After so many years of defending ourselves against life and searching for better forms of control, we sit exhausted in the inflexible structures of the organization we've created, wondering what has happened. What happened to efficiency, creativity, and meaning? What happened to us? Trying to change these structures is the challenge of our lives. We chart their futures and design them to become better. We push them, we stimulate them. We feel fear, we test the stimulus. We collect tools, we study techniques. We use everything we know and get nowhere. What has happened?
—From A Simpler Way, Wheatley and Kellner-Rogers
We know that it is possible to facilitate successful organizational change. We have witnessed some organizations change not only in terms of new goals, new processes, structures, and performance levels, but also in their overall capacity to cope with change. In these systems, after the change effort, people felt more committed to the organization, with greater confidence in their own contributions, and more prepared to face change as an ongoing experience.
However, we'd like to begin by accepting the most typical and discouraging story that has played out over several decades of organizational change efforts. We hope that by acknowledging this discouraging information, you'll feel free to consider very different approaches.
In recent studies, CEOs report that up to 75% of their organizational change efforts have not yielded the promised results. These change efforts have not produced what was expected, however, producing a succession of unintended and unhelpful consequences. Leaders end up managing the impact of unintended effects rather than planned outcomes that failed to materialize. Instead of enjoying the fruits of a redesigned production unit, the leader must worry about the hostility and poor relationships created by this new design. Instead of taking pride in the improved performance resulting from this restructuring, the leader must deal with a depleted and demoralized group of survivors. Instead of complacently enjoying a high stock price following a merger, leaders must desperately fight to obtain people who will work together peacefully and get along well to achieve effectiveness.
Much blame is assigned in the search to understand so much failure. A healthcare administrative official recently commented, "We're under so much stress that all we do is look around the organization for someone to kill." (The person who quoted this is a nun!) It has become common to say that people resist change, that the organization doesn't have the right people to face the future, that people don't take responsibility for their work, that people are too dependent, that all they do is complain.
We would like to stop the slander and ill will this is creating in our organizations. We strongly believe that failures in organizational change are the result of certain deep misunderstandings about who people are and what is happening within organizations. If we can clarify these misunderstandings, efficiency and hope can return to our experience. Successful organizational change is possible if we look at our organizational experience with "fresh eyes."
There's something ironic about our struggle to effect change in organizations. We participate in a world where change is the only thing that exists. We sit in the midst of continuous creation, in a universe whose creativity and adaptability are beyond understanding. Truly, nothing is the same twice. And in our personal lives, we adapt and change constantly, and we see this adaptability in our children, friends, and colleagues. There are over 100 million species on Earth, each demonstrating its capacity for change. Yet, we humans fail in our change projects and accuse others of being incapable of effecting change. Are we the only species that resigns itself and resists? Or perhaps all those creatures simply had better training programs on "Coping with Change and Transition."
For many years, through our own work in various types of organizations, we have learned that life is the best teacher of change. If we understand how life is organized, how the world maintains its endless diversity and flexibility, we will then be able to know how to create organizations where creativity, change, and diversity exist in abundance and complement each other. If we change our thinking about how we organize, we can achieve the same capacities for change that we see everywhere, in all living beings. However, the very act of learning from life's processes requires an enormous change.
LIVING PROCESS OF CHANGE
It's very common these days to describe organizations as "organic." This supposedly means that we no longer view them as machines, which was the dominant view of organizations, people, and the universe for the past three hundred years. However, do current organizational practices resemble those used in real life? Do recent processes of organizational change feel more alive? From what we've observed, "organic" is the new buzzword describing organizational processes that haven't changed. These processes remain fundamentally mechanical. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way we approach organizational change.
A few years ago, we asked a group of Motorola engineers and technicians to describe how they went about changing a machine. Below is what they described in sequential order:
1. Appoint a manager
2. Set a bigger and better goal.
3. Define the direct results.
4. Determine the measurements
5. Section and Analyze the problem.
6. Redesign the machine.
7. Implement adaptation
8. Test the results.
9. Assign blame.
Sound familiar? Doesn't this describe most of the organizational change projects you've been involved in? We see only one real difference: in organizations, we skip step 8. We very rarely test the results of our change efforts. We have a vague notion of the outcomes that have emerged (the unintended consequences) and quickly realize they're not what we planned or what we sold to our superiors. Instead of delving into the results, instead of learning from this experience, we do everything we can to divert attention from this project. We move on to a new project, announce new initiatives, reappoint managers and teams. Avoiding blame becomes the central activity, instead of learning from what happened. No wonder we keep failing!
Life changes its organizational forms using a completely different process. Since human organizations are composed of living beings (we hope you agree with this), we believe that the process of life change is also an accurate description of how change is currently occurring in organizations. This process cannot be described through clear incremental steps. It occurs in the confusing structures of relationships, the networks, that characterize all living systems. There are no simple stages or easy causal loops. In general, communication and change occur quickly but invisibly, hidden by the density of reciprocal relationships. If organizations behaved like living systems, this description of how a living system changes should be familiar to you.
Some part of the system (the system can be anything—an organization, a community, a business unit) observes something. It may be a memo, a casual comment, a news report. It chooses to be disturbed by it. “Choose” is the key word; the freedom to be disturbed or not belongs to living systems. No one can tell a living system what will disturb it (although we always try). If it chooses to worry, it takes the information and circulates it rapidly through its networks. As the concern circulates, others take it and amplify it. The information grows, changes, is distorted, but at all times it accumulates more and more meaning. The information may become so important that the system cannot address it in its current state. Only after this does the system begin to change. By the meaning of the information alone, it is forced to abandon its current beliefs, structures, patterns, and values. It cannot use its past to make sense of this new information. The system must truly abandon everything, plunging into a state of confusion and uncertainty that feels like chaos, a state that always feels terrible. However, after this breakdown, after having abandoned everything that was once necessary, the system is now able to reorganize itself in a new way. Finally, it is open to change. It begins to reorganize itself in terms of new interpretations, new meanings. It recreates itself with new insights about what is true and important. It transforms into something different because it understands the world differently. It transforms into something new because it was forced to abandon the old. And paradoxically, like all living systems, it has changed because this was the only way it saw to preserve itself.
If you reflect on the vast difference between these two descriptions of how change occurs in a machine and in a living system, you'll understand the enormous task ahead. We need to better understand the processes a living system undergoes to transform itself, and then, once we understand that, re-examine every change effort we undertake. We'd like to describe in more detail these processes that life uses and their consequences for organizational change practices.
Every living being, every microbe, every person, develops and changes because it has the freedom to create and preserve itself. The freedom to create itself is the fundamental freedom of all life. A current definition of life in biology says that something is alive if it is capable of self-production. The word is autopoiesis, from the same root as poetry. Every living being is the author of its own existence and continues to create itself throughout its entire life course. In the past, we thought of freedom as a political idea, or reflected on free will as a spiritual concept. However, it now appears in biology as an inalienable condition of life. Life gives itself the freedom to come into being, and without that freedom to create, there is no life.
AUTOMATION: WORK MACHINES
In our lives and in our organizations, we must be accountable for the fact that everyone requires, as a condition of their being, the freedom to be the author of their own life. Every person, openly or secretly, struggles to preserve their freedom of self-creation. If you disagree with this, think about your experiences managing others, whether workers, children, or anyone else. Have you had the experience of giving another human being a set of detailed instructions and having them followed exactly, to the letter? We have not met anyone who has had this experience of complete and automatic obedience to their superiors, so we assume your experience is more like what follows. You give someone clear instructions, written or spoken, and they always change them, even if only slightly. They modify them, reinterpret them, ignore some, add color or emphasis of their own. When we see these behaviors, if we are the boss, we feel frustrated or indignant. Why can't they follow instructions? Why do they resist? Why are you sabotaging my good work?
However, there is another possible interpretation—it's actually an unavoidable interpretation—if we view this through the interpretive lens of living systems. We're not observing resistance or sabotage or stupidity. We're observing the fact that people need to be creatively involved in their work. We see people practicing for themselves their inalienable freedom. They take our work and recreate it as if it were their own work. And none of us can stop anyone else in this process of recreating, modifying, ignoring, and changing orders. The price we pay for perfect obedience is that we lose vitality—we literally lose that which gives us life. We submit to another's instructions as if we were dead. We end up discouraged, hostile, and lifeless. And then our superiors wonder why we ended up so badly.
You might think this is a very optimistic view of what's happening in organizations, since you can undoubtedly name those around you who don't display creative desires and just want to be told what to do. But look at their behavior more closely. Is it as robotic as it seems? Are they truly passive or passive-aggressive (just another term for how other people assert their creativity)? What are their lives like outside of work? How complex is the private life they navigate on a daily basis?
Let's look at human history. Time and again, the indomitable human spirit emerges, fighting against all forms of oppression. No matter how terrible the oppression, human beings find a way to prevail. No system of laws or rules will keep us down; no instructions can tell us exactly how we should act. We will always contribute something of ourselves, always add our inimitable signature to the situation. Whether leaders call us innovators or rebels depends on their understanding of what is happening.
The inalienable freedom one has to create one's own life is demonstrated in other familiar areas of organizations. People, like the rest of life, retain the freedom to decide what to observe. We choose what disturbs us. It's not the quantity or frequency of the message that makes us pay attention. If it's important to us, we notice it. We've all prepared a presentation, a report, a memo on a specific topic, knowing that the issue was critical. Failure to address it would have serious consequences for our group or organization. However, when we presented the topic, we weren't met with enthusiasm and appreciation, but rather with courtesy or disinterest. The matter went nowhere. Others put it aside and addressed what they believed to be important. Often when we have this experience, we interpret their disinterest as a failure of communication, so we rewrite the report, develop a better graph, create a more interesting presentation style. However, none of this matters. Our colleagues don't respond because they don't share our view that this is important. This is failure in the sense of not finding shared meaning, not a failure of communication. They have practiced their freedom and chosen not to be disturbed.
FOUR PRINCIPLES OF NATURAL ALIGNMENT
If we understand that this essential freedom to create oneself is at work in organizations, we can not only reinterpret behaviors in a more positive way, but we can also begin to reflect on how to work with this great force instead of dealing with the consequences of ignoring its existence. We would like to highlight four important principles for you to put into practice.
Participation is not an option
First, when we think about strategies for organizational change, we need to remember the following: Participation is not an option. We have no choice but to invite people into a process where they rethink, redesign, and restructure the organization. We ignore people's need to participate at their own risk. If they are involved, they will create a future where they are included. We won't have to engage in impossible and exhausting missions like selling them the solution, getting them on board with us, or inventing incentives that can lead them to subservient behavior. Over the past fifty years, much wisdom has circulated in the field of organizational behavior: people support what they have created. When observing how life is organized, we would repeat this maxim: people only support what they have created. Life insists on its freedom to participate and can never accept another's plans.
After many years of struggling with participatory processes, you may hear that participation is not a death-penalty option to be avoided at all costs. However, we've encouraged you to think about where you've primarily invested your time in change projects. If you weren't broadly participatory (and our definition of broadly means seeking ways to engage the entire system over time), how much of your time was spent managing unintended effects created by people feeling excluded or ignored? How much of your effort was spent selling a solution you knew no one really wanted? How much energy did you spend redesigning the redesign after the organization pointed out its glaring omissions, caused by a lack of commitment in the first redesign?
In our experience, major struggles arise with implementation whenever we propose changes in the organization, rather than figuring out how to involve people in their creation. These struggles are likely to be more exhausting and prone to failure than those we face when trying to engage an entire organization. Time and again, we've seen that implementation moves very quickly among the people who have been involved in designing those changes.
Yet, we all know this, right? We know that when people are engaged in deciphering the future, in the difficult and complicated processes of participation, they are simultaneously creating the conditions (new relationships, new insights, higher levels of commitment) that facilitate faster and more complete implementation. However, because participatory processes seem to take longer and sometimes overwhelm us with the complexity of human interactions, many leaders seek solutions from small groups, which will later be handed down to the entire organization. They confidently hope this will work; this would make life so much easier. However, life won't allow this to work; people will always resist such impositions. Life, everything in life, insists on participation. We can work with this stubbornness and use it to compromise people's creativity and commitment, or we can continue to ignore it and spend much of our time dealing with the negative consequences.
Life always reacts to orders, it never obeys them.
A second principle also stems from life's need for engagement: Life always reacts to orders, it never obeys them. No matter how clear, visionary, or important the message, it can only produce reactions, not direct compliance. If we recognize that this principle always occurs in all organizations, it changes the expectations of what can be achieved every time we communicate. We can expect reactions as diverse as the diversity of individuals who hear this. Therefore, everything we say or write is merely an invitation for others to engage with us, to think with us. If we offer our work as an invitation for them to react, this changes our relationships with partners, subordinates, and superiors. It opens us to relationships between people, something life craves. Life only accepts "partners," not bosses.
This principle particularly affects the behavior of leaders. Instead of seeking out those who are disloyal, or repeatedly repeating orders, they realize that there is much to learn from reactions. Each reaction reflects a different perception of what is important, and if this diversity were analyzed, the organization would develop a better understanding of what is happening. The capacity for learning and growth expands as concerns about loyalty or submission diminish.
As leaders begin to explore the diversity of each small group of people, life demands something more of them. No two reactions will be the same; no two people or two events will be the same. Leaders must abandon any desire they may have had to repeat the same thing or do it exactly the same, whether it concerns people or processes. Even in industries that are overly regulated or focused on very detailed procedures (such as nuclear power plants, hospitals, and many factories), if people merely repeat procedures carelessly, those procedures will eventually fail. Errors and tragedies in these environments testify to the effects of lifeless behaviors. However, these lifeless procedures are a predictable response to processes that require repetition, rather than a personal commitment to the process. This is by no means a suggestion that we abandon procedures or standardization. However, it is very important to note that there is no such thing as a human-proof procedure. We must emphasize the fact that people always need to be included in the development of a procedure. They can achieve this by understanding the reasoning behind the procedure, or by knowing that they are authorized to modify it if circumstances change. We all need to see that there is enough room for our input, for ourselves, and for how our work is carried out.
And again, life doesn't give us many options here. Even if we insist on obedience, we won't achieve it for long, and we only obtain it at the cost of what we most desire: loyalty, intelligence, and sensitivity.
We don’t see “reality” – everyone creates their own interpretation of what is real.
A third principle derived from life is: We don't see Reality. Each of us creates our own interpretation of what is real. We see the world through who we are, or as the poet Michael Chitwood put it: what you see becomes your life. Since no two people are alike, no two people ever have the same interpretation of what happens. Yet, at work and at home, we act as if others see what we see and assign the same meaning to events as we do. We sit in a meeting and see something happening, and we assume that most of the people in the room, or at least those we trust, saw the same thing. We may even engage them in quick conversation that seems to confirm our sense of unanimity.
Did you see what happened there?
Yes, I know, I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
Oh really!
However, if we pause to compare further, we will quickly discover important and useful differences in what we saw and how we interpreted the situation.
As we work with this principle, we realize that arguing about who is right and who is wrong is a waste of time. If we engage with colleagues to share perceptions, if we expect and even seek the wide diversity of interpretations that exist, we learn and change. Biologist Francisco Varela redefined organizational intelligence. He said that it wasn't the ability to solve problems that makes an organization intelligent. It's the ability of its members to enter a world where they share its importance. If everyone in the group thinks what's happening is important (even if they have different perspectives), they don't have to convince others. They can act: quickly, creatively, and together.
We only gain access to a world of shared importance, as far as we've seen, by engaging in conversations with colleagues. Not debates, not oratory, but conversations that embrace each other's unique perspective. If we remain curious about what the other person sees, and don't try to convince them of our interpretation, we develop a better understanding of what's happening. We also build collaborative relationships that allow us to work together more quickly and efficiently.
When any of us feels invited to our perspective, we reciprocate that respect and trust with commitment and friendship.
And a very important paradox becomes evident. We don't have to agree on an interpretation or have the same values to agree on what should be done. We don't need to accept the lowest common denominator or waste hours and hours pursuing our predetermined solution. As we sit together and listen to so many different perspectives, we break out of our box and open ourselves to new ways of thinking. We've allowed these new perspectives to disturb us and we've changed. And unexpectedly, this allows us to come to an agreement on an agreed-upon course of action and also to wholeheartedly support it. This paradox is contrary to how we've tried to reach group consensus, yet it makes sense from a living systems perspective. We all need to participate, and when we're given that opportunity, we want to work with others. We've entered a world where importance is something we all share, and because of that process, we've developed a great energy to decide together what next step to take.
To create a healthier living system, connect it more to itself.
The fourth principle of life is the best recipe we've found for thinking about organizational change efforts. To create a healthier living system, connect it more to itself. When a system is failing or underperforming, the solution will be found within the system if more and better connections are created. A failing system needs to start talking to itself, especially to those who don't even know they're part of it. The value of this practice was very evident at the beginning of the customer service revolution, when talking to customers and working with the information they provided became an important method for stimulating the organization to reach new levels of quality. Without customer inclusion and feedback, workers can't know what to change or how to make those changes. Quality standards have risen dramatically since customers have been connected to the system.
This principle encompasses a profound respect for systems. It states that they are capable of changing themselves when provided with more and new information. It states that they have a natural tendency to move toward better functioning or health. It assumes that the system already has the degree of experience it needs. This principle also implies that the critical task for a leader is to increase the number, variety, and strength of connections within the system. Introducing distant or unfamiliar members, providing access throughout the system, and through those connections stimulating the creation of new information, has become one of the main tasks for fostering organizational change.
ORGANIZING COMPLEXITY
These four principles provide a clear vision of how, within our organizations, we can work with life's natural tendency to learn and change. As we were all taught in an advertisement many years ago, we cannot ignore Mother Nature. If we insist on developing machine-like organizational change processes and ignore life's imperative to participate in creation, we will only end up with more costly failures.
Here, we have taken special care to state principles rather than techniques or methods to be followed step by step. This is to maintain our understanding of how life is organized. The organizations that life creates are highly complex. They are full of structures, norms of behavior, communication pathways, standards, and responsibilities. However, all this complexity is achieved through a very simple organizational process, one that exalts the individual need to create. The complexity of a living system is the result of individuals' free decisions regarding how best to interpret certain principles or patterns that are at the heart of that system. These simple patterns of behavior are non-negotiable and cannot be ignored. However, how they are interpreted depends on the immediate circumstance and the individuals within that circumstance. Each person is responsible for the patterns, but each person is free to engage their creativity in deciphering what those patterns mean. This organizational process enhances individual freedom, engages creativity and individuality, and yet simultaneously achieves a coherent and methodical organization.
From these simple patterns, complex organizations emerge. Structures, norms, and communication networks develop from the constant interactions among members of the system as they interpret the patterns in changing circumstances. Individuals make decisions about how best to address the patterns, and an organization emerges. Sophisticated organizational forms emerge, however, these forms always materialize from the inside out. They are never imposed from the outside in.
In human organizations, we have spent many years determining the details of the organization—its structures, values, communication channels, vision, standards, and measures. We leave these to experts or leaders to design, and then we strategize how to get them accepted by the organization. Living systems have all these characteristics and details, but they originate differently from within the system. When we think of organizations as living systems, we don't need to dismiss our concern for things like standards, measures, values, organizational structures, and plans. We don't need to let go of any of these things. But we do need to change our beliefs and behaviors regarding where these things come from. In a living system, these things are generated from within, in the process of figuring out what will work well in the current situation. In a machine, where intelligence or creative energy doesn't exist, these characteristics are designed externally and then programmed or built in. We can easily discern whether we are approaching our organization as a living system or as a machine by asking the following question: Who gets to create some aspect of the organization? We know we need structures, plans, and measures, but who creates these? The source or author is what makes the difference. People only support what they have created.
Last year, we met a middle school principal who gave us a great example of creating a complex, orderly system from a few simple patterns. He is responsible for 800 adolescents, between the ages of twelve and fourteen. Most school administrators fear this age group and impose many rules and procedures to try to control adolescents' wayward tendencies. However, his middle school classes operated with three rules, and only three rules. Everyone—students, teachers, and staff—knew the rules and used them to handle every situation. The three rules are very simple:
1. Take care of yourself.
2. Take care of others.
3. Take care of this place.
(As we've reflected on these standards, we've come to believe that they're all we need to create a better world, not just a middle school.)
Few of us would believe that such simple rules can create an orderly group of teenagers, let alone a good learning environment. Yet the principal told a story of how effective these three rules were in creating a well-functioning school. A fire broke out in a closet, and the 800 students had to be evacuated. They stood outside in the pouring rain until they could get back into the building. The principal was the last to enter and says he was greeted by 800 pairs of wet shoes lining the hallway.
Principles define what we've decided is important to us as a community or organization. They contain our agreements about what we will notice, what will disturb us. In these students' case, the wet shoes and muddy floor were something they quickly noticed, something that disturbed them because they had already agreed to take care of this place. They then acted freely to create a response that made sense to them in this unique circumstance.
THE LIVING LABORATORY OF ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE
In deciding what to emphasize in this article, we knew that you required more freedom than these students to design organizational change processes that would work well in your unique situation. Therefore, we decided to give you principles to work with—principles that we believe work with life's great capacity for change. As with all principles, once agreed upon, they need to be seriously considered. They are the standards we agree upon to keep us accountable. However, clear principles provide standards for our efforts; they never describe the details of how to do something. They don't restrict our creativity; they simply guide our designs and create coherence among our diverse efforts. Their clarity serves as an invitation to be creative. Think about how many different approaches and techniques you can create that will be congruent with the four principles we mentioned. How many different forms of practice could materialize as people in your organizations invented change processes that extolled these principles?
No two change processes need be the same. In fact, this is impossible; no technique is ever implemented the same way twice. Nothing is transferred without change. (If it were, they wouldn't be struggling with the issue of organizational change. They could have found what worked well elsewhere and introduced it successfully.) However, if we hold ourselves accountable to these principles, we can create our own change processes, confident that we are working with life rather than denying it. We would have been guided by these principles to create processes that harness the creativity and desire to contribute that resides in the vast majority of people in our organizations.
We'd like to invite you to experiment with this approach and these four principles. As with all good experiments, this doesn't just mean trying something new, but seeing what happens and learning from the results. A good experiment is a process of constant improvement, making modifications as results are obtained, trying to discover what causes the resulting effects. Therefore, whatever you wish to undertake, we ask that you observe carefully, keep a close eye on the matter, and fix whatever is necessary as you go.
One experiment you might want to try is to give these four principles to a project design team, whether one just starting out or one trying to salvage a poorly functioning change process. See what they can create as they take ownership of these principles. Encourage them to think through the application of these principles with many others in the organization. Experiment with a design that is congruent with the principles, and once this design is working, carefully note where modifications or changes need to be made. Treat this as an experiment rather than a perfect solution.
A second experiment can be conducted in any meeting, task force, or event in your organization. This experiment requires asking certain questions. Each question triggers a piece of research. We've learned that if people consciously answer these questions, they focus on critical issues such as levels of participation, engagement, and diversity of perspectives. Here are four questions we believe will be helpful:
1. Who else should be here?
2. What just happened?
3. Can we talk?
4. Who are we now?
The simplicity of these questions may lead you to believe they are insufficient or unimportant; however, consider the types of research they suggest. Every time we ask, "Who else should be here?", we must look at the system of relationships relative to the topic at hand. We want to know who is missing, and the sooner we figure that out, the sooner we can include the missing people. This question helps us expand participation gradually and carefully, as a result of what we have learned about the topic and the organization. It is an extremely simple, yet very powerful, method for becoming good systems thinkers and organizers.
Similarly, the question "What just happened?" leads us to learn from our experience. Since living systems always react, but never obey, this question leads us to what we should know if we see emerging reactions. The question moves us away from blame, opening up the possibility of learning more about who this system is and what attracts its attention.
When we ask, "Can we talk?" we're acknowledging that others perceive the world differently than we do. Imagine leaving a typical meeting where ego battles predominate. Instead of taking a stand, getting angry, or politicking, why not approach the people we disagree with and ask if we can talk with them? What if we're genuinely interested in seeing the world from their perspective? Will this allow us to work together more effectively?
Who are we now? It's a question that keeps us analyzing how we are creating ourselves, not through words and position statements, but through our moment-to-moment actions and reactions. All living systems come into their existence by what they choose to record and how they choose to respond. This is also true in human organizations, so we need to recognize that we are constantly creating the organization through our responses. To monitor our own evolution, we need to ask this question regularly. Without that monitoring, we may be surprised to realize who we have become while we weren't looking. And for organizations that establish some essential patterns, like the middle school principal, everyone needs to periodically review how they are doing. Are individuals and groups embodying the patterns? And do these patterns help make the organization what people hoped when these patterns were created?
However, questions require us to be orderly in their formulation, a discipline we rarely practice. No matter how simple these questions are, we often quickly pass them by. We feel compelled to act rather than investigate. Yet now many of us in organizations wish to change this history of act, act, act, which has led to little learning and much wasted energy. All other forms of life remain attentive and responsive, learning so continuously that science writer James Gleick mentions that life taught itself about existence. Physicist and author Fritjof Capra declares that there is no difference between living and learning: A living system is a learning system. If we do not seriously concentrate on learning in our organizations, there is no way we can transform them into something living.
Throughout this article, we've emphasized the creative freedom that life requires. We hope you'll be inspired to practice your freedom and creativity to experiment with some of the ideas, principles, and questions I've mentioned. We need everyone's best judgment and bravest experiments if we're going to create a worthy future.
by Margaret J. Wheatley & Myron Kellner-Rogers
Margaret Wheatley is an internationally acclaimed speaker and author who presents radically new practices and ideas for organizing in chaotic times. She is president of The Berkana Institute, a charitable global foundation, and was an organizational consultant for many years, as well as a professor of management in two graduate programs. Her work appears in two award-winning books, Leadership and the New Science (1992, 1999) and A Simpler Way (co-authored with Myron Kellner-Rogers, 1996,) plus several videos and dozens of articles. She draws many of her ideas from new science and life's ability to organize in self-organizing, systemic, and cooperative modes. However, increasingly her models for new organizations are drawn from her understanding of many different cultures and spiritual traditions. Her articles and work can be accessed at www.margaretwheatley.com, or by calling 801-377-2996 in Provo, Utah, USA.
