Margaret J. Wheatley
Circles create soothing space, where even reticent people can realize that their voice is welcome.Collection: Space
Successful organizations, including the Military, have learned that the higher the risk, the more necessary it is to engage everyone's commitment and intelligence.Collection: Intelligence
I'm sad to report that in the past few years, ever since uncertainty became our insistent 21st century companion, leadership has taken a great leap backwards to the familiar territory of command and control.Collection: Leadership
We know from science that nothing in the universe exists as an isolated or independent entity.Collection: Science
Determination, energy, and courage appear spontaneously when we care deeply about something. We take risks that are unimaginable in any other context.Collection: Courage
In our daily life, we encounter people who are angry, deceitful, intent only on satisfying their own needs. There is so much anger, distrust, greed, and pettiness that we are losing our capacity to work well together.Collection: Anger
In these troubled, uncertain times, we don't need more command and control; we need better means to engage everyone's intelligence in solving challenges and crises as they arise.Collection: Intelligence
Too many problem-solving sessions become battlegrounds where decisions are made based on power rather than intelligence.Collection: Intelligence
Most people associate command and control leadership with the military.Collection: Leadership
I think a major act of leadership right now, call it a radical act, is to create the places and processes so people can actually learn together, using our experiences.Collection: Leadership
I believe that the capacity that any organisation needs is for leadership to appear anywhere it is needed, when it is needed.Collection: Leadership
When we can lay down our fear and anger and choose responses other than aggression, we create the conditions for bringing out the best in us humans.Collection: Anger
I think it is quite dangerous for an organisation to think they can predict where they are going to need leadership. It needs to be something that people are willing to assume if it feels relevant, given the context of any situation.Collection: Leadership
Hopelessness has surprised me with patience.Collection: Patience
There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.Collection: Community
Very great change starts from very small conversations, held among people who care.Collection: People
Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it aloneCollection: Inspirational
Despite current ads and slogans, the world doesn't change one person at a time. It changes when networks of relationships form among people who share a common cause and vision of what's possible. This is good news for those of us intent on creating a positive future. Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections. We don't need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead, we need to connect with kindred spirits. Through these relationships, we will develop the new knowledge, practices, courage and commitment that lead to broad-based change.Collection: Change
When we seek for connection, we restore the world to wholeness. Our seemingly separate lives become meaningful as we discover how truly necessary we are to each other.Collection: Inspirational
In organizations, real power and energy is generated through relationships. The patterns of relationships and the capacities to form them are more important than tasks, functions, roles, and positions.Collection: Leadership
Ask what's possible, not what's wrong. Keep asking.Collection: Asking
Nothing has given me more hope recently than to observe how simple conversations give birth to actions that can change lives and restore our faith in the future. There is no more powerful way to initiate significant social change than to start a conversation. When a group of people discover that they share a common concern, that's when the process of change begins.Collection: Powerful
we can't be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion; cherished interpretations must dissolve to make way for what's new. Great ideas and inventions miraculously appear in the space of not knowing.Collection: Change
[A]ll change, even very large and powerful change, begins when a few people start talking with one another about something they care about.Collection: Powerful
Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful.Collection: Reflection
One of the easiest human acts is also the most healing. Listening to someone. Simply listening. Not advising or coaching, but silently and fully listening.Collection: Inspirational
I think a major act of leadership right now, call it a radical act, is to create the places and processes so people can actually learn together, using our experiencesCollection: Leadership
It's not differences that divide us. It's our judgments about each other that do.Collection: Leadership
It is time to stop waiting for someone to save us. It is time to face the truth of our situation - that we're all in this together, that we all have a voice - and figure out how to mobilize the hearts and minds of everyone in our workplaces and communities.Collection: Heart
We can no longer stand at the end of something we visualized in detail and plan backwards from that future. Instead we must stand at the beginning, clear in our mind, with a willingness to be involved in discovery... it asks that we participate rather than plan.Collection: Discovery
A leader is one who... Has more faith in people than they do, and . . . who holds opportunities open long enough for their competence to re-emerge.Collection: Opportunity
Leadership is a series of behaviors rather than a role for heroes.Collection: Leadership
A leader these days needs to be a host - one who convenes diversity; who convenes all viewpoints in creative processes where our mutual intelligence can come forth.Collection: Learning
we don't have to agree with each other in order to think well together. There is no need for us to be joined at the head. We are joined by our human hearts.Collection: Heart
To make a system stronger, we need to make stronger relationships.Collection: Stronger
Change always involves a dark night when everything falls apart. Yet if this period of dissolution is used to create new meaning, then chaos ends and new order emerges.Collection: Fall
Listening is such a simple act. It requires us to be present, and that takes practice, but we don't have to do anything else. We don't have to advise, or coach, or sound wise. We just have to be willing to sit there and listen.Collection: Wise
All social change begins with a conversation.Collection: Social
Our growing addiction to the Internet is impairing precious human capacities such as memory, concentration, pattern recognition, meaning-making, and intimacy. We are becoming more restless, more impatient, more demanding, and more insatiable, even as we become more connected and creative. We are rapidly losing the ability to think long about any- thing, even those issues we care about. We flit, moving restlessly from one link to another.Collection: Memories
I believe that the capacity that any organization needs is for leadership to appear anywhere it is needed, when it is needed.Collection: Leadership
I believe that our very survival depends upon us becoming better systems thinkers.Collection: Believe
Power is the capacity to generate relationships.Collection: Capacity
Life doesn't move in straight lines, and neither does a good conversation.Collection: Moving
I've found that I can only change how I act if I stay aware of my beliefs and assumptions. Thoughts always reveal themselves in behavior.Collection: Healing
Whatever life we have experienced, if we can tell our story to someone who listens, we find it easier to deal with our circumstances.Collection: Stories
In fact, Western culture has spent decades drawing lines and boxes around interconnected phenomena. We've chunked the world into pieces rather than explored its webby nature.Collection: Drawing
There are many benefits to this process of listening. The first is that good listeners are created as people feel listened to. Listening is a reciprocal process - we become more attentive to others if they have attended to us.Collection: People
Circles create soothing space.Collection: Circles
Many of us have created lives that give very little support for experimentation. We believe that answers already exist out there, independent of us. What if we invested more time and attention to our own experimentation? We could focus our efforts on discovering solutions that work uniquely for us.Collection: Work
In our daily life, we encounter people we are angry, deceitful, intent only on satisfying ere is so their own needs. There is so much anger, distrust, greed, and pettiness that we are losing our capacity to work well together.Collection: Work