16 quotes
Whatever life we have experienced, if we can tell our story to someone who listens, we find it easier to deal with our circumstances.
Turning to one another (2002)
Change always involves a dark night when everything falls apart. Yet if this period of dissolution is used to create new meaning, then chaos ends and new order emerges.
Margaret Wheatley (2006)
Leadership is always dependent upon the context, but the context is established by the relationships.
Leadership and the New Science (1992)
There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about.
Turning to one another (2002)
We know from science that nothing in the universe exists as an isolated or independent entity.
In organizations, real power and energy is generated through relationships. The patterns of relationships and the capacities to form them are more important than tasks, functions, roles, and positions.
Margaret Wheatley (1992)
In the past, it was easier to believe in my own effectiveness. If I worked hard, with good colleagues and good ideas, we could make a difference. But now, I sincerely doubt that.
Finding Our Way: Leadership For an Uncertain Time (2005)
The things we fear most in organizations - fluctuations, disturbances, imbalances - need not be signs ofan impending disorder that will destroy us. Instead, fluctuations are the primary source of creativity.
Leadership and the New Science (1992)
We have created trouble for ourselves in organizations by confusing control with order. This is no surprise, given that for most of its written history, leadership has been defined in terms of its control functions.
Leadership and the New Science (1992)
In our daily life, we encounter people who are angry, deceitful, intent only on satisfying their own needs. There is so much anger, distrust, greed, and pettiness that we are losing our capacity to work well together.
Turning to one another (2002)
Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful. It's amazing to me how much we do, but how little time we spend reflecting on what we just did.
Finding Our Way: Leadership For an Uncertain Time (2005)
When we can lay down our fear and anger and choose responses other than aggression, we create the conditions for bringing out the best in us humans.
Finding Our Way: Leadership For an Uncertain Time (2005)
To name is to make visible.
Deborah Frieze (2011)
We will need to become savvy about how to build relationships, how to nurture growing, evolving things. All of us will need better skills in listening, communicating, and facilitating groups, because these are the talents that build strong relationships.
Leadership and the New Science (1992)
I believe that our very survival depends upon us becoming better systems thinkers. How can we learn to see the systems we're participating in? How can we act intelligently when things remain fuzzy?
It's An Interconnected World (2002)
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.
Turning to one another (2002)