There is a simpler way to organize human endeavor. I have declared this for many years and seen it to be true in many places. This simpler way feels new, yet it is the most ancient story there is. It is the ancient story demonstrated to us daily by life, not the life we see on the news with its unending stories of human grief and horror, but what we feel when we’re in nature, when we experience a sense of life’s deep harmony, beauty, and power. It is the story of how we feel when we see people helping each other, when we feel creative, when we know we’re making a difference, when life feels purposeful.
For many years, I’ve written and spoken about this ancient new story, and how we might apply it in organizations and communities around the world. I’ve learned that as we understand how living systems operate, we develop the skills we need: we become resilient, adaptive, aware, and creative. We enjoy working together. And life’s processes work everywhere, no matter the culture, group, or person, because these are basic dynamics shared by all living beings.
As we work with life, we also rediscover another gift, the great potential of the human spirit. I’ve worked in many places in the world of extreme material poverty. But that challenge fades in comparison to those of us who have forgotten how resilient and vast the human spirit is. Mother Teresa once said that the greatest poverty she saw was in the West because we suffer from spiritual poverty.
Western cultural views of how best to organize and lead (the majority paradigm in use in the world) are contrary to what life teaches. Western practices attempt to dominate life; we want life to comply with human needs rather than working as partners. This disregard for life’s dynamics is alarmingly evident in today’s organizations. Leaders use control and imposition rather than self-organizing processes. They react to uncertainty and chaos by tightening already feeble controls, rather than engaging our best capacities in the dance. Leaders use primitive emotions of fear, scarcity, and self-interest to get people to do their work, rather than the more noble human traits of cooperation, caring, and generosity. This has led us to this difficult time, when nothing seems to work as we want it to, when too many of us feel frustrated, disengaged, and anxious.
I find it important, periodically, to ask people to step back and try to see the big picture. This is difficult to do when we’re stressed by so many pressures at work and at home. But when we shift to fifty thousand feet, it’s easier to see that our impotence is not a result of personal failings. Instead, failing to achieve good results is a consequence of living in this time when we’ve reached the end of a paradigm. Many of our fundamental beliefs and practices no longer serve us or the greater world. Worse than that, too many are causing harm and distancing us from the very skills, knowledge, and wisdom that would help.
This is the era of many messes. Some of these we’ve created (although not intentionally,) because we act on assumptions that can never engender healthy, sustainable societies and organizations. We act as if 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 care about their freedom.
These beliefs are false. They’ve created the intractable problems that we now encounter everywhere. If you look globally, it’s hard to find examples in any country or any major sector—health, education, religion, governance, development—of successfully solving dilemmas. Attempts to resolve them lead only to more problems, unintended consequences, and angry constituents. While millions of people work earnestly to find solutions, and billions of dollars are poured into these efforts, we can’t expect success as long as we stay wedded to our old approaches.
We live in a time that proves Einstein right: “No problem can be solved from the same level of thinking that created it.”
This book contains many different essays, each of which was first published in a journal, magazine, or book. They represent ten years of work, of how I took the ideas in my books and applied them in practice in many different situations. However, this is not a collection of articles. I updated, revised, or substantially added to the original content of each one. In this way, everything written here represents my current views on the subjects I write about.
This book tells two stories, each meant to serve as a guide for finding our way to a more hopeful future. The first story describes and applies the new paradigm of living systems. It tells how all living systems—which includes people— self-organize, change, create, learn, and adapt. I tell this story in great detail and offer many different applications.
I hope these essays provide answers to many of the fundamental questions of leadership: How do leaders shift from control to order? What motivates people? How does change happen? How do we evoke people’s innate creativity? What are useful measurement systems? How do we solve complex problems? How do we create healthy communities? How do we lead when change is out of our control? How do we maintain our integrity and peace as leaders?
Leaders and people have struggled with these questions for many years. In my experience, when we shift the paradigm, we find answers, real answers.
The second story is of a different kind. In each section, the essays appear in chronological order. I did this so you would notice the evolution of these ideas—how my topics have shifted, my emphasis has changed, and my writing has taken on a different voice. These changes illustrate how the first story fared and evolved as I took these ideas out into a world that was changing rapidly, but not in the right direction. I’m sad to report that in the past few years, ever since uncertainty became our insistent twenty-first-century companion, leadership strategies have taken a great leap backward 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 surprised me, because I thought we knew better. I thought we had learned something from all the experiments about innovation, quality, learning organizations, and human motivation. How is it that we failed to learn that whenever we try to impose control on people and situations, we only serve to make them more uncontrollable?
Whatever might explain this desperate retrenchment, for me it has made telling the new story even more important. Today, we need many more of us storytellers. The need is urgent, because people are forgetting there is any alternative to the deadening leadership that daily increases in vehemence. It’s truly a dark time because people are losing faith in themselves and each other and forgetting how wonderful humans can be, how much hope we feel when we work well together on things we care about.
Because more storytellers are needed, there are essays in this book that speak to you directly. I ask you to look at how these times are affecting you personally. Do you work in ways that support interconnectedness rather than separateness? Are you taking time to think? How well do you listen to those you disagree with? What’s happening with your children? Do you speak up for what you believe in?
The last part of this book is very personal. I’ve shared the perspectives and feelings that have arisen in me as I’ve been out in this troubled world. I write about my children, my country, and how I no longer seek hope, only right action. I also describe the experience of living and working in the endless spiral of paradox, especially the paradox of feeling so blessed in the peace and abundance of my life, while more and more people on this beautiful planet must confront life’s horrors.
My hope is that you will feel strengthened from reading this book. I hope that your clarity grows bright and undeniable, that you have greater confidence to tell the story that is true in your experience, that you act with courage, and that you know you are in company with millions of people around the world working to bring to life this ancient new story.
This book came into form in a place that illuminates what it feels like to live in harmony with life and with each other, Thera Island in the Greek Aegean, near Crete. I didn’t go to Thera (also named Santorini) to learn this—I innocently arrived on the island and was surprised to discover it. All I knew beforehand was that the island had been destroyed by a violent volcanic eruption around 1500 B.C.E. That eruption may have begun the end of Minoan civilization on nearby Crete, and might have destroyed Atlantis, according to the accounts of Plato.
But I was not prepared for the intense and joyful encounter I had with Theran culture when I walked into a museum shop that displayed the vivid wall murals that had adorned their buildings’ interiors. I was surrounded by imagery that reflected deep harmony with life. Dolphins danced with ships, birds filled the air, and every scene was filled with flowers and animals. It felt as if I was looking at the Peaceable Kingdom where all creatures shared easily in life’s pleasures. I recalled that Minoan culture was deeply feminine, led by women priests. I picked up a replica of their pottery and loved the round feminine shape of a jug where swallows flew in graceful arcs across the surface.
I felt such deep kinship with these artists and their joyous images that I needed to learn more. Who were these people who could stir my tired soul and awaken such keen curiosity to know more about their life? Here’s what I learned.
Theran culture was its own unique expression of Minoan culture, a world that never fragmented nature from humans from art. Humans were not separate from the natural order. They didn’t attempt to manipulate it or to observe it from a distance. I found this difficult to comprehend, coming from a culture so fixated on separation and control, where art is something different than life, where humans stand outside life and seek to control it.
Minoans expected order to triumph over chaos because they lived close to life and knew life’s cyclical nature. Cycles kept them from focusing on isolated events or from thinking that life was always progressing. (These beliefs still can be found today in indigenous cultures or their traditions.) In the eternal, recurring cycles of life, incidents and dramas were of no consequence. Humans participated in a grand circular flow of life. People lived these cycles not as humans making history, but as humans living life. Nothing happened outside or independent of the living world. People didn’t visit “nature” as we do now. It was all one life.
Minoans knew life to be abundant. Their paintings express joyful awareness that the earth gives great gifts of fertility and blesses us with its beautiful diversity of animals, flowers, and plants. Every painting celebrates this rich, gorgeous bounty.
All of this ended with the volcanic eruption. An ironic end to a culture that loved life, but also a firm teacher to those of us who hope to cling to what we have. Nearly a thousand years later, Greek civilization reached its zenith in Athens and set the course of Western mind that we’re still dealing with today. The Greeks fell in love with themselves, with the human form, with history, with heroes. In their love of human potential, they set us on a path where we forgot that humans exist within a greater cosmos. And today, it’s hard to remember what it feels like to be a beloved partner with life.
As I sat on the rim of the caldera that ended Theran life, living the good tourist life, I discovered a civilization that embodied what I know. What the Therans knew, I know, that it is possible to live and work together in ways that bring out our creativity, that inspire us to do good work, that bring more harmony and pleasure to our relationships. And I know that we get into desperate trouble, as the Greek experience teaches, when we make ourselves the only focus, when we revere heroic leaders, when we treat life as something distant from us that we ignore and occasionally visit.
The certainty of cycles, the triumph of order over chaos, the diversity born from life’s creativity, the innate artistry of each of us, the enduring beauty of the human spirit—these are what I write about. From Minoan times till now, the story hasn’t changed. But it is important that we reclaim it and retell it before we are swept away by eruptions of our own making.
Margaret J. Wheatley
October, 2004
