Discovering Order in a Chaotic World

A retired management consultant told me that if I could understand and internalize Margaret Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science – Discovering Order in a Chaotic World, then I would understand everything I needed to know about leadership and organizations. Wheatley explores quantum physics, chaos theory, and disequilibrium and change in living systems, and asks what we could learn if we started using these insights as our metaphor for organizations, instead of Newtonian metaphors.

For example, on field theory, she writes: “The space that is everywhere, from inside atoms to the cosmos, is more like this ocean, filled with fields that exert influence and bring matter into form… [Fields] are unapproachable through our five senses, yet in quantum theory, they are as real as particles… The things we see or observe in experiments, the physical manifestations of matter as particles, are a secondary effect of fields.”

So what would it mean to take this understanding of fields, an understanding that “our communal space is filled with these ‘interpenetrating influences and invisible forces that connect’”, and apply it to organizations?

Wheatley suggests (p.54-55):

“We could ask about the messages that fill the space of the organization, thinking of these messages as an organizational field that is influencing behavior. We would look to discern what’s in the field, whether messages there are congruent or discordant… We can never see a field, but we can easily see its influence by looking at behavior. To learn what’s in the field, look at what people are doing. They have picked up the messages, discerned what is truly valued, and then shaped their behavior accordingly. When organizational space is filled with divergent messages, when only contradictions float through the ethers, this invisible incongruity becomes visible as troubling behaviors. Because there is no agreement, there are more arguments, more competition, more power plays. People say one thing and mean another. Nobody trusts anybody. The organization changes direction frequently and can’t find its way.”

It’s a description that suggests that if we understood enough of the new science, we would understand that walking into an office and sensing something – an energy, a mood, a tension, a focus – isn’t crazy. We might not have understood it if we had thought about discrete entities, inputs and outputs, external and internal forces acting in and on a closed system, but if we think about it as a field of influence filling up communal space, we have a new language for describing and understanding and questioning what we’ve already sensed and observed.