Prologue
Interview with Margaret Wheatley
Lotte Darsų
The Creative Alliance, Learning Lab Denmark, Danish School of Education, University of Aarhus, Copenhagen, Denmark
PP: 482 - 485
Article Text
Q. When you look at management development and education, what do you see happening right now?
I see in the field of management development and education that we are trying to educate people to be technicians rather than leaders; that we are giving people a lot of metrics and formulas and really acting from this assumption that numbers express reality and that good managers are people who can work with metrics and measurements. This is all over the world. I see this everywhere; any time I mention ‘the march of metrics,' people just nod their heads. We are training people to be good at believing that numbers convey reality, that with numbers you can understand your organisation, or your health, or your life. If you think about how everyone today knows how many grams of protein they should have, or what their cholesterol level should be - we have metricised, if I can use that word, how we look at reality. This is not only a tragedy, but it creates the kind of management that we are seeing, which is that people are too hurried, too rushed and too overwhelmed to even notice what is missing; too hurried or too overwhelmed to take time for relationships or for getting to know people; too hurried to appreciate the complexity of a problem; too overwhelmed to think.
I have seen it going on for many years, but what makes it much more intense now is that people are doing so much more and have so many more tasks to do. The use of numbers is a quick way to think you understand something and when you are looking for speed and just moving on to the next task, well, I think this is one of the reasons measurement has now become the dominant mode of managing.
The other thing I see in management development is that we are not dealing with the questions of leadership that we used to deal with in the past. I have a rather - maybe it's cynical, but I think it is a realistic - view that people going into management and into leadership are not going in to serve other people. They are really not going in with the ideal of helping other people or being a servant leader or helping others develop their potential. In the well-paying sectors of the world, people are going into leadership so that they can make money and get out, and then live the life they want to. These are very distressing trends that I'm speaking of. It applies also to the state of organisational development and to how we are training people to be change agents. We are giving them techniques: we are not giving them the philosophy or the wisdom or the patience to really know how to create change inside an organisation. So we are becoming a society of technicians and that is just where we are right now.
Q. What do you believe are the needs now?
I think the needs are to reawaken in young people a desire to serve as leaders, and this is very tricky in our modern day systems, because they are so complex. In fact, I believe they are inherently unmanageable. Young people see this and I think that is why so many younger people do not go into traditional systems. I work with a lot of these people (in their twenties and thirties) who have left the large traditional systems. They call themselves ‘walk-outs': they walk out of places where they cannot contribute, but they walk on, their whole phrase is ‘walk-out to walk-on'. They walk on to find places where they can really contribute their ideas and their enthusiasm, their idealism and their caring.
I personally do not expect these large complex systems to be able to turn themselves around and in my own work I have, for many years now, begun to support those who are innovating the new in the midst of the systems that are breaking down. At the Berkana Institute we say that we have to be midwives to the new while we are being hospice workers to the old collapsing systems, and that's difficult work, but it has to be done. If we have any creativity, if we have any spark of life left in us, then we have to realize that we need to find the places where we can make a contribution.
If we have this desire to be leaders, to really work with people so that other people grow and develop as well as ourselves - and that is for me the original and ideal form of leadership - then we have to be very active on our own behalf to find the places and the people with whom we can rediscover our enthusiasm and our imagination. What is very distressing to me is the complete loss of time to think and reflect. The terrible speedup of life and work results in people being overwhelmed and stressed, with no time to think. The human brain under stress is a very limited brain. We lose ⅘ of our brain capacity. We move into a primitive brain that is good at making lists and completing tasks, but we have no access to our creativity, our consciousness, our conscience, all the capacities that make human beings wonderful. More and more I encourage people to notice if their own imagination and creativity has been shut down, if they are tired and overwhelmed and possibly angry and fearful, and how can we each find the places that inspire us again.
This is why I find the arts so essential these days, because with drama, with theatre, with music, with poetry, with sound, with movement, we get away from the numbers; we get away from the spreadsheets; we get away from this tiny meaningless view of what's important. It's only through the arts that we can rediscover our human experience, which is filled with emotions, with a desire for harmony and of love and beauty, and a desire for fun and spontaneity, and really deep expressions of everything: pain, grief, loss as well as joy, and connection and enthusiasm. You don't find those emotions in our day-to-day lives; we're just supposed to get on with a long list of tasks to do.
Many years ago I became focused on bringing artists into my own work to support it. I also chose to write poetry, and I chose to use photographs rather than words for presentations, because I'm trying to take people to the place where they are still alive, where there still is imagination and caring and the human spirit is found. We cannot do that if we stay at this deadly level of spreadsheets and numbers and going so fast that we don't have time to even notice what we are feeling.
Q. What do you see as some of the more hopeful new tendencies?
The more hopeful tendencies in the world of large organisations - I don't even make the distinction now between non-profit and for-profit; if it is a large organisation no matter what their mission, they have all the same issues, and all have the same pressures on them - but what I find hopeful is the work on emotional intelligence, the U process[i], because it's based on a very different worldview, a different cosmology. Anything that gets people to sense into things and to reawaken our natural intuition, our natural ability to pick up what's going on, or pick up information that we can't put in a little box, these are all critical skills. We have a very strange culture in the West, because as far as I can tell, we are the only culture - and it's basically the United States' - we are the only culture that does not believe in any other forms of life having sentience, having consciousness. We have this worldview - you could call it phenomenology, but it's even more reductionist than that - that says that only human beings are fully sentient beings.
I was fascinated some years ago to realize that, because we have such a scientific culture in the United States, we are the only ones that don't believe in nature spirits or other beings, or invisible entities. You still get laughed at in the US, but every other culture that I have explored - high cultures, Chinese cultures, Tibetan cultures, indigenous cultures, the English, the Scandinavian - if you look at all the European cultures, they believe in nature spirits (now we call them fairy tales or myths), but we've have had this very rich culture that is now being destroyed around the world by the rise of Western science.
So the arts are a way in which we reconnect with our spirits, the soul, the ‘Anima Mundi' that Plato spoke about, the soul of the earth. Even the scientists that I love reading have gotten very poetic, now allowing for other forms of consciousness and other beings, or that there is more going on than our simple science lets us know about or makes us curious about. I think that we are coming out of this very inhibiting even paralyzing mental model of the world as machine. That was purely in the West, and I believe that we are at the end of it. That would be hopeful except for this historical evidence that whenever an old thought form or paradigm is dying, it becomes vicious, it goes out in a blaze of anger and aggression and that's what we are seeing also.
Q. Do you think that there is a difference between arts and artfulness?
I would define artfulness as acknowledging and using other capacities beyond analysis, beyond our rational brains. Artfulness is a way of tuning in, using our senses more fully. We could do well with just the five senses if we actually used them more. What I like about the art-ful-ness word is that when you add ‘ness' at the end of a word, I've been taught in Buddhism, it means ‘the state of being', so art-ful-ness would be the state of being created by art or with art, and that's quite a lovely image to work with. For me, that is a state of recognizing the wondrous qualities of the human being and how we express those deep feelings, the whole range of feelings.
One of the things I'm always so moved by when I'm working in Southern Africa is that people will go from telling you their story, which is one of absolute grief, devastated lives, loss of loved ones, death, illness, poverty - and as a Westerner it is difficult to sit and listen to these stories - but the Africans, at least the women, have this wonderful capacity: after you are sitting in grief with them, they will just suddenly stand up and start singing. They have this ability, which I have also seen amongst African Americans in the US in many places, but especially recently in New Orleans, where they will go from intense grief to the communion one feels when sitting there singing a song.
It is a release of the energy that has been built up and a transmutation of the energy, and I have begun to realize that this is what any artful expression does. Art gives you a place to let the energies of life, the joyous ones and the terrible ones, move through you, and in that process, it takes many different forms, but that's what it is to be truly alive. I think that we see that in artistic expressions, whether it is song or dance or poetry or visual expression. It is taking the energy that's in us and moving it so that it doesn't stay stuck in us.
Margaret Wheatley
Margaret Wheatley writes, teaches, and speaks about radically new practices and ideas for organising in chaotic times. She has been a dedicated global citizen since her youth, working as an organisational consultant and researcher since 1973. Margaret is co-founder and President Emerita of The Berkana Institute, a charitable global foundation that connects and supports pioneering, life-affirming leaders around the world who strengthen their communities by working with the wisdom and wealth already present in its people, traditions and environment (www.berkana.org). Margaret received her doctorate in Organisational Behaviour and Change from Harvard University and a Masters in Media Ecology from New York University. She is the author of the path breaking bestseller, Leadership and the New Science (2006; 3rd edn, Berrett-Koehler) and several other books and numerous articles for professional journals which may be downloaded free from her web-site.
[i] Otto Scharmer C (2007) Theory U: Leading from the future as it Emerges. The Social Technology of Presencing, Society for Organisational Learning, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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