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Margaret J. Wheatley

  • I believe the fundamental work of this time — work that requires the participation of all of us — is to discover new ways of 'being together.'

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

  • Who you are depends on who you meet.

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

  • The things we fear most in organizations — fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances — need not be signs of an impending disorder that will destroy us. Instead, fluctuations are the primary source of creativity.

  • ... we have created trouble for ourselves in organizations by confusing control with order.

  • 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'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.

  • All social change starts with a conversation.

    • Margaret J. Wheatley,
    • "Some friends and I started talking...," in Utne ()
  • Nothing has given me more hope recently than to observe how simple conversations give birth to actions that can change lives and restore our faith in the future. There is no more powerful way to initiate significant social change than to start a conversation. When a group of people discover that they share a common concern, that's when the process of change begins.

    • Margaret J. Wheatley,
    • "Some friends and I started talking...," in Utne ()
  • Life doesn't move in straight lines, and neither does a good conversation.

    • Margaret J. Wheatley,
    • "Some friends and I started talking...," in Utne ()
  • ... we can't be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion; cherished interpretations must dissolve to make way for what's new. Great ideas and inventions miraculously appear in the space of not knowing.

    • Margaret J. Wheatley,
    • "Some friends and I started talking...," in Utne ()
  • ... 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.

    • Margaret J. Wheatley,
    • "Some friends and I started talking...," in Utne ()
  • 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.

    • Margaret J. Wheatley,
    • "It's An Interconnected World," in Shambhala Sun ()
  • When my children were small, I had a refrigerator slogan that read: 'If mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.' Perhaps that was my children's first lesson in systems thinking. We adults are learning this too. If others don't feel safe, we aren't safe. If others are struggling, we experience the consequence of their struggle. If others are poor, no matter how wealthy we are, we experience the consequences of their impoverishment.

    • Margaret J. Wheatley,
    • "It's An Interconnected World," in Shambhala Sun ()

Margaret J. Wheatley, U.S. social scientist, management consultant, writer

(1941)