Margaret Wheatley

[Part 2 of 2]

Click here to go to Part 1

EDITORS NOTE: The Shambhala Sun is not one of the first places I would look for a discussion of management and leadership theory. But the following interview, conducted by Sun Editor in Chief Melvin McLeod provides some great insights for managers at any level.

The Sun, a Canadian/U.S. magazine, publishes monthly from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, focusing on "Buddhism, Culture, Meditation, Life."

[This interview is republished at WorkTracks with the express permission of the Shambhala Sun. The Sun retains all copyrights. Reproduction by any means is prohibited.]
© Copyright 2001 Shambhala Sun

Peter Senge and Margaret Wheatley are renowned organizational theorists. Yet their agenda is surprisingly spiritual. Anyone who cares about the quality of our lives at work will find what they say important and inspiring. 

MELVIN MCLEOD (Editor, The Shambhala Sun):  We’ve talked about the aspect of personal practice and the overall environment of change in which companies must operate. Let’s turn to the nature of the organization itself.

PETER SENGE: Organizations arise because people are working together. Organizations are living phenomena in a very real sense and they were appreciated in that spirit for a very long time. It was only a couple of hundred years ago that our view of organizations—and particularly business organizations—really began to change.

This goes back to the roots of Western science, to people like Kepler, Newton and Descartes who conceived of the cosmos as like a giant clockwork. When we started to harness the power of machines in the early years of the industrial era, gradually we started to see more and more of life as machine-like. In fact, the "machine age" is what many people have dubbed the industrial era, because of how powerful the image of the machine has been in our lives. It leads us to see everything, including ourselves, as nothing but an elaborate set of mechanisms. This way of thinking has developed insidiously over a few hundred years, to the point where we no longer realize how captive we are to it.

Of course, this view includes seeing our organizations as machines. A company, in this sense, is literally a machine for making money. You have inputs, whether they’re material resources, energy resources or human resources, and out the other end comes money. If money doesn’t come out, the machine is no good and you throw it away or try to fix it. You fix it by getting new leaders, who can drive change or control things better. In the machine-age world, "to manage" literally means "to control."

On the other hand, look at the literal meaning of the word "company." It does not mean a machine, it means a group of people, and we still preserve that usage when we speak of "a company of men." The word "company" derives from the sharing of bread, from the French word compagner. It’s the same root as the word "companion." In Swedish, the oldest word for company means "nourishment for life" and the oldest symbol for company in Chinese means "life’s work." So we have these much older ideas of what a company is all about: a group of people creating something together, and consequently being a kind of living force.

MCLEOD: If we view the organization in that way, what does it mean to be a leader?

MARGARET WHEATLEY: The leader is one who is able to work with and evoke the very powerful and positive aspects of human creativity. You don’t create these energies, but you do have to support them. You do have to have a sincere belief in the commitment and creativity of the people you’re working with.

We still feel very badly about each other. In my estimation, we’re quicker and quicker to take affront or to be affronted, to take umbrage, to feel insulted, to assume that other people are mal-intended, rather than well-intended. This is where we are as a culture. We’re very far from each other; we’re very far from believing in each other.

So I’ve been working with the idea that a leader is one who has more faith in people than they do in each other, or in themselves. The leader is one who courageously holds out opportunities for people to come back together, to be engaged in the meaningful work of the organization, whatever it is. The leader is one who relies on people’s creativity and their desire to do something meaningful.

So the first act of a great leader, I believe, is an act of faith. It’s believing that human nature is the blessing, not the problem. That’s one of the principles that I work with right now—that we are the blessing, not the problem. Then if you actually make that leap of faith, you go into these organizational processes that we’ve spent about ten years developing, and I feel good about a lot of them: calling the whole system together, finding ways for people to be in dialogue, noticing that people can be very committed to the work of the organization.

So I see the leader as the one who calls people together, who supports them with resources, who keeps the field clear so that they can do this work. The leader is the beacon of belief that we really are sufficient, that we really are talented enough to make this work. The leader displays that faith in people continuously.

SENGE: That’s lovely. It reminds me of Douglas MacGregor’s epochal book, The Human Side of Enterprise, in which he says that we have a fundamental choice as our starting point: Do we believe that people are good? Do we believe people truly want to work? Do we believe people want to contribute? If this is not our conviction, then everything we do from that point on must be a kind of manipulation, to get something out of people which they otherwise would not bring forth on their own.

I think Meg has hit on something very central. These first steps set the direction of the journey. For instance, take this into a particular area, like hierarchy. There is hierarchy based on a belief in original sin, that people are fundamentally flawed, or to use Meg’s phrase, that they are not sufficient. Then there are hierarchies based on the belief that people are sufficient.

There’s been a tendency in recent years to make hierarchy a kind of whipping boy, to blame everything on hierarchy. But hierarchy is a set of social relations that we invoke. We create hierarchy, and the real question is what’s going on in us in that creating. By and large, the hierarchies we have today, whether in schools or businesses, are hierarchies of obedience. Their fundamental modus operandi is obedience or compliance. But we do also have hierarchies of wisdom. We acknowledge elders and have for thousands of years. In this, we invoke a profoundly different type of hierarchy. There’s no obedience required whatsoever; it’s based on choice. If a person has lived longer or worked in a certain way to achieve something, we acknowledge that, and we say, I can learn from you. I’m more than happy to be your student.

WHEATLEY: This whole quest for obedience is another one of those things that takes us in the opposite direction from life. One of the fundamental characteristics of anything living is the freedom to choose. The organism chooses whether to notice something, then it chooses whether or not to be disturbed. If the organism chooses to be disturbed, it still retains the fundamental freedom to decide how it will respond. Obedience is not a natural life process.

SENGE: Living systems, by their nature, resist being obedient.

WHEATLEY: And Peter, the consequence of not honoring life’s intrinsic right to self-determination is that when we ask people to obey and they do obey, they become lifeless. They shut down. They disappear. They become automatons.

SENGE: You get the obedience but you lose the spirit.

WHEATLEY: You lose the life.

MCLEOD: In that light, perhaps one could argue that the most spiritually deadening influence in our society today is the structure of the organization and the workplace.

WHEATLEY: I wouldn’t say that. I would say that the greatest spiritual problems are these deep convictions, perceptions or beliefs in the Western mindset about what is valuable in life.

MCLEOD: Yes, but isn’t their most powerful manifestation in the workplace, given we spend half our waking hours there?

SENGE: I’ll give you a way to say both. It’s like what I said before about hierarchy. It’s easy to blame hierarchy, it’s easy to blame the organization, but we have to remember that we are the ones creating all of these. We don’t have workplaces the way they are because of the laws of physics. They are nothing but the results of the habits of human behavior. And unless we start to realize that, we’ll keep trying to fix it "out there." We’ll keep trying to fix the form of it. We’ll reorganize or try to find the right leader to follow, rather than realizing that we have the leaders we have and the organizations we have because we’ve asked for them and because we’re causing them.

Having said that, I do think the growth in the number of large institutions over the last hundred years or so is a significant development. There have always been schools of many forms, but there weren’t school systems. There have always been companies, there have been various forms of commerce for thousands of years, but we didn’t have global corporations. This is a significant change in the human landscape. If we were to treat it literally as a living phenomenon, we could say that this new species of large institutions embodies and enacts this deep sensibility that Meg is talking about, or you might say, this "insensibility."

These institutions now embody on a large scale this way of being that is so out of touch with who we are and the nature of living phenomena. So I do think it’s fair to say that one of the places that we might find a great degree of leverage in bringing about change is in this institutional milieu. But we have to be careful to realize we’re talking about schools and non-profit organizations, just as much as we’re talking about corporations. There’s no one set of culprits here. It’s all institutions.

WHEATLEY: I absolutely agree. What we really need to change are our fundamental organizing behaviors or habits. That’s why this time is different in many ways. This is a time when very large institutions now exert an unparalleled power over individual behavior. I do feel there are more and more people trying to act out of compassion, but we still don’t know we could choose a different way of organizing. So we get non-governmental organizations all over the world starting to manifest the same kind of institutional paralysis as the large governments that they grew up in response to. It’s the great challenge of our time to understand that the way we organize is increasing the problems we face.

SENGE: People come together in organizations for, in some sense, a noble purpose, but are finding ways to constrict or even destroy life in the process. And when we really probe deeply into that way of organizing, we’ll find ourselves. It’s where we’ll find our own fears and anxieties and beliefs played out. We won’t find somebody behind the curtain who’s causing it to happen.

The change must be both personal and institutional. It can’t be one or the other. It’s a little bit like Taoism, which basically works through the body. Taoists know that the self and the body are not the same and that distinguishing the two is a critical part of your cultivation. In a sense, we’re trying to be organizational Taoists. We’re saying we have this larger body we’ve created, called an institutional body. It could be a vehicle for cultivation, just as a physical body can be a body for cultivation, if we could start to see it that way.

Click here to go to Part One of
Changing How We Work Together

Peter Senge, Ph.D., is a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and chairman of the Society for Organizational Learning. His best-selling book, The Fifth Discipline (1990), has been called one of the most important management books of the twentieth-century. He is also co-author of The Dance of Change (1999) and Schools that Learn (2000).

Margaret Wheatley, Ed.D., is the author of Leadership and the New Science and co-author of A Simpler Way. She is president of the Berkana Institute, a non-profit foundation supporting the discovery of new organizational forms, and a principal in Kellner-Rogers & Wheatley Inc., an international consulting firm.

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