Top 120 Quotes & Sayings by Margaret J. Wheatley - Page 2

The things we fear most in organizations - fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances - are the primary sources of creativity.

All social change begins with a conversation.

Life now insists that we encounter groundlessness. Systems and ideas that seemed reliable and solid dissolve at an increasing rate. People who asked for our trust betray or abandon us. Strategies that worked suddenly don't. Groundlessness is a frightening place, at least at first, but as the old culture turns to mush, we would feel stronger if we stopped searching for ground, if we sought only to locate ourselves in the present and do our work from here.

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.

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.

We need to move from the leader as hero, to the leader as host.

I've found that I can only change how I act if I stay aware of my beliefs and assumptions. Thoughts always reveal themselves in behavior.

Power is the capacity to generate relationships.

Circles create soothing space.

No longer in a relational universe, can we study anything as separate from ourselves. Our acts of observation are part of the process that brings forth the manifestation of what we are observing.

Surrendering to life offers some wonderful realizations. We learn we're capable of being in this dance, of working with whatever happens. We learn to trust ourselves and then others and, gradually, we learn that life itself can be trusted.

You can’t hate someone whose story you know.

Independence is a political concept, not a biological concept.

Our growing addiction to the Internet is impairing precious human capacities such as memory, concentration, pattern recognition, meaning-making, and intimacy. We are becoming more restless, more impatient, more demanding, and more insatiable, even as we become more connected and creative. We are rapidly losing the ability to think long about any- thing, even those issues we care about. We flit, moving restlessly from one link to another.

Passion mutates into procedures, into rules and roles. Instead of purpose, we focus on policies. Instead of being free to create, we impose constraints that squeeze the life out of us.

It is time to stop waiting for someone to save us. It is time to face the truth of our situation - that we're all in this together, that we all have a voice - and figure out how to mobilize the hearts and minds of everyone in our workplaces and communities.

In this new world, you and I make it up as we go along, not because we lack expertise or planning skills, but because that is the nature of reality. Reality changes shape and meaning because of our activity. And 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.

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.

Many of us have created lives that give very little support for experimentation. We believe that answers already exist out there, independent of us. What if we invested more time and attention to our own experimentation? We could focus our efforts on discovering solutions that work uniquely for us.

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 by our human hearts.

We can no longer stand at the end of something we visualized in detail and plan backwards from that future. Instead we must stand at the beginning, clear in our mind, with a willingness to be involved in discovery... it asks that we participate rather than plan.

Life is creative. It makes it up as it goes along.

One of the great errors organizations make is shutting down what is a natural, life-enhancing process-chaos. We are terrified of chaos. As a manager, it signals failure. But if you move out of control and into an appreciation of natural order, you understand that the only way a system changes is when it is far from equilibrium, when it moves from the 'quiet' we treasure and is confronted with the choice to die or reorganize. And you can't reorganize to a higher level unless you risk the perils of the path through chaos.

Perseverance is a choice. It's not a simple, one-time choice, it's a daily one. There's never a final decision.

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

A leader these days needs to be a host - one who convenes diversity; who convenes all viewpoints in creative processes where our mutual intelligence can come forth.

We would do well to ponder the realization that love is the most potent source of power.

The future cannot be determined. It can only be experienced as it occurring. Life doesn't know what it will be until it notices what it has become.

To make a system stronger, we need to make stronger relationships.

Innovation is fostered by information gathered from new connections; from insights gained by journeys into other disciplines or places; from active, collegial networks and fluid, open boundaries. Innovation arises from ongoing circles of exchange, where information is not just accumulated or stored, but created. Knowledge is generated anew from connections that weren't there before.

Life doesn't move in straight lines, and neither does a good conversation.

Disorder can play a critical role in giving birth to new, higher forms of order.

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

Without reflection, we go blindly on our way.

I believe that the capacity that any organization needs is for leadership to appear anywhere it is needed, when it is needed.

In our daily life, we encounter people we are angry, deceitful, intent only on satisfying ere is so their own needs. There is so much anger, distrust, greed, and pettiness that we are losing our capacity to work well together.

As we let go of the machine model of work, we begin to step back and see ourselves in new ways, to appreciate wholeness, and to design organizations that honor and make use of the totality of who we are.

When error holds so much power, play disappears. Creativity ceases.

A leader is one who... Has more faith in people than they do, and . . . who holds opportunities open long enough for their competence to re-emerge.

Power in organizations is the capacity generated by relationships. It is an energy that comes into existence through relationships.

Let's just keep asking ourselves this question: 'Is what I'm about to do strengthening the web of connections, or is it weakening it?'

All of us need better skills in listening, conversing, respecting one another's uniqueness, because these are essential for strong relationships.

Leadership is a series of behaviors rather than a role for heroes.

The search for the lessons of the new science is still in progress, really in its infancy. In this realm, three is a new kind of freedom, where it is more rewarding to explore than to reach conclusions, more satisfying to wonder than to know, and more exciting to search than to stay put. Curiosity, not certainty, becomes the saving grace.

One of the easiest human acts is also the most healing. Listening to someone. Simply listening. Not advising or coaching, but silently and fully listening.

We are, always, poets, exploring possibilities of meaning in a world which is also all the time exploring possibilities.

We each create our world by what we choose to notice, creating a world of distinction that makes sense to us. We then 'see' the world through the self we have created.

Who you are depends on who you meet.

Thinking is always dangerous to the status quo. [...] The moment you start thinking, you'll want to change something.

Self-production: the characteristic of living systems to continuously renew themselves and to regulate this process in such a way that the integrity of their structure is maintained. It is a natural process which supports the quest for structure, process renewal and integrity.

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

Listening is a reciprocal process - we become more attentive to others if they have attended to us.

A world based on machine images is a world filled with boundaries. In a machine, every piece knows its place.

Space is the basic ingredient of the universe; there is more of it than anything else.

We could focus our efforts on discovering solutions that work uniquely for us.

We've taken disturbances and fluctuations and averaged them together to give us comfortable statistics. Our training has been to look for big numbers, important trends, major variances. Yet it is the slight variations - soft-spoken, even whispered at first - that we need to encourage.

This is a world of process, not a world of things.

Aggression only breeds more aggression. It only creates more fear and anger.

I've wanted to see beyond the Western, mechanical view of the world and see what else might appear when the lens was changed

They have eliminated rigidity, both physical and psychological, in order to support more fluid processes whereby temporary teams are created to deal with specific and ever-changing needs. They have simplified roles into minimal categories; they have knocked down walls and created workplaces where people, ideas, and information circulate freely.