Leadership and the New Science

Produced

• 1993

Key Features

This VHS or DVD video comes with a Leader's Guide and a sample participant workbook

Also available: Lessons From The New Workplace, the follow-up video program on Margaret Wheatley's work with various organizations

Is there a simpler way to manage complex organizations in this turbulent business environment where chaos prevails? Dr. Margaret J. Wheatley is sure of it. And her pioneering book, Leadership and the New Science, has been adapted as an inspiring film to help viewers see organizational life from a brand new point of view. It challenges viewers to accept chaos as a beneficial force.

Dr. Wheatley is an associate professor of business management, and a consultant to a wide variety of organizations struggling to break free from outdated paradigms. She has recognized the need to step out of tradition and look to new and different places for solutions. She turned to the new sciences and the behavior of nature's living and non-living systems for examples. In this film, she shows how nature itself provides unmistakable models for creating a new perspective from which greater organizational effectiveness can emerge.

The video "preview" clip shown on this page requires that Windows Media Player is installed on your computer. To add this media player product, go to Windows Media Player Download

Most modern-day organizations are no longer efficient because their basic structural concepts originated in the 17th Century. The New Science -- the science of chaos, evolutionary biology, quantum mechanics and field theory -- provides evidence that organizations can be managed in natural ways, just as complex systems in nature manage themselves.

Based on the best-selling book by Dr. Margaret Wheatley, this program explains that chaos is a necessary and creative force that creates order. Viewers learn about sharing information to empower people and organize tasks, developing relationships to energize teams and achieve peak performance, and more.

The Workbook
The participant workbook is designed to accompany the training film, Leadership and the New Science. Stimulating activities and exercises, which have been personally supervised by Dr. Wheatley, provide training audiences with powerful insights into how we can all find our productive place in organizations that are constantly reshaping themselves.

The Book
In her pioneering bestseller Leadership and the New Science, Margaret Wheatley showed how the "New Science" -- revolutionary discoveries in quantum physics, chaos theory, and biology that are overturning centuries-old images of the universe -- provides powerful insights into the design, leadership, and management of organizations. Now, in an completely revised and expanded second edition, Wheatley uses her past seven years' experience putting these ideas to use in a wide array of organizations all over the world to shed new light on issues crucial to organizing work, people, and life, including:

How do systems move from chaos to order?
How is order different than control?
How can we reconcile individual autonomy and organizational order?
How can we create more participative, open, and adaptive organizations?
What are the keys to organizational growth, learning, and communication?

Substantially revised throughout, the second edition is written in more accessible language and adds an entirely new chapter to this now classic book. In "Change -- The Capacity of Life," Wheatley explains how a Newtonian-based focus on altering the physical structure of our organizations has led to the failure of many of our organizational change efforts. The new physics offers an entirely different understanding of change, in which change is affected by working at the level of identity rather than just isolating and changing one defective part of ourselves or our organizations.
In a revised and expanded epilogue, Wheatley adds a personal chronicle of her experiences since the publication of the first edition. She tells about the shift in her own understanding that occurred as she came to realize that Leadership and the New Science not only presents an alternative view of organizational dynamics but challenges people's most fundamental beliefs about the way the world works. Like the first edition, the book includes a special section of full-color photographs depicting beautiful patterns and processes -- including fractals, strange attractors, and chemical clocks -- that take readers on a mind-opening journey into the heart of the new science.

Simpler Way Hardcover Book By Margaret Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers
Simpler Way explores fundamental new beliefs about organizations and life. Like Leadership and the New Science, this new book is rooted in science but breaks new ground by developing insights from literature, spiritual teachings, and direct experience. The authors challenge many assumptions about life, organizations, and change, while providing inspiration and guidance for readers on their own journey to a simpler way to organize their endeavors.
The book begins and ends with photo essays, providing visual imagery that recalls readers to their own experience with a world that is creative, playful, and self-organizing. Written in a relaxed, poetic, and inviting style, the book welcomes the reader into this exploration of a new way of being in the world, one which can give us increased organizing capacity and effectiveness with less of the stress that plagues us now.

produced by CRM Learning