Margaret J. Wheatley Quotes

Ask what’s possible, not what’s wrong. Keep asking.

You can’t hate someone whose story you know.

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

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.

One of the great errors organizations make is shutting down what is a natural, life-enhancing process-chaos. We are terrified of chaos. As a manager, it signals failure. But if you move out of control and into an appreciation of natural order, you understand that the only way a system changes is when it is far from equilibrium, when it moves from the ‘quiet’ we treasure and is confronted with the choice to die or reorganize. And you can’t reorganize to a higher level unless you risk the perils of the path through chaos.

Everyone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. The more interpretations we gather, the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole.

For eons, humans have struggled to find less destructive ways of living together.

We are, always, poets, exploring possibilities of meaning in a world which is also all the time exploring possibilities.

When leaders take back power, when they act as heroes and saviors, they end up exhausted, overwhelmed, and deeply stressed.

The nature of the global business environment guarantees that no matter how hard we work to create a stable and healthy organisation, our organisation will continue to experience dramatic changes far beyond our control.

We need to move from the leader as hero, to the leader as host.

The future cannot be determined. It can only be experienced as it occurring. Life doesn’t know what it will be until it notices what it has become.