Life & Wisdom Quote by Margaret J. Wheatley

Order is what leaders want to see; control is what they reach for when they feel they are losing it. Wheatley’s line lands because it exposes that swap as a category error with real organizational costs. In many workplaces, “order” gets treated like a picture you can hang on the wall: clean org charts, standardized processes, tidy dashboards. When reality refuses to cooperate - as it always does - the reflex is to tighten the screws: more approvals, more metrics, more policing of behavior. That’s control masquerading as competence.

The subtext is blunt: control is often an anxiety response, not a strategy. It comforts managers by making uncertainty look manageable, but it also drains the very conditions that create genuine order: trust, shared purpose, local judgment, fast feedback. The more you clamp down, the less information flows upward, the more people optimize for compliance over results, and the organization gets “orderly” in the way a museum is orderly - perfectly arranged, not alive.

Wheatley’s broader context (systems thinking and complexity in organizational life) matters here. In complex environments, order emerges from relationships and clear intent, not from micromanagement. You can’t command adaptability; you cultivate it. Her warning is less about being nice and more about being realistic: when leaders confuse control with order, they manufacture brittleness. The organization looks stable right up until it isn’t, and then everyone is shocked by a failure they’ve been rehearsing for years.