Finding Our Way

Selforganizing systems have the capacity to create for themselves the aspects of organization that we thought leaders had to provide. Self-organizing systems create structures and pathways, networks of communication, values and meaning, behaviors and norms. In essence, they do for themselves most of what we believed we had to do for them. Rather than thinking of organization as an imposed structure, plan, design, or role, it is clear that in life, organization arises from the interactions and needs of individuals who have decided to come together.

People come to resent the organization they created, because now it is a major impediment to their creativity, to their hope, to their dreams.

If self-organization already exists in organizations-if people are naturally selforganizing-then the challenge for leaders is how to create the conditions that more effectively support this capacity. They do this by attending to what is available in the domains of information, relationships, and identity.

we can never direct a living system—we can only hope to get its attention.

When an individual changes, its neighbors take notice and decide how they will respond.

Particularly in the West, and in response to this too-demanding price of belonging, we move toward isolationism in order to defend our individual freedom. We choose a life lived alone in order for it to be our life. We give up the meaningful life that can only be discovered in relationship with others for a meaningless life that at least we think is ours. What we can see from our pursuit of individualism is the terrible price exacted for such independence. We end up in vacant places, overwhelmed by loneliness and the emptiness of life.

Every change, every burst of creativity, begins with the identification of a problem or opportunity that somebody finds meaningful. As soon as people become interested in an issue, their creativity is engaged. If we want people to be innovative, leaders must engage them in meaningful issues. The simplest way to discover what's meaningful is to notice what people talk about and where they spend their energy

Those that we fail to invite into the creation process will surely and always show up as resistors and saboteurs

People only support what they create

People only support what they create. Life insists on its freedom to participate and can never be coerced into accepting someone else's plans.

One of the key findings in the field of knowledge management is that people share their knowledge only when they feel cared for and when they care for the organization. It is not new technology that makes for knowledge exchanges but the quality of human relationships

Instead of fleeing from the fearful place of chaos or trying to rescue people from it, leaders can help people stay with the chaos, help them walk through it together, and look for the new insights and capacities that always emerge

In such brutal times as these, when good work gets destroyed by events and decisions far beyond our influence, when we're so overwhelmed with tasks that we have no time to reflect, it is very important that the leader create time for people to remember why they're doing this work. What were we hoping to accomplish when we started this? Who are we serving by doing this work?

The organization that knows how to convert information into knowledge, that knows what it knows, that can act with greater intelligence and discernment-these are the organizations that will make it into the future

Unlike past organizational change efforts, knowledge management is truly a survival issue. Done right, it can give us what we so desperately need organisations that act with intelligence. Done wrong, we will, like lemmings, keep rushing into the future without using our intelligence to develop longer-term individual and organizational capacity. To continue blindly down our current path, where speed and profits are the primary values, where there is no time to think or relate, is suicidal