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We have created trouble for ourselves in organizations by confusing control with order.

Margaret J. Wheatley

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Margaret J. Wheatley
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: January 1
Business Theorist
Writer
Confusing
Organizations
Organized
Organization
Created
Control
Trouble
Order

More quotes by Margaret J. Wheatley

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Life doesn't move in straight lines, and neither does a good conversation.
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There are many benefits to this process of listening. The first is that good listeners are created as people feel listened to. Listening is a reciprocal process - we become more attentive to others if they have attended to us.
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Power is the capacity to generate relationships.
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A world based on machine images is a world filled with boundaries. In a machine, every piece knows its place.
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Let's just keep asking ourselves this question: 'Is what I'm about to do strengthening the web of connections, or is it weakening it?'
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Many of us have created lives that give very little support for experimentation. We believe that answers already exist out there, independent of us. What if we invested more time and attention to our own experimentation? We could focus our efforts on discovering solutions that work uniquely for us.
Margaret J. Wheatley
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Everyone in a complex system has a slightly different interpretation. The more interpretations we gather, the easier it becomes to gain a sense of the whole.
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The things we fear most in organizations - fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances - are the primary sources of creativity.
Margaret J. Wheatley
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Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We have to stop pretending we are individuals that can go it alone
Margaret J. Wheatley
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Most people associate command and control leadership with the military.
Margaret J. Wheatley
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The future cannot be determined. It can only be experienced as it occurring. Life doesn't know what it will be until it notices what it has become.
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For eons, humans have struggled to find less destructive ways of living together.
Margaret J. Wheatley
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Probably the most visible example of unintended consequences, is what happens every time humans try to change the natural ecology of a place.
Margaret J. Wheatley
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Life is creative. It makes it up as it goes along.
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It's not differences that divide us. It's our judgments about each other that do.
Margaret J. Wheatley
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Passion mutates into procedures, into rules and roles. Instead of purpose, we focus on policies. Instead of being free to create, we impose constraints that squeeze the life out of us.
Margaret J. Wheatley
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For example, I was discussing the use of email and how impersonal it can be, how people will now email someone across the room rather than go and talk to them. But I don't think this is laziness, I think it is a conscious decision people are making to save time.
Margaret J. Wheatley
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To make a system stronger, we need to make stronger relationships.
Margaret J. Wheatley
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Successful organizations, including the Military, have learned that the higher the risk, the more necessary it is to engage everyone's commitment and intelligence.
Margaret J. Wheatley
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In this new world, you and I make it up as we go along, not because we lack expertise or planning skills, but because that is the nature of reality. Reality changes shape and meaning because of our activity. And it is constantly new. We are required to be there, as active participants. It can't happen without us and nobody can do it for us.
Margaret J. Wheatley