Meg Wheatley is one of my favorite women thought leaders in the world. I consider her a professional mentor of mine. She is a leading thinker in leadership, systems thinking and community building. Her essays and articles are worth reading and can be found at
Journeying to a New World
Margaret Wheatley, 2007
Note: This is an adaptation of the Epilogue in Leadership and the New Science, Second Edition, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1996
Twelve years after preparing the Second Edition of Leadership in the New Science, I’m still trying to come to terms with the experience of seeing, feeling, tasting and working earnestly from a new paradigm while living in the old one. And I’m more concerned than ever that we understand how crucial it is that we stay together and support one another.
I was in this work a few years before I was able to identify its real nature. I realized that I and others weren’t asking people simply to adopt some new approaches to leadership or to think about organizations in a few new ways. What we were really asking, and what was also being asked of us, was that we change our thinking at the most fundamental level, that of our world view. The dominant world view of Western culture–the world as machine–doesn’t help us to live well in this world any longer. We have to see the world differently if we are to live in it more harmoniously.
Once I understood the nature of the work, it helped me relax and be
more generous. I learned that people get frightened if asked to change
their world view. And why wouldn’t they? Of course people will get
defensive; of course they might be intrigued by a new idea, but then
turn away in fear. They are smart enough to realize how much they would
have to change if they accepted that idea. I no longer worry that if I
could just find the right words or techniques, or describe multiple
case studies, I could convince people. I no longer expect a new world
view to be embraced quickly; I don’t know if I’ll see it take root in
my lifetime. I also know that people are being influenced from sources
far beyond anyone’s control. I know many people who’ve been changed by
events in their lives, not by words they read in a book.
These people have been changed by life’s great creative force,
chaos. One of the gifts offered by this new world view is a clearer
description of life’s cyclical nature. The mechanistic world view
promised us lives of continual progress. Since we were in control and
engineering it all, we could pull ourselves straight uphill, scarcely
faltering. But life doesn’t work that way, and this new world view
confirms what most of us knew–no rebirth is possible without moving
through a dark passage. Dark times are normal to life; there’s nothing
wrong with us when we periodically plunge into the abyss.