•  Overview

People thrive in flexible, creative systems designed to evolve and adapt through cooperation and conversation. Acting on this premise has the power to improve personal relations, transform organizations, and ultimately change the world. A powerful advocate of servant leadership, Margaret Wheatley writes, teaches, and speaks about how we can live together harmoniously in these chaotic times.

Wheatley encourages congregational leaders to move away from hierarchical church models based on control and towards those those that rely on the quality of human relationships. She also encourages leaders to simply begin and adapt accordingly. "Just get started," she contends, "and then learn from that experience."

•  About Margaret Wheatley

Margaret Wheatley is a consultant, researcher, speaker, and writer acclaimed for the connections she draws between nature and organizational management models. She has worked with corporations, the medical and public sectors, youth and adult clients, and a host of other diverse organizations—including individual churches, clergy groups, and denominational centers. Drawing on her management and humanitarian experiences, she founded the Berkana Institute in 1991, a global charitable leadership foundation "dedicated to serving life-affirming leaders."

Her highly-praised publications include Leadership and the New Science, 1992 (revised and expanded in 1999); A Simpler Way, co-authored with Myron Rogers, 1996; and Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time, 2005. Her book Turning To One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future, 2002, is especially popular with and helpful to congregational leaders. She also has written many journal and magazine articles.

Meg talked with Beth Gaede on behalf of the Congregational Resource Guide in May, 2006.

•  Interview

CRG: What experience do you have working with churches?

Meg: I've worked with just about every major denomination. I’ve been involved in speaking to large audiences of laity and clergy or working with smaller numbers of clergy. I usually talk about how to work together, how living systems work, how you find order without control, and about purpose as the real cohering force in an organization. Most recently, I've been teaching processes for how you work together, and how you work in ways that don’t increase conflict.


CRG: When you talk with church leaders, do you find that you say anything different or have different emphases compared with your corporate work?

Meg: Absolutely. Several times, I have tried to recall them to the fact that they are working for Christ, not some large bureaucracy. I look at any church for its own organizational demands and whether it actually serves to motivate its leaders to work well together. I've heard so many stories about church leaders being unwilling or afraid to collaborate on a program even though it would benefit their members. That resistance is grounded in their fear of losing members. It's the nature of all organized religion that you lose your way. Sometimes the demands of running a large organization can take precedence over serving the community of faith.


CRG: One of the Alban Institute's senior consultants talks about the tension between the need to maintain the organization in some form and the entrepreneurial spirit that keeps it alive.

Meg: When you put that idea into a faith context, the faith of the members can run the risk of serving the demands of the bureaucracy instead of the demands of the Lord.


CRG: In your work, you’ve chosen to focus on "the best of human nature." Do you see your work as part of a broader movement in organizational studies and leadership studies, or do you think the work you do and that [appreciative inquiry] folks do is still a minority voice? How do you place yourself?

Meg: As a minority voice. Appreciative inquiry focuses on a specific dynamic that comes out of analytic culture, which always begins with what's wrong. Appreciative inquiry is just trying to redress that and refocus it.

I see my own work as much more inclusive and therefore it also includes other things—because it is about how life works, how living things organize themselves. It includes the workings of chaos and complex systems. It includes a lot of the more specific aspects of conflict resolution and different problem-solving approaches. But it really is still for me the broadest-brush approach to how living systems work.

I don’t work in an appreciative way to bring out human goodness. I just think it's quite a logical decision you have to make. Which one are you going to emphasize? Are you going to protect yourself from dark forces, or are you going to work to bring out what you know is there—generosity and compassion?


CRG: How can you make the most difference?

Meg: If you’re really trying to work with the best qualities of human beings, you end up with a much more dynamic, entrepreneurial, loving society. The human goodness I want to encourage is now at the grassroots level. I know that great changes always begin with a few people.

At the Berkana Institute, we work with the definition that a leader is anyone willing to help, anyone who sees something that needs changing or attention and steps forward. I also know that even work that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize—for great, great effort—began among just a few people talking. So that’s the theme of my third book, Turning to One Another. That's the one that's most popular in congregations. It's about coming together and talking about the issues.


CRG: What seems to be the entry point for your readers? What’s the thing that most catches their attention or helps them get on board?

Meg: In all of this, it's an odd combination of having the science that corresponds to the theology. It gives more breadth to their work. I’m assuming the draw is partly the science. But at another level, it’s confirming theology. Then the organizational, practical part—especially around listening and conversation—connects with people and has been widely used.


CRG: Do you have any cautions about how your ideas might be used badly or misinterpreted?

Meg: Oh, so many! The great caution is that we think we understand this new paradigm. And we just go off and apply it in a very superficial way, which then doesn’t really show us its power. So the caution is, "Don’t think you understand it too quickly."


CRG: I wonder if what you’re getting at might be similar to what happens in organizations when they decide they’re going to do their work on "teams"—everyone’s going to be on a team. And it ends up being sort of a rearranging-the-deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic deal. The organization now has teams, but everyone operates in the same old way.

Meg: That frequently happens. Or they try something like participation, and then they run into all sorts of problems. And they figure, "Well, that didn’t work." There’s a common dynamic, which is to retreat back. The minute this new step doesn’t seem to be working, we retreat back to the old step, which is already not working!


CRG: Are there other cautions you have for faith communities?

Meg: Well, I think the greatest caution is to keep the focus on the quality of our relationships. I listened to a woman minister who said that for everything she did, she applied one criterion: "Is what I’m about to do going to weave the web or break the web?" So I think the greatest thing we have to do is to attend to the quality of our relationships, the level of trust for one another, and whether by our own actions (if we’re a minister), we are doing things to bring people together, or we are doing things—intentionally or unintentionally—that drive people apart.

Because the greatest need right now is to be together. I’ve seen this again and again. In very poor communities or in very dire circumstances, when people can come together, there is joy available. We’re not going to get through this time together with our current mode of fear. So for me, that’s the essence of all of our work right now: What can we do to help people come together? That’s where the spirit flourishes, and that’s where our best attributes come out. And that’s the only way we’ll stop this fragmentation. We can be human only when we’re together. If we really want to bring out the best qualities in ourselves as humans, we need to be together.


CRG: I wanted to ask you about one specific thing you talk about in Finding Our Way. This feels key to me for understanding congregations, particularly control issues. When you talk about making decisions at the most local level, it occurred to me that in order for that to make sense, you need to figure out what "local" means for this particular situation, because we’re all part of many systems.

Meg: That’s a very good sensitivity to hold. I would talk about this differently now. There’s an article up on my Web site called "It’s Just Our Turn to Help the World." I talk about how we really just need to start anywhere. Because we’re in a network, we can trust that the network will pick it up, and then it will grow in power and capacity. So for me, the emphasis has shifted to "Let’s just get started" and then learn from that experience.


CRG: In congregations, most of the people get together once a week or less.

Meg: I don’t think that’s the problem. I think the problem is how we get together and what we expect when we get together. If we expect to have only a personal worship experience followed by a social hour, if we expect to get more involved in community, if we’re involved in projects—you really have to look at what’s going on. There needs to be more than sitting listening to a good sermon and then having coffee. We need to be there for each other. Are we? What do we expect as a congregation? Do we expect that we’re brothers and sisters in Christ? Do we expect to be there for each other? Or do we want to be left alone, come to church for personal reasons, and then leave?

I think the megachurches provide multiple ways for people to get together. In some of them, the small groups that self-organize around personal needs now have more participation than Sunday morning. There’s something there to explore. Why are people coming and what do they need? What are they willing to offer?


CRG: What are the implications of your ideas about local decision making for hierarchical organizations?

Meg: People think there’s no room for them in traditional venues. You see the rise of home churches and break-away congregations. That’s where you see home schooling and charter schools. If you are looking for it, you can always see this dynamic. People will break away because they can’t bear the repression and bureaucracy any longer. They feel it’s threatening their faith.

In general, we’re going to see that the longer these mature hierarchies refuse to change, the faster they are just bringing themselves down. I don’t know how much more deterioration and how many more problems we’re going to have before leaders recognize that they’re in a death spiral. They may just continue until they’re dead.

The only new thing you can create by applying more hierarchy are new regimented and fundamentalist groups of congregants. The only way people stay comfortable with hierarchy is to surrender their free agency. Then they’re willing to just take direction. They only show up as robots, and you don’t have any curiosity or compassion. They’re just there for themselves, and they’ll be complaining all the time. It’s a really suicidal approach.


CRG: If you look at this from another angle, you have people at the top of the hierarchy who are imposing control, but you also have people within an organization who almost hunger for that control, because they like the order.

Meg: They like control. Nobody gets order from this, but only a feeling of control. When you apply more and more control in a situation, all you do is create more chaos, and that’s what we’re seeing everywhere these days.


CRG: So how do you help a congregation move from this sort of desperate clinging to an openness, a willingness to be more creative? Where does that start?

Meg: Well, I think it starts with a few people, not waiting for the senior leaders to be a source of change. It takes a few people willing to do it differently or get involved in something. This is where the "start anywhere" fits. It’s the only thing that will work now.


CRG: So when you see two chaotic organizations and one dies and one flourishes, is the difference that the organization that flourished had a few people in it who were willing to try a different path?

Meg: …and who were willing to rally. Be sure to look at who turned it around. Sometimes it can be the creative leader or a group of individuals who see that there’s no other way to go now, and they embrace change. You also see the situation where the leaders just hold on to power more and more. I see it happening it both ways.


Additional resources related to Margaret Wheatley’s work:

Margaret Wheatley Web site
www.margaretwheatley.com

This rich and extensive site includes access to news, articles, videos, CDs, books, and other resources that describe the tenets of Meg Wheatley's work and provide tools for incorporating that work into different organizational and individual settings. Included is an extensive calendar with Meg’s upcoming workshops and lectures. New resources include the DVD It’s About Time which explores "the necessity for taking time to think, learning from our experience, and reflecting with colleagues—behaviors that are quickly disappearing in most organizations." The DVD set includes overview chapters, refection questions, time inventory and assessments, and articles to be printed and distributed. It is designed to serve individuals, work groups, and organizations.

The Berkana Institute
350 East Tenth Avenue, Spokane, WA 99202, 509 835 4228, http://www.berkana.org

The Berkana Institute is dedicated to supporting "life-affirming leaders around the globe." It supports ideas that inspire positive change and restore hope—including new forms of leadership. This organization provides learning experiences (trips to different countries to explore different ways of learning and leadership) and resources that explore community, large scale change, and global understanding.


Books by Margaret Wheatley:

Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time
Margaret J. Wheatley, Author. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2005.

Science has much to offer those seeking to create organizations that can adapt and thrive during change. A key to the success is recognizing the role human relationships play in creating dynamic, living systems. This collection of "practice-focused" articles explores Wheatley’s ideas and provides examples of how they are incorporated into many different settings—across professions and across the globe.


Turning To One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future
Margaret J. Wheatley, San-Francisco, CMeg: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2002.

Open and honest conversation has the potential to heal any problem. That is the premise of this book, which offers essays on how humans connect and communicate. Wheatley draws on great international humanists such as Nelson Mandela and offers a series of "conversation starter" questions to stimulate the reader’s thinking. Conversation and dialogue has the potential to improve relationships—between individuals, in organizations, within society, and throughout the world. Congregations have found this book especially helpful.

To facilitate meaningful conversations, Wheatley and the Berkana Institute have created the From the Four Directions Circle Starter Kit, which draws on From the Four Directions, Berkana’s global leadership initiative. The kit is designed for those who want to lead through conversation. It includes a video, a CD (The Power of Conversation to Change the World), Wheatley’s book (Turning to One Another) and articles, and A Guide to PeerSpirit Circling by Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea. To order, contact Darla Wenger, email darla@berkana.org, 801-377-2996.


Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
Margaret J. Wheatley, Author. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1999, revised and expanded edition of the original published in 1992.

In this journey from the old science of Newton to the new science of Einstein, Margaret Wheatley encourages leaders to invigorate their organizations by incorporating the insights of quantum physics. Newtonian-based organizations often feel lifeless because the boundaries they create to provide safety and identity also deter the new relationships and new information which would renew them. By contrast, quantum organizations facilitate and multiply relationships and information in order to increase the likelihood of new possibilities from unexpected places.

Assuming that the environment is static, Newtonian organizations tend to plan and then act. Assuming that actions help create the environment, quantum organizations tend to act first; they then plan "just-in-time" strategies to respond to opportunities and needs. Two videos—Leadership and the New Science, and it’s sequel, Lessons from the New Workplace, bring Wheatley’s inspiring ideas to life and provide examples of these ideas in action. Available in print and audio.


A Simpler Way
Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers, Authors. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1996

Organizational management suggestions and photo essays—along with other information taken from science, poetry, and philosophy—merge in this creative exploration of organizational behavior. Offering basic themes—play, organization, self, emergence, and coherence—the authors describe how people organize their lives into systems. These systemic tendencies can be the building blocks of simpler, creative, and life-giving organizations. Available in print or on audio tape.


For Further Reading on the Intersection of Science and Theology


Growing in the Image of God: Saint Paul University Research Series: Faith and Science
Carol Rausch Albright, Author. Ottawa, CanadMeg: Novalis, Saint Paul University, 2002.

Where does the understanding of God and how individuals live their lives intersect? This book explores current trends, how these trends influence academic and secular culture, and how human beings respond. The question of divinity is considered as both the traditional creator and sustaining entity and as a human-based characteristic. This book considers science and religion but not the specific institutions of the church and congregation.


The Holy Web: Church and the New Universe Story
Cletus, Wessels, O.P., Author. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2004.

This book considers Christianity in light of the latest scientific findings. The author doesn’t abide by the typical juxtaposition between scientific discovery and the existence of God. Rather, he shows how today’s scientific break throughs breathes new life into the traditional concepts of creation, redemption, sin, grace, life and death, and the triune God. He asserts that the mission of the church is to foster and sustain the "web of relationships" which make up the universe.


What's Theology Got to Do with It?: Convictions, Vitality, and the Church
Anthony B. Robinson, Author. Herndon, VA: The Alban Institute, 2005.

Anthony Robinson is convinced that theological acumen and insight are key to vital, healthy congregations, and demonstrates how what we say we believe and what we understand makes a difference in how we practice our faith.


This interview is part of the "Wise Voices" effort, which gathers thoughts and essays from people who know congregations. These are leaders with know-how—through first-hand knowledge, academic study, or practical experience. If you are or know of a "Wise Voice" we should include, please contact us at info@crg.org.