A friend of mine sent this to me today – It’s full of positive and interesting thoughts from Margaret Wheatley (an American writer and management consultant who studies organizational behavior. Her approach includes systems thinking, theories of change, chaos theory, leadership and the learning organization: particularly its capacity to self-organize) on the nature of change in organisations.
The paragraphs that really caught my attention are below as it reinforces my own beliefs and is the reason behind why we created this online platform:
“life wants to happen as a community and we are all part of it.”
Please do take the time to read the full article here >>
We live in a world in which life wants to happen.
This is a simple, though profound, realization. You might not think it is such a remarkable notion, but we grew up in a culture influenced by Darwinian evolutionary theory which said life was an accident. Now, if life is an accident, that means there is nothing here to support us; so we do it all alone, and if we don’t get it right, we get killed because the world is an inhospitable place. I believe this kind of thinking led to the heroic image of the great corporate leader who would craft organizations and make things happen — nothing would happen without this great impetus of human ingenuity and human control.We used to believe that for the first seven-eighths of the planet’s existence there was no life, that it showed up about 600 million years ago. Now scientists agree that life seems to have emerged almost instantaneously with the creation of the planet. This is a very important realization. For me, this means that I belong to a whole planetary community of life, and that I am supported in my own small efforts by a deep natural history spanning between four and five billion years — life wants to happen as a community and we are all part of it.
We live in a universe that is alive, creative, and experimenting all the time to discover what’s possible. We are rediscovering our interconnectedness; there are no isolated individuals in the natural world. Life seeks to affiliate with other life, and as it does that it makes more possibilities available, it makes more diversity possible.
THE UNPLANNED ORGANIZATION:
LEARNING FROM NATURE’S EMERGENT CREATIVITY
From Noetic Sciences Review #37
Spring 1996
by Margaret Wheatley ©2007
https://www.margaretwheatley.com/articles/unplannedorganization.html