inward. This inward spiraling has a devastating impact on performance. People become overwhelmed by the volume of tasks, they lose all sense of meaning for their work, and they feel increasingly isolated and alone. Everybody is busier and more frantic, but the major thing they are producing is more stress. The other serious consequence is that both individual and organizational intelligence decline dramatically as people lose the larger context for their work.

It is important that the processes used for bringing people together not be formal. People need less formality and more conviviality. They need time to decompress and to relax enough to be able to listen to one another. Processes, such as conversation and story-telling, help us connect at a depth not available through charts and Powerpoint presentations. However, people don't recognize how much they need this time, and usually resist such informal gatherings--until they attend one and notice what they've been missing.

Demand honest, forthright communication. In a true disaster or crisis, the continuous flow of information gives people the capacity to respond intelligently as they seek to rescue or save people and property. They are hungry for information so that they can respond well to urgent human needs. They take in the information, make fast judgment calls, try something, quickly reject it if it doesn't work, and then try something else. They call to one another, exchanging information and learnings. They contribute what they can to everyone becoming more effective in the rescue effort.

Even though most organizations don't deal with this level of crisis, the lessons are important. People deal far better with uncertainty and stress when they know what's going on, even if the information is incomplete and only temporarily correct. Freely circulating information helps create trust, and it turns us into rapid learners and more effective workers. Often, it is not the actual situation that induces stress as much as it is that people aren't told what's going on, or feel deceived. The greater the crisis, the more we need to know. The more affected we are by the situation, the more information we need. After every commercial air crash, family who have lost loved ones complain about not being adequately informed by the airlines. They want to know details of how their loved one died, a disclosure that often brings relief to those grieving. Yet the airlines are constrained by potential legal liability from sharing the details that would ease their grief. The families end up suing the airline to get the information, and add emotional damages to their suit. This devastating cycle is fed by feelings of rage and loss that are exacerbated by lack of information.

Prepare for the unknown. The U.S. military has invested large sums of money in the development and use of complex simulations that prepare troops for different battle scenarios. Similar simulations now are used by most civil defense and community agencies. Yet it is surprising how few companies engage in any type of simulation or scenario work. The evidence is dramatically clear that this type of preparation allows people to move into the unknown with greater skillfulness and capacity. While traditional planning processes no longer work, it is dangerous to abandon thinking about the future. We need to explore these newer methods that project us into alternative futures. As people engage in processes such as scenario building or disaster simulations, they feel more capable to deal with uncertainty. Individual and collective intelligence increase dramatically, as people become better informed big-picture thinkers. And trusting relationships develop that make it possible to call on one another when chaos strikes.

Keep meaning at the forefront. Often in organizations we forget that meaning is the most powerful motivator of human behavior. People gain energy and resolve if they understand how their work contributes to something beyond themselves. When we are frightened, we may first focus on our own survival, but we're capable of more generous and altruistic responses if we discover a greater purpose to our troubles. Why is my work worth doing? Who will be helped if I respond well? Am I contributing to some greater good?

Of course, the work truly does have to contribute to something meaningful. People don't step forward in order to support greed or egotists or to benefit faceless entities such as shareholders. We need to know that our work contributes to helping other human beings. My favorite example of this desire to contribute was expressed in the mission statement created by employees at a facility that manufactured dog food. They expressed how their work was serving a greater good when they wrote: "Pets contribute to human health."

Use rituals and symbols. As shrines appear on streets mourning the dead, and other demonstrations of grief flare on TV screens throughout this sorrowing world, we are becoming aware of the deep human need for shared symbolic expression when we experience something tragic. And also the need for celebration when we've experienced something wonderful.

The use of ritual and symbols is common in all cultures, although they almost disappeared in the U.S. until our lives became so stressful and isolatory. Now we are rediscovering this basic human behavior. Because it is so basic to humans, symbols and rituals appear spontaneously, even in organizations. No one department has to create them (a scary thought), but the organization does need to notice them when they appear, and to honor them by offering support and resources.

Pay attention to individuals. There is no substitute for direct, personal contact with employees. Even though managers are more stressed and have less time, it is crucial to pick up the phone and connect with those you want to retain. Personal conversations with key people, with experienced workers, with innovators, with those just joining the organization, with younger workers new to the workforce-all of these and more need to know that their leader is thinking about them. When people feel cared for, their stress is reduced and they contribute more to the organization. One of the key findings in the field of Knowledge Management is that people share their knowledge only when they feel cared for and when they care for the organization. It is not new technology that makes for knowledge exchanges, but quality human relationships.

The difficulty in investing in relationships

None of these suggested behaviors is new organizational advice. Most of us have had enough experience in organizations to know the importance of relationships. So why, as the storm clouds thicken, are we not investing in creating healthy, trusting relationships? One answer is that many organizations, as a matter of policy, deliberately distance themselves from their employees. They hold a dangerous assumption, which is that organizational flexibility is achieved by being able to let go employees when times get hard. The ability to remain efficient is primarily found the organization's ability to downsize staff. If you need to downsize, so the assumption goes, you don't want to know your employees or get personally involved with them.

What is most dangerous about this belief is that it is partly true. Organizations do need to be able to shrink and grow as times demand. But it is absolutely possible to achieve this workforce flexibility without sacrificing loyal, dedicated, and smart workers. Years ago, Harley-Davidson had to let go nearly 40% of their workforce. This was a wrenching but crucial decision for the survival of the company. However, they took the time and paid attention to those individuals who were leaving and those who were staying. Every employee had a personal conversation with the CEO, and received complete information about the company's circumstances. People understood why they were being let go, appreciated the personal conversation, and expressed their love and support for the company going forward. Over the years, many of those employees stayed in contact and were rehired as Harley prospered.

One prediction about the future

There is only one prediction about the future that I feel confident to make. During this period of random and unpredictable change, any organization that distances itself from its employees and refuses to cultivate meaningful relationships with them, is destined to fail. Those organizations who will succeed are those that evoke our greatest human capacities-our need to be in good relationships, and our desire to contribute to something beyond ourselves. These qualities cannot be evoked through procedures and policies. They only are available in organizations where people feel trusted and welcome, and where people know that their work matters. The evidence is all around us, and here's one powerful story.

On September 11th, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) cleared the skies of nearly 4500 planes carrying 350,000 passengers in just a few hours. (75% of them landed within the first hour, more than one landing per second.) It was an unprecedented feat for the agency, one that had not been simulated since the end of the Cold War. And it was the first day on the job for the top FAA official who gave the initial order to clear the skies. Controllers had to land these planes, while also staying vigilant for signs that any other planes had been hijacked. They succeeded through intense cooperation, absolute focus and dedication, and because they made decisions locally, including some that were outside of policies. In the months following, officials started to try and capture this astonishing feat in new procedures, but then they scrapped the idea. "A lot of things were done intuitively, things that you can't write down in a textbook or you can't train somebody to do." What is the FAA's policy and plan for preparing for another crisis of unknown dimensions? They will rely on the judgment, intuition, and commitment of its controllers and managers.
From Hope to Hopelessness
Margaret J. Wheatley © 2002
As the world grows ever darker, I've been forcing myself to think about hope. I watch as the world and the people near me experience increased grief and suffering. As aggression and violence move into all relationships, personal and global. As decisions are made from insecurity and fear. How is it possible to feel hopeful, to look forward to a more positive future? The Biblical Psalmist wrote that, "without vision the people perish." Am I perishing?

I don't ask this question calmly. I am struggling to understand how I might contribute to reversing this descent into fear and sorrow, what I might do to help restore hope to the future. 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. Yet without hope that my labor will produce results, how can I keep going? If I have no belief that my visions can become real, where will I find the strength to persevere?

To answer these questions, I've consulted some who have endured dark times. They have led me on a journey into new questions, one that has taken me from hope to hopelessness.

My journey began with a little booklet entitled "The Web of Hope." It lists the signs of despair and hope for Earth's most pressing problems. Foremost among these is the ecological destruction humans have created. Yet the only thing the booklet lists as hopeful is that the earth works to create and maintain the conditions that support life. As the species of destruction, humans will be kicked off if we don't soon change our ways. E.O.Wilson, the well-known biologist, comments that humans are the only major species that, were we to disappear, every other species would benefit (except pets and houseplants.) The Dalai Lama has been saying the same thing in many recent teachings.

This didn't make me feel hopeful.

But in the same booklet, I read a quote from Rudolf Bahro that did help: "When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure." Could insecurity, self-doubt, be a good trait? I find it hard to imagine how I can work for the future without feeling grounded in the belief that my actions will make a difference. But Bahro offers a new prospect, that feeling insecure, even groundless, might actually increase my ability to stay in the work. I've read about groundlessness-especially in Buddhism--and recently have experienced it quite a bit. I haven't liked it at all, but as the dying culture turns to mush, could I give up seeking ground to stand?

Vaclev Havel helped me become further attracted to insecurity and not-knowing. "Hope," he states, "is a dimension of the soul. . . an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. . . .It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out."

Havel seems to be describing not hope, but hopelessness. Being liberated from results, giving up outcomes, doing what feels right rather than effective. He helps me recall the Buddhist teaching that hopelessness is not the opposite of hope. Fear is. Hope and fear are inescapable partners. Anytime we hope for a certain outcome, and work hard to make it a happen, then we also introduce fear--fear of failing, fear of loss. Hopelessness is free of fear and thus can feel quite liberating. I've listened to others describe this state. Unburdened of strong emotions, they describe the miraculous appearance of clarity and energy.

Thomas Merton, the late Christian mystic, clarified further the journey into hopelessness. In a letter to a friend, he advised: "Do not depend on the hope of results . . .you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. . . .you gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people . . . .In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything."

I know this to be true. I've been working with colleagues in Zimbabwe as their country descends into violence and starvation by the actions of a madman dictator. Yet as we exchange emails and occasional visits, we're learning that joy is still available, not from the circumstances, but from our relationships. As long as we're together, as long as we feel others supporting us, we persevere. Some of my best teachers of this have been young leaders. One in her twenties said:: "How we're going is important, not where. I want to go together and with faith." Another young Danish woman at the end of a conversation that moved us all to despair, quietly spoke: "I feel like we're holding hands as we walk into a deep, dark woods." A Zimbabwean, in her darkest moment wrote: "In my grief I saw myself being held, us all holding one another in this incredible web of loving kindness. Grief and love in the same place. I felt as if my heart would burst with holding it all ."

Thomas Merton was right: we are consoled and strengthened by being hopeless together. We don't need specific outcomes. We need each other.

Hopelessness has surprised me with patience. As I abandon the pursuit of effectiveness, and watch my anxiety fade, patience appears. Two visionary leaders, Moses and Abraham, both carried promises given to them by their God, but they had to abandon hope that they would see these in their lifetime. They led from faith, not hope, from a relationship with something beyond their comprehension. T.S. Eliot describes this better than anyone. In the "Four Quartets" he writes :

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without
love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

This is how I want to journey through this time of increasing uncertainty. Groundless, hopeless, insecure, patient, clear. And together.
Dark Night
Margaret Wheatley © 2003
My nation now knows more about waging war than it does about anything else. We know what can be done with different guns, missiles, fighter planes, even the nicknames given to aircraft carriers. Retired military officers, now TV stars, have explained the details of battle strategy, demonstrated every weapon in America's arsenal, paraded soldiers on morning TV wearing the newest battle technology.

I remember listening to a pilot excitedly describe his night vision goggles, how he could see where his bombs landed. When the bombs hit, we saw only plumes of fire and shattered buildings floating eerily in the air, but this pilot saw the destruction in detail. I remember using those same night vision goggles. I was working for the Army Chief of Staff in 1993-94, supporting his efforts to create a military that could respond to this troubled world. It was dark night, and I was riding in a Hummer through the Army's desert center for tank training. We rode in total blackout, not a light anywhere, goggles on. At one point, I thoughtlessly raised my head and looked up. Instantly, the stars we can't see were glowing in my eyes. (Astronomers estimate that there are at least 50 million stars behind each one we can see.) I have never forgotten that rapturous glimpse into the universe provided by military technology. Nor the paradox.

I experience this as a dark time for America, where we have lost our way. I search to find the means for us to see clearly through the darkness. I want us to be able to see both the destruction, and the stars. I felt this even before we chose war, for more fundamental reasons. In the past several years, America has embraced values that cannot create a sustainable society and world. Presently, we organize our activities around beliefs that are inherently life-destroying. We believe that growth can be endless, that competition creates healthy relationships, that consumption need have no limits, that meaning is found in things, that aggression brings peace. Societies that use these values end up, as do all voracious predators in nature, dead.

I know that most Americans would be shocked at this list of national values, but I see them clearly in our behaviors and the choices we make. I also know that this is not who we want to be, so how did we get here? What happened to our ideals about life, liberty, democracy, independence, imagination?

This devolution frequently happens to individuals, organizations, and nations. It's a gradual and nearly invisible process where values quite contrary to those we treasure seep in and grow in power. As these contrary values are used in more and more decisions, higher principles recede into the background and have little influence. We may still think they matter, but they aren't guiding our behavior. Usually, it takes a crisis and deep distress for us to look honestly at ourselves and notice who we've become.

I feel that America is standing on the edge of an abyss, a dark night of the soul. In a dark night, meaning is lost, identity disintegrates, and we move into that most creative of spaces, chaos. W.B.Yeats powerfully describes a dark night in "The Second Coming."
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world;
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

There is only one way through a dark night, and that is by illuminating the truth of who we are, surfacing the grief and regret we feel, and then reclaiming those values and principles that would bring us back to life. We need to walk willingly into the abyss, peering through the darkness to find those values, that identity, that holds its own luminosity. As we reclaim our ideals, we find the way forward, the path illuminated by our refound clarity about who we want to be.

I want to see Americans, and those who care about America, in conversation about the values and behaviors that would restore America to her intended character and original founding principles. I regard the recent spate of books about the Founding Fathers, John Adams, the Constitutional Congress and the American Revolution, as evidence that America wants to be in this exploration. Even as I've been writing this, PBS is airing "Freedom: A History of US," while also advertising Walter Cronkite's upcoming series "Avoiding Armageddon." How much longer will we wait to talk about these deep and troubling issues?

I've begun to invite the people I meet into conversation by asking: "What is it that you love about America? What things must be protected at all costs?" This question leads to wonderful explorations. People are energized to talk about what they love, what it means to live here as an immigrant, what they've learned about freedom, imagination, the human spirit, creativity, democracy. Even if these ideals are receding from our day-to-day experience, we realize how important it is to claim them as our own.

However, I'm also learning that it's very difficult to look truthfully at these times. It's painful to acknowledge that these ideals are no longer vibrant, that, in fact, they are disappearing. It's even more difficult to acknowledge that we must stand up and do something if we are to prevent further deterioration. It takes patience and trust in one another before we dare venture into the darkness.

I have no idea if America will acknowledge this dark night that feels so obvious to me. I can only hope some of us will be brave enough to ask, "What do I love about America that I want to preserve at all costs?" This question takes us into deep territory, revealing the qualities of life and human community that truly inspire us. And our connection to each other strengthens as we dwell in this life-affirming space. I always leave these conversations reenergized, stronger, bolder.

At a personal level, I fear waking one morning from this awful trance that has dulled my imagination and heart, and wonder what happened to the energy and ideals I once had as an American. In his poem, "The Truly Great," British poet Stephen Spender warned that we must: "Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother with noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit." Sacred values erode so slowly, lost to our awareness through subtle, darkening forces. I hope we can find the means to see through this dark night.
Is the Pace of Life Hindering Our Ability to Manage?
in Management Today, a publication of the Australian Institute of Management, March 2004
Margaret Wheatley ©
Best-selling leadership author, consultant and speaker Margaret Wheatley is disappointed in the pace of Australian business life.

In Australia for a series of seminars, Margaret Wheatley says she is starting to think more about the skills that are needed in order to stay effective in an increasingly fast-paced world.

"I realise that the level of speed and the overwhelming nature that characterises the US and Europe has not yet hit here, but it is clearly on its way.

"One of the things I have certainly noticed is that Australians are certainly working a lot harder than they were six years ago. I think it is an unfortunate trend because I have always admired Australians for having set clear boundaries.

"For me it is just another indication of the power of the global pressure on people to go faster and faster."

The author of the management classic Leadership and the New Science says she has for many years been interested in seeing the world differently, seeing beyond the Western, mechanical view of the world to what else might appear when the lens is changed.

"I’ve learned, just as Joel Barker predicted when he introduced us to paradigms years ago, that ‘problems that are impossible to solve with one paradigm may be easily solved with a different one’.

"With colleagues, I’ve been exploring the question: "How might we organise differently if we understood how life organises?" It’s been an exploration that has helped me look into old patterns and problems and develop new and hopeful insights and practices."

As an example, she does not make a big distinction between the roles of managers and leaders in an organisation.

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

"So if there is a crisis or an unhappy consumer or a client suffering or an idea that needs to be developed, we don’t want people in their little squares.

"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.

"So, as a member of the team I can go along and do my job quite happily but if there’s a sudden crisis and I am there, on the spot, I can take up a leadership role. That’s why I think it is dangerous to make a distinction between management and leadership."

She says that in her own work, which has been global, she sees leaders appearing everywhere and it all depends on whether the situation or circumstance calls on them to exert leadership.

"It is not something you have or don’t have. It is much more dependent on whether it is something that really moves you and you say to yourself, ‘I could do something here’."

As the founder of the Berkana Foundation, she says a leader is defined as someone who wants to help.

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

"It is also true in an organisation that when something goes wrong in a plant or someone dies suddenly, then someone needs to step in. You want people to feel that this is a welcome gesture and they don’t have to wait for anyone to tell them to."

Wheatley says the current theme of her talks is that people need to develop time to think.

"And to really learn from our experiences. There is an enormous wasted wisdom out there."

"We do something and then we rush on to the next thing and if it goes badly we don’t want anyone to look at it and if it goes well, we still don’t take the time to take a good look at it. We just rush on…

"So there is a quality lacking. It is something that disturbs me and it is a severe problem in the US and Europe. We are just not learning from all the experiences we are having. 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."

She cautions that learning is not an abstract thing .

"It is about when we do something and there is a significant outcome, either for good or ill, we need to look at it and learn from it. And for me if a leader can actually sponsor these processes and allow more time for people to think, then I believe that is a major contribution."

For instance, she says, there are managers who equate how effective they are by how busy they seem to be.

"We are all caught up in this measurement mania. We are not growing in wisdom right now. We may be just growing in freneticism."

Wheatley continues: "I don’t know if you can wind back the number of hours but I certainly think we could be using them differently. 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.

"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 are going to talk about this subject for seven minutes and this other subject for 10 minutes. These are not processes that bring out thinking. They are just very mechanical processes that we go through. They are quite deadening both to the people who are participating and also in the kind of outcomes that are generated.

"They are not creative and they are not inspiring and we don’t want to be doing them."
Wheatley also explains how she has modified her message.

"I think when I first started to outline this message I expressed the view that that there was a need to just talk to colleagues. Well, I think I have tempered that message.

"We need time when we are in unstructured meetings together and we need meetings without agendas that allow time for reflection. There are different processes that we can use and they are all much more open ended than our current high tech collaborative processes.

"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. People are concerned that if you start a face-to-face conversation it will take longer and that’s where we see the time pressure affecting us."

Another key subject close to Margaret Wheatley’s heart is the impact of change on society and business.

"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. We are just beginning to experience what it is like to operate in a global environment of increasing chaos, of events beyond our control that have a devastating impact on our internal operations and culture.

"The business news is filled with stories of the perils of interconnectedness. One country suffers economic problems, and analysts are quick to say that their problems will not affect other countries. Then we watch as an entire continent and those beyond are pulled into economic recession by the web of interdependence. Or we read how the actions of a few corrupt executives bring down an entire company (and industry), even though tens of thousands of people work there with integrity.

"Interconnected systems are always this sensitive. Activities occurring in one part of the system always affect many other parts of the system. 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."

She says that in an era of increasing uncertainty, new organisational dynamics appear and old ones intensify at all levels of the organisation and it is important to notice how these new dynamics affect employees, leaders, and core-operating functions. Her examples are:
• Employee behaviours: 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.
• Pressure on leaders: Because of increased fear, many people turn to leaders with unreasonable demands. We want someone to rescue us, to save us, to provide answers, to give us firm ground or strong life rafts. But not even the strongest of leaders can deliver on the promise of stability and security.
• Core functions: It wasn't long ago that companies engaged in five-year strategic planning. Those sweet, slow days seem very distant now. Many of the primary functions of business, and of human resources-planning, forecasting, budgeting, staffing, individual development plans – only worked because we could bring the future into focus, because the future felt within our control. When people know they can rely on each other, when there is a true sense of community, it is amazing how well people perform.
• New organisational capabilities: In order to counter the negative organisational dynamics stimulated by stress and uncertainty, we must give full attention to the quality of our relationships. Nothing else works, no new tools or technical applications, no redesigned organisational chart. The solution is each other. If we can rely on one another, we can cope with almost anything. Without each other, we retreat into fear.

There is one core principle for developing these relationships. People must be engaged in meaningful work together if they are to transcend individual concerns and develop new capacities. Here are several ways to put this principle into practices –
• Nourish a clear organisational identity: As confusion and fear swirls about the organisation, people find stability and security in purpose, not in plans. When chaos wipes the ground from beneath us, the organisation's identity gives us some place to stand.
• Focus people on the bigger picture: People who are stressed lose the ability to recognise patterns, to see the bigger picture. And as people become overloaded and overwhelmed with their tasks, they have no time or interest to look beyond the demands of the moment.
• Demand honest, forthright communication: In a crisis, the continuous flow of information gives people the capacity to respond intelligently as they seek to rescue or save people and property. People deal far better with uncertainty and stress when they know what's going on.
• Prepare for the unknown: The US military has invested large sums of money in the development and use of complex simulations that prepare troops for different battle scenarios. Yet it is surprising how few companies engage in any type of simulation or scenario work.
• Keep meaning at the forefront: Often in organisations we forget that meaning is the most powerful motivator of human behavior. People gain energy and resolve if they understand how their work contributes to something beyond themselves.
• Pay attention to individuals: There is no substitute for direct, personal contact with employees. Even though managers are more stressed and have less time, it is crucial to pick up the phone and connect with those you want to retain. When people feel cared for, their stress is reduced and they contribute more to the organisation.

What does Berkana mean?
The Berkana Foundation was created by Margaret Wheatley a decade ago. Berkana is an ancient Norse word for birch tree, and symbolically stands as the Norse rune for growth and rebirth.

The Berkana Institute supports life-affirming leaders around the globe, those who are giving birth to the new forms, processes, and leadership that will restore hope to the future. Since 1991, Berkana has gradually expanded its work to reach pioneering leaders and communities in all types of organisations and in dozens of nations. They define a leader as anyone who wants to help, who is willing to step forward to create change in their world.

According to Margaret Wheatley: "We at Berkana know that the leaders we need are already here, emerging everywhere, among thousands of people who are stepping forward to create a future of possibility and hope. We do everything we can to support their pioneering efforts."
Solving, not Attacking, Complex Problems
A Five-State Approach Based on an Ancient Practice
Margaret J. Wheatley and Geoff Crinean ©2004

Organizations today suffer from a severe disability when it comes to solving problems. In virtually every organization, regardless of mission and function, people are frustrated by problems that seem unsolvable. Every attempt to resolve a problem results in unintended consequences that dwarf the original one. Relationships worsen as people harden into opposing positions, each side insisting on its own solution, unwilling to consider alternatives. Too many problem-solving sessions become battlegrounds where decisions are made based on power rather than intelligence.
Consider the language used to describe problem-solving. We "attack the problem," "tackle the issue," "take a stab at it," "wrestle it to the ground," "get on top of it." If colleagues argue with us, we complain that they "shot down my idea," "took pot shots at me," "used me for target practice," or that "I got killed." In the face of opposition, we "back down," "retreat" or "regroup." (Sometimes there are gentler metaphors in use–we may "float an idea," or test it to see "if it has legs.") Such aggressive descriptions of problem solving point to a startling conclusion. 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!

Aggressive problem-solving techniques manifest in subtle ways as well. Nearly every problem faced by an organization is exceedingly complex. 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. Of course, it’s always someone else’s fault, never our own. This is the one real joy of scapegoating–we walk away, and somebody else or their project takes the hit. Finding others to blame is the only reward of simplistic thinking.
But satisfaction at naming the scapegoat is momentary. Long-term, we’ve set in motion a number of disastrous unintended consequences that create an impotent and hostile organizational culture. In a culture of blame, people become protective and reactive, striking out in self-defense. Innovation and risk-taking vanish. What arises are hardened positions, stronger factions, alliances, even cabals. As polarization takes hold, appreciation for diverse viewpoints disappears. People trust only those who think like they do. Real information goes underground and only angry gossip and paranoid rumors make it to the light of day. Passive aggression grows stronger in calculated strategies where people stonewall, delay, and sabotage. Thinking shrinks to moment-by-moment reactions and long-term strategic thinking disappears. Everybody needs to protect themselves, and nobody thinks about the whole enterprise.

This sorry state of affairs is quite predictable. Aggression only breeds more aggression. It only creates more fear and anger. It is impossible to avoid this deteriorating cycle as long as aggressive tactics are pursued. What has been less evident is that our approaches to problem-solving are inherently aggressive. We haven’t noticed how our attempts to solve problems by seeking simplistic causes, by treating problems as enemies, by needing to assign blame, how all these behaviors are contributing to the increasing number of problems we face, and the deterioration of an organization’s or community’s capacity to work together.
There are healthy alternatives to this aggressive approach to problem-solving. But before detailing a five-stage process, let’s observe for a moment the sea of aggressive energy in which we swim, blindly.
An Aggressive Society
These days, our senses are bombarded with aggression. We are constantly confronted with global images of unending, escalating war and violence. In our personal lives, we can’t help but encounter angry people cursing into cell phones, watch T.V. talk shows where guests and audiences intimidate each other verbally and sometimes physically, or attend public meetings that disintegrate into shouting matches. Aggression appears frequently in advertising images, from food products that promise to "hammer your hunger," to a recent candy commercial where formerly benign M&Ms (tm) became violent and beat up a noisy moviegoer to everyone else’s satisfaction.
Aggression is not only the dominant energy of this time, we regard it as a positive attribute. Parents scream from the sidelines of their children’s sports events: "Get aggressive!" Employees are rewarded for aggressive timelines and plans. Dictionaries define "aggressive" as hostile action, but also positively as assertive, bold, and enterprising.
The predominance of aggression in our behavior and language is more than a curious trend. Aggression only moves in one direction–it creates more aggression. We quickly become locked into a deteriorating cycle of increasing rage and violence. Caught in fear and anger, we lose the capacity to respond in any other way. We strike out ever more fiercely, thus creating more frightening reactions from those we oppose.
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. While this is absolutely necessary on a real battlefield, when aggression moves into our day-to-day relationships, it destroys our capacity to work and live together. Relationships fracture, distrust increases, people retreat into self-defense and isolation, paranoia becomes commonplace. Aggressive tactics breed fear and anger, and these emotions destroy all hope for healthy communities, workgroups, families, and organizations.
Aggression in Organizations
Aggression is the most common behavior used by many organizations, a nearly invisible medium that influences all decisions and actions. What is not recognized is that aggression is one of the greatest barriers to thinking clearly and working well together during this difficult time. Aggression is evident in the consistent use of war and sports metaphors. There is constant use of these images as we "bring in the big guns," "dominate the field," plan "a sneak attack," or "rally the troops." Recently, even email has turned violent: "I’ll shoot you an email."
And organizational aggression is on the rise, mirroring the societal trend. Competition has become increasingly ruthless with strategies that aim to destroy competitors and achieve total market domination, rather than former strategies of co-existence within well-defined niches. The resurgence of command and control leadership is a less obvious but strong form of aggression, where the will of one person is imposed on others with the demand for obedience and compliance.
Day-to-day in organizations there is the overt aggression in meetings where one or two people dominate the time, railroad the agenda, and insist on their opinion or strategy. Passive aggression is also abundant, as when people use delaying tactics, when they agree to do things and then fail to act, when they refuse to respond to communications or act contrary to prior agreements, when they act secretly and fail to communicate what they’re doing, when they resort to sarcasm and cutting humor.
The impact of increasing aggression is having a profound impact on organizational relationships. Distrust is on the rise, so much so that in one survey, managers reported that the primary reason they attend meetings is because they don’t trust what their colleagues will do in their absence. More employees are retreating into self-protective stances, hoarding resources and information for fear of losing further control of their work. And worker stress levels are at an all-time high. In Canada, one-third of lost work days are from emotional/psychological causes.
Organizations are caught in aggression’s one-way street. Fear and anger will continue to increase unless we notice what is happening and make a choice for non-aggressive approaches. In the past, aggressive strategies were part of many organization’s cultures, but they were moderated by other practices. When we had more time available, and weren’t drenched in uncertainty and fear for the unknown future, there were moderating influences on aggression, such things as participation, consensus-seeking, patient problem-solving, inclusion, and diversity of perspectives. But now, in this culture of speed and overwhelm, there is nothing to counterbalance aggressive practices. Yet until we choose for alternative methods, we will continue to experience increasing anger, frustration, impasse, and exhaustion.
Solving problems free from aggression
For eons, humans have struggled to find less destructive ways of living together. 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. The five stage process described here originated in from an ancient teaching in Tibet. We have brought it forward, modified and expanded it, based on our experience of working in many large, complex organizations and communities who face intractable problems. This process allows individuals and groups to disengage from aggressive dynamics, yet to use the passion and energy of all involved to develop greater clarity and insight into appropriate and effective actions.
To step aside from aggressive responses to problem-solving requires using some little-used skills: humility, curiosity, and a willingness to listen. Humility is a brave act–we have to admit that we don’t enough to solve the problem, that our approaches aren’t working and never will. Even our own treasured answers are insufficient–if everyone bowed to our demands and did what we asked, the problem still would not be solved. We need more information, more insight. This kind of humility is rare in competitive, embattled organizations and communities, but it is the door we must walk through to find the place of true solutions. One wise educator put it this way: "Humility is admitting that I don’t know the whole story. Compassion is recognizing that you don’t know it either."
Hopefully, humility leads us up out of our bunkers, to open ground where we step away from the rigidity of our positions and become a bit curious. We need to be open to the possibility that colleagues and even strangers have information and perspectives that may be of value to us. Only with their input do we stand a chance of seeing this problem in all its complexity. Every perspective, prejudice, and opinion offers more information. If we can start to realize that we’re all on the same side–that the problem is the problem–then our different positions become a benefit that allow us to see the situation more fully.
Five stages to solving complex problems
In order to develop a rich understanding of a complex problem and to determine appropriate actions to resolve it, there are five precise activities to complete in sequence. These are:
I. Cooling, Quieting
II. Enriching through Fruitful Opposition
III. Magnetizing Resources
IV. Precise Destroying
V. Intelligent Action
These five stages are depicted here as a cycle because they work developmentally, one stage creating the conditions for the next. This developmental sequence, however, can sometimes be gone through very quickly, or a group might spend a great deal of time in one stage and move rapidly through the next. Each stage has a form associated with it, a shape that provides the appropriate structure for the work at hand. Also, there are different core behaviors that facilitate the inquiry for each stage.

Stage One: Cooling, Quieting
Imagine your most recent experience in a conflicted situation. Most likely, people were arguing their position, not listening, raising their voices, acting out, doing power plays–in essence, acting aggressively. Nothing positive ever results from this continued conflict, yet we stay in it, unwilling to abandon the drama. Now imagine what might have been possible if someone had intervened with a process to lessen the drama, to cool down the situation. This first stage does just that, by using an ancient, pacifying form, the circle.
The circle is the shape that cools, quiets, pacifies (makes peaceful). It is the form of equality, the most common and enduring form of human meeting. Circles have been found from about 500,000 years ago as early human ancestors sat around fires, trying to get warm. The equality of the circle was very important even then. Had they sat in a rectangle or any other form, some of them would have frozen!
To pacify a highly conflicted group, you have to move into a circle (or a number of small circles.) As soon as you sit in this form and it becomes clear that everyone will have a chance to speak, things quiet down. Anyone who persists in being dramatic or loud in a circle soon looks like a fool. Circles create soothing space, where even reticent people can realize that their voice is welcome. As the drama drains, people will still speak passionately, but more quietly and earnestly.
The process is quite straightforward. You go around the circle and everyone who wants to speaks does so, in turn, and within a limited time period. People who choose not to speak may pass and contribute later if they like. As each person speaks, everyone else is silent, listening as best they can. People may ask questions if they don’t understand something being said, but this is not the time for exchanges or debates. The task is to have each voice heard, for each person to make a contribution to the circle. (See endnote for additional resources on circle processes for large and small groups.)

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. We are often surprised when people truly listen to us. Their unexpected acceptance encourages us to listen better.
The second benefit is that listening brings people together. You can see this happening physically in a circle. As people quiet down and get more engaged, they lean in. The circle becomes tighter. The room gets quieter, the volume decreases substantially, yet the intensity of listening is palpable.
And as we listen, we develop greater awareness that each of us is human, struggling with life’s challenges. One adage describes this: "You can’t hate someone whose story you know." We may never agree on an issue, or share the same values, but as soon as we realize there’s a person behind the position, we become more open to them, less reactive.
The purpose of first quieting, calming, and pacifying is to develop a richer appreciation of the complexity of the problem, using a process that begins to bring people together. Every person has a somewhat different perspective, by virtue of individual differences, and also because we each sit in a different part of the organization or community. The world doesn’t look exactly the same to any two people, and circle provides the form to gather many different perspectives without as much judgment or defensiveness.
The core behaviors of this first process are patience and curiosity. We have to be willing to give up our soap boxes and become curious about others’ perspectives. And we have to be patient–it takes time to go round a circle and give everyone equal time. If we become impatient, it’s an indication that we’re still holding onto our position. We just want to get this over with so we can win using more aggressive approaches. But usually, what’s being said by others begins to awaken our curiosity. We learn things we didn’t know, and develop more awareness of how other people are affected by the problem under consideration.
Stage Two: Enriching, Fruitful Opposition
After the initial process of cooling and quieting, it’s essential to return to the source of the conflict, which is people’s different perspectives and positions. In order to understand a problem in its complexity, we have to learn much more about it. We achieve this understanding by giving each person or position ample opportunity to explain their reasoning in depth. What’s required here is to amplify the differences as the means to create a fuller, detailed appreciation of the situation or problem. We are seeking to enrich our understanding from the realization that no one person or position has a sufficient picture of what’s going on.
To create this differentiation and depth, it helps to sit around a square table, to literally "take sides." People need to choose which side they’re on (more than four sides is fine, as long as it doesn’t go beyond an octagon. And people can switch sides as the process evolves.) You can also do this seated as an audience, with each side presenting from the front. The fact that most public forums use such a form explains why they only increase conflict and entrenched positions. They begin by amplifying differences, rather then quieting and calming the situation. If you begin with taking sides, it’s guaranteed that you will only exacerbate the conflict.

Each side is responsible for developing their position in depth. This is not the time for sloganeering or campaigning. The task is to go deeply into the rationale and logic of each position. It is important to keep the exploration of each side separate–we are not seeking compromise, blending of views, consensus or negotiations. Each position has its own logic, and the goal is to develop the unique integrity of each side.
Respect and clear thinking are the core behaviors of this stage. We listen attentively, even to those that we profoundly disagree with. Such respect is easier now that people have sat in circle together and developed more rapport and patience. Respect also means that we’re open to the possibility that we’ll hear something useful from our opponents. We are willing to be curious that others have insight and wisdom that are useful to the group.
And clear thinking is essential. We move away from emotions (no matter how much we care about the issue) and instead use reason to develop greater clarity about what’s going on. We want to clear away the fog created by our emotional investment in the issue. As each side presents its analysis of the problem, others simply listen. After a while, the inherent complexity of the situation becomes quite evident. Often, people are overwhelmed as they realize just how complex things really are. But this overwhelm is of great benefit, because it moves people off of their certainty platforms. Confused and overwhelmed, we become open to new interpretations and possibilities. Confusion often has a helpful companion, humility. Thus, confusion is the necessary precursor for letting go of entrenched positions and moving into creative exploration together.
At the end of this stage of differentiation and taking sides, you’ll notice that people begin to move out of the square or audience form and begin to cluster in messier ways because they want to talk with each other. One paradoxical consequence of exploring differences is that groups emerge at the other end feeling somewhat unified. The boundaries of the different positions have lost their hardness, and people begin to talk together as one cohesive group, wanting to resolve the problem together. This feeling of cohesiveness is an essential pre-requisite for Stage Three, when it will be an important means to attract needed resources
Stage Three: Magnetizing Resources
In magnetism, only opposites attract. Two magnets will repel apart if the same poles (or energy charge) are brought together. Yet when opposing magnetic poles are brought near each other, they snap together in a strong embrace. The same principle of attraction and rejection is relevant to this stage of problem-solving.
After progressing through the stages of cooling and enriching, it is common for people to feel good about working together as a group, to be humbled by the complexity of the issue, and to be energized to move forward in finding a solution. It’s a complex array of predictable emotions. People will be both tired and motivated, confused yet confident. However, it’s also common for people at this stage to want to launch into action planning. Taking action relieves us of the oppressive feelings of confusion and overwhelm. We are eager to do anything rather than linger longer in these uncomfortable states.
However, if actions are determined at this stage, generally they will be the wrong ones. We do not yet have a sufficient understanding of the issue’s complexity to know what actions will be useful. If we rush into actions prematurely, we run the risk of setting in motion a long chain of unintended consequences. Stage Three takes us deeper into the issue, rather than letting us leap prematurely onto the stage of action.
The form that characterizes the work of Stage Three is a half circle, a very humbling symbol. It indicates that however far we’ve come in our understanding of the problem, we’re only half-way there. Our comprehension of what’s going on is still incomplete, and we need many more perspectives and information to complete the circle of understanding.
As a result of working well through the first two processes, people feel more optimistic, confident that they can find the resources, information and support they need. And it’s true that groups at this stage do attract what they need. The source of this attraction is the shared understanding and cohesiveness of the group. As real magnets, we’re creating one pole of sufficient strength to attract its opposite. The bond amongst ourselves, and our clarifying picture of the problem, can now draw in what’s missing. We will be able to attract an entirely new level of different and opposing points of view.?
Generosity is also a core behavior of this stage. We’re no longer working in a reactive, self-protective mode. We’ve developed stronger relationships with colleagues, and have increased our understanding. As our curiosity has grown, as we’ve moved out of our bunkers, it becomes easier to feel open and welcoming. Humbled that we know only half of what we need to know, it’s easier to feel generous, welcoming new viewpoints and uncomfortable information.
To complete the circle of understanding, it can help to sit arrayed along the curve of a half-circle, facing out to the blank, uncompleted circle. You can put up flip charts or a white board in the empty half of the circle. It’s important to keep people focused on the blank space, not on each other. You can also draw a circle split down the middle. Fill in one side with a summary of your understanding. Leave the other side blank, to be filled in during this process.
A variety of questions help to fill in the blanks:
o What else is out there?
o Who else needs to be here?
o What are we blind to, what can’t we yet see?
o What additional information and perspectives do we need?

In answering these questions, the group is creating its next piece of work. Whoever is identified as missing has to be invited into the group. Whatever information is lacking has to be researched and brought in for deliberation. Time is required to go find the people, ideas, and resources that have been identified. It is important for the group to set a realistic but efficient timeline for this work.
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. As our humility and openness becomes evident, and as our generosity grows, word gets out that we’re a good group to work with. This reputation also helps attract the people that we need to complete our circle of understanding.
Stage Four: Precise Destroying
Although we live in an aggressive culture, people often recoil from the word "destroying." Yet if we look honestly at what’s going on in organizations, destroying is the most common response to organizational issues. And it’s the first response, rather than being the last action after careful consideration of the situation. Too many organizations use weapons of mass destruction rather than smart bombs. These WMDs include sweeping budget cuts, where everything is reduced rather than intelligent decisions to cut back in specific areas. Or massive lay-offs. Or constant reorganizations that obliterate the most recent reorganization. We don’t seem to know how to act with precision; instead we routinely resort to carpet bombing.
Destroying is a necessary function in life. Everything has its season, and all things eventually lose their effectiveness and die. 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. Hence it is Stage Four here, coming after deep, thoughtful analysis by a group that is thinking well together. At this stage, precision destroying is necessary to create more capacity for the work going forward. We can see now what small elements of the situation are impeding movement forward, what few things need to be let go of as they are no longer necessary or appropriate for the work we must do.
Many different things need to be considered for destruction: outmoded beliefs; inappropriate or harmful values; traditional practices that no longer make sense; habitual behaviors that are dysfunctional; aspects of the culture that impede future direction; programs that have outlived their usefulness; policies that don’t work as intended; specific individuals who refuse to change or who block progress.
At this stage in the problem-solving process, we can be trusted to act with precision and discipline. We are no longer reacting defensively, intent on getting rid of people and things that threaten us. We have a very clear picture of the problem and are able to use this new found clarity to exercise real discernment. We act as intelligent and insightful contributors rather than as excluded or embattled members of the organization or community. We now are skilled enough to discern those small acts of destroying that will yield real benefit.
The form for Precision Destroying is the triangle. A triangle is a very stable structure, sitting on a broad base that supports its apex. The group can sit as a triangle, leaving the apex area open, with a flipchart or small whiteboard occupying that narrow point. Or people can draw a triangle and focus on the apex area. The core skills of this stage are discipline and discernment. We are restricted by the triangle to nominate only a small number of things to be destroyed in that narrow apex. We apply laser-like discernment to a very complex situation.

Precision destroying is naturally compassionate. We no longer act from self-defense, striking out at what we think harms us. We’re clear about which things impede solutions, which small elements hold us back or burden us with the past. When we determine what to destroy, we do so from a profound appreciation of the problem. We do not act from fear or anger, but from clarity and compassion.
Stage Five: Intelligent Action
This last stage is the reward for working through the first four. We are now a cohesive, smart group of people who have developed genuine perspective and depth about the problem under consideration. We have become good systems thinkers because we’ve included so many diverse and contrasting views and information in our analysis. We can’t help but appreciate the dense interconnections and multiple dynamics at play in this situation. We’ve also developed very useful skills in working well together. We’ve become better listeners, become more open and curious, developed new thinking and analytic skills. We’ve also learned to work with people we had misunderstood, ignored, or feared. We’ve become a more intelligent, diverse, inclusive, and confident team, ready to go to work. The core behaviors of this stage are commitment and team-work. We don’t have to create them or go off to be trained; they are the result of all the work we’ve done to get this far.
The form for this stage is the existing organization. Now is the time to use the processes that people are familiar with: action planning, strategy setting, project planning, budgeting, measurement. These processes have an important role to play. What’s been missing from them before is good thinking. Bored or exhausted, people have used them in rote fashion without insight or intelligence. Or they have been forced to use them in all situations, even those that make no sense. However, now these well-worn and tired processes can be infused with the light of clear thinking and the energy of strong commitment. Newly-developed insights can be used to intelligently determine which actions, measures, and strategies make the most sense. Empowerment will occur naturally, as people proceed to change and discard existing processes and methods that are dysfunctional or nonsensical.

It’s important to note that leaders need to be prepared for big change. Once any group has developed this level of insight and rapport, they cannot be pushed back into small boxes or compliant behavior. With their intelligence awakened, people want to contribute, want to change things, want to make things happen. They will work with existing structures and processes, but they will be altering and adapting them as needed, almost without noticing. Too often, leaders fear a loss of control and attempt to rein in such a group. Their own fear pushes them back into aggressive patterns of command and control. However, the smart leader understands the level of accomplishment attained by this group and the depth of understanding now available. It is time to celebrate the fact that so much commitment and intelligence are now in active use in the organization.
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. Without aggression, it becomes possible to think well, to be curious about differences, and to enjoy each other’s company. Our energy finds new channels in creativity rather than defense. We learn that it is possible to feel passionate about a position without having to resist or out-maneuver those with differing passions.
As we strive to make our organizations and communities work decently in these difficult times, if we are to find true solutions to the problems that afflict us, it is essential that we understand the price we pay for our aggressive methods. If we are to work together more intelligently, we will need to choose processes that evoke our curiosity, humility, generosity and wisdom. The ultimate benefit is that we learn that it is good, once again, to work together.
How is Your Leadership Changing?
Margaret Wheatley ©2005
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. Some of this was to be expected, because humans usually default to the known when confronted with the unknown. Some of it was a surprise, because so many organizations had focused on innovation, quality, learning organizations, and human motivation. How did they fail to learn that whenever you impose control on people and situations, you only succeed in turning people into non-creative, shut-down and cynical workers?
The destructive impact of command and control
The dominance of command and control is having devastating impacts. There has been a dramatic increase in worker disengagement, few organizations are succeeding at solving problems, and leaders are being scapegoated and fired.
Most people associate command and control leadership with the military. Years ago, I worked for the U.S. Army Chief of Staff. I, like most people, thought I'd see command and control leadership there. The great irony is that the military learned long ago that, if you want to win, you have to engage the intelligence of everyone involved in the battle. The Army had a visual reminder of this when, years ago, they developed new tanks and armored vehicles that traveled at unprecedented speeds of fifty miles an hour. When first used in battle during the first Gulf War, several times troops took off on their own, speeding across the desert at high speed. However, according to Army doctrine, tanks and armored vehicles must be accompanied by a third vehicle that literally is called the Command and Control vehicle. This vehicle could only travel at twenty miles an hour. (They corrected this problem.)
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. The result is dispirited employees and leaders wondering why no one takes responsibility or gets engaged anymore. 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.
We know how to create smart, resilient organizations
We do know how to create workplaces that are flexible, smart, and resilient. We have known for more than half a century that engaging people, and relying on self-managed teams, are far more productive than any other form of organizing. In fact, productivity gains in self-managed work environments are at minimum thirty-five percent higher than in traditionally managed organizations. And workers know this to be true when they insist that they can make smarter decisions than those delivered from on high.
With so much evidence supporting the benefits of participation, why isn't every organization using self-managed teams to cope with turbulence? Instead, organizations increasingly are cluttered with control mechanisms that paralyze employees and leaders alike. Where have all these policies, procedures, protocols, laws, and regulations come from? And why do we keep creating more, even as we suffer from the terrible consequences of over-control?
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. And this drive for power is supported by the belief that the higher the risk, the more necessary it is to hold power tightly. What's so dangerous about this belief is that just the opposite is true. Successful organizations, including the Military, have learned that the higher the risk, the more necessary it is to engage everyone's commitment and intelligence. When leaders hold onto power and refuse to distribute decision-making, they create slow, unwieldy, Byzantine systems that only increase risk and irresponsibility. We never effectively control people or situations by these means, we only succeed in preventing intelligent, fast responses.
The personal impact on leaders' morale and health is also devastating. When leaders take back power, when they act as heroes and saviors, they end up exhausted, overwhelmed, and deeply stressed. It is simply not possible to solve singlehandedly the organization's problems; there are just too many of them! One leader who led a high risk chemical plant spent three years creating a highly motivated, self-organizing workforce. He described it this way: "Instead of just me worrying about the plant, I now have nine hundred people worrying. And coming up with solutions I never could have imagined."
Sometimes leaders fail to involve staff out of some warped notion of kindness. They don't include people, they don't share their worries, because they don't want to add to their stress. But such well-meaning leaders only create more problems. When leaders fail to engage people in finding solutions to problems that effect them, staff don't thank the leader for not sharing the burden. Instead, they withdraw, criticize, worry and gossip. They interpret the leader's exercise of power as a sign that he/she doesn't trust them or their capacities.
Assessing changes in your leadership
With no time to reflect on how they might be changing, with no time to contemplate whether their present leadership is creating an effective and resilient organization, too many leaders drift into command and control, wondering why nothing seems to be working, angry that no one seems motivated any more.
If you are feeling stressed and pressured, please know that this is how most leaders feel these days. Yet it is important that you take time to notice how your own leadership style has changed in response to the pressures of this uncertain time. Otherwise you may end up disappointed and frustrated, leaving a legacy of failure rather than of real results.
Some questions to think about
Here are questions to help you notice if your leadership is slipping into command and control. If you feel courageous, circulate these questions and talk about them with staff.
1. What's changed in the way you make decisions? Have you come to rely on the same group of advisors? Do you try to engage those who have a stake in the decision?
2. What's happening to staff motivation? How does it compare to a few years ago?
3. How often do you find yourself invoking rules, policies or regulations to get staff to do something?
4. How often do you respond to a problem by developing a new policy?
5. What information are you no longer sharing with staff? Where are you more transparent?&
6. What's the level of trust in your organization right now? How does this compare to two to three years ago?
7. When people make mistakes, what happens? Are staff encouraged to learn from their experience? Or is there a search for someone to blame?
8. What's the level of risk-taking in the organization? How does this compare to two to three years ago?
9. How often have you reorganized in the past few years? What have you learned from that?
10. How's your personal energy and motivation these days? How does this compare to a few years ago?
We Can Be Wise Only Together
Preface for The World Café: Shaping Our Futures
Through Conversations That Matter
Margaret Wheatley ©2005


In this troubling time when people are so disconnected from one another, I keep searching to find those ideas, processes, and behaviors that can restore hope to the future. The World Café does just that. The stories told in these pages by its practitioners from all over the world demonstrate that it is possible for people to find meaning, even joy in working together. And that as we work together, we discover a greater wisdom that can resolve our most irresolvable problems.

The World Café reintroduces us to a world we have forgotten. This is a world where people naturally congregate because we want to be together. A world where we enjoy the ages-old process of good conversation, where we’re not afraid to talk about things that matter most to us. A world where we’re not separated, classified, or stereotyped. A world of simple greeting, free from techniques, technology, or artificiality. A world which constantly surprises us with the wisdom that exists not in any one of us, but in all of us. And a world where we learn that the wisdom we need to solve our problems is available when we talk together.

This world has been forgotten by us, but it has never abandoned us. For several years, David Isaacs, co-founder of the Café process, has said that our work is to remember this world, that we don’t need to create it. From what I observe in many places however, it appears that our memory of healthy, productive human interactions has been nearly extinguished by the creeping complexity of group work, facilitation techniques, obscure analytic processes, and our own exhaustion. People are more polarized, more overwhelmed, more impatient, more easily disappointed in others, and more withdrawn than ever. We’re frustrated by the increasing number of problems that confront us and our impotence to resolve even the most simple ones. And no sane person wants to participate in yet another meeting or get involved with yet another problem-solving process because these things only increase our frustration and impotence.

Perhaps the most pernicious consequence of this memory loss is our growing belief that humans are a difficult, self-serving species, and that we cannot trust each other. As this negative belief grows stronger, we remove ourselves and focus only on work that we can do on our own. We pay attention only to the work in front of us, and thus lose any appreciation of the whole system. Isolated and alone, we lose courage and capacity; our work loses meaning and we end up with unending fatigue and loneliness.

The World Café process reawakens our deep specie’s memory of two fundamental beliefs about human life. First, we humans want to work together on things that matter to us. In fact, this is what gives satisfaction and meaning to life. Second, as we work together, we are able to access a greater wisdom that is found only in the collective.

As you read the stories and counsel in this wonderful book, The World Cafe, you will see these two beliefs brought to life in the café process. In order to provoke your exploration of them, I’d like to underline some of the dimensions of the Café process that bring these beliefs into vibrant, healthy reality.

Believe in everybody. The World Café is a good, simple process for bringing people together around questions that matter. It is founded on the assumption that people want to work together, no matter who they are. For me, this is a very important assumption. It frees us from our current focus on personality types, learning styles, meme colors, emotional IQ—all the popular ways we currently use to pre-identify and pre-judge people. Each of these typologies ends up separating and stereotyping people. This is not what was intended by their creators, but it is what has happened.

The Café process has been used in many different cultures, amongst many different age groups, for many different purposes, and within many different types of communities and organizations. It doesn’t matter who the people are—the process always works. It works because all people can work well together, can be creative and caring and insightful when they’re engaged in meaningful work. I hope that these stories inspire us to move away from all the preconditions we currently use about who should be involved, who should attend a meeting, all the careful but ill-founded analysis we put into constructing the “right” group.

Diversity. It’s important to notice the diversity of the places and purposes for which the World Café has been used. These pages contain a rich illustration of a value I live by—we need to “depend on diversity.” Diversity is a survival skill these days, because there’s no other way to get an accurate picture of any complex problem or system. We need many eyes and ears and hearts engaged in sharing perspectives. How else can we create an accurate picture of the whole if we don’t honor the fact that we each see something different because of who we are and where we sit in the system? Only when we have many different perspectives do we have enough information to make good decisions.

And exploring our differing perspectives always brings us closer together. One café person said it well: “You’re moving among strangers, but it feels as if you’ve known these people for a long time.”

Invitation. In every World Café, there’s a wonderful feeling of invitation. Attention is paid to creating “hospitable space”. But the hospitality runs much deeper. It is rooted in the host’s awareness that everyone is needed, that anyone might contribute something that suddenly sparks a collective insight. Café facilitators act like true hosts—creating a spirit of welcome that is missing from most of our processes. It’s important to notice this in the stories here, and to contrast it with your own experience of setting up meetings and processes. What does it feel like to be truly wanted at an event, to be greeted by facilitators who delight in your presence, to be welcomed in as a full contributor?

Listening. When people are engaged in meaningful conversation, the whole room reflects our curiosity and delight. People move closer physically, their faces exhibit intense listening and the air becomes charged with their attention to each other. A loud, resonant quiet develops, broken by occasional laughter. It becomes a challenge to call people back from these conversations, (which I always take as a good sign.)

Movement. In the café process, people move from table to table. But it’s much more than physical movement. As we move, we leave behind our roles, our preconceptions, our certainty. Each time we move to a new table, we lose more of ourselves and become bigger—we now represent a conversation that happened among several people. We move away from a confining sense of self and our small certainties into a spaciousness where new ideas can reveal themselves. As one participant describes it: “It’s almost as if you don’t know where the thought came from because it’s merged so many times that it’s been molded and shaped and shifted with new dimensions. People are speaking for each other and using words that started somewhere else that they hadn’t thought of before.”

We also move into a greater awareness as we look for connections amongst the conversations, as we listen to voices other than our own. Patterns become apparent. Things we couldn’t see from our own narrow perspective suddenly become obvious to the entire group.

Questions. Cafes, like all good conversations, succeed or fail based on what we’re talking about. Good questions--ones that we care about and that we want to answer—call us outward and to each other. They are an invitation to explore, to venture out, to risk, to listen, to abandon our positions. Good questions help us become both curious and uncertain, which is always the road that opens us to the surprise of new insight.

Energy. I’ve never been in a World Café that was dull or boring. People become energized, inspired, excited, creative. Laughter is common, playfulness abounds even with the most serious of issues. For me this is proof positive of how much we relish being together, of how wonderful it is to rediscover the fact of human community. As one host from a very formal culture says: “My faith in people has been confirmed. Underneath all the formal ways of the past, people really want to have significant conversations. People everywhere truly love to talk with each other, learn together, and make a contribution to things they care about.”

Discovering Collective Wisdom

These are some of the Café design dimensions that bring out the best in us. But this is only half the story. Café conversations take us into a new realm, one that has been forgotten in modern, individualistic cultures. This is the realm of collective intelligence, of the wisdom we possess as a group that is unavailable to us as individuals. This wisdom emerges as we get more and more connected with each other, as we move from conversation to conversation, carrying the ideas from one conversation to another, looking for patterns, suddenly surprised by an insight we all share. There’s a good scientific explanation for this because this is how all life works. As separate ideas or entities become connected to each other, life surprises us with emergence, the sudden appearance of new capacity and intelligence.

To those of us raised in a linear world with our minds shrunken by detailed analyses, the sudden appearance of collective wisdom always feels magical. I am fascinated by the descriptions given by Café participants of this emergence. Here are a few quotes from them:
• the magic in the middle
• the voice in the center of the room
• the magic in experiencing our own and other people’s humanity around whatever the content is.
• something coming to life in the middle of the table
• what joins us together—a larger whole that we always knew was there, but never really appreciated.
• a spinning sphere or ball suspended above all the tables, which is the spirit of the whole community or the spirit of whatever the project is. It gets more colorful and brighter as more people touch it.

For me, the moments when collective wisdom appears are always breathtaking. Even though I know such wisdom is bound to appear, I’m always stunned with delight when it enters the room. And the appearance of such wisdom is a huge relief. We actually do know how to solve our problems! We can discover solutions that work! We’ve just been looking in the wrong places—we’ve been looking to experts, or external solutions, or to detailed, empty analyses. And all this time, the wisdom has been waiting for us, waiting for us to enter into meaningful conversations and deeper connections, waiting for us to realize that we can be wise only together.


One last comment. One of the wonderful things about this book is that it is designed to give us an enticing taste of a Café experience; as much as is possible, it embodies what it describes. In these pages, we are introduced to many strangers, diverse people we don’t know who may be doing work very different from our own. They relay stories of their many experiences in using the World Café. Their stories are compelling and it’s possible to feel as if we’re sitting with them at an intimate café table, exchanging tales, learning from each other, moving closer. Then our gifted host, Juanita, enters and warmly invites us to another level of learning. She speaks in the Café voice, inviting, curious, inquiring. With her guidance, we can see things that weren’t clear, or learn principles that we can use in our own work. And as stories and learnings weave together, we can begin to notice patterns and insights that weren’t available to us before we opened the book. In the end, we too may experience a collective insight, a wider wisdom, the magic of thinking together.

I hope you will enjoy this book for all that it offers. I hope you will read it, savor it, use it, do it. If enough of us do so, we can reintroduce many people to a world where people enjoy working together, where collective activity yields true insight and solutions, where work and life are revived with meaning and possibility. In this way, we truly can restore hope to the future.

EIGHT FEARLESS QUESTIONS

Excerpt from "A Call to Fearlessness for Gentle Leaders" address at the Shambhala Institute Core Program, Halifax, June 2006

by Margaret Wheatley ©2006


I think these questions are worth holding for a while.


How do you call yourself? How do you identify yourself? And have you chosen a name for yourself that is big enough to hold your life's work?

I have a colleague who first suggested this to me. And he said, "So many of us choose names that are too small for a whole life." So, we call ourselves, 'cancer survivors;' that seems to be a very bold name, but is it big enough to hold a life? Or, 'children of abuse.' Or, we call ourselves 'orphans,' or 'widows,' or 'martyrs'.... are these names big enough to hold your life?

And the second question that just occurred to me as I was doing this is, Are we choosing names that demand fearlessness? You're a coach. You're an executive. You're a consultant. You're a teacher. You're a minister. You're a hospital administrator. You're a civil servant. Are those names demanding fearlessness of us? I don't know what the names are that would create fearlessness, but I think this is a very important question.


What's so bad about fear?

Fear has a lot of positive attributes when you think about it. First of all, it gives us adrenaline. So it gives us the energy we need, the surging we need, to really do things that, then, look courageous. So, fear could be a good thing.

The second thing about fear is that it's instantly available. You don't have to do any work here; you just have a thought and suddenly you're afraid.

And the other good thing about fear is that it's a constant companion. Day and night. Waking and dreaming. It's always there.

So, what is there to fear about fear? I don't know the answer to that question yet. So, I just ask you to consider it. But, it seems to me that a lot of our fear is based on wanting to protect and defend ourselves. And a lot of fear arises when we're so focused on ourselves that we lose our engagement with the world. If the way out of fearfulness is to stop identifying so terribly with ourselves and with the self that we're trying to protect and defend and nourish, then this leads us into the possibility that the way out of fearfulness is to connect with the greater world.


Does the world need us to be fearless?

What's going on in the world, and does it require a different response from us? Does the world need us to be fearless? Here's a poem that I wrote a while ago, that also expressed my views on this:

The flags are flying at half-mast. Again.
This one drapes across the highway as I drive toward it.
It's over-sized, the type of flag that became popular when patriotism
needed to be more visible.
It suffocates the road, limp, lifeless.
Wind attempts to lift its spirit but
the flag refuses so
laden with sorrow.

This flag is for Katrina.
I remember another massive flag that
flared-out defiantly in the fierce wind after 9-11.

The world I see will soon be lost in lifeless flags.
We are only at the beginning.

Last night, I threw out a salt container that still had some salt in it.
I wanted to clear out space in my crowded cabinet.
As I tossed it in the garbage, it came to me. There will
come such scarcity that even those few grains will be treasure.
I still threw it out, but I vowed to remember this night.

Now, how do I live whole-heartedly?

Every time a flag gets lowered, I tell myself:
This is what it feels like as a culture dies.
This is what it feels like in the age of destruction.
This is what groundless feels like.
Don't grasp for ground.
Don't grasp.

Groundlessness has to be learned.
I am teaching myself with these terrifying mantras.


What if we can't save the world?

What if our efforts come to nothing? What if, at the end of our lives, we die having watched destruction and not been able to create any good effect?

What, really, is available to us if we can't save the world? What do we fund our work for? Where do we gain energy if we don't believe that we're going to be successful? How can we do our work without hope that we will succeed?

There's something very interesting to understand about hope. That is, that hope and fear are one. Any time we're hopeful, we don't know it necessarily, but we're bringing in fear. Because fear is the constant, unavoidable companion of hope. What this simply means is that I hope for a certain outcome and I'm afraid I won't get it. I hope for a certain result and I'm fearful it won't happen. This is the way that hope and fear are wedded together. There is a place called, "beyond hope and fear." It is to be free from hope, so that we are free from fear.

So, it might be that the road to fearlessness is only found by giving up hope. By giving up outcomes, by giving up goals.

I find this to be an intolerable posture, by the way. If we don't have hope, where will we find our motivation? If we don't have hope, who will save the world? If we go down in despair - which seems to be the alternative to hope in many peoples' imaginations, who will save the world?

What if your work achieves nothing? Thomas Merton, a great writer and contemplative in the Catholic tradition, said, "Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not, perhaps, results opposite to what you expect.

"As you get used to this idea of your work achieving nothing, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there, too, a great deal has to be gone through, as, gradually, you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything."

What would it feel like to find our fearlessness with each other? For those relationships to be enough? For us to feel we would have made a significant contribution, and led a good life, just because we cared for, loved, consoled a few people? This is quite a frightening thought; to shift from saving the world to loving a few people? Doesn't seem like that will do it, does it?


What is it like to live in the future now?

I was given a passage by the Brazilian theologian, Ruben Alvez, who described hope in this way:

"What is hope? It is the presentiment that imagination is more real and reality less real than it looks. It is the suspicion that the overwhelming brutality of fact that oppresses us and represses us is not the last word. It is the hunch that reality is more complex than the realists want us to believe, that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual, and that, in a miraculous and unexpected way, life is preparing the creative events which will open the way to freedom and to resurrection.

"But, hope must live with suffering. Suffering, without hope, produces resentment and despair. And hope, without suffering, creates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness. So, let us plant dates, even though we who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see.

"This is the secret of discipline. Such disciplined love is what has given saints, revolutionaries, and martyrs the courage to die for the future they envision; they make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope."

I'm finding this to be a very provocative exploration of hope, not comfortable at all. I don't actually want to make my body the seed of the future I hope for, or the seed of my own highest hope. I don't really want to have to sacrifice that much. I don't think I really know what "disciplined love" is. I don't understand that.


Why do we imprison ourselves? Why are we so afraid?

The American poet, Robert Bly, wrote:

"If we don't lift our voices, we allow
others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.
Every day we steal from ourselves knowledge gained over a thousand years."

Why do we imprison ourselves? And what's the nature of the bars? What's the nature of the prison?

I think some of the prison bars that we have constructed for ourselves are our fear of losing our jobs. Our fear of not being liked. Our need for approval. Our desire to make important changes but not have to risk anything at all. So, we still want the comfort of this life and it feels like a bigger risk to step out and say, "No," or to say, "You can't do that to me." It feels like a larger risk, because I think the real prison we're in is our affluence, and our focus on our affluence or our hypnosis around material goods. I offer you this to think about: what is it that keeps you from acting fearlessly?

I'm quite perplexed by how fearful we are as cultures now in North America, and in Europe: we're so damned fearful of losing what we have, we're not noticing that we're losing what we have through our silence.

Why do we put up these bars that keep us back from doing what we know needs to be done? What impedes us from standing forward for those things that nurture us, our hearts, and our spirits? Bernice Johnson Reagon, who was very active in the civil rights movements and also a wonderful singer, co-founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, tells the story of looking back at those days of the civil rights movement, now from the safety and comfort of a successful life and career. She said, "In those days, we used to go out onto the streets, we used to protest. They would shoot at us, and someone would get killed. And then we'd go to their funeral and then we'd mourn and we'd grieve. And then the next day, we'd go back on the streets and protest some more." And she said, "When I look back, now, I think we were crazy to do that." But, then she said this. "But, when you're doing what you're supposed to do be doing, it's somebody else's job to kill you."


Can we work beyond hope and fear?

Can we find a way to be motivated, to be energetic, to be happy; to take delight in the work that we're doing that isn't based on outcomes, that isn't based on needing to see a particular result? Is that even available?

What if we could offer our work as a gift so lightly, and with so much love, that that's really the source of fearlessness? We don't need it to be accepted in any one way. We don't need it to create any certain outcome. We don't need it to be any one thing. It is in the way we offer it, that the work transforms us. It is in the way we offer our work as a gift to those we love, to those we care about, to the issues we care about. It is in the way we offer the work that we find fearlessness. Beyond hope and fear, I think, is the possibility of love.


What would it take for us to just deal with what is? To not need to be always engaged in changing the world?

Yitzhak Perlman, the great violinist, was playing in New York. Yitzhak Perlman was crippled by polio as a young child, so the bottom part of his body doesn't work well and he wears these very prominent leg braces and comes on in crutches, in a very painful, slow way, hauling himself across the stage. Then he sits down and, very carefully, unbuckles the leg braces and lays them down, puts down his crutches, and then picks up his violin. So, this night the audience had watched him slowly, painfully, walk across the stage; and he began to play. And, suddenly, there was a loud noise in the hall that signaled that one of his four strings on his violin had just snapped.

Everyone expected that they would be watching Yitzhak Perlman put back the leg braces, walk slowly across the stage, and find a new violin. But this is what happened. Yitzhak Perlman closed his eyes for a moment. Yitzhak Perlman paused. And then he signaled for the conductor to begin again. And he began from where they had left off. And here's the description of his playing, from Jack Riemer in the Houston Chronicle:

"He played with such passion, and such power, and such purity, as people had never heard before. Of course, everyone knew that it was impossible to play this symphonic work with three strings. I know that. You know that. But that night, Yitzhak Perlman did not know that. You could see him modulating, changing, recomposing the piece in his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get new sounds from them that they had never made before. When he finished, there was an awe-filed silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered. Everyone was screaming and cheering and doing everything we could to show how much we appreciated what he had just done. He smiled. He wiped the sweat from his brow. He raised his bow to us. And then he said, not boastfully, but in a quiet and pensive and reverent tone,

"'You know, sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.'"

Sometimes, it is our task to find out how much music we can make with what we have left. What is the name that is big enough to hold your fearlessness, that is big enough to call you into fearlessness? That is big enough to break your heart? To allow you to open to the suffering that is this world right now and to not become immobilized by fear and to not become immobilized by comfort? What is the way in which you can hold your work so that you do feel free from hope.... and therefore free from fear?
Leadership Lessons for The Real World
Leader to Leader Magazine, Summer 2006
Margaret J. Wheatley © 2006
People often comment that the new leadership I propose couldn't possibly work in "the real world." This "real world" demands efficiency and obedience and is managed by bureaucracy and governed by policies and laws. It is filled with people who do what they're told, who sit passively waiting for instructions and it relies on standard operating procedures for every situation, even when chaos erupts and things are out of control.

This real world was invented by Western thought. We believe that people, organizations and the world are machines, and we can organize massive systems to run like clockwork in a steady-state world. The leader's job is to create stability and control, because without human intervention, there is no hope for order. It is assumed that most people are dull, not creative, that people need to be bossed around, that new skills only develop through training. People are motivated using fear and rewards; internal motivators such as compassion and generosity are discounted.

This is not the real world. The real real world demands that we learn to cope with chaos, that we understand what motivates humans, that we adopt strategies and behaviors that lead to order, not more chaos.

Here is the real world described by new science. It is a world of interconnected networks, where slight disturbances in one part of the system create major impacts far from where they originate. In this highly sensitive system, the most minute actions clan blow up into massive disruptions and chaos. But it is also a world that seeks order. When chaos erupts, it not only destroys the current structure, it also creates the conditions for new order to emerge. Change always involves a dark night when everything falls apart. Yet if this period of dissolution is used to create new meaning, then chaos ends and new order emerges.

This is a world that knows how to organize itself without command and control or charisma. Everywhere, life self-organizes as networks of relationships. When individuals discover a common interest or passion, they organize themselves and figure out how to make things happen. Self-organizing evokes creativity and leads to results, creating strong, adaptive systems. Surprising new strengths and capacities emerge.

In this world, 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' (as one scientist described quantum particles.) Relationships evoke these potentials. We change as we meet different people or are in different circumstances.

In this historic moment, we live caught between the mechanical worldview that no longer works and a new paradigm that we fear to embrace. But this new paradigm comes with the promise that it can provide solutions to our most unsolvable challenges. To demonstrate this promise, I want to apply the lens of the new science to one of society's most compelling, real world challenges: How well we deal with natural and manmade disasters.

Leadership in Disasters: Learning from Katrina

Following any disaster, we see the best of human nature and the worst of bureaucracy. Headlines convey our frustration: "Poor Nations Say Much Charity Fails to Reach Victims," "System Failure: An investigation into what went so wrong in New Orleans," "Red Cross Under Investigation," "Congress probe examines what went wrong."

Other headlines speak to the valiancy of individuals and unofficial relief efforts: "Real-life Heroes," "Organized Churches are not an oxymoron," "No Red Cross, No Salvation Army or Federal Funds ... Just Friends."

Time Magazine relayed this story in September 2005 just weeks after hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. It illustrates the conflict between willing volunteers and government bureaucracy.
As flames blazed 400 miles away in New Orleans on Labor Day, about 600 firefighters from across the nation sat in an Atlanta hotel listening to a FEMA lecture on equal opportunity, sexual harassment and customer service. "Your job is going to be community relations," a FEMA official told them. . ."You'll be passing out FEMA pamphlets and our phone number."

The room, filled with many fire fighters who, at FEMA's request had arrived equipped with rescue gear, erupted in anger. "This is ridiculous," one yelled back. "Our fire departments and mayors sent us down here to save people, and you've got us doing this?" The FEMA official climbed atop a chair. . .and tried to restore order. "You are now employees of FEMA, and you will follow orders and do what you're told," he said, sounding more like the leader of an invading army than a rescue squad. . . .

[The firefighters] got tired of hanging around their hotel and returned home (Time, 2005, 39).
Although this story is appalling, it happens all the time in disasters. The first response of people is to do anything they possibly can to help, rescue and save other people. They gather resources, invent solutions on the spot, and work tirelessly for days on end. They don't think about risk or reward—these are spontaneous outpourings of compassion focused creatively and purposefully. A group of mid-level managers for Southwest Bell described how they felt responding to the Oklahoma City bombing: "There was no risk. It was already a disaster."

Yet these self-organized efforts are often hindered by officials who refuse their offers or who cite regulations or who insist that protocols and procedures be followed. This is not a criticism of individual officials—they themselves are imprisoned by their role and can't act independently. As Time Magazine described what happened with Katrina: " . . . at every level of government there was uncertainty about who was in charge at crucial moments. Leaders were afraid to actually lead, reluctant to cost businesses money, break jurisdictional rules or spawn lawsuits. They were afraid, in other words, of ending up in an article just like this one."

As people argued about their roles and authority, no one saw the pattern of destruction and chaos that was unfolding. Officials responded only to disconnected bits of information that related to their office. No one seemed to understand the information they were getting or to notice that they were only seeing a small portion of what was happening. There were many instances when terrified, suffering people filled T.V. screens while on another screen government officials denied there were any serious problems.

Even before Katrina hit, key decision-makers at all levels of government displayed a curious blindness. Years of simulations and analyses had created clear descriptions of the damage that would result from a category 3 or 4 hurricane. The destruction of New Orleans was one of the top three potential catastrophes on FEMA's list. How is it possible that officials were blindsided and failed to prepare adequately for this eventuality? And why were they so slow to respond even as the National Weather Service mapped Katrina's approach with unerring accuracy? It was as if government officials at all levels could not comprehend the reality of what was about to happen. Either they discounted the information, failed to interpret it correctly, or duped themselves into believing "it can't happen here." This is a familiar yet troubling example of paradigm blindness, where people are unable to see information that threatens and disconfirms their worldview.

In the days after Katrina, this blindness was coupled with bureaucratic conditioning and cumbersome chains of command. Missteps, misperceptions and inaction cascaded through organizations, only creating more chaos.

However, all along the Gulf Coast, people self-organized with neighbors and strangers to help, save, and rescue people. The efforts of ham radio operators created an immediate and effective communication network that saved many lives. In one case, according to Sky magazine, a desperate family in New Orleans could not get any response from their local 911. They did, however, reach a relative a thousand miles away. He called his local 911, who then contacted a New Orleans ham operator, who then relayed the information to local people who then rescued the family.

Unlike official agencies, many of these operators prepared themselves ahead of time. They established themselves in safe, dry places before the storm struck. Acting independently, each with their own generator and transmitter, they wove a powerful network of communications. Their independence is what made them extremely resilient. If one person could no longer transmit, another picked it up quickly. They acted freely but from a clear shared intent. These are always the conditions that make it possible to bring order out of chaos.

Senior leaders find it difficult to act this spontaneously or independently. Any independent response is constrained by the need to maintain the power and policies of the organization. Paralyzed by formal operating procedures, it takes courage to forego these controls and do what you think might help. The Southwest Bell employees in Oklahoma leapt into action immediately after the bombing in large part because their leaders were out of town. When the leaders returned, their staff told them: "It's good you weren't here. We could just take action." Although this is never what a leader wants to hear, these leaders were wise enough to know this was true and that their absence had created value.

Leaders who respond quickly ignore standard operating procedures. In the state of West Virginia, the governor didn't wait to be asked but immediately mobilized six C-130 cargo planes from the National Guard to go and pick up those needing evacuation. The planes were sent filled with supplies and were expected to return filled with people. The governor was there to welcome them when they arrived, but only three planes came back with people. FEMA had refused to let more people board the planes. About 400 evacuees benefited from this quickly mobilized relief effort. Even though West Virginia is one of the poorest states, they outdid their more affluent neighbors in providing help.

In contrast to the terrible failures of government, it was communities, individuals, and small groups who responded immediately to Katrina. One commentator writing in The Nation describes these responses as "acts of love in times of danger." The community of Ville Platte exemplified the generous self-organizing capacity that always appears in disasters. They organized their "home-made rescue and relief efforts" around the slogan "If not us, then who?" A community of 11,000 people, with an average yearly income of only $5300 for the majority of its residents, was able to serve 5000 displaced and traumatized victims of Katrina, inviting them to share their homes and community not as refugees or evacuees, but as "company." Those with boats went to New Orleans to join "The Cajun Navy." They rescued people from rooftops, picked up the dead, transported the injured to trauma centers. They saw people from other communities doing the same thing. FEMA wasn't around, "That was it. Just us volunteers."

Ville Platte helped thousands without any Federal or Red Cross aid (they did try to reach the Red Cross, but gave up after 13 days of calling and no response.) Their success cannot be explained by the old mechanical paradigm, but is easily understood by the dynamics described in new science. We live in a world of relationships, where each event or person evokes new capacities. We live in a world where order emerges out of chaos if people are free to make their own decisions based on shared meaning and values. We live in a world where effective response doesn't require top-down leadership or an organization plan drawn up ahead of time. People self-organize in order to accomplish something that matters to them. As one community member said: "All of us know how to spontaneously cooperate. My God, we're always organizing christenings or family gatherings. So why do we need a lot of formal leadership?"

In a disaster, where quick response is demanded, formal organizations are incapacitated by the very means they normally use to get things done -- chains of command, designated leaders, policies, procedures, plans, regulations and laws. We can rely on human compassion, but we need to develop the means for official agencies to support and work with rather than resist the self-organizing capacity of people that always emerges in a disaster. Leaders need to have the freedom to make intelligent decisions based on their comprehension of the situation, not their understanding of policies and procedures. The formal leader's job is to ensure that the resources they control get to local groups as fast as possible. Leaders need to trust that people will invent their own solutions, that they'll make good use of the resources they provide. And leaders need to expect and value the unique and inventive responses created in each community, rather than enforcing compliance to one-size-fits-all.

These radically different behaviors require that we free official leaders to act wisely and that they trust people to self-organize effective responses. How much more sad history do we have to repeat before we understand this? Let us hope we learn from Katrina that the only way to restore order out of chaos is to rely on people's intelligence, love, and capacity to self-organize to accomplish what they care about.

We also need to entrust local people with the official resources of money and materials for the rebuilding. When rebuilding is left to governments, outside contractors, and large non-profit organizations, progress gets mired down in regulations, time drags on, people's needs aren't served, and no one from the local community is satisfied with the results. Supporting initiatives where local people do the work sustains local cultures, recreates community cohesion, and is accomplished at amazing speed. The clean-up of Ground Zero was accomplished in record time, with no traditional New York and contractor politics; people worked overtime and risked their health to remove the debris of their shared tragedy.

This capacity to create solutions without traditional hierarchies or formal leadership is found in communities everywhere, not just those facing disasters. At The Berkana Institute, (which I co-founded in 1992) we work with the assumption that "the leaders we need are already here." We have discovered that even in the most economically poor communities in the world there is an abundance of leaders. These leaders work to strengthen their community's ability to be self-reliant by working with the wisdom and wealth already present in its people, traditions and environment (see www.berkana.org). A 2002 Ford Foundation report on leadership notes the same thing. "There is a sense among some in our country today that we are lacking inspirational leaders….Yet a closer look reveals that all over the nation groups of concerned citizens are working together, often at the local level, to solve tough social problems. These are the new leaders in America today."

We need to carefully consider what we are learning about leadership in these disaster-laden times. I hope we learn that we can rely on human caring, creativity, and compassion. We can rely on us 'bundles of potential' figuring out solutions, learning quickly, and surprising ourselves with new capacities. We can rely on people to self-organize quickly to achieve results important to them. Together, people act creatively, take risks, invent, console, inspire and produce. This is how life works. We can learn this from new science, or we can learn it from what happens everyday somewhere in the real world.
The Real World: Leadership Lessons from Disaster Relief and Terrorist Networks
Written for the third edition of Leadership and the New Science, Berrett-Koehler Publishers 2006
Margaret J. Wheatley, Ed.D. ©2006
People often comment that the new leadership I propose couldn’t possibly work in ”the real world.” I assume they are referring to their organization or government, a mechanistic world managed by bureaucracy, governed by policies and laws, filled with people who do what they’re told, who surrender their freedom to leaders and sit passively waiting for instructions. This “real world” craves efficiency and obedience. It relies on standard operating procedures for every situation, even when chaos erupts and things are out of control.

This is not the real world. This world is a manmade, dangerous fiction that destroys our capacity to deal well with what’s really going on. The real world, not this fake one, demands that we learn to cope with chaos, that we understand what motivates humans, that we adopt strategies and behaviors that lead to order, not more chaos.

In this historic moment, we live caught between a worldview that no longer works and a new one that seems too bizarre to contemplate. To expose this, I want to apply the lens of new science to two of society’s most compelling, real world challenges: How well we deal with natural and manmade disasters. And how well we respond to global terror networks. Using this high resolution lens, we can see many dynamics that are crucial to understand, yet were obscured from view by our old sight.

Here is the real world described by new science. It is a world of interconnected networks, where slight disturbances in one part of the system create major impacts far from where they originate. In this highly sensitive system, the most minute actions clan blow up into massive disruptions and chaos. But it is also a world that seeks order. When chaos erupts, it not only disintegrates the current structure, it also creates the conditions for new order to emerge. Change always involves a dark night when everything falls apart. Yet if this period of dissolution is used to create new meaning, then chaos ends and new order emerges.

This is a world that knows how to organize itself without command and control or charisma. Everywhere, life self-organizes as networks of relationships. When individuals discover a common interest or passion, they organize themselves and figure out how to make things happen. Self-organizing evokes creativity and results, creating strong, adaptive systems. Surprising new strengths and capacities emerge.

In this world, 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. We change as we meet different people or are in different circumstances.

And strangest of all, scientists cannot find any independent reality that exists without our observations. We create reality through our acts of observation. What we perceive becomes true for us and this version of reality becomes the lens through which we interpret events. This is why we can experience the same event or look at the same information and have very different descriptions of it.

This real world stands in stark and absolute contrast to the world invented by Western thought. We believe that people, organizations and the world are machines, and we organize massive systems to run like clockwork in a steady-state world. The leader’s job is to create stability and control, because without human intervention, there is no hope for order. Without strong leadership, everything falls apart. It is assumed that most people are dull, not creative, that people need to be bossed around, that new skills only develop through training. People are motivated using fear and rewards; internal motivators such as compassion and generosity are discounted. These beliefs have created a world filled with disengaged workers who behave like robots, struggling in organizations that become more chaotic and ungovernable over time.

And most importantly, as we cling ever more desperately to these false beliefs, we destroy our ability to respond to the major challenges of these times.


Leadership in Disasters: Learning from Katrina

The world has experienced so many disasters and human tragedies in the past several years that some worry about ‘compassion fatigue.’ I don’t believe that our compassion is finite and in danger of being exhausted. The source of our fatigue is that we don’t have the organizational structures or the leadership that can respond quickly and well to these emergencies. We want to help, but our organizations fail to deliver our compassion to those most in need. This is both frustrating and exhausting because, as humans, we are spontaneously generous and want to be of service.

Following any disaster, we see the best of human nature and the worst of bureaucracy. Headlines convey our frustration: “Poor Nations Say Much Charity Fails to Reach Victims,” “System Failure: An investigation into what went so wrong in New Orleans,” “Red Cross Under Investigation,” “Congress probe examines what went wrong.”

Other headlines speak to the valiancy of individuals and unofficial relief efforts : “Real-life Heroes,” “Organized Churches are not an oxymoron,” “No Red Cross, No Salvation Army or Federal Funds...Just Friends.”

Time Magazine relayed this story in September 2005 just weeks after hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast,. It illustrates the conflict between willing volunteers and government bureaucracy.
As flames blazed 400 miles away in New Orleans on Labor Day, about 600 firefighters from across the nation sat in an Atlanta hotel listening to a FEMA lecture on equal opportunity, sexual harassment and customer service. “Your job is going to be community relations,” a FEMA official told them. . .”You’ll be passing out FEMA pamphlets and our phone number.”

The room, filled with many fire fighters who, at FEMA’s request had arrived equipped with rescue gear, erupted in anger. “This is ridiculous,” one yelled back. “Our fire departments and mayors sent us down here to save people, and you’ve got us doing this?” The FEMA official climbed atop a chair. . .and tried to restore order. “You are now employees of FEMA, and you will follow orders and do what you’re told,” he said, sounding more like the leader of an invading army than a rescue squad. . . .

[The firefighters] got tired of hanging around their hotel and returned home (Time, 2005, 39).
Although this story is appalling, it happens all the time in disasters. The first response of people is to do anything they possibly can to help, rescue and save other people. They gather resources, invent solutions on the spot, and work tirelessly for days on end. They don’t think about risk or reward—these are spontaneous outpourings of compassion focused creatively and purposefully. A group of mid-level managers for Southwest Bell described how they felt responding to the Oklahoma City bombing: “There was no risk. It was already a disaster.”

Yet these self-organized efforts are often hindered by officials who refuse their offers or who cite regulations or who insist that protocols and procedures be followed. This is not a criticism of individual officials—they themselves are imprisoned by their role and can’t act independently. As Time Magazine described what happened with Katrina: “ . . . at every level of government there was uncertainty about who was in charge at crucial moments. Leaders were afraid to actually lead, reluctant to cost businesses money, break jurisdictional rules or spawn lawsuits. They were afraid, in other words, of ending up in an article just like this one” ( 2005, 36).

Concerns about who had legal and decision-making authority created many nightmares. Official requests for aid were given to the wrong person or to someone who didn’t understand and denied the request. If requests made it to the right desk but were not worded correctly, they were ignored or denied. The Louisiana governor requested Federal help from the President. When asked what she needed, she replied: “Give me all you got.” That plea was not deemed sufficient for the Federal government to step in, and days passed before Federal and state officials worked out who had jurisdictional authority (Time, 2005).

As people argued about their roles and authority, no one saw the pattern of destruction and chaos that was unfolding. Officials responded only to disconnected bits of information that related to their office. No one seemed to understand the information they were getting or to notice that they were only seeing a small portion of what was happening. There were many instances when terrified, suffering people filled T.V. screens while on another screen government officials denied there were any serious problems. In some cases, their inability to comprehend what was happening was due to inexperience (from job turnover). In other cases, the problem was a new chain of command, with managers in the Department of Homeland Security focused on terrorism now responsible for FEMA, yet with no understanding of natural disasters.

Even before Katrina hit, key decision-makers at all levels of government displayed a curious blindness. Years of simulations and analyses had created clear descriptions of the damage that would result from a category 3 or 4 hurricane. The destruction of New Orleans was one of the top three potential catastrophes listed by FEMA for many years. How is it possible that officials were blindsided and failed to prepare adequately for this eventuality? And why were they so slow to respond even as the National Weather Service mapped Katrina’s approach with unerring accuracy? It was as if government officials at all levels could not comprehend the reality of what was about to happen. Either they discounted the information, failed to interpret it correctly, or duped themselves into believing “it can’t happen here.” This is a familiar yet troubling example of paradigm blindness, where people are unable to see information that threatens and disconfirms their worldview. No matter how much data is in front of them, their lens filters it out or distorts it to mean something else. And in some cases, people literally do not see the information, even if it’s right in front of them (see Kuhn 1969).

In the days after Katrina, this blindness was coupled with bureaucratic conditioning and cumbersome chains of command. Missteps, misperceptions and inaction cascaded through organizations, only creating more chaos. An already devastating set of circumstances turned even more tragic because of the failure of leaders to accurately perceive what was going on and to risk taking actions that went beyond the bonds of bureaucracy.

However, all along the Gulf Coast, people self-organized with neighbors and strangers to help, save and rescue people. The efforts of ham radio operators created an immediate and effective communication network that saved many lives. In one case, a family desperate in New Orleans could not get any response from their local 911. They did, however, reach a relative a thousand miles away. He called his local 911, who then contacted a New Orleans ham operator, who then relayed the information to local people who then rescued the family (Sky, 2006).

Unlike official agencies, many of these operators prepared themselves ahead of time. They established themselves in safe, dry places before the storm struck. Acting independently, each with their own generator and transmitter, they wove a powerful network of communications. Their independence is what made them extremely resilient. If one person could no longer transmit, another picked it up quickly. “Each one is a mobile, independent unit working in cooperation for a common goal” (Sky, 83). They acted freely but from a clear shared intent. These are always the conditions that make it possible to bring order out of chaos.

Senior leaders find it difficult to act this spontaneously or independently. Any independent response is constrained by the need to maintain the power and policies of the organization. Paralyzed by formal operating procedures, it takes courage to forego these controls and do what you think might help. The Southwest Bell employees in Oklahoma leapt into action immediately after the bombing in large part because their leaders were out of town. When the leaders returned, their staff told them: “It’s good you weren’t here. We could just take action.” Although this is never what a leader wants to hear, these leaders were wise enough to know this was true and that their absence had created value.

In Hurricane Katrina, the chain of command and the observance of protocol created even more disasters:
While people were dying in New Orleans, the U.S.S. Bataan steamed offshore, its six operating rooms, beds for 600 patients and most of its 1,200 sailors idle. Foreign nations...readied rescue supplies, then were told to stand by for days until FEMA could figure out what to do with them. Florida airboaters complained that they had an armada ready for rescue work but FEMA wouldn’t let them into New Orleans. Brown defended his agency’s measured steps, saying aid ‘has to be coordinated in such a way that it’s used most effectively (Time, 39-40).

Leaders that respond quickly ignore standard operating procedures. In the state of West Virginia, the governor didn’t wait to be asked but immediately mobilized six C-130 cargo planes from the National Guard to go and pick up those needing evacuation. The planes were sent filled with supplies and were expected to return filled with people. The governor was there to welcome them when they arrived, but only three planes came back with people. FEMA had refused to let more people board the planes. About 400 evacuees benefited from this quickly mobilized relief effort. Although economically poor, West Virginia offered more assistance than their affluent neighboring states, all because they rallied around the Governor’s call to help brothers and sisters whom they had never met.
In contrast to the terrible failures of government, communities, individuals, and small groups responded immediately to Katrina. One commentator describes these responses as “acts of love in times of danger” (The Nation, 2005,13). The community of Ville Platte exemplified the generous self-organizing capacity that always appears in disasters (The Nation, 13-18). They organized their “home-made rescue and relief efforts” around the slogan “If not us, then who?” A community of 11,000 people, with an average yearly income of only $5300 for the majority of its residents, was able to serve 5000 displaced and traumatized victims of Katrina, inviting them to share their homes and community not as refugees or evacuees, but as “company.” Those with boats went to New Orleans to join “The Cajun Navy.” They rescued people from rooftops, picked up the dead, transported the injured to trauma centers. They saw people from other communities doing the same thing. FEMA wasn’t around, “That was it. Just us volunteers.”

Ville Platte helped thousands of “company” without any Federal or Red Cross aid (they did try to reach the Red Cross, but gave up after 13 days of calling and no response.) Their success cannot be explained by the old mechanical paradigm, but is easily understood by the dynamics described in new science. We live in a world of relationships, where each event or person evokes new capacities. We live in a world where order emerges out of chaos if people are free to make their own decisions based on shared meaning and values. We live in a world where effective response doesn’t require top-down leadership or an organization plan drawn up ahead of time. People self-organize in order to accomplish something that matters to them. As one community member said: “All of us know how to spontaneously cooperate. My God, we’re always organizing christenings or family gatherings. So why do we need a lot of formal leadership?”

In a disaster, where quick response is demanded, formal organizations are incapacitated by the very means they normally use to get things done -- chains of command, designated leaders, policies, procedures, plans, regulations and laws. We can rely on human compassion, but we need to develop the means for official agencies to support, work with and not resist the self-organizing capacity of people that always emerges in a disaster. Leaders need to have the freedom to make intelligent decisions based on their comprehension of the situation, not their understanding of policies and procedures. The formal leader’s job is to ensure that the resources they control get to local groups as fast as possible. Leaders need to trust that people will invent their own solutions, that they’ll make good use of the resources they provide. And leaders need to expect and value the unique and inventive responses created in each community, rather than enforcing compliance to one-size-fits-all.

These radically different behaviors require that we free official leaders to act wisely and that they trust people to self-organize effective responses. How much more sad history do we have to repeat before we understand this? Let us hope we learn from Katrina that the only way to restore order out of chaos is to rely on people’s intelligence, love, and capacity to self-organize to accomplish what they care about.

We also need to entrust local people with the official resources of money and materials for the rebuilding. When rebuilding is left to governments, outside contractors, and large non-profit organizations, progress gets mired down in regulations, time drags on, people’s needs aren’t served, and no one from the local community is satisfied with the results. Supporting initiatives where local people do the work sustains local cultures, recreates community cohesion, and is accomplished at amazing speed. The clean-up of Ground Zero was accomplished in record time, with no traditional New York and contractor politics; people worked overtime and risked their health to remove the debris of their shared tragedy.

In the 1990s, almost 2 billion people were affected by disasters, 90% of them in the most impoverished nations. We will not succeed in responding effectively and in ways that satisfy our compassion until we change how we organize relief efforts. The basic shift needs to be from control to order, from a reliance on formal authority and procedures to a reliance on the self-organizing capacities of local people, agency staffers, and those who volunteer to help. Some of the more progressive thinking on disaster relief focuses on how to mobilize and develop local people by engaging them in the work of rescue and rebuilding. If local people are engaged, they “move from object to subject, victim to actor, to the possibility of being.” (Smillie, 2001 )

This capacity to create solutions without traditional hierarchies or formal leadership is found in communities everywhere, not just those facing disasters. At The Berkana Institute, (which I co-founded in 1992) we work with the assumption that “the leaders we need are already here.” We have discovered that even in the most economically poor communities in the world there is an abundance of leaders. These leaders work to strengthen their community’s ability to be self-reliant by working with the wisdom and wealth already present in its people, traditions and environment (see page _ [Berkana page at end of book]). A 2002 Ford Foundation report on leadership notes the same thing. “There is a sense among some in our country today that we are lacking inspirational leaders….Yet a closer look reveals that all over the nation groups of concerned citizens are working together, often at the local level, to solve tough social problems. These are the new leaders in America today” (Louv, 2002).

We need to carefully consider what we are learning about leadership in these disaster-laden times. I hope we learn that we can rely on human caring, creativity, and compassion. We can rely on us ‘bundles of potential’ figuring out solutions, learning quickly, and surprising ourselves with new capacities. We can rely on people to self-organize quickly to achieve results important to them. Together, people act creatively, take risks, invent, console, inspire and produce. This is how life works. We can learn this from new science, or we can learn it from what happens everyday somewhere in the real world.

Leadership of Networks: Learning from Terrorist Groups

How is it possible that a few thousand enraged people can threaten the stability of the world? How is it possible that the most powerful governments on earth find themselves locked in a costly and fearsome struggle, diverting large amounts of resources and attention to suppress the actions of a small group of fanatics? It’s hard to acknowledge the power and success of global terror networks, but they are among the most effective and powerful organizations in the world today, capable of changing the course of history. They do this without formal power, advanced technology, huge budgets, or large numbers of followers.

What are the criteria we use to judge effective leaders? They include the abilities to communicate a powerful vision, to motivate people to work hard for them, to achieve results, exceed plans, and implement change. We want their leadership to result in a resilient organization able to survive disruptions and crises, one that grows in capacity, that doesn’t lose its way even after the leader retires. If we apply these criteria to the leaders of terrorist networks, they come out with high marks. It’s difficult to acknowledge them as our teachers, but we have much to learn from them about innovation, motivation, resiliency and the working of networks.

New science explains the behavior of networks in great detail because this is the only form of organization used by the planet. With the lens of science, we can peer into these terrorist organizations and explore the causes of their success. We can also see how to respond in ways that ensure we stop contributing to their success.

At present, we are dangerously blind to their strength because we use the wrong lens to evaluate their capacity. We use factors that apply to our world but not to theirs, to the behavior of hierarchical organizations, not to networks. Failing to use the right lens, we think we are winning the war on terror. We ask whether bin Laden is still a threat, whether Al-Qaeda is losing its strength, by evaluating his ability to give orders or to communicate using advanced technology. We assume that he is a weaker leader now that he is on the run and hiding in caves. We assume that if we prevent communication, terrorists won’t be given orders and therefore won’t launch attacks. We assume that if we kill the top leaders, if we decapitate their organization, that young terrorists will slink away from this anarchic, leaderless group.

U.S. military commanders frequently acknowledge they are fighting a new kind of enemy. They describe this enemy as one who learns, changes, adapts. As soon as U.S. soldiers figure out insurgents’ strategy, they change it. Think about the vast resources nations spend on defending themselves against the last terrorist attack, even though experience teaches that they never repeat themselves.

The Army’s long-term strategy is to develop a fighting force that is as adaptive, nimble and smart as insurgents. (The ten year plan is to develop many more special forces.) The military has studied the behavior of networks and the emergence of ‘netwars’ for many years. Before 9/11, they warned of the proliferation of networks, not only transnational terrorist groups, but also black market sales of WMDs, drug and crime syndicates, fundamentalist and ethno-nationalist movements, immigration smugglers, urban gangs, back-country militias and militant single-issue groups (Arquilla, 2001, 6). As networks, these groups operate in small, dispersed units that can deploy nimbly—anywhere, anytime. They know how to penetrate and disrupt, as well as elude and evade. Many groups are leaderless (Arquilla, ix). They also attack by ‘swarming,’ suddenly appearing from multiple directions, coalescing quickly and secretly, then disintegrating as quickly as they appeared (Arquilla,12, also Rheingold).

Although these groups appear leaderless, they in fact are well-led by their passion, rage and conviction. They share an ideal or purpose that gives them a group identity and which compels them to act. They are geographically separate, but “all of one mind” (Arquilla, 9). They act free of constraints, encouraged to do “what they think is best” to further the cause. This combination of shared meaning with freedom to determine one’s actions is how system’s grow to be more effective and well-ordered. The science thus predicts why terrorist networks become more effective over time. If individuals are free to invent their own ways to demonstrate support of their cause, they will invent ever more destructive actions, competing with one another for the most spectacular attack.

People who are deeply connected to a cause don’t need directives, rewards, or leaders to tell them what to do. Inflamed, passionate, and working with like-minded others, they create increasingly extreme means to support their cause. Describing Al Qaeda’s success, network analyst Albert-László Barabási notes: “Bin Laden and his lieutenants did not invent terrorist networks. They only rode the rage of Islamic militants, exploiting the laws of self-organization along their journey (2002, 224). An insurgency is not “as is often depicted, a coherent organization whose members dutifully carry out orders from above, but a far-flung collection of smaller groups that often act on their own or come together for a single attack” (NYT 12/2/05). In this way, movements that begin as reasonable most often migrate to more extremist measures, propelled there by their members’ zealousness. And with passions inflamed, growth is assured. The dramatic acts of one small group inspire many copycat actions in places far distant.

Over time, a network is fueled more by passion than by information. Networks begin with the circulation of information. This is how members find each other, learn from each other and develop strategies and actions. Most attempts for disrupting network activities focus on how to interfere with their communications. But once the network has momentum, it is passion and individual creativity that propel it forward. Communication is still essential for large coordinated attacks, but the proliferation of small, disconnected, lethal attacks does not require information. It only requires passionate commitment and a willingness to martyr oneself. Therefore, as the anger of network members grows in intensity, information plays a lesser role and personal innovation takes over. When we succeed in disrupting network communications, we also incite more local rage. Individuals may not be able to communicate with each other but, in their isolation, they become more creative in designing their own deadly attacks. So we can never adequately measure our success in disrupting a network by only measuring how well we are disrupting their communications.

The essential structure of any network is horizontal, not hierarchical, and ad hoc, not unified. This broad dispersal makes it difficult to suppress any rebel group. “Attack any single part of it, and the rest carries on largely untouched. It cannot be decapitated because the insurgency, for the most part, has no head” (NYT, 12/2/05). What appears as atomized and fragmented is, in fact, far more lethal than an organized military force. Bruce Hoffman, a Rand Corporation terrorism expert states: “There is no center of gravity, no leadership, no hierarchy; they are more a constellation than an organization. . . .They have adopted a structure that ensures their longevity” (NYT, 12/2/05).

These descriptions and dynamics do not surprise anyone familiar with new science and its observations of networks. Networks possess amazing resiliency. They are filled with redundant nodes, so that one picks up if another goes down (as did ham radio operators in New Orleans.) And human networks always organize around shared meaning. Individuals respond to the same issue or cause and join together to advance that cause. For humans, meaning is a ‘strange attractor’—a cohering force that holds seemingly random behaviors within a boundary. What emerges is coordinated behaviors without control, leaderless organizations that are far more effective in accomplishing their goals.

When we think of organizations as machines, we are blind to the power of self-organized networks. We keep looking for the leader. We assess an insurgency by whether its leader is visible, available and able to communicate easily with the forces. This is a profound and dangerous misperception of the leader’s role. In early 2006, I listened to interviews with U.S. analysts trying to assess whether bin Laden was still a threat. They were looking at traditional organizational attributes: visibility, technology, chain of command, ability to issue orders, communication channels. Against those criteria, it seemed that bin Laden’s power had been severely reduced. But one network expert said: “It’s the idea, not the organization. . . bin Laden is a person of influence” (NPR 1/25/06, Morning Edition). And Barabási warns that: “Because of its distributed self-organized topology, Al Qaeda is so scattered and self-sustaining that even the elimination of Osama bin Laden and his closest deputies might not eradicate the threat they created. It is a web without a true spider” (2002, 223).

The science of how networks emerge out of chaos, organize around shared meaning and grow more effective provides new and more accurate measures for assessing the strength of Al Qaeda and other insurgencies. These measures focus not on size, structure or chain of command, but on meaning and emotions. They are startlingly different to the traditional ones we use.

1. Instead of counting the number of insurgents, how can we assess their passion and rage? A rise in attacks and demonstrations indicates increasing rage.

2. Is there a predictable pattern to attacks? Or are they becoming more varied? Greater variety of attacks indicates local initiative. This indicates increased dedication to the cause and less reliance on a central authority.

3. Where are attacks occurring? More attacks in surprising places is evidence of the network’s strength, that it is growing.

4. What is the impact of our actions in fueling the passion of network members? Is what we’re doing fanning the flames or working to pacify the situation?

5. To determine the leader’s influence, look at the popularity of his ideas and interpretations. Do people accept his interpretations without question or do they debate them? How does the leader’s appearance (in any form) affect the behavior of his followers? Is there any correspondence between the number of attacks and these announcements? Or do attacks continue to escalate independent of his presence? If attacks increase without his visibility, this indicates the network’s momentum, “a web without a spider.”

6. To determine the network’s resiliency, what happens when a node or cell is destroyed? Have the number of attacks decreased or just shifted to a new location?

These and other measures would lead to a very different assessment of who is winning the war on terror. If networks grow from passion, if Al Qaeda “rides the rage” of angry Islamic militants, then the best strategy for immobilizing terrorist networks is not to kill their leaders, but to defuse the sources of their anger and not to incite them further. Many analysts arrive at a similar conclusion—we can only win the war on terror by eliminating the causes of rage. As long as our actions provoke their anger, we can expect more terrorists, more extreme attacks, and the continuing destablilization of the world by a small group of people. Barabisi states: “If we ever want to win the war, our only hope is to tackle the underlying social, economic, and political roots that fuel the network’s growth. We must help eliminate the need and desire. .. to form links to terrorist organizations by offering them a chance to belong to more constructive and meaningful webs.” We might win small and discrete battles, we might break up different cell groups, but if we do nothing to eliminate their rage, people will continue to form these deadly networks and “the netwar will never end” (224).

Similar clarity pervades the work of military strategist and advisor Thomas Barnett, who links economic progress to national security. Barnett notes that one-third of humanity lives outside the global economy in “the Gap.” Their economic poverty has serious consequences because, since the end of the Cold War, “ all the wars and civil wars and genocide have occurred within the Gap.” To achieve true security, we must ensure that these populations benefit from economic advantages, thus “eradicating the disconnectedness that defines danger in the world today” (2005, xii).

This is the real world that we resist seeing at our own imminent peril. If we continue to seek to control it by exerting ever more pressure on those who hate us, those who feel disconnected, those who are impoverished, we only create a future of increasing disorder and terror. But to see a new way out of this terrifying future, we must learn to understand and see the world differently. Einstein’s wonderful counsel that no problem is ever solved by the same thinking that created it defines what we must do. We must understand the behavior of networks in this densely interconnected world. We must understand human motivation and our astonishing capacity to self-organize when we care about something. We must understand that we lose capacity and in fact create more chaos when we insist on hierarchy, roles, and command and control leadership.

There is no more time to think about whether we need to make this shift. We can’t afford to continue wandering blindly in the real world, oblivious to what’s going on. But if we can become curious and willing students of Life’s dynamics, I know we will discover surprising new capacities and insights. Whenever we humans see clearly and understand the true dimensions of any problem, we become brave and intelligent actors in the world. It is time to open our eyes, change our lens, and step forward into actions that will restore sanity and possibility to the real world.
Relationships: The Basic Building Blocks of Life

©Margaret Wheatley 2006
The scientific search for the basic building blocks of life has revealed a startling fact: there are none. The deeper that physicists peer into the nature of reality, the only thing they find is relationships. Even sub-atomic particles do not exist alone. One physicist described neutrons, electrons, etc. as “. . .a set of relationships that reach outward to other things.” Although physicists still name them as separate, these particles aren’t ever visible until they’re in relationship with other particles. Everything in the Universe is composed of these “bundles of potentiality” that only manifest their potential in relationship.

We live in a culture that does not acknowledge this scientific fact. We believe wholeheartedly in the individual and build organizations based on this erroneous idea. We create org charts of separate boxes, with lines connecting the boxes that indicate reporting relationships and alleged channels of communication. But our neatly drawn organizations are as fictitious as building blocks are to physicists. The only form of organization used on this planet is the network—webs of interconnected, interdependent relationships. This is true for human organizations as well. Whatever boxes we stuff staff into, people always reach out to those who will give them information, be their allies, offer support or cheer them up. Those lines and boxes are imaginary. The real organization is always a dense network of relationships.

The sad irony of reorganizations

Communities of Practice (CofPs) are a powerful example of such networks. These self-organized, non-mandated relationships are created by people engaged in similar work. Staff form these relationships to become better at what they do. From these self-created networks, new practices and knowledge emerge and often develop into the core competencies of the organization. These skills develop not through training or performance reviews, but because people find each other and form good relationships. In those relationships, just as with elementary particles, potentials manifest and new capabilities are born.

Reorganizations always create a host of unintended consequences because leaders either ignore or are blind to these and other networks. Strategists focus on rearranging the boxes of the organization without realizing that they’re ripping apart the networks of relationships employees constructed to help them perform better. After a high-level corporate reorganization, one senior manager I know went to her CEO and told her she’d need three months to recreate the relationships that were essential to her global team’s performance. Most leaders, however, don’t notice the relationship-havoc they wreak with every reorganization. They blindly tear apart all those networks of relationships that employees carefully wove together. The sad irony is that capacity is reduced by reorganizations, no matter their stated goal of improving performance.

Many of our frequent and recurring failures in organizations are a consequence of not comprehending the importance of relationships. We approach major organizational issues--mergers, accountability, knowledge management, implementation and change—as if they were engineering issues. If we develop the right plan, work flows, job descriptions and project deadlines, everything will roll out smoothly. This mechanical approach doesn’t work with humans, because (big news!) humans are not machines. We’ve developed quite a robust mythology that humans are machines who can be bossed around, told what to do, given a minor part to play in a large enterprise, and enticed with external rewards. This is becoming ever more common these days. I hear many people asking of their employers: “Why can’t they just treat us like human beings?”

What even money can’t buy

Since we’re not machines, who are we? In my own work in many different cultures, I’ve discovered that we’re a wonderful species. There are common human yearnings: We want to be together; we want to learn; we hope to contribute to others; we want our children to be healthy and have better lives. These desires are inherent, they do not require external motivators. But sadly, in this time of fractured relationships and human horrors, it’s difficult to see these traits. However, these positive traits are absolutely necessary if we’re to work well together. If we fail to deny them, or provoke other behaviors with external rewards, we’ll continue to struggle to motivate employees, worker disengagement (now at historic highs) will continue to escalate, and we’ll become more cynical and disgusted with each other.

These basic human qualities are evident every time there’s a disaster. While official agencies and government struggle to get their act together, neighbors and strangers rush in to provide assistance and comfort. In moments of tragedy and loss, kindness is our normal response. We reach out to find one another. Is it possible that such powerful relationships are available at work? (I had a client who, after experiencing the Oklahoma City bombing, asked: “Why are we at our best in the worst conditions, and at our worst in the best conditions?”)

Human kindness manifests only in relationship. Archbishop Tutu says: “We can be human only together.” If we’re to evoke kindness, intelligence, accountability and learning in our organizations, we need to promote healthy relationships. So much of what we do as leaders, even actions that are well-intended, works to disrupt relationships. Here’s a story I’ve seen played out many times. A boss decides to reward individual staff for their contributions by giving generous bonuses or pay raises. Yet the employees reject these because they’re aware of how individual rewards will impact their relationships with colleagues. I’ve seen this happen many times, even amongst employees who really needed the money. The most startling example I witnessed was in England, where a leader decided to reward outstanding ideas with up to $25,000 bonuses. After a few months, his employees asked him to disband the program because it was interfering with their relationships. When he recovered from his shock, he asked them what they wanted instead of the money. They asked for simple things--a thank you, a night at the pub, a box of chocolates.

The leader’s work: Reweaving relationships

I picture you reading this shaking your head in disbelief, or quickly noting how this could never apply to your association. But I’ve seen this response often enough to realize that employees are far more sensitive to their relationships at work than leaders are. In survey after survey of what people value about their jobs, good relationships with colleagues is always one of the top three motivations. (Pay and money are far down the list. Other top motivators are the ability to learn, and the ability to contribute.)

As leaders, it’s important to notice where you reward individual performance, or use competition to drive results, or remain blind to or interfere with the networks that staff weave together. How are you taking advantage of the capacities that develop from good relationships? Have you experienced times when people came together and surprised you with new competencies that didn’t exist before they came together?

A simple means to support and develop relationships is to create time to think together as staff. Time to think together has disappeared in most organizations. This loss has devastated relationships and led to increasing distrust and disengagement. Yet when a regular forum exists where staff can share their work challenges, everything improves. People learn from each other, find support, create solutions, and gradually discover new capabilities from this web of trusting relationships. This is no surprise. We’re all “bundles of potentiality” that only manifest in relationship.
Journeying to a New World

©Margaret Wheatley 2006
Note: This is an adaptation of the Epilogue in Leadership and the New Science, Second Edition, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1996.
I first wrote these thoughts in 1995. Twelve years later, I'm still trying to come to terms with the experience of seeing, feeling, tasting and working earnestly from a new paradigm while living in the old one. And I'm more concerned than ever that we understand how crucial it is that we stay together and support one another.

I was in this work a few years before I was able to identify its real nature. I realized that I and others weren't asking people simply to adopt some new approaches to leadership or to think about organizations in a few new ways. What we were really asking, and what was also being asked of us, was that we change our thinking at the most fundamental level, that of our world view. The dominant world view of Western culture – the world as machine – doesn't help us to live well in this world any longer. We have to see the world differently if we are to live in it more harmoniously.

Once I understood the nature of the work, it helped me relax and be more generous. I learned that people get frightened if asked to change their world view. And why wouldn't they? Of course people will get defensive; of course they might be intrigued by a new idea, but then turn away in fear. They are smart enough to realize how much they would have to change if they accepted that idea. I no longer worry that if I could just find the right words or techniques, or describe multiple case studies, I could convince people. I no longer expect a new world view to be embraced quickly; I don't know if I'll see it take root in my lifetime. I also know that people are being influenced from sources far beyond anyone's control. I know many people who've been changed by events in their lives, not by words they read in a book.

These people have been changed by life's great creative force, chaos. One of the gifts offered by this new world view is a clearer description of life's cyclical nature. The mechanistic world view promised us lives of continual progress. Since we were in control and engineering it all, we could pull ourselves straight uphill, scarcely faltering. But life doesn't work that way, and this new world view confirms what most of us knew – no rebirth is possible without moving through a dark passage. Dark times are normal to life; there's nothing wrong with us when we periodically plunge into the abyss.

Over the past years, nudged by the science, I have come to know personally that the journey of newness is filled with the black potholes of chaos. The science has restrained me from trying to negotiate my way out of dark times with a quick fix. But even though I know the role of chaos, I still don't like it. It's terrifying when the world I so carefully held together dissolves. I don't like feeling lost and emptied of meaning. I would prefer an easier path to transformation. But even as I experience their demands as unreasonable, I know I am in partnership with great creative forces. I know that chaos is a necessary place for me to dwell occasionally. So I have learned to sit with these dark moments – confused, overwhelmed, only faintly trusting that new insights will appear. I know that this is my only route to new ways of being.

The more I contemplate these times, when we truly are giving birth to a new world view, the more I realize that our culture has to take this journey through chaos. The old ways are dissolving, and the new is only beginning to show itself. To journey through chaos, we must engage with one another differently, as explorers and discoverers. I believe the passage is possible only if we claim these roles. We need to realize that no single person or school of thought has the answer, because what's required is far beyond isolated answers. We need to realize that we must inquire together to find the new. We need to turn to one another as our best hope for inventing and discovering the worlds we are seeking.

Being an explorer is unnerving and filled with risk. I keep hoping that someone, somewhere, really does have the answer. But I know that, in this voyage to a new world, you and I have to make it up as we go along, not because we lack skills or expertise, but because this is the nature of reality. Reality changes shape and meaning as we're in it. 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.

If we take seriously the role of explorer and inventor, we'll realize how much we need each other. In this time of chaos, the potential for disaster is as strong as for new possibilities. How will we navigate these times?

The answer is, together. We need each other differently now. We cannot hide behind any old boundaries or hold onto the belief that we can make it on our own. We need each other to test out ideas, to share what we're learning, to help us see in new ways, to listen to our stories. We need each other to forgive us when we fail, to trust us with their dreams, to offer their hope when we've lost our own.

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 the 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 need to require this of one another. It will help us be bolder explorers. It might keep us from going mad.

This is a strange world and it promises only to get stranger. Niels Bohr, the great quantum physicist, once said that great ideas, when they appear, seem muddled and strange. They are only half-understood by their discoverer and remain a mystery to everyone else. But if an idea does not appear bizarre, he counseled, there is no hope for it. So we must live with the strange and the bizarre, directed to unseen lands by faint glimmers of hope. Every moment of this journey requires that we be comfortable with uncertainty and appreciative of chaos' role. Every moment requires that we stay together. After all is said and done, we have the gift of each other. We have each other's curiosity, wisdom, and courage. And we have Life, whose great ordering powers, if we choose to work with them, can make us even more curious, wise and courageous.
How Large-Scale Change Really Happens - Working With Emergence

Margaret Wheatley Ed.D. and Deborah Frieze ©2006
The School Administrator Spring 2007
In spite of current ads and slogans, the world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes as networks of relationships form among people who share a common cause and vision of what’s possible. This is good news for those of us who want to change public education. We don’t need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead, we need to connect with kindred spirits.

This is why networks are so important. But networks aren’t the whole story. They need to evolve into intentional working relationships where new knowledge, practices, courage, and commitment can develop, such as happens in Communities of Practice. From these relationships, emergence becomes possible. Emergence is the process by which all large-scale change happens on this planet. Separate, local efforts connect and strengthen their interactions and interdependencies. What emerges as these become stronger is a system of influence, a powerful cultural shift that then greatly influences behaviors and defines accepted practices.

Can public education be changed?

For decades, educators, theorists and citizens have struggled with the question of how to change public education to serve the needs of our society. Think about how many different reform efforts you’ve seen in your career. Yet how many of them achieved the intended results? By now, most educational leaders are frustrated and exhausted, fearing they’ll never find the means to change public education.

Yet the great irony is that we have just witnessed and experienced first-hand perhaps the most profound change in education in American history. This change is the rapid appearance of what we’re calling here a Culture of High-Stakes Testing. As an administrator, can you even remember what you were doing before No Child Left Behind?

There is no question that No Child Left Behind has accomplished unprecedented changes not only in public schools but also in society. We’re not commenting here on whether those are positive or negative changes; we only want to note the scope of NCLB’s reach and influence. NCLB determines most decisions, methods and behaviors in schools. Its demands have transformed teacher preparation programs, curriculum design, textbooks, parent expectations and relationships with schools, and student expectations about learning. Its rankings of schools even affect real-estate values. By any method of evaluation, NCLB has been a powerful force for change in 21st century America.

But has it accomplished its intent? The official legislation for NCLB states it would “close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind.” In his first days in office, President Bush stated that: “These reforms express my deep belief in our public schools and their mission to build the mind and character of every child, from every background, in every part of America....too many of our neediest children are being left behind."

NCLB planned to accomplish this by focusing on four elements:
1. Stronger Accountability for Results
2. More Freedom for States and Communities
3. Encouraging Proven Education Methods
4. More Choices for Parents

The intent of NCLB, then, was to create a Culture of Achievement for All (our term) by focusing on freedom, choice, reliability of methods and better results. To accomplish these ambitions, traditional change theory was applied. This change theory includes several sequential steps. You create a vision, develop a strategy, write a policy, design an implementation plan, structure a timeline of activities and desired outcomes, design assessment and evaluation tools, then parcel out the work. In terms of relationships, you seek allies and change champions from senior leaders, use policies and legislation to enforce the new behaviors, develop rewards and enticements to achieve buy-in, punish those who don’t buy it, and develop a communication strategy to create good press. This should sound familiar, because it has been and remains the primary way we do change in education (and in all types of organizations). (Educator Stephanie Pace Marshall describes this as “the old story” in The Power to Transform, Jossey-Bass, 2005)

This theory of change has several embedded assumptions:
• change is top-down and requires top-level support
• change requires careful planning and good controls
• change happens step-by-step in a neat, incremental fashion
• behavior can be mandated
• rewards and punishment motivate people to change
• large-scale changes require large-scale efforts

NCLB and its implementation plans embodied this theory perfectly. If this approach to change was ever going to work, it would have been here. Yet most would agree it has failed to achieve its intentions. The intent was to create a Culture of Achievement for All (our term), but what has emerged is a Culture of High Stakes Testing (also our term) which acts to subvert achievement and learning. NCLB has also had a wearying and demoralizing effect on educators. Australian teachers visiting U.S. classrooms described teachers as “panicked.” One teacher renamed NCLB, “No Teacher Left Standing.”

How could this have happened? How could such profound changes occur, creating results opposite to what was intended. To answer this question, we need to shift our lens and notice how change really happens on this planet.

Change Happens Through Emergence
In all living systems (which includes us humans), change always happens through emergence. Large-scale changes that have great impact do not originate in plans or strategies from on high. Instead, they begin as small, local actions. While they remain separate and apart, they have no influence beyond their locale. However, if they become connected, exchanging information and learning, their separate efforts can suddenly emerge as very powerful changes, able to influence a large system. This sudden appearance, known as an emergent phenomenon, always brings new levels of capacity. Three things are guaranteed with emergent phenomena. Their power and influence will far exceed any sum of the separate efforts. They will exhibit skills and capacities that were not present in the local efforts. And their appearance always surprises us.

A simple way to understand emergence is to look at the phenomenon of the “Perfect Storm.” Meteorologists can never predict the sudden appearance of these super-powerful storms. Their power is a result of a number of discrete and often invisible factors converging in perfect synchrony. If any one of the elements were not present at that very moment, the storm could not emerge. It is the “perfection” of their convergence that creates such overwhelming power. This power cannot be predicted by assessing the strength of individual forces or by summing their combined power. It is the simultaneity of their convergence, that they all come together in the moment, that creates their power.

NCLB activated unseen dynamics in the atmosphere of America to create education’s Perfect Storm. Many local changes that had little significance in isolation converged with other changes to create a force no one can ignore. No one could possibly have predicted what emerged: educators hanging on to life rafts, struggling to maintain a focus on achievement, learning, the whole student, the arts and so forth, as they react to the gale force demands of high stakes tests.

This Culture of High-Stakes Testing is an emergent phenomena, what we name as a “System of Influence” In human organizations and societies. A System of Influence determines accepted practices and patterns of behavior; it sets the criteria for what’s important and what’s not. Over time, those who fail to conform to these requirements get labeled as deviant and pushed to the fringes. A System of Influence, like a culture, sets the values, norms, expectations, beliefs and assumptions. It determines where resources go, what practices to use, which behaviors to reward. To understand how these powerful, determining systems of influence arise, we have to look into the dynamics of emergence. Once we understand these dynamics, we can work with emergence to create a new system of influence that better serves our intentions.

The Emergence of the Culture of High-Stakes Testing

What were the invisible and discrete forces that converged to create this Culture of High-Stakes Testing? While we describe them here separately, it is how they interacted and converged, their dynamic interplay, that gave rise to this Perfect Storm. Here are just a few—we encourage you to think of others.
• Overwhelming diversity of needs, cultures, problems in the classroom
• A loss of confidence in public education and its professionals
• Realization that America is falling behind other nations in the global economy
• Students failing to achieve
• Employers complaining that graduates lack basic skills
• Hegemony of the corporate model: command and control leadership; focus on results; motivation through fear and rewards; only numbers count
• Increasing use of simple metrics to describe complex phenomena
• Development of computerized testing
• Increasing reliance on testing to sort students
• A culture that has difficulty with ambiguity and diversity
• A culture that wants easy answers, quick fixes and silver bullets





None of these changes, beliefs, or dynamics by themselves are sufficient to create the level of system-wide change we have just experienced in education. NCLB provoked these and made them visible. They converged in unanticipated ways to emerge as this Culture of High-Stakes Testing. Now this culture dominates and influences everything we do in education. This is the nature of emergent phenomena.


Working with Emergence to Foster Change

This is how we got here. Now, how do we change it? How do we create a society where no child is left behind, how do we succeed in creating schools where teachers can focus on learning, where all children can achieve? Although the dynamics of emergence can seem distressingly complex, there is a simple change theory embedded here that provides hope, opportunity and a clear map of what we need to do as leaders.

Emergence is a description of large-scale change. These Systems of Influence have broad reach and affect behaviors throughout the system. Yet emergence doesn’t start big. It begins with small local actions. Large-scale change emerges from connections among these local efforts, from the exchanges of learning and the forging of relationships.

Even though we might experience this Culture of High-Stakes Testing as permanent and immovable, it can be changed. But not through looking for fixes or applying our old theory of change. You can never “fix” an emergent phenomenon. It’s not possible to work backwards. Even if you could change all the discrete elements, you could never replicate how they converged. What we can do is much easier and more straightforward. We begin to create system-wide change by working locally. It is locally that we learn how to be the change we want to see in the world. (Ghandhi was right.) At the start, these small efforts seem impotent, puny in the face of the dominating culture. And by themselves, they are insufficient.

These initial local experiments not only teach us how to make the future come alive in the present. At a more subtle level, they activate supportive beliefs that have been suppressed by the current culture. For example, if you design a program for students that results in high levels of achievement for economically-poor students, you activate those in the community who still believe in the American ideal of opportunity for all. Many such supportive dynamics and beliefs are invisible now, but they appear as we do our work.

The work of educational leaders is to encourage local experiments, to watch for and nourish supportive beliefs and dynamics, and to sponsor faculty and staff to connect with all the kindred spirits now working in isolation. This is how we intentionally work with emergence to create the future we desire.

Intentionally working with emergence

Emergence has a life cycle. In each stage, connections become stronger and interactions more numerous and diverse. It begins with networking, connecting people who are often so busily engaged in their own efforts that they have no idea what’s happening outside their building or district. Often, simply discovering you’re not alone offers a huge boost to morale.

Yet networking is only the beginning. The second stage is when people realize that they can create more benefit by working together. Relationships shift from casual exchanges to a commitment to work together in some way. Personal needs expand to include a desire to support others and improve professional practices. Although there are many ways these connections can manifest, one widespread example in both corporate and education is Communities of Practice (CofPs). The Ball Foundation in Chicago defines the CofPs they fund as, “a group of practitioners dedicated to learning with and from one another in pursuit of promising instructional, organizational and leadership practices that support increased student achievement.”

Communities of Practice have become a common process in schools and districts. Many educational foundations are extending the theory and practice of CofPs. (See, for example, IDEA Partnership, www.ideapartnership.org.) Formed within buildings, districts, or across states, they connect teachers, administrators, and professionals who are advancing their field of practice or solving specific problems. Topics can range from improving reading skills of third graders in a school to developing new models for teacher preparation across campuses nationwide.

Although CofPs are now an accepted practice in public education, do we fully appreciate the role they can play in creating the conditions for a new System of Influence to emerge? The theory of change through emergence that we’re describing here only happens through a strengthening of connections and a linking together of disparate efforts. CofPs provide a powerful means to do this.
SIDEBAR:

How CofPs are changing learning in the U.S. Army
by Margaret Wheatley
In 1993-94, I spent enough time with the Army to appreciate how much it focused on learning. As one Colonel said: “We figured out that it’s better to learn than be dead.” But until recently, learning occurred within a culture of command and control. The Army has several well-established, structured approaches to learning, including Army Lessons Learned and After Action Reviews. Unfortunately, the outcome of this highly structured approach has been the opposite of what was intended. According to a 2005 article in the New Yorker, officer training had become so bureaucratic that it was encouraging “reactive instead of proactive thought, compliance instead of creativity, and adherence instead of audacity.”
Then came Iraq, where we face an enemy who constantly changes tactics and creates deadly innovations that catch soldiers by surprise. In this volatile environment, traditional processes for capturing lessons learned are too slow. Soldiers need instant access to what just happened, what another soldier just experienced across Faluja or Baghdad. To save their lives and to support their buddies, junior officers began to turn to one another for real-time learning. Because they have electronic access everywhere, it became possible to create virtual CofPs where soldiers could share knowledge instantly, in the midst of battle even, rather than waiting for answers from the chain of command. As a result, tactics and responses now come not from Army doctrine, but from immediate first-hand experiences.
The preeminent virtual CofP is CompanyCommand.com, launched in 2000 by Nate Allen and Tony Burgess, company commanders based in Hawaii who spent evenings on the porch sharing stories and lessons learned. It began as an informal web site to extend these conversations to other company commanders. By 2004, their membership exceeded ten thousand, and the Army, realizing the value of this CofP, brought the site in-house. They chose to support it rather than to shut it down, even though it meant relinquishing control and ignoring training protocol. In January ’07, I asked a group of company commanders how many of them used CompanyCommand. Every single one of them did, and they told me of new CofPs springing up focused on specific weaponry or needs.
In Iraq, the capacity for generating real-time, collective intelligence has been essential for survival; it has also changed the nature of learning and battle tactics in a large hierarchical system. CompanyCommand is a brilliant example of how a small, local effort that catalyzes connections and demonstrates real results emerges as a new System of Influence focused on learning rather than command and control. This accomplishment offers hope and inspiration to anyone working within a large. controlling hierarchy. Educators, please take hope.

In many years of organizational work, we authors have learned that for any issue, the solutions we need are already here. If you’re looking to solve a problem, look inside the organization or system and you’ll find someone who’s already worked out a solution or created the needed new process. It seems to us that CofPs are just that—the solution we need, already here. What’s lacking is the realization that they are a major means to create the changes we yearn for. Our old theories of change didn’t allow us to appreciate their power. We believed that large-scale changes require large-scale efforts. With that lens, we scarcely notice CofPs; they’re too small, too localized. But with emergence, it’s not critical mass we have to achieve. It’s critical connections. Anything that strengthens connections is important. CofPs aren’t the only means to do this, but they are a tried and tested process for developing connections, promoting learning, and evolving practices that work. And they are already available to us.

What if, as educational leaders, we could understand that Communities of Practice are a powerful route to large-scale change? We would no longer view them as a fad or an interesting diversion from traditional processes. Instead, we would invest in them more seriously. If they weren’t working well, we wouldn’t dismiss them, abandon them or stop funding them. Instead, we would make it a priority to figure out how to make them successful. We would invest whatever it took in time and resources to ensure their viability and vitality.

As leaders seeking to refocus schools on achievement and learning, we would identify a new role for ourselves: weaving a stronger, more diverse web, making and strengthening connections. In this new role, there are many things to do:
• We would focus institutional resources in support of those efforts that developed more connections.
• We would bring staff together more frequently to think together and to discern what we’re learning.
• We would seek difference--both people and ideas that offer new perspectives.
• We would keep expanding the web, including new and different people in all activities.
• We would support more local efforts and innovations, then insist that staff and faculty take them out into the world and connect with others.
• We would offer financial support for practitioner gatherings that provided opportunities for real exchanges.

We would also focus on how we could activate or strengthen dynamics that presently are invisible in this high-stakes testing culture. These include: people’s natural desire to work in community; our human need to seek supportive relationships; the fact that learning is social and flourishes in relationship. And we could activate ideals that live deep in the American psyche: that all children deserve education; that education is the route out of poverty; that we want fairness, justice and equality; that America is the land of opportunity where anyone can succeed if they try.

If, as leaders, we do our work at innovating at the local level, if we work hard to strengthen connections, and if we embody these societal ideals in our own work, then we will be doing all we can to work towards the emergence of a new System of Influence that makes it possible to fulfill these desires and ideals. If we can look thoughtfully at how we got into this testing culture that no one wanted, we will understand how change really happens on this beautiful planet. And a new map will reveal itself for how we can work with emergence to create an educational system that truly leaves no child behind.


USING EMERGENCE TO TAKE SOCIAL INNOVATIONS TO SCALE

by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze ©2006
In spite of current ads and slogans, the world doesn't change one person at a time. It changes as networks of relationships form among people who discover they share a common cause and vision of what's possible. This is good news for those of us intent on changing the world and creating a positive future. Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections. We don't need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead, we need to connect with kindred spirits. Through these relationships, we will develop the new knowledge, practices, courage, and commitment that lead to broad-based change.

But networks aren't the whole story. As networks grow and transform into active, working communities of practice, we discover how Life truly changes, which is through emergence. When separate, local efforts connect with each other as networks, then strengthen as communities of practice, suddenly and surprisingly a new system emerges at a greater level of scale. This system of influence possesses qualities and capacities that were unknown in the individuals. It isn't that they were hidden; they simply don't exist until the system emerges. They are properties of the system, not the individual, but once there, individuals possess them. And the system that emerges always possesses greater power and influence than is possible through planned, incremental change. Emergence is how Life creates radical change and takes things to scale.

Emergence has a life-cycle. It begins with networks, shifts to intentional communities of practice and evolves into powerful systems capable of global influence. Since it's inception in 1992, The Berkana Institute has striven to learn how living systems work, how they emerge from networks to communities to systems of influence. In our global work--primarily with economically poor communities in many different nations--we have experimented actively with emergence in many different contexts. We have demonstrated what's possible when we connect people across difference and distance. By applying the lessons of living systems and working intentionally with emergence and it's life-cycle, we have become confident that local social innovations can be taken to scale and provide solutions to many of the world's most intractable issues.

Why we need to understand networks

Researchers and social activists are beginning to discover the power of networks and networking. And there is a growing recognition that networks are the new form of organizing. Evidence of self-organized networks is everywhere: social activists, terrorist groups, drug cartels, street gangs, web-based interest groups. While we now see these everywhere, it is not because they're a new form of organizing. It's because we've removed our old paradigm blinders that look for hierarchy and control mechanisms in the belief that organization only happens through human will and intervention.

Networks are the only form of organization used by living systems on this planet. These networks result from self-organization, where individuals or species recognize their interdependence and organize in ways that support the diversity and viability of all. Networks create the conditions for emergence, which is how Life changes. Because networks are the first stage in emergence, it is essential that we understand their dynamics and how they develop into communities and then systems.

Yet much of the current work on networks displays old paradigm bias. In social network analysis, physical representations of the network are created by mapping relationships. This is useful for convincing people that networks exist, and people are often fascinated to see the network made visible. Other network analysts name roles played by members of the network or make distinctions between different parts of the network, such as core and periphery. It may not be the intent of these researchers, but their work is often used by leaders to find ways to manipulate the network, to use it in a traditional and controlling way.

What's missing in these analyses is an exploration of the dynamics of networks.
• Why do networks form? What conditions that support their creation?
• What keeps a network alive and growing? What keeps members connected?
• What type of leadership is required? Why do people become leaders?
• What type of leadership interferes with or destroys the network?
• What happens after a healthy network forms? What's next?
• If we understand these dynamics and the life-cycle of emergence, what can we do as leaders, activists and social entrepreneurs to intentionally foster emergence?

What is Emergence?

Emergence violates so many of our Western assumptions of how change happens that it often takes quite a while to understand it. In nature, change never happens as a result of top-down, pre-conceived strategic plans, or from the mandate of any single individual or boss. Change begins as local actions spring up simultaneously in many different areas. If these changes remain disconnected, nothing happens beyond each locale. However, when they become connected, local actions can emerge as a powerful system with influence at a more global or comprehensive level. (Global here means a larger scale, not necessarily the entire planet.)

These powerful emergent phenomena appear suddenly and surprisingly. Think about how the Berlin Wall suddenly came down, how the Soviet Union ended, how corporate power quickly came to dominate globally. In each case, there were many local actions and decisions, most of which were invisible and unknown to each other, and none of which was powerful enough by itself to create change. But when these local changes coalesced, new power emerged. What could not be accomplished by diplomacy, politics, protests, or strategy suddenly happened. And when each materialized, most were surprised. Emergent phenomena always have these characteristics: They exert much more power than the sum of their parts; they always possess new capacities different from the local actions that engendered them; they always surprise us by their appearance.

It is important to note that emergence always results in a powerful system that has many more capacities than could ever be predicted by analyzing the individual parts. We see this in the behavior of hive insects such as bees and termites. Individual ants possess none of the intelligence or skills that are in the hive. No matter how intently scientists study the behavior of individual ants, they can never see the behavior of the hive. Yet once the hive forms, each ant acts with the intelligence and skillfulness of the whole.

This aspect of emergence has profound implications for social entrepreneurs. Instead of developing them individually as leaders and skillful practitioners, we would do better to connect them to like-minded others and create the conditions for emergence. The skills and capacities needed by them will be found in the system that emerges, not in better training programs.

Because emergence only happens through connections, Berkana has developed a four stage model that catalyzes connections as the means to achieve global level change. Our philosophy is to “Act locally, connect regionally, learn globally.” We focus on discovering pioneering efforts and naming them as such. We then connect these efforts to other similar work globally. We nourish this network in many ways, but most essentially through creating opportunities for learning and sharing of experiences and shifting into communities of practice. We also illuminate the work of these pioneering efforts so that many more people will learn from them. We are attempting to work intentionally with emergence so that small, local efforts can become a global force for change.




The Life-Cycle of Emergence


Stage One: Networks. We live in a time when coalitions, alliances and networks are forming as the means to create societal change. There are ever more networks and now, networks of networks. These networks are essential for people finding like-minded others, the first stage in the life-cycle of emergence. It's important to note that networks are only the beginning. They are based on self-interest--people usually network together for their own benefit and to develop their own work. Networks tend to have fluid membership; people move in and out of them based on how much they personally benefit from participating.


Stage Two: Communities of Practice. Networks make it possible for people to find others engaged in similar work. The second stage of emergence is the development of communities of practice (CofPs). Many such smaller, individuated communities can spring from a robust network. CofPs are also self-organized. People share a common work and realize there is great benefit to being in relationship. They use this community to share what they know, to support one another, and to intentionally create new knowledge for their field of practice. These CofPs differ from networks in significant ways. They are communities, which means that people make a commitment to be there for each other; they participate not only for their own needs, but to serve the needs of others.

In a community of practice, the focus extends beyond the needs of the group. There is an intentional commitment to advance the field of practice, and to share those discoveries with a wider audience. They make their resources and knowledge available to anyone , especially those doing related work.

The speed with which people learn and grow in a community of practice is noteworthy. Good ideas move rapidly amongst members. New knowledge and practices are implemented quickly. The speed at which knowledge development and exchange happens is crucial, because local regions and the world need this knowledge and wisdom now.


Stage Three: Systems of Influence. The third stage in emergence can never be predicted. It is the sudden appearance of a system that has real power and influence. Pioneering efforts that hovered at the periphery suddenly become the norm. The practices developed by courageous communities become the accepted standard.
People no longer hesitate about adopting these approaches and methods and they learn them easily Policy and funding debates now include the perspectives and experiences of these pioneers. They become leaders in the field and are acknowledged as the wisdom keepers for their particular issue. And critics who said it could never be done suddenly become chief supporters (often saying they knew it all along.)


Emergence is the fundamental scientific explanation for how local changes can materialize as global systems of influence. As a change theory, it offers methods and practices to accomplish the systems-wide changes that are so needed at this time. As leaders and communities of concerned people, we need to intentionally work with emergence so that our efforts will result in a truly hopeful future. No matter what other change strategies we have learned or favored, emergence is the only way change really happens on this planet. And that is very good news.