Life’s a messy business
Margaret Wheatley is President Emerita
of The Berkana Institute. Since 1992
Berkana has expanded its work to serve
pioneering leaders and communities in all
types of organisations in many nations. The
following is a brief survey of Meg Wheatley’s
research into the changes required to make
leadership work in the new global community.
Today leadership in every major institutional form, whether public or private, for profit or for public benefit, is failing.1
This is because the world has so radically changed in the 21st Century that former models of leadership are no longer doing the job.
The really serious problem is that there isn’t time to wait for the up-and-coming generation to bring the necessary skills to new models of leadership which better suit the global networking community.They will need mentors who can remember what the world looked like when leadership did work.They need help to create a healthy society with a culture of hope.Which means that those already in leadership must adapt.
Nothing today is simple or slow.We can’t make sense of the world by using the analytical processes we were taught.We can’t understand the complexity of modern systems by reductionism. In a complex system, it is impossible to find simple causes that explain our problems – or even to know who to blame!
Leadership through command and control is doomed to fail in the webby world of non-hierarchical, organic social growth we find ourselves in today.
But how do leaders shift from the old model of command and control? How does change happen? What are useful measurement systems? How do we lead when change is out of our control?
The 20th Century story of dominion, control, and materialism came from a 17th Century notion
– from a time when philosophers began to describe the universe as a great clock.
When we created this mechanistic story of complete dominion over matter, we also brought in control’s unwelcome partner – fear. Once we are intent on controlling something, we feel afraid when we meet with resistance.
According to this philosophy, in public life, in science, health, management, self-help, the focus is on creating better functioning machines. We replace the faulty part, reengineer the organisation, install a new behaviour or attitude, create a better fit,recharge our batteries.The language and thinking is mechanistic.
Meg Wheatley:“As I reflect on the awful demands placed on leaders by the old story, I wonder how anyone could survive in that job.Yet the mechanistic story has created roles for all of us that are equally deadly. It has led us to believe that we, with our unpredictable behaviours, our passions, our independence, our creativity, our consciousness – that we are the problem rather than the blessing.”2
Life seeks organisation but it uses
messes to get there
A real problem for us as leaders is that if we tolerate creative expressions, we find ourselves with unmanageable levels of diversity.
In our nobler moments we want organisations to be adaptive, flexible, self-renewing, resilient, learning,intelligent.The problem is that these attributes are found not in mechanistic models but in living systems.
But living systems are a messy business:“Life seeks organisation, but it uses messes to get there. Organisation is a process, not a structure.”3
The living systems model of organisation being pursued by The Berkana Institute is on offer through a support advisory service to various projects throughout the world, particularly in education.
For instance, the CIDA City Campus is a new university in Johannesburg for business, economic and social development. CIDA is managed by its students and has taken over the downtown hotels, abandoned by the business sector since the end of apartheid, for student support services which include accommodation, financial aid, transport, sports, societies and career advice (www.cida.co.za).The Berkana Institute has been engaged to advise on this innovative venture.
The complexity of 21st Century systems cannot be understood by our old ways of separating problems, or scapegoating individuals, or rearranging the boxes on an org chart.
To understand this new world of continuous change and intimately connected systems, we need new ways of understanding and the best way to gain these insights is through the study of living systems.
Self-organisation in living systems is a powerful force that creates the systems we observe in the world of living things and testifies to a world that knows how to organise from the inside out.
Rather than thinking of organisation as an imposed structure, plan design, or role, it is clear that in life, organisation arises from the interactions and needs of individuals who have decided to come together for their own good.
Our great task as leadership in a living system is to rethink our understanding of community so that we can move from the closed protectionism of current forms to an openness and embrace which includes the planetary community. It is instructive that the instinct of community is not peculiar to humans but is found everywhere in life.
Evolution progresses from new relationships, not from the harsh and lonely dynamics of survival of the fittest. Survival of the fit is probably closer to Darwin’s thesis. Species that decide to ignore relationships, that act in greedy and rapacious ways, simply die off. If we look at the evolutionary record, it is cooperation that increases over time.
This cooperation is spawned from a fundamental recognition that nothing can exist without the other – that it is only in relationship that one can be fully one’s self.
Boundaries become places of meeting and exchange rather than warfare.Australian Aborigines recognise this through ancient rites of admitting strangers to their land.
Leaders who are learning to live in the new story can help us understand ourselves differently by the way they lead.They trust our humanness; they welcome the surprises we bring to them; they are curious about our differences; they delight in our inventiveness; they nurture us; they connect us.
In living systems “(o)rganisations… emerge from fundamentally similar conditions.A self gets organised.A world of shared meaning develops. Networks of relationships take form. Information is noticed, interpreted, transformed. From these simple dynamics emerge widely different expressions of organisation.”4
Information is the nutrient
of self-organisation
The process of living organisation proceeds thus: —
- Identity – making sense, interpreting the self, deciding what to do (you can never direct a living system, you can only disturb it enough for it to want to adapt).
- Information is the medium – life uses information to organise itself into material form to act. It is the nutrient of self-organisation.
The scientist’s view is that complex living systems thrive in a zone of exquisitely sensitive information processing, on a constantly changing edge between stability and chaos that has been dubbed “the edge of chaos”. In this dynamic region, new information can enter, but the organisation retains its identity.
Contradicting most of our current efforts to keep organisations at equilibrium, living systems seem to seek this far-from-equilibrium condition to stay alive. If a system has too much order, it atrophies and dies.Yet if it lives in chaos, it has no memory.
It is information-unplanned, uncontrolled, abundant, superfluous – that creates the conditions for the emergence of fast, well-integrated, effective responses.
• Relationships are the pathways to the intelligence of the living system.Without connections nothing happens.5
People need opportunities to ‘bump up’ against others in the system, making the unplanned connections that spawn new ventures or better-integrated responses.This is the ‘stew’, the messy theatre in which living systems thrive.
Most people, whatever their organisation, are using information, relationships, and identity to get work done.
The problems that we see in organisations are artefacts of much deeper dynamics occurring in these three domains of information, relationships, or identity.
often the price of belonging to
community is to forfeit autonomy
A major problem for those of us obsessed with order and tidiness is that the path of selforganisation can never be known ahead of time.
But… It is possible to prepare for the future without knowing what it will be.The primary way to prepare for the unknown is to attend to the quality of our relationships, to how well we know and trust one another.6
And this is where we meet the great paradox of real life – the need for self-determination and the need for one another.Very often the price of belonging to a community is to forfeit one’s individual autonomy.
With the loss of personal autonomy, diversity not only disappears but also become a major management problem.The community spends more and more energy on new ways to exert control over individuals through endlessly proliferating policies, standards and doctrines.This is a dynamic we have seen thriving in our society since the turn of the millennium.
What did we believe was possible together that was not possible alone? What did we hope to bring forth by linking with others? These questions invite both our individuality and our desire for relationships.
If we stay with these questions and don’t try to structure relationships through policies and doctrines, we can create communities that thrive in the paradox.
The call of purpose attracts individuals but does not require them to shed their uniqueness. Staying centred on what the work is together transforms the tension of belonging and individuality into energetic and resilient communities marked by congruence rather than coercion.This is the key to dynamic organisation.
Most public meetings, although originating from a democratic ideal, serve only to increase our separation from one another.Agenda and processes try to honour our differences but end up increasing our distance.These are “public hearings” where nobody is listening and everyone is demanding air time.7
Reflective leaders, including those in the military, have learned that the higher the risk, the more we need everyone’s commitment and intelligence.
In holding onto power and refusing to distribute decision-making, leaders have created unwieldy, Byzantine systems that only increase risk and irresponsibility – and nowhere more publicly than in the churches.
Whenever humans need to change a deeply structured belief system, everything in life is called into question – relationships with loved ones, children, colleagues, authority, and major institutions – the higher you are in the organisation, the more change is required of you personally.
Questions to ask during the transition have to do with ‘endurability’ – what about us is worth sustaining long-term? This focus flies in the face of current fashion. Our infatuation with ‘virtual’ organisations, outsourcing, and short-term contracts misses an important truth – we cannot create an organisation that means something to its people if that organisation has no life beyond the next project or contract.
As leaders, we have no choice but to figure out how to invite in everybody who is going to be affected by change.Those that we fail to invite into the creation process will surely and always show up as resistors and saboteurs, because they have been excluded.
When organisational change fails, instead of enjoying the fruits of a redesigned production unit, the leader must manage the hostility and broken relationships created by the redesign. Instead of glorying in the new efficiencies produced by restructuring, the leader faces a burned-out and demoralised group of survivors.8
the solution will be discovered
within the system
In our lives together, and in our organisations, we must honour the fact that everyone requires the freedom to author their own life. Every person, overtly or covertly, struggles to preserve this freedom to self-create.
We will always add our unique signature to the situation.Whether leaders call us innovative or rebellious depends on their comprehension of what’s going on.
As people are engaged in the difficult and messy processes of participation, we are simultaneously creating the conditions – new relationships, new insights, greater levels of commitment – that facilitate more rapid and complete implementation. But because participative processes can overwhelm us with the complexity of human interactions, many leaders grasp instead for quickly derived solutions from small groups, that are then pronounced to the whole organisation.
But the truth is that when a system is failing, or performing poorly, the solution will be discovered within the system if more and better connections are created.
Organisation found in living systems is always highly complex, but this complexity is obtained by an organising process that is simple and that honours the individual’s need to participate.The complexity is the result of individuals interpreting, in the moment, a few simple principles.
We humans have spent so many years determining the details of the organisation – its structures, values, communication channels, vision, standards, measures. Living systems have all these features and details, but they originate differently.
In a living system, they are generated as people figure out what will work well in the current situation. In a machine these features are designed outside and then engineered in.
In such brutal times as these, when good work gets destroyed by events and decisions far beyond our influence, when we’re so overwhelmed with tasks that we have no time to reflect, it is very important that the leader create time for people to remember why they’re doing this work.What were we hoping to accomplish when we started this? Who are we serving by doing this work?
The time has long gone for attempts to solve problems by seeking simplistic causes, by treating problems as enemies.
1. Wheatley, Margaret J, Finding Our Way – Leadership for an Uncertain Time, 2007, San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler, p 101
2. Ibid 20
3. Ibid 27
4. Ibid 36
5.Ibid 40
6. Ibid 117
7. Ibid 53
8. Ibid 83
