It Starts With Uncertainty

　　MARGARET WHEATLEY and PEMA CHÖDRÖN discuss how organizations can acknowledge their confusion and trust in the goodness of the underlying order.

　　Margaret Wheatley: I see the essence of my work as becoming comfortable with uncertainty, which is actually a chapter title in my book, Leadership and the New Science. I came to that work initially through science, through an understanding of chaos as having a deeper order revealed in it, and as a person who had worked in organizations a lot.

　　I remember the great revelatory moment I had when I was writing my first book that order and control are two different phenomena. In the Western leadership tradition, we believe that order is only available through the control that we exert. But I realized that order is available through different processes that have nothing to do with our own authorship—that this world is in fact exquisitely ordered, but not necessarily for our own purposes. The Western tradition is to play God with the world, assuming that nothing happens unless we make it happen.

　　We feel we have no support from natural processes, no support from life, and that we can only make the world the way we want it by the force of our own effort. That”s a great deception in Western thought, and it”s been a hindrance in leadership practices. I like to quote Chuang-tzu, from the third century BCE, who had a very different approach to leadership. He said it”s more a matter of believing the good than of seeing it as the result of our effort.

　　So as leaders, do we believe we are participating in a world that knows how to organize itself

　　 Do we realize we are working with people who have great reservoirs of goodness, commitment and creativity

　　 Or do we, in the traditional Western model, feel that if there”s good in the organization, it”s only because of our own qualities of leadership

　　 I have realized over time that the real role of a leader is not to control but to midwife—to evoke those qualities of commitment, compassion, generosity and creativity that are in all of us to start with.

　　Pema Chödrön: Meg, I was electrified by your article “Consumed By Either Fire or Fire,” because while it talks about personal journey, the implications for leadership are profound. Here is the question that came up for me. You talk about the need for leaders to trust the goodness of people and not feel they have to control things. It seems to me, though, that this means the employees themselves have to have a lot of trust in their own goodness, and they have to have the inner strength that allows them not to freak out in the face of insecurity and uncertainty.

　　I would guess that the traditional leadership policies you”re trying to change come from the fact that people are so afraid of paradox, so afraid of uncertainty. It takes a lot of bravery even to consider that uncertainty is not a threat, that in fact it”s creative and powerful.

　　I spend a lot of time in my own teaching proclaiming that truth, and it makes me realize again and again how it comes back to the inpidual journey of mindfulness. It requires being able to look bravely at yourself without running away from what you see, because resting with the ugliness, the chaos and the confusion in yourself is the path to happiness and creativity and flexibility.

　　To me, the point where people get stuck is exactly here. They have so little trust in their ability to rest with negativity and uncertainty that whenever they detect a hint of paradox or not knowing, they become afraid and do all kinds of conformist, fundamentalist things to become secure again.

　　Margaret Wheatley: In your book When Things Fall Apart, you quote Trungpa Rinpoche as saying that this is a dark time when people lose faith in th…

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