Margaret J. Wheatley

“Aggression only moves in one direction - it creates more aggression.”

“In this present culture, we need to find the means to work and live together with less aggression if we are to resolve the serious problems that afflict and impede us.”

“There are many benefits to this process of listening. The first is that good listeners are created as people feel listened to. Listening is a reciprocal process - we become more attentive to others if they have attended to us.”

“I think we have to notice that the business processes we use right now for thinking and planning and budgeting and strategy are all delivered on very tight agendas.”

“Too many problem-solving sessions become battlegrounds where decisions are made based on power rather than intelligence.”

“I believe that the capacity that any organisation needs is for leadership to appear anywhere it is needed, when it is needed.”

“Aggression is the most common behavior used by many organizations, a nearly invisible medium that influences all decisions and actions.”

“In these troubled, uncertain times, we don't need more command and control; we need better means to engage everyone's intelligence in solving challenges and crises as they arise.”

“I'm sad to report that in the past few years, ever since uncertainty became our insistent 21st century companion, leadership has taken a great leap backwards to the familiar territory of command and control.”

“I think a major act of leadership right now, call it a radical act, is to create the places and processes so people can actually learn together, using our experiences.”

“Successful organizations, including the Military, have learned that the higher the risk, the more necessary it is to engage everyone's commitment and intelligence.”

“Aggression is inherently destructive of relationships. People and ideologies are pitted against each other, believing that in order to survive, they must destroy the opposition.”

“For example, I was discussing the use of email and how impersonal it can be, how people will now email someone across the room rather than go and talk to them. But I don't think this is laziness, I think it is a conscious decision people are making to save time.”

“Listening is such a simple act. It requires us to be present, and that takes practice, but we don't have to do anything else. We don't have to advise, or coach, or sound wise. We just have to be willing to sit there and listen.”

“The future cannot be determined. I can only be experienced as it is occurring. Life doesn't know what it will be until it notices what it has become.”

“I think it is quite dangerous for an organisation to think they can predict where they are going to need leadership. It needs to be something that people are willing to assume if it feels relevant, given the context of any situation.”

“Our willingness to acknowledge that we only see half the picture creates the conditions that make us more attractive to others. The more sincerely we acknowledge our need for their different insights and perspectives, the more they will be magnetized to join us.”

“I've wanted to see beyond the Western, mechanical view of the world and see what else might appear when the lens was changed.”

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

“We do as much harm holding onto programs and people past their natural life span as we do when we employ massive organizational air strikes. However, destroying comes at the end of life's cycle, not as a first response.”