Margaret Wheatley Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful. It's amazing to me how much we do, but how little time we spend reflecting on what we just did.

Margaret Wheatley
Disorder can play a critical role in giving birth to new, higher forms of order.

Margaret Wheatley
The dense and tangled web of life-the interconnected nature of reality—now reveals itself on a daily basis. Since September 11th, think about how much you've learned about people, nations, and ways of life that previously you'd known nothing about. We've been learning how the lives of those far away affect our own. We're beginning to realize that in order to live peacefully together on this planet, we need to be in new relationships, especially with those far-distant from us.

Margaret Wheatley
We will need to become savvy about how to build relationships, how to nurture growing, evolving things. All of us will need better skills in listening, communicating, and facilitating groups, because these are the talents that build strong relationships.

Margaret Wheatley
Life doesn't move in straight lines, and neither does a good conversation.

Margaret Wheatley
We would do well to ponder the realization that love is the most potent source of power.

Margaret Wheatley
Over many years of work all over the world, I've learned that if we organize in the same way that the rest of life does, we develop the skills we need: we become resilient, adaptive, aware, and creative. We enjoy working together. And life's processes work everywhere, no matter the culture, group, or person, because these are basic dynamics shared by all living beings.

Margaret Wheatley
Focusing makes things fuzzier. The more we study a complex phenomenon, the more confused we are bound to become.

Margaret Wheatley
Whatever life we have experienced, if we can tell our story to someone who listens, we find it easier to deal with our circumstances.

Margaret Wheatley
Space is the basic ingredient of the universe; there is more of it than anything else.

Margaret Wheatley
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.

Margaret Wheatley
It's not differences that divide us. It's our judgments about each other that do.

Margaret Wheatley
In the past, it was easier to believe in my own effectiveness. If I worked hard, with good colleagues and good ideas, we could make a difference. But now, I sincerely doubt that.

Margaret Wheatley
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.

Margaret Wheatley
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.

Margaret Wheatley
I believe that our very survival depends upon us becoming better systems thinkers. How can we learn to see the systems we're participating in? How can we act intelligently when things remain fuzzy?

Margaret Wheatley
If others don't feel safe, we aren't safe. If others are struggling, we experience the consequence of their struggle. If others are poor, no matter how wealthy we are, we experience the consequences of their impoverishment.

Margaret Wheatley
Here are a few principles I've learned. Start something, and see who notices it. It's only after we initiate something in a system that we see the threads that connect. Usually, someone we don't even know suddenly appears, either outraged or helpful.

Margaret Wheatley
We've taken disturbances and fluctuations and averaged them together to give us comfortable statistics. Our training has been to look for big numbers, important trends, major variances. Yet it is the slight variations — soft-spoken, even whispered at first — that we need to encourage.

Margaret Wheatley
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.

Margaret Wheatley
In a complex system, there is no such thing as simple cause and effect. There's no one person to blame, or to take the credit.

Margaret Wheatley
I was reading of chaos that contained order; of information as the primal, creative force; of systems that, by design, fell apart so they could renew themselves; and of invisible forces that structured space and held complex things together. These were compelling, evocative ideas, and they gave me hope, even if they did not reveal immediate solutions.

Margaret Wheatley
We have created trouble for ourselves in organizations by confusing control with order. This is no surprise, given that for most of its written history, leadership has been defined in terms of its control functions.

Margaret Wheatley
There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.

Margaret Wheatley
Leadership is always dependent upon the context, but the context is established by the relationships.

Margaret Wheatley
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.

Margaret Wheatley
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.

Margaret Wheatley
A world based on machine images is a world filled with boundaries. In a machine, every piece knows its place.

Margaret Wheatley
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 alone.

Margaret Wheatley
I believe the fundamental work of this time — work that requires the participation of all of us — is to discover new ways of 'being together.'

Margaret Wheatley