Quotes from Margaret J. Wheatley

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

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.

In this present culture, we need to find the means to work and live together with less aggression if we are to resolve the serious problems that afflict and impede us.

Everyone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. The more interpretations we gather, the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole.

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

We experience problem-solving sessions as war zones, we view competing ideas as enemies, and we use problems as weapons to blame and defeat opposition forces. No wonder we can't come up with real lasting solutions!

Too many problem-solving sessions become battlegrounds where decisions are made based on power rather than intelligence.

In these troubled, uncertain times, we don't need more command and control we need better means to engage everyone's intelligence in solving challenges and crises as they arise.

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.

It's been said thousands of times, in all faiths and philosophies. Know thyself. What may be less clear in these wise expressions is the reason we learn to know ourselves: we develop a knowledge of self so that we can give up the self and serve others.

The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, in which connections

Focus on serving others. ... No matter what is going on around us, we can attend to the people in front of us, to the issues confronting us and there, we offer what we can. We can offer insight and compassion. We can be present. We can stay and not flee. We can be exemplars of the best human qualities. That is a life well lived, even if we didn't save the world.