Education Quote by Margaret J. Wheatley

Leadership here isn’t framed as charisma or command; it’s framed as infrastructure. Wheatley’s verb choice, “create,” pulls the spotlight off the heroic individual and onto the quieter labor of design: building “places and processes” where learning can happen without being derailed by hierarchy, speed, or ego. That’s a pointed rebuke to the default management instinct to treat learning as a training module and leadership as decision-making theater.

The phrase “right now” does heavy contextual work. Wheatley has spent decades critiquing mechanistic organizations and advocating systems thinking; in a moment defined by polarization, institutional distrust, and brittle workplaces, “right now” reads like an emergency clause. Learning isn’t a perk. It’s a survival strategy. Calling it a “radical act” sharpens the critique: what’s radical isn’t the content of what people learn, but the fact that many institutions are structured to prevent collective sensemaking. Real learning requires time, psychological safety, and permission to revise beliefs - all of which threaten cultures built on certainty and control.

“People can actually learn together” contains a quiet accusation. The “actually” implies we claim collaboration while rewarding individual performance, while “together” pushes against the myth that expertise is possessed by a few and delivered downward. The closer, “using our experiences,” rejects abstract, top-down doctrine. Experience is messy, local, embodied - and therefore harder to standardize or spin. Wheatley’s intent is to recast leadership as convening: not having the answers, but engineering the conditions where a group can earn them.