I rarely read books twice, but Margaret Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science is an exception and an absolute revelation. I’ve read it 3 or 4 times over the last 15 years, and it still thrills me.
The beauty is Wheatley’s simplifying of really complex science to establish a really basic premise for rethinking our leadership and our companies. She also lays out the practical implications in our daily work and interactions with our teams. So, despite the science, it’s not complex or obtuse for those of us who are far from scientists. The book is also less than 200 pages, so it doesn’t follow the “rule” of most business books that seem to require 220 pages or more, even when the idea is captured in the first 50. You will want to read this whole book, and it won’t become redundant.
Wheatley establishes her premise succinctly in the introduction:
“Each of us lives and works in organizations designed from Newtonian (Isaac Newton) images of the universe. We manage by separating things into parts. We believe that influence occurs as a direct result of force exerted from one person to another. We engage in complex planning for a world that we keep expecting to be predictable, and we search continually for better methods of objectively measuring and perceiving the world. These assumptions…come to us from seventeenth-century physics, from Newtonian mechanics…But the science has changed. If we are to continue to draw from science to create and manage organizations, to design research, and to formulate ideas about organizational design, planning, economics, human motivation, and change processes (the list can be much longer), then we need to at least ground our work in the science of our times. We need to stop seeking after the universe of the seventeenth century. We need to expand our search for the principles of organization to include what is presently known about how the universe organizes.”
In other words, our organizations are designed counter to how we actually know and understand the world to work today – counter to quantum mechanics.
She continues:
“The quantum mechanical view of reality startles us out of common notions of what is real. Even to scientists, it is admittedly bizarre. In the quantum world, relationship is the key determiner of everything. Subatomic particles come into form and are observed only as they are in relationship to something else. They do not exist as independent “things.” There are no basic “building blocks.”
Given this knowledge of the quantum structure of the universe, as leaders:
- We must move from a mindset of seeking stability to one of navigating emergence.
- We must shift from desiring to feel in control to recognizing and embracing the actual chaos of the universe.
- We need to reestablish and develop our leadership to be one that can only be seen and known through our relationships that are constantly dynamic.
- We must become more flexible.
- We must embrace more creativity from more people more often.
- We must recognize that the companies that are “built to last” are those built to change.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
Don’t let the quantum mechanics scare you. I understood what Wheatley shared of the science without any confusion. Grab this book and use it to rethink what you are building and where you are working based on how the universe is built and works.