A bestseller–more than 300,000 copies sold, translated into seventeen languages, and featured in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Miami Herald, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Fortune • Shows how discoveries in quantum physics, biology, and chaos theory enable us to deal successfully with change and uncertainty in our organizations and our lives • Includes a new chapter on how the new sciences can help us understand and cope with some of the major social challenges of our times We live in a time of chaos, rich in potential for new possibilities. A new world is being born. We need new ideas, new ways of seeing, and new relationships to help us now. New science–the new discoveries in biology, chaos theory, and quantum physics that are changing our understanding of how the world works–offers this guidance. It describes a world where chaos is natural, where order exists "for free." It displays the intricate webs of cooperation that connect us. It assures us that life seeks order, but uses messes to get there. Leadership and the New Science is the bestselling, most acclaimed, and most influential guide to applying the new science to organizations and management. In it, Wheatley describes how the new science radically alters our understanding of the world, and how it can teach us to live and work well together in these chaotic times. It will teach you how to move with greater certainty and easier grace into the new forms of organizations and communities that are taking shape. You'll learn that: • Relationships are what matters–even at the subatomic level • Life is a vast web of interconnections where cooperation and participation are required • Chaos and change are the only route to transformation In this expanded edition, Wheatley provides examples of how non-linear networks and self-organizing systems are flourishing in the modern world. In the midst of turbulence, Wheatley shows, we create work and lives rich in meaning.
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Margaret J. Wheatley. Leadership and the New Science. Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
Prologue: Maps to the Real World
Introduction. Searching for a Simpler Way to Lead Organizations
Chapter 1. Discovering an Orderly World
Chapter 2. Newtonian Organizations in a Quantum Age
Chapter 3. Space Is Not Empty: Invisible Fields That Shape Behavior
Chapter 4. The Participative Nature of the Universe
Chapter 5. Change, Stability, and Renewal: The Paradoxes of Self-Organizing Systems
Chapter 6. The Creative Energy of the Universe – Information
Chapter 7. Chaos and the Strange Attractor of Meaning
Chapter 8. Change: The Capacity of Life
Chapter 9. The New Scientific Management
Chapter 10. The Real World
Epilogue. Journeying to a New World
Illustration Credits
To Further Explore these Ideas and the Work of Margaret Wheatley
The Berkana Institute
Initiatives of The Berkana Institute
Bibliography
About the Author
About Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Be Connected
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I have always thought of this book as a collection of intriguing maps, much like those used by the early explorers when they voyaged in search of new lands. Their early maps and commentaries were descriptive but vague, enticing but not fully revealing. They pointed in certain directions, illuminated landmarks, warned of dangers, yet their elusive references and blank spaces served to encourage others to explore and discover. They contained colorful embellishments of places that had struck the discoverer’s imagination, yet ignored other important places or contained significant errors. Many early maps contain warnings: “Here there be dragons,” or “Regions very imperfectly known.” But these maps contained enough knowledge to inspire those who were willing, to dare similar voyages of their own.
The territory that I began mapping when this book was first published in 1992 has now revealed many more of its features. It is the world we live in daily, a world of uncertainty, sudden shifts, and webs of relationships extending around the world. In 1990, as I began to apply the new sciences to the challenges of leadership, I noted that “we live in a time of chaos, as rich in the potential for disaster as for new possibilities.” What’s ironic is that I now look back to 1990 as the good old days, when we had time and space to reflect on ideas, when we had the luxury to think about a new worldview and consider whether we believed it or not. The tone of this book reflects that more spacious era. It is a gentle invitation to become curious, to discover your own questions, to see if your experiences confirm or disconfirm new science, and to engage with me and many others as explorers of this new world only beginning to become visible.
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Whatever your personal beliefs and experiences, I invite you to consider that we need a new worldview to navigate this chaotic time. We cannot hope to make sense using our old maps. It won’t help to dust them off or reprint them in bold colors. The more we rely on them, the more disoriented we become. They cause us to focus on the wrong things and blind us to what’s significant. Using them, we will journey only to greater chaos.
Now that I’ve spent years applying the lens of new science to organizations, communities, governments, nation states, and to myself and family, I can report on the gifts available with a new paradigm. I have discovered insights and explanations about why things are unfolding as they are. I have been inspired to experiment with new ideas and solutions. I feel I am learning how to move more effectively and gracefully through this time.
