Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World [カセット]

Edit of 20 Dec 07 to add links.

This book is beyond five stars, and not just for business, where it is receiving all the praise it is due, but within government, where it has not yet been noticed. It was recommended to me by the author of Building a Knowledge-Driven Organization and I now recommend it to everyone I know. If there are two books that can "change the world," these are the ones.

Although the Chinese understood all this stuff centuries ago (Yin/Yang, space between the dots, the human web), the author is correct when she notes late in the book that the commoditization of the human worker (Cf. Lionel Tiger, Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System) and the emphasis on scientific objectivity and scientific manager (Cf. Jean Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West) were perhaps the greatest error we might have made in terms of long-run progress. Coincidentally, as I finished the book, on the Discovery channel in the background they were discussing how the leveeing of the Mississippi blocked the Louisiana watershed from cleansing the Mississippi naturally, as it once used to.

It's all about systems--the author does cite Donella Meadows' 1982 article in Stewart Brand's Co-Evolution Quarterly, but does not pay much heed to the large body of literature that thrived in the 1970's around the Club of Rome.

There are perhaps three bottom lines in this book that I would recommend to any government leader who hopes to stabilize and reconstruct our world:

1) Information is what defines who we are, what we can become, what we can perceive, what we are capable of achieving. Blocking or controlling information flows stunts our growth and virtually assures defeat if not death. It is the optimization of listening--being open to *all* information (and especially all the information the secret world now ignores)--that optimizes our ability to adjust, evolve, and grow.

2) Command & control is history, block and wire diagrams are history. General Al Gray had it right in the 1990's when he talked about "commander's intent" as the baseline. Leaders today need to be disruptive, to look for dissonant views and news, and to empower all individuals at all levels with both information, and the authority to act on that information.

3) Disorder is an *opportunity*. We have the power to define ourselves, our "opponents," and our circumstances in ways that can either inspire protective, constricted, secretive, "armed" responses, or inclusive, open, sharing "pro-active" peaceful responses.

The author is to be praised for noting early on in the book that "Ethical and moral questions are no longer fuzzy religious concepts but key elements in the relationship any organization has with colleagues, stakeholders, and communities." I would extend that to note that social ethics and foreign policy ethics are the foundation for sustainable life on the planet, and we appear to be a long way from understanding that it is ethics, not guns, that will stabilize and fertilize...Cf Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.

It also merits comment that the author essentially kills the industry of forecasting, scenarios, modeling, and futures simulations. I agree with her view (and that of others) that early warning is achieved, not through the theft of secret plans and intentions or the forecasting of behavior, but rather by casting a very wide net, listening carefully to all that is openly available, sharing it very widely (as the LINUX guys say, put enough eyeballs on it, and no bug will be invisible), and then being open to changed relationships. Trying to maintain the status quo will simply not do.

I give the author credit for carrying out an extraordinary survey of the literature on quantum mechanics, and for developing a PhD-level explanation of why old organization theory, based on the linear concepts of Newtonian physics, is bad for us, and how the new emergent organization theory, understood by too few, is let about the things and more about the relationships between and among the things.

This is an elegant essay and a heroic personal work of discovery, interpretation, and integration. While I would have liked to see more credit given to Kuhn, Drucker, Garfield, Brand, Rheingold, and numerous others that I have reviewed here for Amazon, on balance, given the academic narrowness of her Harvard PhD, I think the author has performed at the Olympic level. This is a radical book, somewhat reminiscent of Charles Hampden-Turner's book, Radical Man: The Process of Psycho-Social Development. which as I recall was not accepted by Harvard as a thesis at the time. Perhaps Harvard is evolving (smile).

For other key books that complement and precede this book, see my lists on information society, collective intelligence, business intelligence, and intelligence qua spies and secrecy in an open world.

A handful of other amazing books (am limited to ten total):
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration

On its face, this book seems to be on to something. The social sciences have long adapted ideas from the natural sciences, so why not look to current natural science and see what it could teach us? Unfortunately, she misquotes many parts of the scientific theories she examines and takes them in directions that they do not warrant. This is not good science.

First and foremost, Wheatley completely ignores the fact that the seventeenth century science she disparages was not wrong. It was incomplete, yes. But most of the modern theories she explores cover natural phenomenon beyond the margins of our everyday world. Newtonian mechanics continues to be a very accurate, widely used method. It is only at the margins - very small objects (quantum mechanics), very large objects (relativity), and very fast objects (special relativity) - that many of the new theories take over. It might be more appropriate, then, to try to discover how ideas from the new sciences could extend our ideas about leadership and organizations rather than replace them.

The first modern theory she discusses is quantum physics. She paints a metaphysical world where we all get to create our own realities, where nothing is real outside of our relationships, and where the idea of objective reality is a myth. This is not what quantum physics says. It does not say that there isn't an objective world out there. It says that it behaves in a probabilistic way. We don't get to create our own realities. Instead, at the quantum level there is no such thing as passive observation; our observation influences a reality that is already there.

Her treatment of thermodynamics is similarly skewed, and her understanding of open versus closed systems is in places flat wrong. Similar criticisms for her treatments of the other modern theories.

The conclusions she comes to have value, but they can be found in other books with MUCH more clarity and much better support (see Senge's "The Fifth Discipline" for example). Wheatley offers what one New York Times op-ed writer termed "quantum mysticism" instead of what could have been a very interesting and thoughtful treatment. I cannot recommend this book.

In this brilliant book, Margaret J. Weathley brings parallels between the theory of leadership and the quantum physics. Being an organizational consultant, not the physical by herself, she
encourages "to stop seeking after the universe of the seventeenth century and begin to explore what has become known to us during the twentieth century".

She exposes the bright conclusions from her experience of working as a consultant, and these conclusions are confirmed by quantum physics as well:

- The things we fear most in organizations - disruptions, confusion, chaos - need not be interpreted as signs that we are about to be destroyed. Instead, these conditions are necessary to awaken creativity.

- What is critical is the relationship created between two or more elements. Systems influence individuals, and individuals call form systems.

- There is no objective reality; the environment we experience does not exist "out there". It is co-created through our acts of observation, what we choose to notice and worry about.

- Acting should precede planning.

- Instead of the ability to analyze and predict, we need to know how to stay acutely aware of what's happening now, and we need to be better, faster learners from what just happened.

- We need fewer descriptions of tasks and instead learn how to facilitate process.

- Power becomes a problem, not a capacity. People use their creativity to work against these leaders, or in spite of them; they refuse to contribute positively to the organization.

- Those who have used music metaphors to describe working together, especially jazz metaphors, are sensing to the nature of this quantum world. This world demands that we be present together, and be willing to improvise.

- If a manager is told that a new trainee is particularly gifted, that manager will see genius emerging from the trainee's mouth even in obscure statements. But if the manager is told that his or her new hire is a bit slow on the uptake, the manager will interpret a brilliant idea as a sure sign of sloppy thinking of obfuscation.

- In quantum world, what you see is what you get.

- Every time we go to measure something, we interfere.

- A place where the act of looking for certain information evokes the information we went looking for - and simultaneously eliminates our opportunity to observe other information.

- Every observation is preceded by a choice about what to observer.

- We all construct the world though lenses of our own making and use these to filter and select.

- It simply doesn't work to ask people to sign on when they haven't been involved in the planning process.

- Roles mean nothing without understanding the network of relationships and the resources that are required to support the work of that person. In this relational world, it is foolish to think we can define any person solely in terms of isolated tasks and accountabilities.

- What is distinguishable and important, he says, are the kinds of connections.

- Our old views constrain us. They deprive us from engaging fully with this universe of potentials.

Based on the parallels above mentioned, Margaret J. Weathley brings lot of compelling ideas about the leadership and organizational management. This book isn't a collection of dos and don'ts, but invigorates deep creative thinking.