A Simpler Way

Margaret Wheatley is addictive. After reading "Leadership and the New Science" I have bought the rest of her books, and also those that she recommends by contributing a foreword. This book has a great deal of white space, lots of photos, is double-spaced, but by no means is it simplistic. To play on the title, it is a "simpler way" to absorb the large deep ideas that are documented in "Leadership and the New Science." If her primary writing were a trilogy, this is the entry-level book, "Finding Our Way" is the intermediate volume, and "Leadership" is the graduate course. However, I recommend they be read in reverse order, because the simpler books are more clearly appreciated if one has the deeper background. What I find most compelling about this book is the manner in which it captures core ideas from a wide variety of works that have been bubbling into human consciousness in the past 20 years. The bibliography is quite good although by no means all-inclusive (missing Kurzweil, E. O. Wilson, and Stephen Wolfham, as well as Tom Atlee and Bill Moyers, among others). Among the core ideas in this book that are presented with elegance are the absurdity of thinking that life can have a boss--or that rigid ideas and identities will lead to anything other than rigid non-adjustable organizations. The author stresses the value of diversity, passion, connectedness, humanity and humanness, and tieing it all together, the role of information and of ethics as facilitators for "being." There is a very useful discussion of bacteria and the manner in which human attempts to impose machine and medical solutions are ultimately defeated by bacteria. Although Howard Bloom's "Global Brain" is not in the bibliography, everything the authors discuss here is consistent with his concerns about bacteria winning the inter-species war with humanity. Taking this a step further, I would contrast this book, and the varied books on collective intelligence, wisdom of the crowd, ecological economics (Herman Daly) and so on, with a book I recently reviewed about the National Security Council, aptly titled "Running the World." The stupidity and arrogance of that title reveals all that we need to know about why U.S. foreign policy is failing, and how desperately we need to take the ideas from this book and apply them to how we manage ourselves and our relationships with other nations, other tribes, other religions, other communities.

In this sharply perceptive and penetrating philosophic work, the authors with unusual sensitivity and insight have been able to express life of human organizations in a beautiful way. The authors in a poetic way express that life is creative and playful, contrary to Darwinist theory that life occurred out of an error and it is struggle for survival. The mechanistic image of the world doesn't help us any longer. We keep exploring what we can see when we look at life and organizations using different images. Organizations are living systems. They are like people, intelligent, creative, adaptive, self-organizing and meaning-seeking. The simpler way to organize human endeavor requires a belief that the world is inherently orderly. The world seeks organization. It doesn't need humans to organize it. The book is based around the following essential ideas: everything is in a constant process of discovery and creating; life uses mess to get to well-ordered solutions, it doesn't seem to share our desires for efficiency or neatness, it uses redundancy, fuzziness, dense webs of relationships, and unending trails and errors to find what works; life is intent on finding what works, not what's "right"; life creates more possibilities as it engages with opportunities; life is attracted to order; life organizes around identity; everything participates in the creation and evolution of its neighbors. "A simpler way" is to a great extent influenced by Maturana and Varela, Kelly, Prigogine, Jacob, Lewontin, Kauffmann and other great thinkers. Here is the quote from this book: "In their work on human cognition, Maturana and Varela explain that, at any moment, what we see is most influenced by who we have decided to be. Our eyes do not simply pick up information from an outside world and relay it to our brains. Information relayed from the outside through the eye accounts for only 20 percent of what we use to create a perception. At least 80 percent of the information that the brain works with is information already in the brain. We each create our own worlds by what we choose to notice, creating a world of distinctions that makes sense to us. We then "see" the world through this self we have created. Information from the external world is a minor influence. We connect who we are with selected amounts of new information to enact our particular version of reality. Because information from the outside plays such a small role in our perceptions, Maturana and Varela note something quite important for our activities with one another. We can never direct a living system. We can only disturb it. As external agents we provide only small impulses of information. We can nudge, titillate, or provoke one another into some new ways of seeing. But we can never give anyone an instruction and expect him or her to follow it precisely. We can never assume that anyone else sees the world as we do. Their work on human cognition underscores the realization that we are all, alway

It's late on a Sunday night and I've just finished reading "A Simpler Way" for the second time. It's one of those books that repays multiple readings as you delve deeper into what the authors are saying. It may be the best book I've ever read about creativity and organizational change, and I've read a bunch of 'em. It may change your life, if you let it. It's not "too New Age" at all - it's firmly grounded in the latest thinking in biology and other sciences. Basically, it says we are too controlled by inaccurate images of the world - specifically, the Darwinist belief in the "struggle" to survive and the machine metaphor. These two ways of looking at the world have predominated for decades now, and have percolated down into our lives, so that we think that such things as struggle, fierce competition, control, planning, rigidity, coercion, and so on, are the ways life is, and are the ways to organize our lives. WRONG, say the authors. The world actually is very different from what the Darwinists and the machine-as-metaphor people have said. According to the latest and best studies of evolution, biology, physics, nature, etc., the world is a lot more interested in cooperation, connections, synergy, alliances, freedom, etc., than we thought, and we can, if we're brave enough, allow THESE images of the world to pervade our lives and our companies.

Most management theories and methods are based on control and competition. Managers lead through their personal influence over a certain system and they must compete with other systems and sources of influence. This is too rationalist and egocentric: no wonder so many managers are neurotic! Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers believe in overcoming egocentric attitudes in business. While most business books try to influence the reader's cognitive level, with rational arguments and informations, "A Simpler Way" tries to go deeper, appealing to the reader's esthetic and emotional perception. Our education made us believe that individuality and competition are basic facts of life. But this idea does not match the perception that life is effectively growing and diversifying over our planet. This can only be explained if we understand cooperation and creativity to be the basic facts of life! "A Simpler Way" does not include formulas or steps to implement a specific organization model. Instead, it subtly shows that living, real organization is not based on fear, but on freedom and diversification, suppliyng ideas for the transformation and giving references for further study. If you believe that in business wisdom is more important than knowledge, you will probably like to read "A Simpler Way". If you don't, maybe you should read it anyway and give yourself a chance to change your mind.

A Simpler Way is a beautiful object as well as being a lovely book. It's engaging cover photo, the texture of the paper, the size of the pages, the open and clean use of white space. And Wheatley has taken a major step forward in her philosophy and her life since Leadership and the New Science. This book is more exploratory, more tentative, and at the same time even more convincing than her earlier effort. More than being an uplifting book, more than being an effective business book, more than all of this, it is a book which raises tantalizing new questions, awakens a creative opportunity, and whets an appetite for learning more. It is a book which helped me reawaken a curiosity and a thirst for further exploration that I haven't indulged in too long a time. From A Simpler Way, I have read several books about the New Sciences. I began with Dancing Wu Li Masters, and was thoroughly charmed. Then the Tao of Physics, which built a little more around the ideas from Wu Li Masters. And then Turbulent Mirror. And then Synchronicity and the Inner Path of Leadership. And then Bohm. And more and more more. From biology to botany to chaos to quantum physics to buisness organization to leadership. The philosophy of science. The vast amounts of knowledge in these books has allowed me to open up whole new perspectives on my life... my personal life, my spiritual life, my home life, my work life. But it started, for me, with A Simpler Way. And I am the richer for it.