158 PART II Bridging the Knowing-Doing Gap
are leading in ways that you admire and ask for their advice. Buy them lots of lunches. Keep them happy. More than likely, you will need to call on them again and again. The wisdom they possess could be invaluable to you.
When your car goes into a ditch during a snowstorm, it is going to be pretty obvious when you have pulled it out and you are back on the road headed toward your destination. Same goes for getting back on track when major change starts to derail. Ask yourself, are you on the road again?
Signs you are back on track:
Natural Change
Margaret Wheatley is the author of Turning to One Another and the best-selling Leadership and the New Science, an exploration of the ways inwhich the discoveries in sub-atomic physics and chaos theory might be applied in organizations. Since resistance is a part of the natural world, it seems that her thinking might help illuminate the conversation on the subject.
RM: You’ve written that the Newtonian mechanistic model hinders our ability to change.
MW: It is an absolute mental block created by our machine images. Machines only change within very narrow limits. I think that we don’t understand at all how well equipped we are as living organisms to deal with change in a creative way, so that resistance becomes a much