Leadership Quote by Margaret J. Wheatley

Wheatley is quietly detonating a favorite corporate fantasy: that leadership is a staffing problem you can solve in advance with org charts, succession plans, and a neat pipeline of “high potentials.” Calling that belief “quite dangerous” isn’t a soft critique; it’s a warning about what happens when institutions confuse control with preparedness. Prediction, in her framing, breeds brittleness. You optimize for the last crisis, then get blindsided by the next one.

The subtext is deeply ecological, consistent with Wheatley’s systems-informed worldview: organizations are living networks, not machines. If conditions are complex and shifting, leadership can’t be permanently assigned like a title; it has to surface where the knowledge, proximity, and credibility actually are. That’s why she pivots from “need leadership” to “assume” leadership. The verb matters. Leadership here is an act people step into, not a role bestowed from above.

Her second sentence is doing cultural work. “Willing” and “relevant” smuggle in a moral and emotional dimension that most management talk avoids. People don’t take responsibility because a competency model tells them to; they do it when the stakes feel real, when the situation matches their sense of agency, and when the environment won’t punish them for trying. Context isn’t a footnote; it’s the trigger.

Read against late-20th-century managerialism, Wheatley is arguing for a distributed, situational ethic: design organizations where authority can travel to where the problem is, and where leadership is less a ladder than a reflex. The danger isn’t unpredictability. It’s pretending you’ve eliminated it.