Meg Wheatley

Understanding Leadership 
& The New Science

© 2003 by Michael Finley

Want to make a hit at your next board meeting? Announce a major change initiative with the words:

"Let's take this organization down the path of total chaos."

And say it like you mean it. Your colleagues will spew coffee across the table at the words. People who have known you for years and have every reason to trust you for your experience and usually sage counsel will bolt from their chairs and demand your resignation.

Everyone present will shake their heads, close their eyes, and picture an orderly organization pushed off the cliff of all that is reasonable, plummeting, all hands screaming, down, down into the abyss of the unknown.

It's the word. Chaos has historically been everything any sensible manager would do anything to avoid. In terms of kneejerk negativity, it is right up there with bolshevism, kryptonite, and Barney the dinosaur.

So -- why is organizational theorist Meg Wheatley suggesting we inoculate our organizations with a healthy dose of chaos?

Wheatley believes that we way we have been thinking about organizations (indeed, about everything) for the last three hundred years is simply wrong. The modern view of the world, which was formed in the 17th century by such scientific worthies as Newton, Kepler, and Galileo, is predicated upon the geometric symmetries of the ancient Greeks -- pure circles, perfect squares, and absolutely straight lines.

The problem with this "scientific" view of the world is that it is not an empirical, observable one. Pure circles, pure squares, or straight lines work elegantly in the abstract realm of mathematics, but in the real universe they are conspicuous by their absence.  

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Twentieth-centu

Margaret Wheatley