I recently posted this piece on the Pop!Tech blog to share some of the ways my thinking about the recent election had been shaped by reading Margaret Wheatley’s book Leadership and the New Science. Wheatley’s work calls for the application of new science’s understanding of the nature and operation of the universe to how humans organize themselves. Basically we know that the universe is infinitely more complex than we will ever grasp and certainly does not behave like a machine made of defined parts. Knowing about some of the parts tells us very little about how natural systems really work and the more we look to understand the world we live in the more we see that its all about dynamic relationships than individual things. Yet despite this understanding we still organize human endeavor around the model of the machine. This has significant implications on the two areas of life I think are most important, how we work and how we eat.
Wheatley’s work focuses heavily on leadership in and organization of the workplace. Particularly after reading Steven Greenhouse’s “The Big Squeeze” it is clear that most people’s jobs are like cogs in an awkward machine. If companies were to move into a more 21st century understanding of human potential and the important of relationship many of the problems in the treatment of workers described in Greenhouse book would be addressed.
In Michale Pollan’s most recent book “In Defense of Food; and eater’s manifesto” he describes the problem of nutritionism, which is basically a reductionist approach to food- an appreciation of only their specific parts (some isolated nutrients) and not of the relationships of those parts or the food’s relationship with our bodies’ systems. The video below talks about the book’s concepts generally but addresses the problems of reducing a carrot down to simply beta carotene that leaves us with very little understanding of the value of this vegetable. Worth watching.
In addition to needing better understanding of our food, our food system as a whole could improve with some of Wheatley’s ideas about organizations and leadership. Currently there are at least five agencies that have some role in regulating food and none of them work with each other (big surprise). Huge improvements would be made with greater communication between these agencies and a better understanding of the relationships between their various goals and interests would lead to a system much more in line with reality.
The approach to organizations and leadership that Margaret Whealey believes in is coherent and intensely positive. Recent events, like the election of Barack Obama, indicate to me that we are more than ready for a similar approach in our various efforts for change.
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