Life & Wisdom Quote by Margaret J. Wheatley

Wheatley takes a familiar complaint about technology and flips its moral charge. Email isn’t framed as social rot or etiquette collapse; it’s presented as an adaptation, a small, rational bargain people strike inside overstretched workdays. That pivot matters. By refusing the easy “laziness” diagnosis, she redirects blame away from individual character and toward the tempo of modern organizations, where responsiveness is rewarded and time is the scarce currency. The line “conscious decision” is doing quiet, strategic work: it treats impersonal communication not as an accident but as a coping mechanism.

The subtext is less about email than about how institutions train us to relate to each other. When someone messages “across the room,” it’s not just avoidance of small talk; it’s a micro-symptom of workplaces that valorize frictionless throughput over human texture. Email becomes a tool for control: it creates a record, reduces emotional risk, and lets the sender manage attention on their own schedule. That’s “saving time,” but it also reshapes power and accountability. You can ignore a knock at your door; you can also “circle back” forever in a thread.

Contextually, Wheatley’s broader work on leadership and systems thinking helps explain the tone: she’s interested in the incentives that produce behavior, not in shaming the behavior itself. The quote works because it sounds charitable while landing a sharper critique: if impersonal communication is a rational choice, then the irrational thing might be the environment that makes that choice feel necessary.