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Margaret J. Wheatley Biography Quotes 43 Report mistakes

43 Quotes
Known asMargaret Wheatley
Occup.Writer
FromUSA
Born1944
Early Life and Education
Margaret J. Wheatley, widely known as Meg Wheatley, was born in 1944 in the United States. Curiosity about how people learn, collaborate, and create meaning guided her from an early stage, and she pursued formal study that bridged education, communication, and organizational life. She earned an Ed.D. from Harvard University, an M.A. from New York University, and a B.A. from the University of Rochester, grounding her later work in rigorous inquiry and a broad intellectual tradition.

Entering the World of Organizations
Wheatley began her career engaged with education and community organizations, where she encountered the recurring challenges of leadership, bureaucracy, and change. Those early experiences set the path for her consulting and teaching, as she explored how groups could become more humane, self-organizing, and effective. She increasingly worked with nonprofits, corporations, health systems, schools, faith communities, and public agencies, helping leaders cultivate conditions for people to contribute, think together, and act responsibly in uncertain environments.

Leadership and the New Science
Her breakthrough book, Leadership and the New Science, first published in the early 1990s, introduced many readers to a new way of seeing organizations as living, dynamic systems. Drawing on insights from complexity, quantum physics, and biology, she challenged the mechanistic assumptions that had long dominated management thinking. The book was widely translated and read across sectors; it encouraged leaders to look for patterns, relationships, and self-organizing capacities rather than relying only on hierarchy, control, and prediction. Its influence positioned Wheatley as a central voice in the global conversation on organizational change.

Berkana Institute and Global Networks
To carry this work into communities and across borders, Wheatley co-founded the Berkana Institute, a nonprofit hub for leadership learning and community resilience. At Berkana she worked closely with colleagues who became pivotal in her story, including Myron Kellner-Rogers and Deborah Frieze. Together they nurtured networks of practitioners committed to local action and peer-to-peer learning, encouraging initiatives to grow from the ground up. Berkana emphasized the power of relationships, local wisdom, and small experiments that can spread through connection rather than command.

Books and Core Ideas
Wheatley expanded her thinking through a stream of books that deepened and humanized her approach. A Simpler Way, coauthored with Myron Kellner-Rogers, offered a poetic invitation to view organizations as living processes that thrive on curiosity, invitation, and connection. Turning to One Another distilled her belief that honest, respectful conversation is a primary technology of change. In Finding Our Way she collected essays that applied living-systems principles to everyday dilemmas leaders face. With Deborah Frieze, she wrote Walk Out Walk On, which visited communities around the world to learn how people create solutions when they stop waiting for top-down fixes and instead organize locally. Later works such as Perseverance and So Far From Home reflected a more contemplative, steadying voice for leaders working amid complexity and turbulence. Who Do We Choose to Be? invited leaders to face reality with courage and clarity while recommitting to service.

Warriors for the Human Spirit
As her thinking matured, Wheatley began describing leaders as Warriors for the Human Spirit. This was not a call to battle others, but a disciplined commitment to protect and restore human dignity, compassion, and sanity in difficult times. She created training and practices to help leaders cultivate presence, attention, and ethical steadiness, so they could contribute without succumbing to fear, anger, or exhaustion. This work integrated her long engagement with contemplative traditions and emphasized that inner development is inseparable from effective, responsible leadership.

Teaching, Speaking, and Communities of Practice
Wheatley has taught in graduate and executive programs and has been a frequent keynote speaker for organizations across the world. Her ideas circulated through communities of practice devoted to organizational learning and systemic change, often in conversation with contemporaries whose work addressed similar terrain, such as Peter Senge, Peter Block, Juanita Brown, and David Isaacs. Yet her distinct contribution remained a consistent focus on relationships, conversation, and living-systems understanding, translated into practical invitations leaders could act on immediately.

Approach and Influence
Across her career, Wheatley has insisted that the quality of relationships determines the quality of results. She urged leaders to build trust, support local initiative, notice emerging patterns, and host conversations that matter. Rather than seeking heroic solutions, she encouraged small, coherent actions sustained over time by communities of commitment. Her books and workshops have influenced executives, community organizers, educators, health professionals, clergy, and public servants, giving them language and practices to navigate uncertainty with steadiness and hope.

Legacy
Margaret J. Wheatley helped reframe leadership for an age of complexity, moving it from command-and-control to curiosity-and-care. Through seminal books like Leadership and the New Science, through partnerships with colleagues such as Myron Kellner-Rogers and Deborah Frieze, and through the Berkana Institute and Warriors for the Human Spirit, she has shown that meaningful change grows from relationships, conversation, and the courage to serve. Her enduring legacy is a body of work that equips people everywhere to act with compassion and clarity, even when the path forward is not yet visible.

Our collection contains 43 quotes who is written by Margaret, under the main topics: Motivational - Wisdom - Leadership - Deep - Nature.
Margaret J. Wheatley Famous Works

43 Famous quotes by Margaret J. Wheatley

"Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful"
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"Aggression only moves in one direction - it creates more aggression"
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"Circles create soothing space, where even reticent people can realize that their voice is welcome"
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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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"Most people associate command and control leadership with the military"
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"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"
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"I'm sad to report that in the past few years, ever since uncertainty became our insistent 21st century companion, leadership has taken a great leap backwards to the familiar territory of command and control"
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"For us, someone who is willing to step forward and help is much more courageous than someone who is merely fulfilling the role"
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"Determination, energy, and courage appear spontaneously when we care deeply about something. We take risks that are unimaginable in any other context"
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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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"Organisations are now confronted with two sources of change: the traditional type that is initiated and managed; and external changes over which no one has control"
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"In these troubled, uncertain times, we don't need more command and control; we need better means to engage everyone's intelligence in solving challenges and crises as they arise"
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"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"
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"I think it is quite dangerous for an organisation to think they can predict where they are going to need leadership. It needs to be something that people are willing to assume if it feels relevant, given the context of any situation"
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"For me, this is a familiar image - people in the organization ready and willing to do good work, wanting to contribute their ideas, ready to take responsibility, and leaders holding them back, insisting that they wait for decisions or instructions"
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"Even though worker capacity and motivation are destroyed when leaders choose power over productivity, it appears that bosses would rather be in control than have the organization work well"
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"We know from science that nothing in the universe exists as an isolated or independent entity"
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"We have created trouble for ourselves in organizations by confusing control with order"
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"Listening moves us closer, it helps us become more whole, more healthy, more holy. Not listening creates fragmentation, and fragmentation is the root of all suffering"
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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"
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"For eons, humans have struggled to find less destructive ways of living together"
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"Yet we act as if simple cause and effect is at work. We push to find the one simple reason things have gone wrong. We look for the one action, or the one person, that created this mess. As soon as we find someone to blame, we act as if we've solved the problem"
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"Aggression is inherently destructive of relationships. People and ideologies are pitted against each other, believing that in order to survive, they must destroy the opposition"
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"Whatever life we have experienced, if we can tell our story to someone who listens, we find it easier to deal with our circumstances"
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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"
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"I've wanted to see beyond the Western, mechanical view of the world and see what else might appear when the lens was changed"
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"Without aggression, it becomes possible to think well, to be curious about differences, and to enjoy each other's company"
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"Listening is such a simple act. It requires us to be present, and that takes practice, but we don't have to do anything else. We don't have to advise, or coach, or sound wise. We just have to be willing to sit there and listen"
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"I think we have to notice that the business processes we use right now for thinking and planning and budgeting and strategy are all delivered on very tight agendas"
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"I think a major act of leadership right now, call it a radical act, is to create the places and processes so people can actually learn together, using our experiences"
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"Hopelessness has surprised me with patience"
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"And time for reflection with colleagues is for me a lifesaver; it is not just a nice thing to do if you have the time. It is the only way you can survive"
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"When leaders take back power, when they act as heroes and saviors, they end up exhausted, overwhelmed, and deeply stressed"
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"Thinking is the place where intelligent actions begin. We pause long enough to look more carefully at a situation, to see more of its character, to think about why it's happening, to notice how it's affecting us and others"
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"In this present culture, we need to find the means to work and live together with less aggression if we are to resolve the serious problems that afflict and impede us"
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"Destroying is a necessary function in life. Everything has its season, and all things eventually lose their effectiveness and die"
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"Our willingness to acknowledge that we only see half the picture creates the conditions that make us more attractive to others. The more sincerely we acknowledge our need for their different insights and perspectives, the more they will be magnetized to join us"
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"I believe that the capacity that any organisation needs is for leadership to appear anywhere it is needed, when it is needed"
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"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"
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"We do as much harm holding onto programs and people past their natural life span as we do when we employ massive organizational air strikes. However, destroying comes at the end of life's cycle, not as a first response"
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"In virtually every organization, regardless of mission and function, people are frustrated by problems that seem unsolvable"
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"I believe that our very survival depends upon us becoming better systems thinkers"
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"Aggression is the most common behavior used by many organizations, a nearly invisible medium that influences all decisions and actions"
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