Margaret J. Wheatley (commonly Meg Wheatley) is a writer and management consultant who studies organizational behavior. Her approach includes systems thinking, theories of change, chaos theory, leadership and the learning organization: particularly its capacity to self-organize. Her work is often compared to that of Donella Meadows and Dee Hock. She describes her work as opposing "highly controlled mechanistic systems that only create robotic behaviors." Management consulting is the process of helping companies to improve or transform themselves. ... Organizational Studies (also known as Industrial Organizations, Organizational Behavior and I/O) is a distinct field of academic study which takes as its subject organizations, examining them using the methods of economics, sociology, political science, anthropology, and psychology. ... Systems thinking involves the use of various techniques to study systems of many kinds. ... This article is about the normal meaning of change (things varying). ... Chaos theory, in mathematics and physics, deals with the behavior of certain nonlinear dynamical systems that (under certain conditions) exhibit the phenomenon known as chaos, most famously characterised by sensitivity to initial conditions (see butterfly effect). ... In common usage, leadership generally refers to: the position or office of an authority figure, such as a President [1] a position of office associated with technical skill or experience, as in a team leader or a chief engineer a group of influential people, such as a union leadership [2... Peter Senge defined a learning organization as human beings cooperating in dynamical systems (as defined in systemics) that are in a state of continuous adaptation and improvement. ... Self-organization refers to a process in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open system, increases automatically without being guided or managed by an outside source. ... Donella Dana Meadows (March 13, 1941 Elgin, Illinois, USA - February 20, 2001, New Hampshire) was a pioneering environmental scientist, a teacher and writer. ... Dee Hock is the founder and former CEO of the VISA credit card company. ...

Background

She received her doctorate from Harvard University and holds an M.A. in systems thinking from New York University. She has worked on every inhabited continent in "virtually every type of organization" and considers herself a global citizen. Her practice as an organizational consultant and researcher began in 1973. Since then she served as a professor of management in two graduate programs.

Current work and publications

She is presently president of The Berkana Institute, a global charitable leadership foundation.

Her books include

• Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World (1999)
• Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future (2002)
• A Simpler Way (coauthored with Myron Kellner-Rogers)

Quotes

"There is a simpler, finer way to organize human endeavor. I have declared this for many years and seen it to be true in many places. This simpler way is demonstrated to us in daily life, not the life we see on the news with its unending stories of human grief and horror, but what we feel when we experience a sense of life’s deep harmony, beauty, and power, of how we feel when we see people helping each other, when we feel creative, when we know we’re making a difference, when life feels purposeful."

"Over many years of work all over the world, I've learned that if we organize in the same way that the rest of life does, we develop the skills we need: we become resilient, adaptive, aware, and creative. We enjoy working together. And life’s processes work everywhere, no matter the culture, group, or person, because these are basic dynamics shared by all living beings."

"Western cultural views of how best to organize and lead (now the methods most used in the world) are contrary to what life teaches. Leaders use control and imposition rather than participative, self-organizing processes. They react to uncertainty and chaos by tightening already feeble controls, rather than engaging people's best capacities to learn and adapt. In doing so, they only create more chaos. Leaders incite primitive emotions of fear, scarcity, and self-interest to get people to do their work, rather than the more noble human traits of cooperation, caring, and generosity. This has led to this difficult time, when nothing seems to work as we want it to, when too many of us feel frustrated, disengaged, and anxious."