Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time - Softcover

Wheatley, Margaret J.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1576754057 ISBN 13: 9781576754054

Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

The acclaimed author “richly articulates how the insights of modern science . . . can usher in a new era of human and planetary health” (Systems Thinker).

For years, Margaret Wheatley has written eloquently about humanizing our organizations and helping people to work together more effectively and compassionately. She has shown how breakthroughs in chaos theory and quantum physics can enable organizations to function more like responsive, self-organizing living systems, rather than cold mechanisms of control. And she has gradually expanded these ideas into the wider arena of human society.

In short, Margaret Wheatley is one of the most innovative and influential organizational thinkers of our time, and Finding Our Way brings together her shorter writings for the first time, touching on all the topics she has addressed throughout her career, showing how she has applied the ideas in her books in many different situations. “However,” she writes, “this is not a collection of articles. I updated, revised, or substantially added to the original content of each one. In this way, everything written here represents my current views on the subjects I write about.”

Provocative, challenging, at times poetic, and often deeply moving, Finding Our Way sums up Wheatley’s thinking on a diverse scope of topics from leadership and management to education and raising children in turbulent times; from societal commentary to specific organizational techniques and more.

“Wheatley provocatively lays out how managers must operate to be effective in a system that is ‘alive’ . . . Finding Our Way challenges us to see the enterprises we lead in new light.” —Leader’s Beacon

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Margaret Wheatley is president emerita of The Berkana Institute and an internationally acclaimed speaker and writer. She has been an organizational consultant and researcher since 1973, and has been Associate Professor of Management at the Marriott School of Management, Brigham Young University, and Cambridge College, Massachusetts. She is the author of the bestselling Leadership and the New and Turning to One Another and coauthor of A Simpler Way.

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The New Story is Ours to Tell

Willis Harman, an invaluable mentor to me and many people, changed my work with a letter he wrote me in 1994. Willis urged me to continue speaking my message but warned me not to derive it solely from science. As he did with so many, he wanted me to understand the deeper premises of modern science, which, for all the “new science” hoopla, were anything but new. He encouraged me to explore the deeper values and premises of my work that were far more important than any science.

I contemplated his letter for months. I realized that I was using the science to get the attention of those who could hear this message in no other form. (When I told Willis this, he laughed and applauded my clarity. If you’re being Machiavellian, it’s good to realize it.) What was “my message” from the new sciences has grown in depth and strength into a “new story.” It is sourced from many traditions, not just Western science, and I offer it to any individual or group that is willing to listen. I am less focused on persuasion and more engaged in the telling of a story that gives hope and possibility to us all.

Many people hold this new story. Traditional cultures have held it for centuries, even as they’ve been told their ways are primitive or backward. But for us growing up in the West, many of us falter in expressing this voice because we’ve been told that these ideas which we feel intuitively—about leaders, organizations, and people—are crazy. It is time to change this definition of craziness. We, in fact, represent the new sanity—the ideas and values and practices that can create a future worth wanting.

Those who carry a new story and who risk speaking it abroad have played a crucial role in times of historic shift. Before a new era can come into form, there must be a new story. The playwright Arthur Miller noted that we know an era has ended when its basic illusions have been exhausted. I would add that these basic illusions not only are exhausted but also have become exhausting.

As they fail to produce the results we want, we just repeat them with greater desperation, plummeting ourselves into cynicism and despair as we lock into these cycles of failure.

I was introduced to the critical nature of the teller-of-new-stories role in reading the work of physicist Brian Swimme and theologian Thomas Berry. They wrote a new story of the universe, based on their belief that creating a new cosmic story is the most important work of our times. It is the new stories that will usher in a new era of human and planetary health.

Lest you believe that cosmic stories can only be told by physicists or theologians, their idea of a cosmic story is one that answers such questions as, What’s going on? Where did everything come from? Why are you doing what you do?

I believe that you and I have important themes to contribute to this new cosmic story. I would like to contrast in some detail the new and the old stories. My hope is that in seeing the great polarities between these two, you will feel more strongly called to give voice to the new.

For more than three hundred years, Western culture has been developing the old story. I would characterize it as a story of dominion and control, and all-encompassing materialism. This story began with a dream that it was within humankind’s province to understand the workings of the universe, and to gain complete mastery over physical matter. This dream embraced the image of the universe as a grand, clockwork machine. As with any machine, we would understand it by minute dissection, we would engineer it to do what we saw fit, and we would fix it through our engineering brilliance. This hypnotic image of powers beyond previous human imagination gradually was applied to everything we looked at: our bodies were seen as the ultimate machines; our organizations had all the parts and specifications to assure well-oiled performance; and in science, where it all began, many scientists confused metaphor with reality and believed life was a machine.

This dream still has immense hypnotic power over us. For every problem, we quickly leap to technical solutions, even if technology is the cause of the initial problem. Science will still save us, no matter the earthly mess we’ve created. In our bodies, we long to believe the promises of genetic engineering. Our greatest ills, perhaps even death, will vanish once we identify the troubling gene. We need only invest more in technology to yield unsurpassed benefits in health and longevity, and all because we are such smart engineers of the human body.

In most of our endeavors—in science, health, management, self-help—the focus is on creating better-functioning machines We replace the faulty part, reengineer the organization, install a new behavior or attitude, create a better fit, recharge our batteries. The language and thinking is mechanistic. And we give this image such hegemony over our lives because it seems our only hope for combating life’s cyclical nature, our one hope of escape from life’s incessant demands for creation and destruction.

When we created this story of complete dominion over matter, we also brought in control’s unwelcome partner, fear. Once we are intent on controlling something, we feel afraid when we meet with resistance. Since nothing is as controllable as we hope, we soon become entangled in a cycle of exerting control, failing to control, exerting harsher control, failing again, panicking. The fear that arises from this cycle is notable in many of us. It’s especially notable in our leaders. Things aren’t working as they had hoped, but none of us knows any other way to proceed. The world becomes scarier as we see daily the results of our ignorance and confront our true powerlessness. It is from this place, from an acknowledgment of our ignorance and lack of power, that the call goes out for a new story.

But the old story has some further dimensions worth noticing. This story has had a particularly pernicious effect on how we think about one another, and how we approach the task of organizing any human endeavor. When we conceived of ourselves as machines, we gave up most of what is essential to being human. We created ourselves devoid of spirit, will, passion, compassion, emotions, even intelligence. Machines have none of these characteristics innately, and none of them can be built into its specifications. The imagery is so foreign to what we know and feel to be true about ourselves that it seems strange that we ever adopted this as an accurate description of being human. But we did, and we do. A colleague of mine, as he was about to work with a group of oil company engineers, was warned that they had “heads of cement.” He cheerfully remarked that it didn’t matter, because they all had hearts, didn’t they? “Well,” they replied, “we call it a pump.”

The engineering image we carry of ourselves has led to organizational lives where we believe we can ignore the deep realities of human existence. We can ignore that people carry spiritual questions and quests into their work; we can ignore that people need love and acknowledgment; we can pretend that emotions are not part of our work lives; we can pretend we don’t have families, or health crises, or deep worries. In essence, we take the complexity of human life and organize it away. It is not part of the story we want to believe. We want a story of simple dimensions: People can be viewed as machines and controlled to perform with the same efficiency and predictability.

It is important to recognize that people never behave like machines. When given directions, we insist on putting our unique spin on them. When told...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1576754057
• ISBN 13: 9781576754054
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 312
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