Margaret J. Wheatley Quotes

We have a complex system of government. You have to teach it to every generation.

We all look at the same object in different ways.

The belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built.

Multiple descriptions are better than one.

Unfortunately, the more complex the system, the greater the room for error.

It is important to understand that there are many different ways of seeing the world and expressing the wisdom of Native belief...No one voice speaks for all voices.

For a small island, the place is remarkably diverse. Writers tend to see things from their own points of view, looking in one direction very much.

You know the movie "Rashomon" from [Takeshi] Kurosawa, when all the people in the forest see something different? Each performance was like that.

This matter of two sides to every question is bad logic and bad practice: sometimes there are no sides; sometimes there are a hundred.

When the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large scientific method in most cases fails. One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible. Nevertheless, no one doubts that we are confronted with a causal connection whose causal components are in the main known to us. Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

The world is too complex for subsumption under any general theory of change.

Confidence comes from seeing so many sides, angles, views, and tangents. Because when you do select an approach or direction, you are doing so with better/ more complete information.

We have also obtained a glimpse of another crucial idea about languages and program design. This is the approach of statified design, the notion that a complex system should be structured as a sequence of levels that are described using a sequence of languages. Each level is constructed by combining parts that are regarded as primitive at that level, and the parts constructed at each level are used as primitives at the next level. The language used at each level of a stratified design has primitives, means of combination, and means of abstraction appropriate to that level of detail.

Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts.

There are always many sides to the truth.

It is necessary, if one would read aright, that he should read at least two newspapers, representing both sides of important subjects.

The last thing we want is a monolithic viewpoint where six people are standing before a president saying the same thing over and over again.

The primary consequence of the computational nature of the universe is that the universe naturally generates complex systems, such as life. Although the basic laws of physics are comparatively simple in form, they give rise, because they are computationally universal, to systems of enormous complexity.

Life is not found in atoms or molecules or genes as such, but in organization; not in symbiosis but in synthesis.

We tell specific stories about ourselves to ourselves and we're all the heroes of our own lives. But you live through certain experiences with other people, and sometimes they have very different takes on what happened.

I would therefore like to posit that computing's central challenge, how not to make a mess of it, has not yet been met.

My scripts are always filled with notes. I like to just analyze everything from the point of view of the whole picture, of the movie, my whole picture.

It must be evident how multifarious and how mutually complicated are the considerations which the working of such an engine involve. There are frequently several distinct sets of effects going on simultaneously; all in a manner independent of each other, and yet to a greater or less degree exercising a mutual influence.

The whole is always more, is more capable of a much greater variety of wave states, than the combination of its parts. ... In this very radical sense, quantum physics supports the doctrine that the whole is more than the combination of its parts.