Margaret Wheatley on the Heart of Organization

(3 ratings)

Margaret Wheatley is an internationally acclaimed writer (“Leadership and the New Science”) and management consultant who works with a broad variety of organizations and leaders – from the U.S. Army Chief of Staff to corporate CEOs to small town ministers. She is President Emeritus of The Berkana Institute, a global charitable foundation begun in 1991 to encourage life-affirming leadership.

In this refreshing look at organizational theory, Margaret points out the inherent tendency of all life to self-organize; i.e., to create patterns, structures, and organization without the use of planning, direction, or control. She illustrates her point with fascinating examples from nature, such as the construction of 20-foot dirt towers by termites in Australia. She emphasizes the undirected (“leaderless”) nature of these astounding phenomena, accomplished without centralized design or direction. What consciousness lies beneath it, and what is its nature?

With unabashed enthusiasm and conviction, Margaret posits it is a playful life force, one that is not struggling to survive but rather is constantly tinkering – exploring its creative potential to achieve new possibilities with ever greater levels of complexity and diversity. She suggests that collective human activity (as in organizations) might function more effectively if it operated in a similar manner. Flying in the face of conventional management theory, she advises against goal setting, planning, and the traditional linear approach to progress. Instead she embraces something more organic: identifying what is valuable to the organization, determining who cares about it, then having them do something, notice its effect, and do something else. She identifies the primary agents of effective change to be passion and interconnection in the pursuit of a vision, without preconceived notions of its manifestation.