Some part of the system (…an organization, a community, a team, a nation) notices something. It might be in a memo, a chance comment, a news report. It chooses to be disturbed by this. Chooses is the operative word here–the freedom to be disturbed belongs to the system. No one ever tells a living system what should disturb it (even though we try all the time.) If it chooses to be disturbed, it takes in the information and circulates it rapidly through its networks. As the disturbance circulates, others take it and amplify it. The information grows, changes, becomes distorted from the original, but all the time it is accumulating more and more meaning. Finally, the information beomces so important that the system can’t deal with it. Then and only then will the system begin to change. It is forced, by the sheer meaningfulness of the information, to let go of its present beliefs, structures, patterns, values. It cannot use its past to make sense of this new information. The system must truly let go, plunging itself into a state of confusion and uncertainty that feels like chaos, a state that always feels terrible.
Having fallen apart, having let go of who it has been, the system now and only now open to change. It will reorganize using new interpretations, new understandings of what’s real and what’s important. It becomes different because it understands the world differently. It becomes new because it was forced to let go of the old. And, paradoxically, as is true with all living systems, it changed because it was the only way to preserve itself.
Margaret J. Wheatley, Finding Our Way: Leadership For an Uncertain Time, 2005, viewing change within organizations that are seen as living systems rather than machines
