Margaret Wheatley wrote an article titled The Unplanned Organization: Learning from Nature’s Emergent Creativity (1996).
« In my work with large organizations, one of the questions we often ask is, “How would we work differently if we really understood that we are truly self-organizing?” »
« When we say that organizations or people are living systems, we’re saying that, unlike machines, people have intelligence… People are capable of change… We live in a universe that is alive, creative, and experimenting all the time to discover what’s possible… This is my favorite realization. We see this at all levels of scale, whether we’re looking at the smallest microbes or looking out into the galaxies. We live in a world which is constantly exploring what’s possible, finding new combinations not struggling to survive, but playing, tinkering, to find what’s possible. »
« People are intelligent. We’re creative, we’re adaptive, we seek order, we seek meaning in our lives. When we really start to understand this, when we really start to change our perception of who people are, then it changes how we think about organizing. »
« It is the natural tendency of life to organize — to seek greater levels of complexity and diversity… Everywhere you look you see that life is system-seeking. We are rediscovering our interconnectedness; there are no isolated individuals in the natural world. »
« To repeat: Life is self-organizing. It seeks to create patterns, structures, organization, without pre-planned directive leadership. »
« Life uses messes to get to well-ordered solutions… Life is incredibly messy. We could even say it is unbelievably wasteful. But shift perspective and judgments, and what at first glance what may appear to be messy and inefficient may actually be life experimenting — discovering what is possible. If you have ever tried to create an aquarium, you’ll know how messy that can be. You keep trying to put in new life forms and hoping that the whole will suddenly take hold as a system. Then your fish die. But if you keep messing around, sooner or later the aquarium takes as a system, and sustains itself. »
« Life is intent on finding what works, not what’s right… I find this very liberating. This is where playfulness can enter into our own human relationships in a different way, because the task of the moment, of any moment, is to find something that works, but not be so ego-attached to it that we believe it is the only solution, the only right answer. »
« Life creates more possibilities as it engages with opportunities… Every time we try to make something work, we are creating more possibilities within the system — we open many different “windows of opportunity”. If a particular opportunity is not fulfilled, there are always many others to engage with. Each path of opportunity leads to its own pattern of order. It may be unpredictable, but life is attracted to order. It is the nature of natural systems. »
« What’s the ‘self’ that gets organized in ‘self-organizing’? … These two words are equally important. Life organizes spontaneously and creatively, but it organizes around a self. It is making self. For me, this feels like further evidence that consciousness is at work in everything because you can’t organize around a self without being conscious that you are a self. So when we see self-organization, I believe what we’re watching is consciousness forming itself into different identifiable beings. »
« Thus, we live in a world which is truly co-creative, in which you and I cannot exist in isolation. »
« Beyond the Machine Image… One of the interesting things I learned recently is that since about 1850 we have described our brains in terms of our current technology. So, in the middle of the nineteenth century brains were thought of as hydraulic pumps. Then they were thought of as telegraph systems, then as telephone switchboards, and now we’re up to neural nets. But these are all technological machine metaphors for understanding ourselves. » « But the new recognition of a self-organizing world tells us that we can use any period of chaos and dissipation to reorganize ourselves to a structure better suited to the environment. »
If you start to think about this for a while, and you’re engaged in a change process or a change strategy, this alters the way you relate to change. If identity is a key issue, then it seems to me inescapable that we involve people from the start in whatever the change is going to be. Then they have the chance to reorganize their own sense of identity to fit the changed reality. You can’t change people, but people change all the time. »
« Realizing that we live in a self-organizing world is to recognize that so much more is available for us as groups, as organizations, as communities. So much more is available to us in the form of a naturally occurring energy — the self-organizing capacity we all have. We have to learn how to engage it, how to evoke it. »
« Termite Towers and Leaderless Groups… Termite colonies are examples of a wonderful self-organizing process, and can be highly instructive about human endeavor as well. For instance, individual termites are capable only of digging dirt piles. They don’t do anything sophisticated. This is true of most social insects. If you think of the hive as a brain, and the social relations as a mind, individual termites are like single neurons. Isolated, they barely have any significance. But as a coordinated group they perform like a hive-mind. Like neurons, they emit chemicals for communication. Termites emit scents that attract other termites. They are constantly aware of what’s going on in their environment; they’re very tuned in. They wander at will, bump up against one another, and then they respond. »
« I think this is an excellent maxim for organizational life. You wander at will, you bump up against one another, and you respond. But you’re developing so much more consciousness of what’s going on in your environment, and you’re tuned to so much more information than we have allowed people in those “org. chart” disasters. »
« So after a certain number of termites collect, their behavior shifts, emerging into something with an entirely new capacity, and they start building their towers. A group of termites over here will start an arch, another group over there will notice it, and they’ll start the other side of the arch. Spontaneously, it meets in the middle, and there was no engineer present. »
« This is a view of life beyond conventional strategic plans, planners, goals, objectives, and Myers-Briggs tests. Let me explain that last remark: Myers-Briggs is a system for assessment of psychological types. It’s a way of understanding who you are, how you take in information, how you thrive. Like all such tests, it is focused on individuals … But as far as I can tell, right now, none of our personality assessors or indicators let us know who or what we are capable of being when we are in community with one another. »
« I believe it is a travesty to think we can understand ourselves or another human being independent of being in a relationship with them. And one of the wonderful things the termites show is that we live in a world that has emergent properties, which means that when a group is together it is capable of behaviors that simply are not knowable when you study the individuals… So why do we spend so much time trying to understand our self (little s), since that self changes — whole new capacities come forward in us — when we are together in our communities? »
« The reason I think this is so problematic for us is that you cannot plan; you can only watch once you’re in the process of being together. You can only notice what’s happening, and then tinker with it… and see what emerges. » « That feels unplanned, it looks messy, it smacks us in the face; it goes against all the ways we have been taught to be effective leaders, or effective individuals. In contemporary society, we’ve gone crazy with goal-setting and planning and thinking about our lives in a linear progression. »
« We would do well to learn from the termites. There is a lot of wisdom available in the study of emergent behavior. And it is available only because we live in a world which is self-organizing. We live in a world in which, when we come together, we can discover new possibilities. And we live in a world in which the discovery of new possibilities is, I believe, the reason for existing. »
« If you think of life as a network, then you don’t have bottoms or tops. Emergent solutions can come from anywhere, but they are always very situational, always highly contextual, and therefore they’re going to be quite variable, and always unplanned… I also want to emphasize that emergent organizations are leader-full, not leaderless. Leaders emerge and recede as needed. Leadership is a series of behaviors rather than a role for heroes. »
« Aspen Trees and Hidden Connectedness… I recently learned from my son’s fifth grade teacher that the largest known living organism on the planet lives in Utah, where we now live… It’s a grove of aspen trees that cover thousands of acres. When we look at them, we think, “Oh, look at all the trees.” When botanists looked underground they said, “Oh, look at this system, it’s all one. This is one organism.” »
« Michigan mushroom, which covered 37 acres… What was interesting about that was when mycologists looked at these mushrooms they couldn’t figure out how they survived, because they didn’t have all the “functionality” they needed to be healthy mushrooms. When they looked underground they found the answer — it was just one large organism. »
« In a self-organizing world, one of the things that works on our behalf is not only that we have a natural tendency toward change, that we can constantly reorganize, or that we can structure ourselves without leaders (as long as we’re well connected and informed and focused) but that, underneath it all, what we’re doing is discovering our connections. »
« Biologist Francisco Varela has said that you cannot direct a living system, you can only disturb it. »
« If we really start to sense the self-organizing capacity that is around us, we could realize that our efforts to foster change or to midwife change — not to manage change — have much support. »
« I would like us just to be more experimental. We are not looking for the solutions, we’re just seeing what works for this system, with a deep respect for its interconnections. When it doesn’t work, we move on and try something else, and when it works, we feel very blessed. »
The article was adapted from Wheatley’s talk “The Heart of Organization” at IONS’ fourth annual conference “Open Heart, Open Mind” in San Diego, California, (July 1995) and was published in the Noetic Sciences Review #37 (Spring 1996).
Margaret Wheatley is the author of:
- Restoring Sanity: Practices to Awaken Generosity, Creativity, and Kindness in Ourselves and Our Organizations(2024);
- Who Do We Choose To Be? Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity (2023)
- Leadership and the New Science (2012)
- Perseverance (2010)
- Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future (2009)
- Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time (2007)
- A Simpler Way (1999)
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