What Would It Be Like to Restore Sanity? What would it be like to work together again in creative and generous ways? What would it be like to be curious about who you're with rather than judging or fearing them? What would it be like to engage together in exploring possibilities rather than withdrawing in conflict or disagreement? What would it be like to be working well together? From 50 years working with leaders globally, I state with full confidence that leadership has never been more difficult. And it's not our fault. We've been good and caring leaders, we've led people in empowering, engaging ways to create meaningful, productive work. But now we face external conditions far beyond our control to change, dynamics intensifying at shocking speed. The perfect storm is here, created by the coalescence of climate and human-created catastrophes. As leaders dedicated to serving the causes and people we treasure, confronted by this unrelenting tsunami, what are we to do? I state my answer to this also with full confidence: We need to restore sanity by awakening the human spirit. We can achieve this only if we undertake the most challenging and meaningful work of our leader lives: Creating Islands of Sanity. An Island of Sanity is a gift of possibility and refuge created by people's commitment to form healthy community to do meaningful work. It requires sane leaders with unshakable faith in people's innate generosity, creativity, and kindness. It sets itself apart as an island to protect itself from the life-destroying dynamics, policies, and behaviors that oppress and deny the human spirit. No matter what is happening around us, we can discover practices that enliven our human spirits and produce meaningful contributions for this time.
Looks at the power of conversation for changing everything from personal relationships to organisational dysfunction, and then suggests conversation starters for meaningful discussions.
Bestselling author Margaret Wheatley issues the call for leaders to restore sanity in an insane time and become the presence of insight and compassion in the face of chaos. This book offers a path for leaders to engage well and wisely with the destructive dynamics of this time. Deepening the insights in her classic book, Leadership and the New Science, Wheatley uses two lenses to understand where we are and how we got here: the science of living systems and the pattern of collapse in complex civilizations. Using a combination of commentary, practices, quotes, and stories, Wheatley addresses questions like, what is good leadership in this crazed, conflicted world? What skills and sensitivities do leaders need in order to serve well this time? How do we lead as an Island of Sanity, creating the conditions for people to be generous, creative, and kind? Three new chapters provide richer and deeper insight for informing our choices as leaders and citizens. The first two explain why uncertainty, confusion and conflicts can only increase, touching on topics like the weaponization of information and the loss of a shared reality as we retreat to our own bubbles. The last offers practices for leaders willing to become what she calls Warriors for the Human Spirit: decent human beings serving an indecent, inhumane time.
This is an era of increasingly complex problems, fewer and fewer resources to address them, and failing solutions. Is it possible to find viable solutions to the challenges we face today as individuals, communities, and nations? This inspiring book takes readers on a learning journey to seven communities around the world to meet people who have “walked out” of limiting beliefs and assumptions and “walked on” to create healthy and resilient communities. These Walk Outs who Walk On use their ingenuity and caring to figure out how to work with what they have to create what they need. In India, we meet people from Shikshantar, a community that is rejecting the modern culture of money, with its emphasis on self-interest and scarcity, in favor of a gift culture based on generosity and reciprocity. In Zimbabwe, we discover the capacity people have to adapt and invent new ways of surviving and thriving in the face of total systems collapse. Through essays, stories, and beautiful color photographs, Wheatley and Frieze immerse us in these communities that are accomplishing extraordinary things by relying on everyone to be an entrepreneur, a leader, an artist. From Mexico to Greece, from Columbus, Ohio, to Johannesburg, South Africa, we discover that every community has within itself the ingenuity, intelligence, and inventiveness to solve the seemingly insolvable. “It’s almost like we discovered a gift inside ourselves,” one Brazilian said, “something that was already there.” “This book gives insight and beauty to the new world beyond consumerism and all of its side effects. Written with poetic and reflective grace, it is an intimate journey through communities that are creating a future with their own hearts, hands, and relationships.” —Peter Block, author of Community and coauthor of The Abundant Community The Enhanced Edition includes 25 minutes of animation, video, and audio. The animation shows the “Two Loops Theory of Change” with a voiceover from co-author Deborah Frieze. Three videos show inspirational “Walk On” communities in Brazil, South Africa, and India. This edition also includes the “Walk Out Walk On” theme song. Margaret Wheatley cofounded and led the Berkana Institute, a global foundation that partners with people developing healthy and resilient communities. Deborah Frieze succeeded her as Berkana’s president and created the Berkana Exchange with many of the people described in this book. Margaret is the author of several books, including Leadership and the New Science, A Simpler Way, Turning to One Another, Finding Our Way, and Perseverance.
By the bestselling author of Leadership and the New Science and Turning to One Another Thoughtful, compassionate reflections on how we can carry on with joy despite difficulties, challenges, and disappointments Illuminated by both beautiful original paintings and by poems and quotations from a variety of traditions and cultures In this inspiring and beautifully illustrated book, bestselling author Margaret Wheatley offers guidance to people everywhere for how to persevere through challenges in their personal lives, with their families, at their workplaces, in their communities, and in their struggles to make a better world. She provides hope, wisdom, and perspective for learning the discipline of perseverance. Wheatley does not offer the usual feel-good, rah-rah messages. Instead, she focuses on the situations, feelings, and challenges that can, over time, cause us to lose heart or lose our way. Perseverance is a day-by-day decision not to give up. We have to notice the moments when we feel lost or overwhelmed or betrayed or exhausted and note how we respond to them. And we have to notice the rewarding times, when we experience the joy of working together on something hard but worthwhile, when we realize we’ve made a small difference. In a series of concise and compassionate essays Wheately names a behavior or dynamic—such as fearlessness, guilt, joy, jealousy—that supports or impedes our efforts to persevere. She puts each in a broader human or timeless perspective, offering ways to either live by or transcend each one. These essays are self-contained—you can thumb through the book and find what attracts you in the moment. Perseverance helps you to see yourself and your situation clearly and assume responsibility for changing a situation or our reaction to it if it’s one that troubles us. There deliberately are no examples of other people or their experiences. You are the example—your personal experiences are the basis for change. In addition to Wheatley’s graceful essays there are poems and quotations drawn from traditions and cultures around the world and throughout history. The book is deeply grounded spiritually, accessing human experience and wisdom from many sources. This grounding and inclusiveness support the essential message—human being throughout time have persevered. We’re just the most recent ones to face these challenges, and we can meet them as those who came before us did. As Wheatley quotes the elders of the Hopi Nation: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
The acclaimed author “richly articulates how the insights of modern science . . . can usher in a new era of human and planetary health” (Systems Thinker). For years, Margaret Wheatley has written eloquently about humanizing our organizations and helping people to work together more effectively and compassionately. She has shown how breakthroughs in chaos theory and quantum physics can enable organizations to function more like responsive, self-organizing living systems, rather than cold mechanisms of control. And she has gradually expanded these ideas into the wider arena of human society. In short, Margaret Wheatley is one of the most innovative and influential organizational thinkers of our time, and Finding Our Way brings together her shorter writings for the first time, touching on all the topics she has addressed throughout her career, showing how she has applied the ideas in her books in many different situations. “However,” she writes, “this is not a collection of articles. I updated, revised, or substantially added to the original content of each one. In this way, everything written here represents my current views on the subjects I write about.” Provocative, challenging, at times poetic, and often deeply moving, Finding Our Way sums up Wheatley’s thinking on a diverse scope of topics from leadership and management to education and raising children in turbulent times; from societal commentary to specific organizational techniques and more. “Wheatley provocatively lays out how managers must operate to be effective in a system that is ‘alive’ . . . Finding Our Way challenges us to see the enterprises we lead in new light.” —Leader’s Beacon
We want life to be less arduous and more delightful. We want to be able to think differently about how to organize human activities." So begins A Simpler Way, an exploration of a radically different world view that will reshape how we think about organizing all human endeavor. Margaret J. Wheatley and coauthor Myron Kellner-Rogers explore the question: "How could we organize human endeavor if we developed different understandings of how life organizes itself?" They draw on the work of scientists, philosophers, poets, novelists, spiritual teachers, colleagues, audiences, and their own experience in search of new ways of understanding life and how organizing activities occur. A Simpler Way presents a profoundly different world view that can change how we live our lives and how we can create organizations that thrive. A Simpler Way explores fundamental new beliefs about organizations and life. Like Leadership and the New Science, this new book is rooted in science but breaks new ground by developing insights from literature, spiritual teachings, and direct experience. The authors challenge many assumptions about life, organizations, and change, while providing inspiration and guidance for readers on their own journey to a simpler way to organize their endeavors. The authors describe a new paradigm of life as self-organizing and coevolving, drawing on sources that support modern science but predate its findings by thousands of years. They examine five major themes-play, organization, self, emergence, and coherence-each grounded in both the science and philosophy of a world that knows how to organize itself. Each theme is explored in depth, and then applied to how we think about human organizations. The book begins and ends with photo essays, providing visual imagery that recalls readers to their own experience with a world that is creative, playful, and self-organizing. Written in a relaxed, poetic, and inviting style, the book welcomes the reader into this exploration of a new way of being in the world, one which can give us increased organizing capacity and effectiveness with less of the stress that plagues us now.
The new edition of the bestselling, acclaimed, and influential guide to applying the new science to organizations and management. In this new edition, Margaret 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. 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. This book 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.
So begins A Simpler Way, an exploration of a radically different world view that will reshape how we think about organizing all human endeavor. Margaret J. Wheatley and coauthor Myron Kellner-Rogers explore the question: ''How could we organize human endeavor if we developed different understandings of how life organizes itself?'' They draw on the work of scientists, philosophers, poets, novelists, spiritual teachers, colleagues, audiences, and their own experience in search of new ways of understanding life and how organizing activities occur. A Simpler Way presents a profoundly different world view that can change how we live our lives and how we can create organizations that thrive. A Simpler Way explores fundamental new beliefs about organizations and life. Like Leadership and the New Science, this new book is rooted in science but breaks new ground by developing insights from literature, spiritual teachings, and direct experience. The authors challenge many assumptions about life, organizations, and change, while providing inspiration and guidance for readers on their own journey to a simpler way to organize their endeavors. The authors describe a new paradigm of life as self-organizing and coevolving, drawing on sources that support modern science but predate its findings by thousands of years. They examine five major themes-play, organization, self, emergence, and coherence-each grounded in both the science and philosophy of a world that knows how to organize itself. Each theme is explored in depth, and then applied to how we think about human organizations. The book begins and ends with photo essays, providing visual imagery that recalls readers to their own experience with a world that is creative, playful, and self-organizing. Written in a relaxed, poetic, and inviting style, the book welcomes the reader into this exploration of a new way of being in the world, one which can give us increased organizing capacity and effectiveness with less of the stress that plagues us now.
Bestselling author Margaret Wheatley issues the call for leaders to restore sanity in an insane time and become the presence of insight and compassion in the face of chaos. This book offers a path for leaders to engage well and wisely with the destructive dynamics of this time. Deepening the insights in her classic book, Leadership and the New Science, Wheatley uses two lenses to understand where we are and how we got here: the science of living systems and the pattern of collapse in complex civilizations. Using a combination of commentary, practices, quotes, and stories, Wheatley addresses questions like, what is good leadership in this crazed, conflicted world? What skills and sensitivities do leaders need in order to serve well this time? How do we lead as an Island of Sanity, creating the conditions for people to be generous, creative, and kind? Three new chapters provide richer and deeper insight for informing our choices as leaders and citizens. The first two explain why uncertainty, confusion and conflicts can only increase, touching on topics like the weaponization of information and the loss of a shared reality as we retreat to our own bubbles. The last offers practices for leaders willing to become what she calls Warriors for the Human Spirit: decent human beings serving an indecent, inhumane time.
Wheatley provides encouraging maps for how to design organizations based on living systems' capacity for creativity, change, and adaptation. But in the 20 years since the first publication, she's seen that in spite of our best efforts the world that's emerged is on a destructive trajectory.
The new edition of the bestselling, acclaimed, and influential guide to applying the new science to organizations and management. In this new edition, Margaret 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. 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. This book 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.
At a time when most communities’ resources are stretched past the breaking point, how is it possible to deal with the enormous challenges that families, neighborhoods, cities, regions, and nations face today? This inspiring book takes readers to seven communities around the world where the people have walked out of limiting beliefs and practices that precluded solutions to major social problems, and walked on to discover bold new ways to meet their needs. This book is a true learning journey, filled with intimate stories and portraits of the people and places the authors came to know through years of working together to transform their communities. The journey begins in Mexico, then moves to Brazil, South Africa, Zimbabwe, India, Greece and the U.S. The authors’ lives and ways of thinking have been transformed by these experiences and relationships – an experience they hope to recreate for the reader through vivid prose and photos. The reader will experience first hand how a change of beliefs about people results in new capacities and the possibility of a more healthy future.
In this inspiring and beautifully illustrated book, bestselling author Margaret Wheatley offers guidance to people everywhere for how to persevere through challenges in their personal lives, with their families, at their workplaces, in their communities, and in their struggles to make a better world. She provides hope, wisdom, and perspective for learning the discipline of perseverance. Wheatley does not offer the usual feel-good, rah-rah messages. Instead, she focuses on the situations, feelings, and challenges that can, over time, cause us to lose heart or lose our way. Perseverance is a day-by-day decision not to give up. We have to notice the moments when we feel lost or overwhelmed or betrayed or exhausted and note how we respond to them. And we have to notice the rewarding times, when we experience the joy of working together on something hard but worthwhile, when we realize we've made a small difference. In a series of concise and compassionate essays Wheately names a behavior or dynamic—such as fearlessness, guilt, joy, jealousy—that supports or impedes our efforts to persevere. She puts each in a broader human or timeless perspective, offering ways to either live by or transcend each one. These essays are self-contained—you can thumb through the book and find what attracts you in the moment. Perseverance helps you to see yourself and your situation clearly and assume responsibility for changing a situation or our reaction to it if it's one that troubles us. There deliberately are no examples of other people or their experiences. You are the example—your personal experiences are the basis for change. In addition to Wheatley's graceful essays there are poems and quotations drawn from traditions and cultures around the world and throughout history. The book is deeply grounded spiritually, accessing human experience and wisdom from many sources. This grounding and inclusiveness support the essential message—human being throughout time have persevered. We're just the most recent ones to face these challenges, and we can meet them as those who came before us did. As Wheatley quotes the elders of the Hopi Nation: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.”
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of her classic Leadership and the New Science, bestselling author Margaret Wheatley once again turns to the new science of living systems to help leaders persevere in a time of great turmoil. I know it is possible for leaders to use their power and influence, their insight and compassion, to lead people back to an understanding of who we are as human beings, to create the conditions for our basic human qualities of generosity, contribution, community and love to be evoked no matter what. I know it is possible to experience grace and joy in the midst of tragedy and loss. I know it is possible to create islands of sanity in the midst of wildly disruptive seas. I know it is possible because I have worked with leaders over many years in places that knew chaos and breakdown long before this moment. And I have studied enough history to know that such leaders always arise when they are most needed. Now it's our turn.
What Would It Be Like to Restore Sanity? What would it be like to work together again in creative and generous ways? What would it be like to be curious about who you're with rather than judging or fearing them? What would it be like to engage together in exploring possibilities rather than withdrawing in conflict or disagreement? What would it be like to be working well together? From 50 years working with leaders globally, I state with full confidence that leadership has never been more difficult. And it's not our fault. We've been good and caring leaders, we've led people in empowering, engaging ways to create meaningful, productive work. But now we face external conditions far beyond our control to change, dynamics intensifying at shocking speed. The perfect storm is here, created by the coalescence of climate and human-created catastrophes. As leaders dedicated to serving the causes and people we treasure, confronted by this unrelenting tsunami, what are we to do? I state my answer to this also with full confidence: We need to restore sanity by awakening the human spirit. We can achieve this only if we undertake the most challenging and meaningful work of our leader lives: Creating Islands of Sanity. An Island of Sanity is a gift of possibility and refuge created by people's commitment to form healthy community to do meaningful work. It requires sane leaders with unshakable faith in people's innate generosity, creativity, and kindness. It sets itself apart as an island to protect itself from the life-destroying dynamics, policies, and behaviors that oppress and deny the human spirit. No matter what is happening around us, we can discover practices that enliven our human spirits and produce meaningful contributions for this time.
The acclaimed author “richly articulates how the insights of modern science . . . can usher in a new era of human and planetary health” (Systems Thinker). For years, Margaret Wheatley has written eloquently about humanizing our organizations and helping people to work together more effectively and compassionately. She has shown how breakthroughs in chaos theory and quantum physics can enable organizations to function more like responsive, self-organizing living systems, rather than cold mechanisms of control. And she has gradually expanded these ideas into the wider arena of human society. In short, Margaret Wheatley is one of the most innovative and influential organizational thinkers of our time, and Finding Our Way brings together her shorter writings for the first time, touching on all the topics she has addressed throughout her career, showing how she has applied the ideas in her books in many different situations. “However,” she writes, “this is not a collection of articles. I updated, revised, or substantially added to the original content of each one. In this way, everything written here represents my current views on the subjects I write about.” Provocative, challenging, at times poetic, and often deeply moving, Finding Our Way sums up Wheatley’s thinking on a diverse scope of topics from leadership and management to education and raising children in turbulent times; from societal commentary to specific organizational techniques and more. “Wheatley provocatively lays out how managers must operate to be effective in a system that is ‘alive’ . . . Finding Our Way challenges us to see the enterprises we lead in new light.” —Leader’s Beacon
We want life to be less arduous and more delightful. We want to be able to think differently about how to organize human activities." So begins A Simpler Way, an exploration of a radically different world view that will reshape how we think about organizing all human endeavor. Margaret J. Wheatley and coauthor Myron Kellner-Rogers explore the question: "How could we organize human endeavor if we developed different understandings of how life organizes itself?" They draw on the work of scientists, philosophers, poets, novelists, spiritual teachers, colleagues, audiences, and their own experience in search of new ways of understanding life and how organizing activities occur. A Simpler Way presents a profoundly different world view that can change how we live our lives and how we can create organizations that thrive. A Simpler Way explores fundamental new beliefs about organizations and life. Like Leadership and the New Science, this new book is rooted in science but breaks new ground by developing insights from literature, spiritual teachings, and direct experience. The authors challenge many assumptions about life, organizations, and change, while providing inspiration and guidance for readers on their own journey to a simpler way to organize their endeavors. The authors describe a new paradigm of life as self-organizing and coevolving, drawing on sources that support modern science but predate its findings by thousands of years. They examine five major themes-play, organization, self, emergence, and coherence-each grounded in both the science and philosophy of a world that knows how to organize itself. Each theme is explored in depth, and then applied to how we think about human organizations. The book begins and ends with photo essays, providing visual imagery that recalls readers to their own experience with a world that is creative, playful, and self-organizing. Written in a relaxed, poetic, and inviting style, the book welcomes the reader into this exploration of a new way of being in the world, one which can give us increased organizing capacity and effectiveness with less of the stress that plagues us now.
Looks at the power of conversation for changing everything from personal relationships to organisational dysfunction, and then suggests conversation starters for meaningful discussions.
In Sweet Company takes readers on a spiritual odyssey into the hearts and minds of some of the most influential women of our time —Olympia Dukakis, Sister Helen Prejean, Riane Eisler, Zainab Salbi, Margaret Wheatley, Katherine Dunham, Reverend Lauren Artress, Grandmother Twylah Hurd Nitsch, Sri Daya Mata, Rabbi Laura Geller, Le Ly Hayslip, Miriam Polster, Alma Flor Ada, and Gail Williamson. For all these women, their spiritual life nourishes them and serves as a dependable compass for decision making. Written with warmth and wisdom, In Sweet Company tells their stories, their personal journeys, and relates their thoughts on living a spiritual life.
So begins A Simpler Way, an exploration of a radically different world view that will reshape how we think about organizing all human endeavor. Margaret J. Wheatley and coauthor Myron Kellner-Rogers explore the question: ''How could we organize human endeavor if we developed different understandings of how life organizes itself?'' They draw on the work of scientists, philosophers, poets, novelists, spiritual teachers, colleagues, audiences, and their own experience in search of new ways of understanding life and how organizing activities occur. A Simpler Way presents a profoundly different world view that can change how we live our lives and how we can create organizations that thrive. A Simpler Way explores fundamental new beliefs about organizations and life. Like Leadership and the New Science, this new book is rooted in science but breaks new ground by developing insights from literature, spiritual teachings, and direct experience. The authors challenge many assumptions about life, organizations, and change, while providing inspiration and guidance for readers on their own journey to a simpler way to organize their endeavors. The authors describe a new paradigm of life as self-organizing and coevolving, drawing on sources that support modern science but predate its findings by thousands of years. They examine five major themes-play, organization, self, emergence, and coherence-each grounded in both the science and philosophy of a world that knows how to organize itself. Each theme is explored in depth, and then applied to how we think about human organizations. The book begins and ends with photo essays, providing visual imagery that recalls readers to their own experience with a world that is creative, playful, and self-organizing. Written in a relaxed, poetic, and inviting style, the book welcomes the reader into this exploration of a new way of being in the world, one which can give us increased organizing capacity and effectiveness with less of the stress that plagues us now.
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