Transition Culture

29 Jun 2006

Meg Wheatley – The Power of Chaos - reconstructed from my cack-handed notes…

Meg Wheatley spoke at Dartington’s Barn Cinema on Wednesday 14th June as part of Dartington Arts’ Arts and Ecology Lecture series. I attempted to take notes as best I could but she spoke quite fast and so these notes are intended to provide just an overview of what she covered. Any mistakes here are entirely my fault. If you would like to watch the film of the talk you can download it here, but only until Friday. After that you will be able to buy copies of the DVD of the talk here. After her talk she did a questions and answers session in the bar which was very illuminating, but which no-one recorded unfortunately. Anyway, here’s Meg.

“My work has focused on what I call ‘ethical leadership’, that is how organisations and leaders maintain both effectiveness and leadership. Chaos is a topic that lends light to ecology, art and to leadership. It is an ancient figure/topic/sensibility, which exists in all traditions. Chaos and Gaia both embody the creative principle. Gaia pulled life from chaos and gave it form, it is a fundamental part of life. Nowadays we are not willing to embrace chaos, yet we need that abyss, we have to face the emptiness and chaos before anything new can emerge, it is a partner in the creative process. There are three ways in which we experience chaos;

1. Being Plunged into Chaos.

We all know about chaos. We have all experienced times when life is fine, all going on OK, when an unexpected event tips our equilibrium. We are cruising along, all is well, when something happens which tips us into chaos. Although the chaos can feel like pure darkness and meaninglessness, we usually reorganise and find new ways forward. We either emerge or we don’t. We can use the chaos. Medicine can be used to medicate it, yet in spiritual traditions it is seen as the Dark Night of the Soul, a spiritual transition.

When we emerge from this where do we find ourselves compared to where we were before we entered the period of chaos? Higher or lower than before (“Higher!� say the audience). Yes, higher. Once we emerge from this our lives can be richer and better. After things fall apart we emerge stronger.

2. In the Creative Process.

We can also use chaos in the creative process. When we are involved in the creative process, we can find ourselves losing our way and losing the moment of inspiration. This is, however, necessary for the true creativity to emerge. You can’t be creative if you refuse to be confused. It is in that state that we let go of how we hold the problem. Insight is never incremental. It is only when the artist throws his brushes down, the writer destroys his/her PC or the scientist storms out of the lab in frustration, that moment of letting go, that you are open to insights.

3. In Natural Disasters.

Hurricane Katrina was a good example of this (she shows a slide of 50 buses swamped by flood waters). Here are 50 buses in New Orleans that could have been used to evacuate people, but bureaucracy prevented their use (I didn’t get why…). Bureaucracy can never respond quickly enough. The more we try to control chaos the more chaotic things become. During the New Orleans disaster, a building was on fire, the firemen arrived from nearby cities but found that when they arrived they were required to do training in sexual harassment and diversity issues before they could attend the fire, and the training was in Alberta! When they go there, one of the firemen, furious at this stage said “�I’m not here for this, I’m here to fight fires!�, and was told “you work for the Government, you’ll do as you are told!� Big agencies are not able to get things done quickly enough.

Communities are capable of amazing self organisation. In times of chaos, our need to create calm creates more chaos, we really can rely on human compassion and generosity. Stuart Kaufmann writes “we live in a world where you get order for free�. It spontaneously organises. Chaos is a stage of condition which allows the new order to emerge.

In 1990 the penny dropped. I had been told up to that point that order has to be man made, otherwise there is chaos. We substitute ourselves with God. Order appears as shapes, as patterns, as recurring patterns in trees, clouds, ferns. If you look for it it’s amazing. Life organises itself into order through shape.

She then showed an equilateral triangle and then explained two simple rules. The points of the triangle are ordered 1 and 2, 3 and 4, 5 and 6 respectively. You roll a dice and move halfway towards the number you rolled. If you do this repeatedly, what would appear to be a completely chaotic process, you create this exquisitely ordered shape, known as the Serpinski Gasket. It is a formula that repeats and repeats in a spirit of freedom. You can read a more detailed account of how to do this here.

Relating this to an organisation, our ideal would be to have very few rules, no hidden agendas, and that this is non-negotiable. People joining an organisation want the values that appear on the surface, its publicly stated principles, to be true, then they go inside the organisation and find the real set of principles! While there is a need for rules, ideally they would have the following characteristics. Everyone would use the rules to make their own decisions based in the immediate solution (this evokes our maturity), and everyone would be held accountable to explain their decisions based on these rules.

She then talked about a High School she visited, which she has also written about in a recent article, so I’ll just paste here that section, which is far more thorough than my notes…

Last year we met a junior high school principal who gave us a superb example of creating a complex and orderly system from a few simple patterns. He is responsible for eight hundred adolescents, ages twelve to fourteen. Most school administrators fear this age group and the usual junior high school is filled with rules and procedures in an attempt to police the hormone-crazed tendencies of early teens. But his junior high school operated from three rules, and three rules only. Everyone; students, teachers, staff, knew the rules and used them to deal with all situations. The three rules are disarmingly simple: 1. Take care of yourself; 2. Take care of each other; 3. Take care of this place. (As we’ve thought about these rules, we’ve come to believe that they might be all we need to create a better world, not just a junior high school.)

Few of us would believe that you could create an orderly group of teen-agers, let alone a good learning environment, from such simple rules. But the principal told a story of just how effective these three rules were in creating a well-functioning school. A fire broke out in a closet and all 800 students had to be evacuated. They stood outside in pouring rain until it was safe to return to the building. The principal was the last in, and he reported being greeted by 800 pairs of wet shoes lined up in the lobby.

Principles define what we have decided is significant to us as a community or organization. They contain our agreements about what we will notice, what we will choose to let disturb us. In the case of these students, wet shoes and muddy floors were something they quickly noticed, something that disturbed them because they had already agreed to “take care of this place.” They then acted freely to create a response that made sense to them in this unique circumstance.

The current image of successful leadership is that if a duck with ducklings behind. Ducks are actually very bad mothers, yet it is what most leaders hope for. The model of command and control has seen a resurgence of interest in recent years in response to uncertain times. It is a myth that high risk requires high control. You need intelligence everywhere rather than top-down. A second myth is that there is no order without a power structure, without organisations. A third myth is that people do what they are told. They do not. Everyone has the freedom to do what they want. A final myth is that fear is a good motivator.

Implementing these myths leads to high levels of worker disengagement, people ithdrawing from their work place, what we might call “warm chair attrition�. People end up feeling exhausted and stressed. What happens to the human brain under stress? It loses about 4/5ths of its functioning, and it loses its ability to see pattern. Pattern making is how humans create meaning. Without meaning we feel lost in the Universe.

What is the relationship between chaos and the human spirit? There is a great relationship between humans’ experience of life, which includes cycles, chaos, death, how we experience that as a culture, and the kind of art we produce. So, my hunch is that cultures that live close to life are not afraid of chaos, are not afraid of death, or trying to ward off life, instead they embrace it and show in their art this harmonious relationship with the cosmos, that is not available to us when we have separated ourselves and are trying to play God. D.H. Lawrence wrote of the Etruscans that they “preserve the natural humour of lifeâ€?. Why has humanity had such a lust to be imposed upon, when we thrive more with things that are flexible and alive? Greek art was obsessed with the human form, not with Nature’s chaos. It was about falling in love with the human form. Man was seen as the centre of the Universe. Etruscan cultures and those of Southern Greece had at their core the divine feminine. (She closed with a beautiful excerpt from her latest book about the art of a peoples who lived in the Mediterranean on an island with a large volcano which kept having small eruptions but who kept returning to the island and who made beautiful art). You can find it in her latest book, Finding Our Way: Leadership For an Uncertain Time.