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Order Within Disorder
Despite fluctuations and disruptions in business, the economy, and elsewhere, our world is inherently orderly.
Reviewed by Dr. Fred Hill
This is one of my 10 favorite books! It has intellectual elegance with common sense insight for leaders
everywhere. Margaret Wheatley describes her book as "...a foray into a new land, a map clear in places, vague in
others -- that would require further pioneers to describe and elaborate on its features and its meanings." The book
has provoked much thought, discussion, and usefulness.
Wheatley's leadership research continues today to strive for simpler ways to lead organizations. She is concerned why change keeps drowning us and making us feel less capable and more
confused. These concerns led her to study process structures, "things that sustain their identity over time yet are not locked rigidly into any one physical form." She maintains that
despite fluctuations and disruptions our world is inherently orderly.
Here is an example of the elegance of her scientific research that applies to organizations and leadership:
A living system produces itself; it will change in order to preserve that self. Change is prompted only when an organism decides that changing is the only way to maintain itself.
...disorder can be the source of new order. ... If a living system can maintain its identity, it can self-organize to a higher level of complexity, a new form of itself that can deal
better with the present. ... growth appears from disequilibrium, not balance. ... the things we fear most in organizations -- disruptions, confusion, chaos -- need not be interpreted as
signs we are about to be destroyed. Instead, these conditions are necessary to awaken creativity. ... order exists within disorder and disorder within order. These are
complementarities that only look like polarities. Indeed, both are necessary for healthy organizations.
Leaders must beware that they do not confuse control with order. In short, stop looking for control and start searching for order in your organizations. Nothing exists independent of
relationships with others -- not people; not things.
Please read this book -- it is beautiful and insightful!
Dr. Fred E. Hill is a professor of Learning Resources and Technology Services, at St. Cloud State University.
Leadership and the New Science; Discovering Order in a Chaotic World by Margaret J. Wheatley,
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, 1999, ISBN 1-57675-055-8
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