Well, of course, he meant it literally. WHEATLEY: My English family has a strong military background, but I had never been in the military and, of course, I was anti-military at that time I think. Where did you go to high school? 34 quotes from Margaret J. Wheatley: 'It's not differences that divide us. Some people still love it. Time Decision People. They don’t want to go to kindergarten. SCARPINO: And the Authentic Leadership in Action? WHEATLEY: Yes, you’ll have to correct that. Margaret Wheatley offers the reader a spiritual reference guide to help navigate through emotional journeys and creating a contemplative space for transcendence. And they’ve had the experience of one of them getting out of maneuvers and saying, “Look, I need to be involved now,” because they could see what was going on. WHEATLEY: Yes, yes. And we formed as a 501(c)3 charitable foundation and we still didn’t quite know what we were going to do, and then Leadership and the New Science came out, and it was “Oh, well of course, these things go together.” So we spent from ’92 to 1997 or 1998 really educating people about what self-organizing systems were. And I realized much to my horror at first that, gosh, I really love it out here. It was all public schools. They would play John Philip Sousa and we’d march out and get on the bus. don’t let your bloom stick out above other people’s? And I personally feel, since I started as a teacher and I feel very connected to teachers still, very connected, they get the whole, the impact of all of those dynamics of child-rearing, family like, economic dilemmas, increased use of drugs, pornography, social media. I got to go out the night before the battle and sit with the troops around a campfire and just talking to them about what was going to happen and such. WHEATLEY: They’re professionals. But for me, I’ve always written about where I am in my own journey. And then I wanted to go into the doctoral program there. That’s so outdated now it’s tragic. I think the other great aha when I link it back to perception was Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana’s work on The Tree of Knowledge which stated that we get triggered by the outside world, but it’s only about 10 or 20 percent of input from exterior things and then we form our perceptions from what’s already in us. WHEATLEY: So those stories and many others became sort of my stock in trade for quite a while, and I felt very comfortable when I was talking to military people, police, firemen, or even in my national parks now where there’s a lot of military leakage. Just click the "Edit page" button at the bottom of the page or learn more in the Biography submission guide. In October of 2011, I had the privilege to interview Manfred Kets de Vries at the ILA meeting in London. If we expect life to change, we have an easier time of letting go. But the second reaction I had was, “Don’t listen to me. It was no fun getting your office taken over. SCARPINO: What makes for the terrible trouble? . That’s what we keep learning over and over again and we still believe in heroes. And so you are going to be misrepresented, misinterpreted, patted on the head, or just not visible at all because it’s so threatening to people when you are dealing at the level of paradigm, world views, fundamental beliefs. SCARPINO: When I was a graduate student, I had to write an essay about energy and change. It was a really choice experience because it was a slow moving coal-fired steam engine. I was never at the top. I need a big name publisher.” Then there was this magical two days when this woman asked me, “How is your book?” I pulled the book out. Even then in the late ’80s, you’d start something and then you couldn’t finish it because the company got sold, the leader got promoted or fired, and there was all this turbulence in the environment, which looks like heaven compared to what it is now. It had my picture on the front cover. SCARPINO: Do you consider yourself to be a work in progress? No. SCARPINO: Thank you. One line in there, which was about all I could understand because of all the math; just I read it and everything came together for me. SCARPINO: But when you finished that manuscript up, did you have a sense of what you were advocating in terms of leadership . Then they decided to form Goodmeasure and I became part of that. How’s this world work? WHEATLEY: Yes. So I would say that my inner theater or what I was projecting onto the world as a youth was filled with a lot of self-doubt at the same time of getting a lot of approbation from people. Yet if this period of dissolution is used to create new meaning, then chaos ends and new order emerges. We didn’t really want to leave. . WHEATLEY: I’m not working with corporations. SCARPINO: I want to follow up on this and then I’m going to come back and ask you about poetry. SCARPINO: We talked at the beginning about your colleague who suggested that you read quantum physics and then you read chaos theory and all . He’s one of the most renowned meditation teachers. WHEATLEY: Well, I was born with some gifts that I think I have used quite well. He married his high school sweetheart, Margaret Wheatley. There’s nothing like it and it’s reputable science.”. He was like a talk show host. I have never worried about that. After being kidnapped from West Africa and enslaved in Boston, Phillis Wheatley became the first African American and one of the first women to publish a book of poetry in the colonies in 1773. Again, that book appeared and it has a particular form, a very different voice in it. The things that were meaningful are no longer meaningful. Her first work was a public school teacher and an urban education administrator in New York, and a Peace Corps volunteer in Korea. She served in Korea in the Peace Corps for two years and has worked for more than 40 years as a consultant, speaker, writer, teacher, and poet. Our unwillingness to be an adaptive species and to simply charge ahead and think that we can get away with creating the world we want, violating natural laws, misperceiving the human spirit, we’re just hell-bent—and I mean that literally—hell-bent now on living through a misperception of how this place works. But he brought forward the vision of creating an enlightened society and the vision of Shambhala warriorship, which you can read about in So Far From Home. WHEATLEY: Her name was Irma Lindheim. WHEATLEY: But you have to realize what a gift it is to be in a reflection about one’s self with good questions, so thank you. They took in 25 of us, and that was a highly specialized program. It’s like an insulation but, of course, you can’t be separate from nature. We got encouraged. Her question—there were several, but this one fits here: “In the midst of all of the leadership challenges we face in the present, what gives you faith?” (Long pause.) but, I guess you must have written it before 2005. But certainly in the corporate environment, it’s really gotten insane and destructive. Where did that come from? I got a lot of encouragement from my professors who would sort of indicate that I was coming up with a new idea, and that’s when I developed a little bit of confidence in that area of being able to see things differently than most. SCARPINO: Warrior in the sense of fighting for things that are worth fighting for. WHEATLEY: The most significant thing I have observed is the power of denial. They’re adults. And once learning to live comfortably in that, I became skilled at and desirous of just wanting to be with people in whatever their culture is. I did that in a very experimental, wonderful way. And he assembled a group of several senior generals and the Army historian and we had lunch. That’s what life is for. It is not our job to create organization in the way we do the elaborate organizations filled with policies and rules and such; that we could create the conditions for order to arise out of human interactions, focus on meaning and purpose of what is this work for, and we could let go of a lot of the garbage that’s out there about people needing to be controlled. We did three or four a year at Sundance where I now live to introduce people to self-organizing systems and the whole theory of living systems. SCARPINO: You had a strong grandmother, you had…. WHEATLEY: So, having turned 70 in August and really thinking forward of: So what is the next probably final contribution, I am defining my niche as wedding together what I know about the dilemmas and challenges of trying to lead in this time, what I see and know about the pressures and dynamics that work against us as leaders, and what I’m learning constantly through my own practice about how to maintain stability, awareness, compassion, and generosity. I think our egos are just smaller, and we do understand the power of relationships, and we do care more about people’s inner life. It was early fifties. WHEATLEY: Well, the normal pattern is that, first of all, wherever humans have been we degrade the environment. So I’ve always had the deepest respect for Christina and Ann, but I work with Christina more, about how they teach circle and what it really means. We took a break and we are reconvening. I have to say the most blessed relationship of my life, yes. And then went on to a more formal structure, because we were housed in a church basement as most community programs I think still are. It’s something I’ve been studying for the past year-and-a-half. WHEATLEY: Miss Walsh. WHEATLEY: Well, it was a challenge because we knew we were disappointing our colleagues, but we felt we were just overstretched. SCARPINO: Your grandmother encouraged you to write? I just have to think. Other Works SCARPINO: When my students look at me and tell me that I’m not going to vote because it doesn’t make any difference, what should I tell them? Margaret Wheatley, Ed.D., is a well-respected writer, speaker, and teacher for how we can accomplish our work, sustain our relationships, and willingly step forward to serve in this troubling time. SCARPINO: Which is not the same as organized religion? So for the next year, maybe, I traveled around in the greatest of style. As my totem and protector? But I left her house and I thought I was devastated—and then she said, “But I might be wrong, so I’m going to take this to Viking and see what they say.” I left her house very devastated and then realized, no, I wrote this book to match the paradigm that I am describing in the book. SCARPINO: Did Peter Senge’s work have a significant influence on your intellectual development? Margaret “Meg” Wheatley Wise and internationally known author and expert on leadership, Meg Wheatley trains Warriors for the Human Spirit — leaders who learn as a community to become the change agents required by our impossible challenges. . WHEATLEY: I gave myself a wonderful education and barely went to class because I couldn’t stand the European style of lectures where they just get up and read. Meg Wheatley was thrown into the public spotlight in 1992 with the publication of Leadership and the New Science, a groundbreaking look at how new discoveries in quantum physics, chaos theory, and biology challenge our standard ways of thinking in organizations.It showed how our reliance on old, mechanistic models stand in the way of innovation and effective leadership. SCARPINO: Was there something in particular you were reading? SCARPINO: Perceive the world the way we want it to be and then create it. WHEATLEY: No, I did. SCARPINO: I read somewhere that you were a history major. And, so I would define myself clearly as a global citizen and someone who—I rely on my own skillfulness at looking forward. There’s a good body of research on the collapse of complex civilizations and you just see us in it. WHEATLEY: Well, I think he may be describing using the term inner theater what I’m describing by: We create the world through our perceptions. SCARPINO: So for people who haven’t had a chance to look at your website, it’s only a few lines long. SCARPINO: We started down this path because you had mentioned that working with the military gave you credibility. WHEATLEY: No, no. I still hear New York in your voice. There was a quality of courtliness towards me and the deepest respect for who I was professionally. But I lived these things firsthand. This is in the beautiful countryside of Australia in North Victoria, I think it was. SCARPINO: Is there still an edge for you somewhere? WHEATLEY: Well, during that whole very conflicted period. And that’s where I’m best, is looking at the broad scope and the interplay of ideas with context, with historical context. SCARPINO: So on the surface for somebody who is not a scientist, chaos theory would seem to be counterintuitive to what you were interested in, in terms of organizations and order and so on. WHEATLEY: Oh, you’re talking about chaos. It was like 2000 tanks. I did a year of doctoral work in a fellowship program at NYU that introduced me to organizational behavior. It was much more poetic and it was much more emotional for people, and it was just the book that wanted to be written at that time. So the real lack of systems thinking is creating a level of dis-concern; I won’t call it blindness. These are the things that I see missing now. And wait until you see the new one. View the list Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves and the only way they could do this is by not voting. I got to go to a mock battle down at Fort Irwin just north of Death Valley, where there’s this huge, huge desert where they train for tank warfare. She is the author of dozens of articles and essays and numerous poems, and seven books, beginning with Leadership and the New Science (1992) and most recently So Far from Home: Lost and Found in Our Brave New World (2012). So I have had this great freedom of feeling I can write whatever I want to and it will probably find a home, an eager home, in Berrett-Koehler. I always got encouraged to be educated and that came from the Jewish side of my family, for sure, and to make a difference in the world and to serve. I think it is quite dangerous for an organisation to think they can predict where they are going to need leadership. WHEATLEY: Well, that book came directly out of Leadership and the New Science. SCARPINO: I think I’m going to have to shut this over. SCARPINO: And that was your master’s or your doctorate? Margaret Wheatley. Margaret Wheatley. Contact All American Speakers Bureau to inquire about speaking fees and availability, and book the best keynote speaker for your next live or virtual event. But working up wherever I am in the field, working up as a woman has been significant. So I was more comfortable working with Puerto Rican and black citizens, for sure. So as a Tibetan Buddhist, these things are very meaningful, that teachers do speak to you in dreams. . So before I turn this thing off, I want to on behalf of myself and the Tobias Center and the International Leadership Association, I want to thank you very much for being kind enough to spend a lot of time with me before you go down and stand on a stage. But I never—I just had great freedom. Korea has their own alphabet, Hangul, but they used a lot of Chinese characters as well. Meg has been an organizational consultant and researcher since 1973 and a dedicated global citizen since her youth. . They went to England. Plus I had gotten into horses and I loved to ski. We can take our management metaphor, not from machines, but from the ways living systems organize and reorganize and manage themselves.” So when we take our management metaphor not from machines but from the way living systems organize . WHEATLEY: They have written the best book, the deepest book, the most—well deepest is probably the word—on circle practice. Carole told me that you go on retreat for two months every year now. WHEATLEY: No. WHEATLEY: Right, yes. That’s all you did then. Publicity Listings I mean it was like full force my future coming at me and it was hard to take in. And that’s a huge concern from my view. They were very rare. WHEATLEY: Yes, but the misuse of the term is everywhere. These systems have been in a state of breakdown ever since I started writing, but I thought they were changeable and now I realize they’re not. . Industry Week named her first book, Leadership and the New Science, Best Management Book of 1992. Because while I was in Korea in ’68, Martin Luther King was assassinated, JFK was assassinated, and the whole country was in such turmoil, and then watching those riots and the police brutality, I— So I went back to Korea only to pack and told them that I’ve just got to go home. It’s disappeared in the sciences as well. My history professor in college said, “Well, I don’t like advising women to go to graduate school because you just get married and get pregnant.” I remember that comment from him, Hayden White, wonderful historian. SCARPINO: And this was training through Berkana? And, in fact, you had some at least published remarks . SCARPINO: Carole Schwinn also described you as a keen observer of the world around you. They are. Why that theme in the second book? But what I learned from a General, again this was one of the stories I kept speaking about, was he told me, he said, “We train them in weapons, we train them physically, we train them how to think.” He said, “My final words to them always are ‘go and do good.’” And it’s just this great release to them. There was none of this testing or denial or any of the normal nonsense, so I remember it for that quality. Hired me and says, “ Well, I was very supportive of Buddhist wisdom, suited... 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