Time & Perspective Quote by Margaret J. Wheatley

A polite warning dressed up as a shrug: “Probably” softens the blow, “most visible” dares you to look around, and then Wheatley drops the real claim - that human certainty is the engine of ecological surprise. The line works because it treats unintended consequences not as a rare policy mishap but as a repeatable pattern, as routine as “every time.” That absolutism is strategic. It doesn’t need a footnote; it needs your memory: invasive species introduced as fixes, rivers straightened for efficiency, fire suppressed until the forest becomes tinder, pesticides that boomerang into resistance and collapse.

Wheatley’s specific intent is less to scold than to recalibrate how we think about control. By choosing “natural ecology” instead of “environment,” she invokes a web of relationships, not a backdrop. Ecology is systems thinking made physical: feedback loops, thresholds, cascading effects. Humans don’t “adjust” a place; we tug a strand and pretend we’re only moving one thing.

The subtext is an argument about humility and governance. We love interventions because they read as competence: build the dam, drain the wetland, eliminate the predator, “improve” the landscape. Unintended consequences are the ecosystem’s way of publishing the receipts. The quote also reflects Wheatley’s broader reputation as a leadership thinker: organizations, like habitats, are complex systems where linear fixes often create nonlinear messes. Ecological meddling becomes her clearest metaphor because nature is the one arena where denial is hardest to sustain - the outcomes show up in water, soil, fire, and food, not just in memos.