Margeret j. Wheatly - Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World

Abstract

Writing from wide experience working with organisations as a management consultant, Margaret Wheatley has seen the necessity for integrating the new science with organisational management. The new science of quantum physics, fractals, and chaos theory creates a new nonlinear world view. The old, linear view is suited only for the factory model, where outputs increase in a linear fashion according to the inputs. But the real world is nonlinear: think about learning. We study and study and suddenly, we understand. Wheatley describes the conventional command-and-control management style, where we think the company is a black box with inputs on the left and outputs on the right. She talks about laboriously crafted organisational charts, when the real communication of the company takes place around the water cooler. She shows us how organisations flounder and stagnate when they are seen as machines in a Newtonian world, the old mechanistic view.