Quantum Physics

Research in physics, chemistry, and the life sciences also provides new ways to understand the power and efficacy of AI. Organization development and conflict resolution consultants often mention Margaret Wheatley as one who has provided an intellectual framework for understanding and learning about community in new ways. Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World (second edition) is quite accessible and a good place to start.

Wheatley’s venues are Harvard and major corporations all over the world that seek her counsel. Her words are clear, spare, evocative, and, through it all, joyful. She has the remarkable ability to walk scientific neophytes through quantum physics, chaos theory, and the chemical, biological dynamics of open, living systems, drawing from these cosmic laboratories fascinating insights about postmodern leadership.

She suggests that the mechanical way of understanding the world described by Sir Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century is inadequate and counterproductive today, even though most of our leadership and organizational models derive from Newtonian principles and assumptions. Communities are not machines, nor the sum of the rights and rules of membership. Rather, they are alive, dynamic, vital entities, capable of being influenced and co-created for good or bad. As Cooperrider has said repeatedly, "Community is not a problem to be fixed but a mystery to be embraced."

In a post-Newtonian world, power does not devolve from position in a static hierarchy but from the vitality of relationships, wherever they emerge in the community. Outcomes are not predictable, and an infinite number of potentialities await our engagement. At the beginning of Leadership and the New Science, Wheatley writes, "The quantum world teaches that there are no pre-fixed definitely describable destinations. There are, instead, potentials that will form into real ideas depending on who the discoverer is and what she is interested in discovering."

Later in the book Wheatley records scientists’ astonishment at discovering unpredictable, beautiful, self-organizing patterns emerging from random, chaotic data when it is carefully monitored. She shares recent discoveries in chemistry and biology describing how open, living systems thrive and flourish. She then considers the implications of these observations for community and leadership. Near the end of the book, she suggests new kinds of leaders for a world evolving beyond Newtonian assumptions and practices:

Here is a very partial list of new metaphors to describe leaders: gardeners, midwives, stewards, servants, missionaries, facilitators, conveners. Although each takes a slightly different approach, they all name a new posture for leaders, a stance that relies on new relationships with their networks of employees, stakeholders, and communities. No one can hope to lead any organization by standing outside or ignoring the web of relationships through which all work is accomplished.¹¹

11. Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2001), 165.