Thanks to Axel Albin of tinygigantic I have just discovered Meg Wheatley. I intend to write some more about her ideas when I have had more time to digest them, but after an afternoon of listening to interviews, watching videos and reading some of her articles I have a sense of of her as great truth teller and some one, who, without false optimism, offers a way forward through many of of the dilemmas that face us all. But for now here is a taster from an interview with Scott London:
“We really have to “de-engineer” our thinking, which means that we have to examine how mechanistically we are oriented — even in our treatment of one another. This is especially true in corporations. We believe that we can best manage people by making assumptions more fitting to machines than people. So we assume that, like good machines, we have no desire, no heart, no spirit, no compassion, no real intelligence — because machines don’t have any of that. The great dream of machines is that if you give them a set of instructions, they will follow it.
I see the history of management as an effort to perfect the instructions that you hope someone will follow this time — even though they have never followed directions in their whole life.
When I spoke of “de-engineering” our thinking, I wanted us to realize that at bottom we are alive, we are human beings. We possess all of the attributes that somehow disappeared in the mechanistic way of thinking. At the organizational level, the same is true. You cannot give an organization of people a set of directions, a re-engineered business process, a new org-chart, a new boss, a new set of behavioral expectations. You can’t just legislate that. It doesn’t happen. Yet corporations were, at the time of the reengineering frenzy, spending literally millions and millions of dollars to develop new engineering plans for the organization.
The 70 to 80 percent failure rate of those re-engineering efforts was, for me, totally predictable. Some say it was even higher than that over the long-term. Wherever you are taking an engineering approach to human , you are going to get an enormous level of backlash and resistance and bitterness because people have not been included.”