Dear Margaret Wheatley (Meg)
You are one of my favourite thinkers about organisational development. Your book, A Simpler Way (1996, co-written with Myron Kellner-Rogers) introduced me to the idea of organisation as natural process, rather than the artificially imposed structure of containment and management which modern worklife suggests. It's a beautiful photo-essay that explores the concepts of order and change, and reflects upon how these play out in our human culture.
Your earlier book, Leadership and the New Science (1992) also brought me exciting new ideas about organisations. In it you present three areas of science - “the new discoveries in biology, chaos theory, and quantum physics that are changing our understanding of how the world works ” -and consider them in the context of human organisations.
Since then you have written several more books, developing these ideas and promoting new ways of conceptualising how we work together. All of your titles sit on my bookshelf.
You can therefore imagine my dismay when I discovered the theme of your upcoming latest book: Restoring Sanity. Dismay and disappointment. Oh Meg, what have you done?
To be published in March 2024, this book will expound upon an article written in professional magazine Leader to Leader in November 2023. The article lays down this premise:
What is sanity? Not in the psychological sense, but in our day-to-day lives, where “crazy” is the most popular adjective to describe events, comments, decisions, and fun experiences. What is sanity? Is it a standard of conduct? Is it common sense? Is it rational behavior?
Yes, and so much more. Sanity is an honest relationship with reality. Sanity is seeing clearly, free of our filters, judgments, biases. When we see what’s going on, then we can discern what actions might be useful. Sanity creates possibilities.
The blurb for your upcoming book goes on to say
We need to restore sanity by awakening the human spirit. We can achieve this only if we undertake the most challenging and meaningful work of our leader lives: Creating Islands of Sanity.
An Island of Sanity is a gift of possibility and refuge created by people’s commitment to form healthy community to do meaningful work. It requires sane leaders with unshakable faith in people’s innate generosity, creativity, and kindness. It sets itself apart as an island to protect itself from the life-destroying dynamics, policies, and behaviors that oppress and deny the human spirit. No matter what is happening around us, we can discover practices that enliven our human spirits and produce meaningful contributions for this time.
Ok, this sounds lovely – and I don't disagree at all with benefit of finding these types of spaces.
However, I do disagree fundamentally that this endeavor is a project belonging to sanity. By setting up this binary – sanity good, madness bad – you are invoking and reinforcing sanism in the biggest of big ways. No matter that you try to sidestep by saying “not in the psychological sense.” What other sense is there?
When you lay down your definition (sanity is an honest relationship with reality) I must challenge you: whose reality are you talking about? In my own experience, madness taught me that our consensual agreement about reality is an illusion, and a deeply damaging one at that.
I fundamentally disagree that what we need in this world is more sanity. Sanity is what brought us to this point, the state of a world at the brink of self-destruction. And I fundamentally disagree that generosity and kindness belong to the sane.
Let me tell you Meg, about a woman, a fellow patient I met when I was sectioned in a mental hospital with other casualties of this sane world. She was a broken and battered person, struggling with depression and psychosis and poverty and a vivid lack of education. On the day I arrived, this woman saw that I was confused and distressed with my circumstances, and she reached out to me, and stayed by my side, to reassure me that I would be alright. I never learned her name, but I will never forget her. She offered such kindness, so generously, with a deep compassion that that been honed by her own suffering. When you claim these human gifts as the provenance of sanity, you disrespect this woman. You disrespect her.
I know you don't mean to. You are offering your wisdom to a world crying out for help. But this book, this avenue you have taken, is a wrong turn. It does you a disservice and with unfortunate irony it does the world a disservice as well.
You yourself have taught me that chaos and order are both intrinsic to life. They need not be drenched in moral judgments about good and bad. When we fear chaos and impose our own brands of order, when we worship rationality and condemn the irrational, we are denying ourselves and who we are.
Perhaps I'm jumping the gun. I must buy and read Restoring Sanity to really understand the full extent to which you expound your thesis.
Perhaps when I have read it, we could dialogue about it? I would really value your perspective on the work my mad colleagues and I are doing, to restore madness to a world gone sane. Together we are in the process of setting up a co-operative organisation here in the UK (called Mad Insight) which provides consultancy, training and coaching from a mad perspective. We begin from the premise that madness is a gift and that the mad voice offers a valuable perspective which is habitually silenced in the name of sanity.
I really think we're much on the same page, Meg – just coming at things from different directions. I am grateful for your work, and your own insight, from which I have learned so much. I just think that perhaps you might learn from me too.
With sincerely best wishes from Julia of Madreality
Photo by Andrew Dunstan on Unsplash