Information Proliferates, Confusion Grows

Margaret Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science has a section on information flow in systems and organizations. I marked paragraph after paragraph, reflecting on how many times I had seen what she described.

Some choice quotes (bold text mine):

pg. 97:

Of course, such freedom is exactly what we try to prevent. We have no desire to let information roam about promiscuously, procreating where it will, creating chaos. Management’s task is to enforce control, to keep information contained, to pass it down in such a way that no newness occurs. Information chastity belts are a central management function. The last things we need is information running loose in our organizations.

pg. 99:

Think about how we generally have treated information. We’ve known it was important, but we’ve handled it in ways that have destroyed many of its life-giving properties. For one thing, we haven’t been interested in newness. We’ve taken disturbances and fluctuations and averaged them together to give us comfortable statistics. Our training has been to look for large numbers, important trends, major variances. We live in a society that believes it can define normal and then judge everything against this fictitious standard. We struggle to smooth out the differences, conform to standards, measure up. Yet in life, newness can only show up as difference. If we aren’t looking for differences, we can’t see that anything has changed; consequently, we aren’t able to respond.

pg. 105:

A very different process for how new and abundant information can facilitate self-organization is found in organizational change work described as “Whole Systems”. One model, now in wide use, is “Future Search”. The whole system – sometimes literally, sometimes through selected members – is gathered in one room to develop a desired future for the organization. People from all parts of the organization, including those ‘outsiders” who in truth are very connected to it, work together to generate information on the organization’s history, its present capacities, and its external demands The first day is spent bringing to the surface the information contained in the organizational neural net – opinions, interpretations, and history carried within all the different people in the room. Information is generated in deliberately overwhelming amounts.

In the presence of so much information, people often feel temporarily powerless and disheartened. They don’t know how to make sense of it, and they are in that terribly uncomfortable state of feeling confused. But as information continues to proliferate and confusion grows, there comes a memorable time (usually during the last quarter of the event) when the group self-organizes, growing all that information into new, potent visions of the future. Rather than basing agreements on the lowest common denominator, the whole system that is present at the conference has self-organized into a new creation, a unified body that sets new and challenging directions for itself.

pg. 108:

Organizations that want to stay vital must search out surprise, looking for what is startling, uncomfortable, and maybe even shocking. The organization then needs to support people to reflect on this unsettling or disconfirming information, providing them with the resources of time, colleagues, and reflection. The value of this has been evident in processes such as scenario planning, and some approaches to quality and knowledge management. People are encouraged to look for variances, to travel far afield and bring in newness. They are encouraged to think together to decide what the information means.

Metaphors of Leadership

I’m developing course content for a teen leadership program at the Royal Ontario Museum. I’m drawn back to my notes from Margaret Wheatley, who defines a leader as “anyone who is willing to help”.

In Leadership and the New Science, she writes:

Many writers have offered new images of effective leaders. Each of them is trying to create imagery for the new relationships that are required, the new sensitivities needed to honor and elicit worker contributions. Here is a very partial list of new metaphors to describe leaders: gardeners, midwives, stewards, servants, missionaries, facilitators, conveners. Although each takes a slightly different approach, they all name a new posture for leaders, a stance that relies on new relationships with their networks of employees, stakeholders and communities. No one can hope to lead any organization by standing outside or ignoring the web of relationships through which all work is accomplished. Leaders are being called to step forward as helpmates, supported by our willingness to have them lead us. (p.165)

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.