The subtitle of this book by organizational development theorist and consultant Margaret Wheatley really says it all—“Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe.”

The premise seems far out at first. Wheatley reminds us of something all of us who work for organizations say regularly: Things just don’t seem to be working any more. All of our ideas about how to make an organization hum just aren’t cutting it. While the problem can be readily seen, identifying the reason for it is a lot more difficult. But Wheatley thinks she’s got a handle on it. We are, she says, spending too much time paying attention to Newtonian physics from several hundred years ago.

“Riiiiight,” I say to myself upon hearing this diagnosis. “Some new age scientific mumbo jumbo is going to help me help the people in an organization to work and play well together? I don’t think so!”

The problem of course, is that when you read Wheatley’s ideas, they make a lot of sense. I admit to being a convert. I know and understand very little about the new science, much less the old science, but Wheatley makes it understandable and the analogies she draws to today’s business world seem right on target.

Every time I read or re–read one of her books or articles, I become a believer all over again, recognizing just how much sense her notions have.

“Each of us lives and works in organizations designed from Newtonian images of the universe,” she writes. “We manage by separating things into parts, we believe that influence occurs as a direct result of force exerted from one person to another, we engage in complex planning for a world that we keep expecting to be predictable, and we search continually for better methods of objectively perceiving the world.

“But the science has changed. If we are to continue to draw from the sciences to create and manage organizations, to design research, and to formulate hypotheses about organizational design, planning, economics, human nature, and change processes (the list can be much longer), then we need to at least ground our work in the science of our times. We need to stop seeking after the universe of the seventeenth century and begin to explore what is known to us in the twentieth century.”

In much of this book, Wheatley looks at three branches of science—quantum physics, self–organizing systems, and chaos theory—and the lessons they can offer for organizational improvement.

The difference between Sir Isaac Newton’s machine imagery and the new science are striking. In the machine model, Wheatley explains, one must understand parts. Things can be taken apart, dissected literally or representationally, and then put back together without any significant loss. The assumption is that by comprehending the workings of each piece, the whole can be understood. Newton’s work was based on a spiritual understanding that assumed that God was a master mechanic who had gotten the world started and then sat back to let it run, until it eventually ran down.

Contrast this with the new science, which understands the system as a system and gives primary value to the relationships that exist among seemingly disparate parts. In this view, the universe is continually changing and there is a dynamic interplay always present.

Wheatley quotes an ancient Sufi teaching that explains the change in focus: “You think because you understand one you must understand two, because one and one makes two. But you must also understand and.”

The yearning many of us feel for simplicity is rewarded in the new science, Wheatley says. “In many systems, scientists now understand that order and conformity and shape are created not by complex controls, but by the presence of a few guiding formulae or principles.”

The massive structures and controls we impose on organizations grow, Wheatley believes, out of a Newtonian belief that our universe cannot be trusted with growth, rejuvenation, and progress. We believe that if we want progress, we must provide the energy, the momentum to reverse decay.

She says this has been a massive burden for us to bear and it’s time for us to lay it down and look to nature for its many examples and lessons of order. “Despite the experience of fluctuations and change that disrupt our plans, the world is inherently orderly. And fluctuation and change are part of the very process by which order is created.”

Every living thing, Wheatley says, expends energy and will do whatever is needed to preserve itself, including changing. This process, known as autopoiesis, shows us a universe “rich in processes that support growth and coherence, individuality and community.” Another proof is found in dissipative structures in chemistry, which demonstrate that disorder can be the source of new order. Even as energy dissipates, it doesn’t lead to the demise of a system. Rather, it is part of the process by which the system lets go of its present form so it can reemerge in a form better suited to the demands of the current environment.

In quantum physics, Wheatley reports, change happens in jumps, beyond our powers of precise prediction. But the inability to predict change is not a result of inherent disorder. Rather, “The results we observe speak to a level of quantum interconnectedness of a deep order that we are only beginning to sense. There is a constant weaving of relationships, of energies that merge and change, of constant ripples that occur within a seamless fabric. There is so much order that our attempts to separate out discrete moments create the appearance of disorder.”

Wheatley says we even can find order in the event that epitomizes total disorder, chaos. A system is defined as chaotic when it is impossible to know where it will be next. (Sound like any work group or team you know?) There is no predictability; the system is never in the same place twice. But as chaos theory shows, if one looks at such a system long enough and with the perspective of time, it always demonstrates its inherent orderliness. The most chaotic of systems never goes beyond certain boundaries.

“While we have lusted for order in organizations, we have failed to understand its true nature,” Wheatley says. It is hard to welcome disorder as a full partner in the search for order when we have expended such effort to bar it from the gates. This is not an easy land to inhabit, not an easy concept in which to place faith—except that we’re already living with the evidence that supports it. And most of us have already experienced systems naturally recreating themselves as they play in their environment.

“All this time we have created trouble for ourselves in organizations by confusing control with order…If organizations are machines, control makes sense. If organizations are process structures, then seeking to impose control through permanent structure is suicide. If we believe that acting responsibly means exerting control by having our hands into everything, then we cannot hope for anything except what we already have—a treadmill of effort and life–destroying stress.

“What if we could reframe the search? What if we stopped looking for control and began, in earnest, the search for order….It is hard to open ourselves to a world of inherent orderliness. ‘In life, the issue is not control, but dynamic connectedness.’ I want to act from that knowledge. I want to move into a universe I trust so much that I give up playing God. I want to stop holding things together. I want to experience such safety that the concept of ‘allowing’—trusting that the appropriate forms can emerge—ceases to be scary. I want to surrender my care of the universe and become a participating member, with everyone I work with, in an organization that moves gracefully with its environment, trusting in the unfolding dance of order.”

Don’t we all, Margaret. Don’t we all.