There is a simpler way
to lead organizations
The Power of Chaos
Excerpts from a conversation with Meg Wheatley
by Joe Flower
About one lifetime ago, astronomer and physicist J.B.S. Haldane
remarked, "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose,
it is queerer than we can suppose."
In recent years, science has begun to turn itself inside out in
fascinating investigations of that basic strangeness of the
universe. Since its very beginnings, one of the basic assumptions
of science has been a deterministic, clockworklike model of the
universe. Nature was obviously more complex than the straight
lines and simple forces of Euclid's geometry and Newton's physics
but eventually (it was assumed), if we got enough information
together, and got down to the right level of detail, we would
find that everything was predictable.
In the first half of this century, quantum mechanics (which held,
among other things, that whether light is made of particles or
waves depends on what question you ask), Kurt Godel's principle
of incompleteness (which demonstrated that every mathematical
system contains theorems that are true but unprovable without
enlarging the system), and Werner Heisenberg's theory of
uncertainty (which held that you can discover the speed of an
atomic particle, or its location but not both at once), began
to chip away at this deterministic assumption.
Systems thinking, which arose out of studies of communication in
World War II, greatly increased our ability to think about how
complex, active, interactive systems work, but it remained
weakest in dealing with "mess," turbulence, and
traumatic change. How do things fall apart? And then what
happens?
Some of the people working on communications theory focused not
on the message, but on the garbage in between the static.
Others began thinking about dripping faucets, clouds, coastlines,
and the formation of bubbles in water that was about to boil.
Just as systems theory, born in communications theory, proved
helpful in dealing with all sorts of things, from organizations
and family interactions to economic problems and the design of
lawnmowers, perhaps a study of turbulence and chaos would be
relevant to such messy things as landslides, rush-hour traffic,
epileptic seizures, and organizations going through traumatic
change.
The resulting "chaos theory" has hit its stride only in
the past decade and only now is it beginning to leak into
other applications, as theorists begin to apply its insights to
discontinuous, transforming change in a great many fields. At the
United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, historian Robert
Artigiani has even applied it to analyses of the US Constitution,
the rise and fall of Greek civilization, and the success of
Horatio Nelson at Trafalgar.
Meg Wheatley, Ed.D., has begun to try chaos theory in a field
that has intimate experience with the realities of chaos: the
management of organizations. With a doctorate from Harvard and a
masters from New York University, Wheatley began her consulting
career as a founding member of Rosabeth Moss Kanter's firm,
Goodmeasure, Inc. Wheatley is now an associate professor of
management at Brigham Young University, and a principal in KRW,
Inc. Industry Week named her book, Leadership and the New
Science: Learning About Organization from an Orderly Universe
"Best Management Book of 1992." She is founder and
president of the Berkana Institute, which sponsors an ongoing
series of dialogues about the "new science," and how it
applies to rethinking the life of organizations.
Our conversation with her took a shape much like the
organizational changes that so fascinate her: nonlinear,
surprising, and self-organizing.
(Conversation with Wheatley)
A Simpler Way
There is a simpler way to lead
organizations.
In order to find that simpler way we need to look for very
different lenses by which to see into the organization. Until
now, our predominant lens has been the lens that sees
organizations as machines, and human beings as machines or parts
of machines which is all good 17th century Newtonian imagery.
When you switch to thinking about organizations as complex living
systems, you get to see a lot of processes that could work in
your behalf, as a leader. We can take our management metaphor,
not from machines, but from the ways living systems organize and
reorganize and manage themselves.
At one level we are already switching our focus to a deeper
understanding of organizations as living systems. If you look at
the language by which we are now trying to describe
organizations, a lot of it describes living systems. We talk
about "learning organizations." We are looking for
resiliency, for dynamic qualities. We are looking more at
relationships and how relationships work in organizations.
Chaos
Once we make that switch then we have to start looking at
the processes by which living systems grow and thrive. And one of
those is a periodic plunge into the darker forces of chaos. Chaos
seems to be a critical part of the process by which living
systems constantly recreate themselves in their environment.
We have been afraid. As managers and leaders, and as consultants,
we have been terrified of chaos. Whenever a group is confused,
whenever people are really uncomfortable not knowing what to do,
most of us take that as a signal that we have failed them
somehow. The model we have is that organizations should work
smoothly, that we as leaders should feel in control all the time.
Chaos, of course, is a loss of control. So the minute chaos
erupts, we back off from it. We rush in to save the group from
confusion.
We tend to think that is our job. But that's only true if you
think of your organization as a machine, because machines cannot
tolerate great variance. Machines are established to run in
certain environments. They have no flexibility or resiliency to
deal with extraordinary levels of change. If you think of an
organization as a living system then hopefully you can structure
it so that it has the capacity for great flexibility and
resiliency, and the ability to adapt, to change, and to grow.
Patience
We can't get out of the messes we are in without
developing a much longer time parameter, without having a new
kind of patience for the development of order. Strange attractors
reveal the order that is inherent in certain kinds of chaotic
systems. You can't see that order until you are able to watch the
system evolve over a good period of time. When you look moment to
moment at a system in chaos, all you see is chaos, total
unpredictability. When you are able to watch the system develop
over time, you can see the order that emerges out of the chaos.
T.J. Cartwright, a planning expert, has given a definition of
chaos that I love: "order without predictability." This
is a very enticing paradox for us.
Yet in today's organizations we are seeking more and more control
as things get more and more crazy. You can ask any top leader or
administrator that you know and they will tell you that they are
barely hanging on. It is a sign of health for a leader now to
admit that he or she does not know what works. In admitting that
the old approaches don't work, they are opening themselves up to
the possibility of radically different ways of thinking about
their organizations.
No cookie cutters
I got in trouble with my academic colleagues recently
when I was quoted as saying, "The idea that expertise can be
transmitted needs to be abandoned." They said "Then why
have graduate programs?" I was trying to say that the belief
that any particular model or any particular body of knowledge
transfers whole from one system to another is erroneous.
Knowledge, models, and expertise are co-created by thinking
people working in and with their environment. Since that
environment is different for every organization, it doesn't work
to take something that has been developed in one place and just
transfer it wholesale to another place.
We have tried that. We have tried it with program after program,
and we have generated a well-earned cynicism among our work force
as they watch these programs come and go without creating the
desired change. We have to do something different. We have to
engage the whole system of the organization in figuring out what
makes sense for that particular system.
The answers, the expertise, need to be created by the system that
needs the expertise. Certainly, some people have expert
knowledge, but the way to use that knowledge, these days, is to
give people particular frameworks and ideas to play with
realizing that as they play with them they are creating new
knowledge. They are not taking something that's tried and true
and just applying it in cookie-cutter fashion. If they are making
it work, they are creating new knowledge.
Information
I use the word "chaos" to describe those times
in an organization when people are confused, don't know what to
do, and feel overwhelmed by information that they can't make
sense of. If we recognize chaos as a potentially generative force
in our organization, then the first task, when chaos erupts, is
not to shut it down, not to reach for early closure, not to
immediately move back to our past comfort level. At those
moments, what people do not need is for someone else to come in
and make sense of it all for them. Nor do they need the other
normal strategy, which is to back away from all of this
information and just work a piece of it. What they need instead
are processes by which they can stay with the discomfort of that
information long enough that they get knocked off their
certainty, long enough for them to reach the clarity that they no
longer know what works, that their model, their frame for
organizing this problem or this organization doesn't work any
more.
That's what I call chaos, when people move into such deep
confusion that they let go of their present conceptions of how to
solve a problem. When they move into that place of not knowing,
and stay there for a while, what happens is that the process of
"self organization" kicks in.
Living systems, when confronted with change, have the capacity to
fall apart so that they can reorganize themselves to be better
adapted to their current environment. We always knew that things
fell apart, we didn't know that organisms have the capacity to
reorganize, to self-organize. We didn't know this until the
Noble-Prize winning work of Ilya Prigogine in the late 1970's.
But you can't self-organize, you can't transform, you can't get
to bold new answers unless you are willing to move into that
place of confusion and not-knowing which I call chaos.
In my work I find that you can create intentional chaos by
overloading people with important and relevant information that
they can't make sense of.
We help people generate information that finally overwhelms them.
The information has to be relevant, and it has to be important.
It has to deal with big questions.
People get scared and frustrated, and they want to problem-solve
their way out of the chaos. But we don't let them. We keep them
generating even more information. Finally they let go. Once they
let go, they have the capacity to come up with bold solutions
that integrate all of the information. At the other side of chaos
you get a new kind of order, an order that is adaptive, that is
transforming, that is all the things we want in an organization
to be.
That is an intentional use of chaos. The chaos that seems rampant
in our organizations today needs to be resolved in the same way.
When people are feeling confused and overwhelmed, instead of
shutting down information, we need to create more processes for
looking at the information, and even generating even more
information.
Information, in organizations, is usually handled with an
attitude of control and parsimony. But when we do that, we are
taking information, which is the vital organizing force of the
universe, and using it in a way that creates more loss of
control.
We need organizations in which information is open and abundant,
in which information that is relevant to the life of the
organization is just there for people to use as they require. You
get order through creating information and making it available.
That is an enormously paradoxical concept for managers who have
been trained to see information as power, as something that has
to be carefully controlled and conserved and fed to people in
little doses.
The science of self organizing systems says that if you want
order you need a free flow of information, because information is
what living systems use to transform themselves.
"Who are
we?"
In order to make sense of this information, an
organization needs a strong core identity that is clear to
everyone involved. It needs filters that help people recognize
information that is critical for the organization. We have not
attended seriously enough, yet, to issues of the identity and
purpose of organizations. We talk about values, visions, and
missions. I am starting to talk about the core identity.
"Why does this organization exist? What is its purpose? What
is it trying to achieve? Why do we bother working together?"
These questions need to be answered. The answers need to come out
of the whole organization.
We need to have processes in which the whole organization is
engaged in weaving its story.
An organization needs to know who it is in order to make sense of
a chaotic environment. Otherwise you are just buffeted in all
different directions. We need to do much more work in
organizations in making a really vibrant core, the core values.
One of the lessons we can learn from the new science is that once
you have formed a strong core identity you can then trust people
to organize their own behavior around that identity, instead of
organizing by policies and procedures. The behavior will look
very different from person to person. And that will be okay,
because (and this is one of the great lessons of chaos) you then
stand back and look, not at those individual behaviors but at the
pattern. Then you will be able to see the true pattern of the
organization.
Scary
This can be very scary for managers. It asks them to act
like adults, and to believe that they have adults working for
them. Not everyone will be able to do this. Some American
managers will be able to behave like adults and change their life
posture. Some of them won't.
Those who don't, who are already leading lives of increasing
stress, will simply not be able to survive, either professionally
or in their personal lives.
I don't think we have a choice. And I don't believe that we will
find a simpler way to lead complex organizations just by doing
the old approaches faster and better.
There is a simpler way to manage, and it feels very strange, even
foreign to us. But time and stress are on the side of change. We
simply can't keep doing it the way we have been doing it.
Motivation
As managers and as consultants, we have always been
interested in that big question: how do you motivate people. But
the real answer is simple you don't. Instead, you trust that
they are self organizing systems who come with their own desire
to thrive. They will make adjustments and do what is necessary
for them to flourish. In an organization, you don't have to
"incentify" anybody. You have to create the conditions
under which they can thrive.
Among the things that human beings naturally seek are the ability
to contribute and to make a difference, and the ability to be
involved in satisfying social relationships. Those criteria show
up at the top of every study I have ever looked at on why people
work. If you design your organization around these criteria, it
will have to be one in which people are not boxed into roles, in
which they feel that they can continue to grow, learn, and
develop, and in which a variety of relationships are available to
them.
When you box people in, when you see only a few of their
attributes, you kill them. Then, in order to make them work, you
start adding on all of these incentive programs and other
external motivators. The pay and incentive system could be much
simpler. People do not need these intricate structures. The
reason they need them now is that we don't allow them to work in
an environment which satisfies them. We need to be more creative
than that.
Once we've created organizations which really support people's
contributions, then I don't think people are looking for complex
rewards. I think they are looking for straightforward pay that
feels fair. They are looking for pay that reflects their
contribution (or their team's contribution) to the whole.
Just as this is scary for managers to use the energy of chaos,
and to survive without so much structure, it's also scary for the
people being managed, until they experience it. It's a little
less scary the second time. By the third, fourth, or fifth time
that you have been through a process which includes chaos and
letting go, you realize that this works and that it has enormous
potential.
I recently completed work with an organization that decided to
engage all 900 of its employees in creating a vision. The process
was messy and ambiguous. It was a process that did not allow
anyone to nail down a vision for anybody else. We finally got to
a place where a lot of people in the organization understood that
even vision is a process. That they don't need to have something
clearly written down. That, having gone through the process of
working together, and illuminating what they wanted the vision to
be, the vision is in their guts, in their hearts. They don't need
it up on a wall.
To get to that point of clarity that vision itself is a
process they went through a series of very large conferences
which included moments of deep, intentional chaos, and ongoing
periods in which we simply would not let people become concrete.
They didn't like it at all. But they liked what they got. They
liked where it ended up. Now they have a little faith in this
very different process.
Play and Laughter
People have to be more playful. Once we accept the fact
that we can't just import solutions that will work for our own
organization, that we have to make it up, then we have to ask,
"What are the circumstances that help people be thoughtful
and creative, that help them come up with answers that
work?"
What helps people be creative is experimentation seeing what
works by doing it. We need to create an atmosphere in which
experimentation is welcome, and that means an atmosphere in which
we don't take everything so incredibly seriously. We need to be
much more forgiving, we need to be much more compassionate, we
need to be in deeper relationships with one another.
Play is a quality that leads to good experimentation. Sometimes
that means not having the answer right away. We need to realize
that it's okay to say "That's interesting, I don't know the
answer, let's just think about it. Let's play with it for
awhile."
One plays by not killing people for making mistakes, and by going
back to some vague memory that work should be fun, that when work
is fun, it can still be very hard, but it has a whole different
quality to it.
We need more laughter in management. Lewis Thomas explains that
he could tell something important was going on in an experimental
laboratory by the laughter. He says, "Whenever you can hear
laughter, and somebody saying, 'But that's preposterous' you
can tell things are going well and that something probably worth
looking at has begun to happen in the lab."
Contrast that to the sort of quintessential management maxim,
which is, "Don't surprise me. I want to know ahead of time,
I can't be caught looking like I didn't know what was going on
everywhere in the organization." That's an incredibly
restrictive maxim. It insures that you will stay exactly where
you are.
All this process
People ask how we can possibly do all this process at the
very time that we are trying to be more nimble. But how can we
possibly be more nimble if we are not willing to engage all the
time thinking together, figuring things out, coming up with
solutions that work for a while, that are temporarily adaptive?
We tend to think of process as a "touchy feely" thing.
In fact, quantum physics says that process is the basic building
block of the whole universe. The universe is energy fields coming
into relationship with one another, forming something
temporarily.
Planning
Information only has value when it is in relationship to
the current need. And the current need is forever changing.
This notion of life as a fluid, as a changing process, needs to
get imbedded in our organizational thinking. We have failed in
things like quality in this country by failing to see that what
makes the quality process work is the attention to process
itself, to the fact of people being in new relationships in which
they are generating new and useful information. Instead we have
thought of quality management as a technique or a tool. That is
why so many of these processes have failed we see them as a
technique to get to a particular outcome, rather than a way of
building a quality of relationships that generates critical
information continually.
Of course, this greatly affects the way you do your planning. You
can't do simple cause and effect linear projections anymore. But
you can set a very clear direction in which you intend to go. You
can set a clear intention about the kinds of markets in which you
believe your core skills work best.
You probably will not get there exactly, but the process of
trying to create probabilities about what the organization and
its environment can achieve together is very important. We need
to create, as part of the planning function, much better
information sensing devices, generating information that then
gets fed to all parts of the organization, so that the
organization can continuously adapt and change as that
information requires. That's different from saying, "This
our five year plan."
You can still say, "In five years, this is who we want to
be, who we want to be serving, what markets we'll be in, what
will characterize us and what will make us different."
Focusing on a strategy is critical. But the question is: Who gets
to do it? If the 12 top managers come up with a brilliant
strategy, the rest of the organization is going to say, "So
what? We already know this."
All of us who have worked with this know from our experience that
we get a lot of "So whats" if people are not involved.
Even things like the strategy of the organization should come
from the organization. You can't "self-organize" from
the outside. You can't have 12 people decide how a whole group of
a thousand or 20 thousand should self-organize.
Creating meaning
We need to find processes by which we can engage the
whole system in developing its future, creating meaning, creating
purpose, creating clarity about what it is that we are capable of
accomplishing as an entity.
The guys who sweep the halls will have something to say about it,
and so will the customers and the suppliers all of the
stakeholders. There is a great deal of talent and expertise
available both within our organizations and in those outside
stakeholders, that we just need to start using.
I don't work with any processes now that start with the
assumption that a few people can design something that will be of
benefit for the rest of the organization. Only the organization
itself can design the processes and outcomes of which it is
capable. So the real challenge is creating these processes that
engage greater and greater numbers of the organization. That is a
real challenge, it is a fundamental rethinking of leadership, but
I think it is the right challenge to be involved with.
People are open to the challenge because of their own loss of
confidence in what they have done in the past. And, at some
deeper level, they know that this stuff makes sense, because we
are all of us self-organizing systems. People recognize it from
their own experience of life.
We already have a lot of examples of the principles that come
from this new science at work in successful organizations. We
just haven't had the language to talk about, and the lens to look
at, what was making sense.
They have seemed to be the exceptions, the sort of odd things
that shouldn't work. But now, instead of being the exceptions or
the oddballs, we can see that they are the forerunners of a whole
new way of working.
Words
Strange attractor: Think of a planet's orbit. The dynamics of the
solar system the interaction of the planet's mass and speed
with the mass of the sun cause the planet to act as though it
is "attracted" to a particular line in space, which we
call its orbit. In this simple, mechanical, deterministic system,
it's not hard to plot where the planet will be tomorrow or 15
years from now. On the other hand, think of the movement of
clouds, the growth of trees, the swirling motion of a liquid.
These systems seem "chaotic," without any
predictability. But in fact, theorists of chaotic systems have
discovered that they also have "attractors" akin to a
planet's orbit; that is, their movements have an internal
structure. When various measurements of their movements are
plotted onto two or three-dimensional "phase space"
graphs, they do not fall into random glops, nor into simple
orbits, but into strange and beautiful shapes reminiscent of
taffy in a pulling machine, filigrees of coral, or the rings of
Saturn. These shapes of probability showing the complex,
selforganizing structures of chaotic systems, have been dubbed
"strange attractors."
Chaos: We think we know chaos. It's a "mess," a pile of
rubble, a condition without form or meaning. But as Nobelist Ilya
Prigogine showed in his book, Order Out of Chaos, there are, in
fact, two kinds of chaos. One is low energy randomness, like a
shuffled deck of cards. Without the addition of more energy (like
some poker players), such a system is not going to organize
itself. But high energy, turbulent chaos is quite something else
its disorder contains the seeds of order.
As Wheatley puts it, chaos is "the final state in a system's
move away from order. Not all systems move into chaos, but if a
system is dislodged from its stable state, it moves first into a
period of oscillation, swinging back and forth between different
states. If it moves from this oscillation, the next state is full
chaos, a period of total unpredictability. But in the realm of
chaos, where everything should fall apart, the strange attractor
comes into play" and a new kind of order emerges from the
chaos.
Resources
For further reading on the "new science:"
Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. New
York: Bantam Books, 1980.
Briggs, John, and F. David Peat. Turbulent Mirror: An
Illustrated Guide To Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness.
New York: Harper and Row, 1989. The easiest layman's guide.
Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics. New York: Bantam Books, 1976.
Also, The Turning Point: Science, Society and the Rising
Culture. New York: Harper and Row, 1989.
Gleick, James. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Viking,
1987.
Jantsch, Erich. The SelfOrganizing Universe. Oxford: Pergamon
Press, 1980.
Peters, Tom. Thriving on Chaos. New York: Knopf, 1987.
Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. Order Out of Chaos. New
York: Bantam Books, 1984.
Zukav, Gary. The Dancing Wu Li Masters. New York: Bantam Books,
1979.
Added by Jiri:
Wheatley, Margaret Leadership and New Science: Bervers-Kohlers,
SF 1992
Wheatley, Margaret, and Myron Kellner-Rogers. A
Simpler Way: Berrett-Koehler, 1996
Closely related:
McCarthy, Jim. Dynamics of Software Development. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Press, 1995
Moore, James. The Death of Competition (Leadership & Strategy in the Age of Business Ecosystems) New York: HarperCollins, 1996