Here is my review of Wheatley's new leadership paradigm for discovering order in a chaotic world

In one of the most fascinating and intriguing books I have read for a long time, I am thoroughly enjoying Margaret Wheatley’s book, “Leadership & the New Science”.

Quite simply, but respectfully, she challenges our simple and entrenched notions of how organizations work and function. Pushing us beyond Sir Isaac Newton’s mechanistic theories, she forces us to take a deeper dive into the ocean of systems, where we are forced to think more about the relationship of how things work together in a symbiotic and complimentary manner, and that the nature of these relationships rarely remain static or constant.

Sir Isaac Newton and machine imagery leads us to study parts as the key to understanding the whole. New science tends to have a more holistic focus that looks at systems and how things within that system relate to each other. Even in the context of human health, the body is viewed more as an integrated system rather than as a collection of discrete parts. A mechanical worldview tends to concentrate on the ‘what’, and ‘how’, not so much the ‘why.’ However, Wheatley impressively takes us on a journey that goes deeper than merely looking at how structures work and how they can be applied in an organizational and human context. Pushing away all preconceived notions and assumptions that sit at the basis of organizational structures (i.e. to create order), Wheatley leaves us questioning the value of disorder and chaos: Not as you and I would typically view disorder and chaos, as being disruptive and unwanted, but rather that it has significant value in creating new order because the old order can no longer be sustained. She cites the work of Nobel Peace prizewinner, Ilya Prigogine in chemistry, where he discovered that the dissipative activity of loss was necessary to create new order (“Dissipative Structures Theory”). Basically, Prigogine was saying that when anything disturbs the system, it plays a crucial role in helping it self-organize into a new form of order. He calls this one of life’s paradoxes.

Wheatley explores this further, by saying those new conditions, and indeed anything that unsettles a system’s equilibrium; there is an opportunity to awaken creativity and a new resolution. Historically, we have tended to believe that all disorder was the absence of the natural state of order, and that chaos and normal were two separate states. However, in the context of where paradox is considered to be a distinguishing feature, we can see that disorder can incorporate a dance – of chaos and order, of change and stability. “Neither one is primary; but both are absolutely necessary.”

Exploring this theory in the context of desiring order in organizations, we come to see that we have focused more on rigid structures than fluid processes that inject creativity into the ebb and flow of chaos as it pushes up against a set order. There is no doubt that at times our rigid structures do not neatly wrap themselves around the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and that our commitment to a mechanistic worldview may prevent us from exploring alternate ways to look at things as we appreciate them in a broader systemic way, rather than discrete parts that bump up against each other randomly.

The concept that jumps out at me from Wheatley’s analysis of systems and structures, is her view that we should not run from chaos or seek to overturn it in order to find a form of organizational utopia, but rather appreciate and encourage constant interchanges between chaos and order to bring about new orders. Wheatley of course, is not proposing that we seek chaos and disorder so that we might find order, but that in the context of a world that always changing, we would embrace the conflict and seek a new order, rather than revert to an old order that can no longer be maintained in the light of new circumstances.

This certainly has ramifications for the way organizations are structured and operate, as organizations often lack the kind of faith that can accomplish purposes in a variety of ways. Once again, Wheatley is not suggesting that structure is unimportant. She does, however, believe very strongly that blind adherence to any one particular structure may in fact prevent growth, impede development and ultimately lead to organizational atrophy and ineffectiveness. Structures are time-limited and certainly not infinite. Structures should not be built to eliminate disorder and chaos, but instead create an environment where chaos and change are foundational to finding a new order to help the organization move forward and sustain itself in a world that has changed and will continue to.