Margaret (Meg) Wheatley
Margaret Wheatley began caring about the world’s peoples in 1966, as a Peace Corps volunteer in postwar Korea. In many different roles – speaker, teacher, consultant, advisor, formal leader – her work has deepened into an unshakable conviction that leaders must learn how to invoke people’s inherent generosity, creativity, and need for community. As this world tears us apart, sane leadership on behalf of the human spirit is the only way forward. She is cofounder and president of The Berkana Institute (www.berkana.org), an organizational consultant since 1973, a global citizen since her youth, and a prolific writer. She has authored nine books, beginning with the classic Leadership and the New Science. Her newest book (June 2017) is Who Do We Choose to Be? Facing Reality | Claiming Leadership | Restoring Sanity. She has been honored for her groundbreaking work by many professional associations, universities, and organizations. She has created a website rich in resources, and her numerous articles are available to download for free at www.margaretwheatley.com.
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My newest book1 has a question as its title: Who do we choose to be? I have been asking this question of leaders for several years now because it is essential that we make a conscious choice about how we will use our power and influence. Are we willing to take a stand against the vicious of this time who are destroying people, planet, and the future? Or are we going to withdraw, deny what’s happening, and just focus on personal success?
Until I began reflecting on pivotal moments in my career, I hadn’t realized the role that choice has played in my own development; indeed, it has been the most satisfying theme of my work. In fact, I had no idea that my work could be summarized as the offering of choice until I began speaking and teaching about new science and its promise of a simpler way to lead and motivate people.
What is choice? It is the realization that we are not locked into one way of thinking or behaving, that we can liberate ourselves from the confines of our assumptions and habits of action. Ultimately, choice frees us. It offers a new sense of possibility: It doesn’t have to be this way. We can change. We can choose a different way.
I will not forget the moment in 1990, when I was stunned with the realization that control and order were not synonyms. I was sitting at my desk, reading about the science of living systems and the capacity to self-organize into increasing levels of complexity and functionality. It was a true aha! moment – order could be created from interactions among parts or species or people as they each made individual decisions, but based on a shared sense of identity. The elaborate controls that were the primary focus of leaders were not only unnecessary, but they created obstacles to what complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman2 would soon name as “order for free.” Although I love Kauffman’s language, I also translated this concept into my own terms: Life seeks order, but it uses messes to get there.
In the many years since then, I have been very clear that a new paradigm offers choice. We can interpret the world or an event or a person differently. And if we do, more becomes possible. Joel Barker’s work on paradigms3 made this very clear. He taught that what is impossible to solve with one paradigm can be easy to resolve with a change in paradigms. A new way of seeing brings with it the potential to liberate us from the prison of our assumptions.
However we see the world, whatever experiences have formed our mental models, every single one of them is woefully inadequate to perceive what’s going on. We all walk around with dense blinders that filter out critical information and, as we now work faster with consuming levels of distraction, we have become truly blind. Those who take the time to think are increasingly rare, and very powerful. As an ancient proverb noted: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
How many of us understand that we have choice? Consumed by tasks, addicted to distractions, avoiding thinking, we have become the most endangered of all species. And this has happened because we fail to use the essential freedom that all living systems possess: choice. Everything alive is free to choose to notice what’s happening in its environment, and then free to choose how it will respond. Even though we humans still possess the highest capacities for thought and awareness, where do we see these in our actions? Failing to notice what’s going on and learning from experience – failure to exercise choice – we win the award for the dumbest species as well as the most endangered. (Actually, dumb and endangered are causally linked.)
This is why I had to put choice in my book title, and why it has become paramount in my work with leaders. If we take time even for a brief moment’s reflection, we can’t help but notice what’s happening to the people we support, the causes we care about, the families we love, and the planet we live on. Whatever skills and resources we have as leaders and citizens, how do we choose to use them? Here is a prose poem I wrote to answer this question.
What This World Needs
This world does not need more entrepreneurs.
This world does not need more technology breakthroughs.
This world needs leaders.
We need leaders who put service over self, who can be steadfast through crises and failures, who want to stay present and make a difference to the people, situations, and causes they care about.
We need leaders who are committed to serving people, who recognize what is being lost in the haste to dominate, ignore, and abuse the human spirit.
We need leaders because leadership has been debased by those who take things to scale or are first to market or dominate the competition or develop killer apps, or those who hold onto power by constantly tightening their stranglehold of fear until people are left lifeless and cowering.
We need leaders now because we have failed to implement what was known to work, what would have prevented or mitigated the rise of hatred, violence, poverty, and ecological destruction. We have not failed from a lack of ideas and technologies – we have failed from a lack of will. The solutions we needed were already here.
Now it is too late. We cannot solve these global issues globally. We can see them clearly. We can understand their root causes. We have evidence of solutions that would have solved them. But we refused to compromise, to collaborate, to persevere in resolving them as an intelligent, creative species living on one precious planet.
Now it’s up to us, not as global leaders but as local leaders. We can lead people to create positive changes locally that make life easier and more sustainable, that create possibility in the midst of global decline.
Let us use whatever power and influence we have, working with whatever resources are already available, mobilizing the people who are with us to work for what they care about.
As former president Teddy Roosevelt enjoined us: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
These questions are about thinking, and they require time to think. They also ask for a then-and-now perspective to gain clarity about what has changed in the past few years.