Leadership Quote by Margaret J. Wheatley

There is a quiet provocation in Wheatley splitting change into the kind we can choreograph and the kind that arrives like weather. The line reads like a management memo, but its real target is managerial vanity: the deeply ingrained belief that disruption is something leaders either “drive” or “handle.” By naming “traditional” change as “initiated and managed,” she’s not praising it so much as exposing it as a comforting fiction - a domesticated version of reality that makes organisations feel competent and in charge.

The second half does the real work. “External changes over which no one has control” is a direct rebuke to the corporate habit of treating the world as a set of variables waiting to be optimized. Wheatley’s intent isn’t to induce panic; it’s to force a posture shift. If change can’t always be owned, then leadership can’t only be about planning, execution, and compliance. It has to be about sensing, adaptation, and the ability to reorganize without collapsing into blame.

Context matters: Wheatley emerged as a major voice alongside late-20th-century systems thinking and complexity science, when global supply chains, financial shocks, technological acceleration, and geopolitical volatility made five-year plans feel like museum pieces. The subtext is that organisations shouldn’t merely “manage change” as a project category; they should redesign themselves to live in motion. The quote works because it punctures a popular corporate narrative - control as competence - and replaces it with a more unsettling, more honest metric: resilience as intelligence.