Module Catalog →
Module Catalog →
Organizations are living, self-organizing systems shaped by relationships, participation, and meaning.
Margaret (Meg) Wheatley, Ed.D., is a writer, teacher, consultant, and co-founder and president emerita of The Berkana Institute. A Peace Corps volunteer in Korea early in her career, she later earned a doctorate in organizational behavior from Harvard and worked with leaders and communities across the world.
Her enduring concern is practical and human: how people can organize, learn, and serve one another well amid uncertainty and disruption.
In 1992, management still largely imagined organizations as machines: leaders designed structures, issued instructions, and corrected deviations. Wheatley offered another image—organization as a living system.
Drawing carefully from biology, chaos theory, and other developments in science, she emphasized relationships, information, participation, networks, and the capacity of systems to generate order without a central controller.
What matters most is not the isolated part but the pattern connecting the parts. Leaders strengthen the quality of relationships through which information, trust, meaning, and action move.
Living systems can create coherent patterns through local interaction. The leadership task becomes setting purpose, sharing information, inviting participation, and resisting the reflex to over-control.
People organize around meaning and identity. Clear purpose and accessible information often coordinate action more effectively than additional rules.
Where Wheatley’s work feeds the Open Sky frameworks.
Design for participation. Invite the people in the system to make sense of it together.
Strengthen information flows. Make consequential information available where people can act on it.
Protect identity and purpose. Let clear meaning coordinate action instead of multiplying controls.
Trust emergence with boundaries. Create conditions for local initiative while holding a coherent purpose.