Ten Principles for Creating Healthy Communities
“The world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes as networks of relationships form among people who discover they share a common cause.”
Margaret Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science reframed how we understand leadership and social change. Instead of managing people as if they were parts in a machine, Wheatley draws on living-systems science, including connection, feedback, and emergence, to describe how change happens.
In a living system, order arises through relationships and the continuous exchange of information. What holds a community together isn’t control, but purpose and meaning shared through conversation. Innovation, she argues, is everyone’s responsibility and is the natural outcome of connection.
Wheatley’s Ten Principles for Creating Healthy Communities
People support what they create
People act responsibly when they care
Conversation is the natural way people think together
To change the conversation, change who’s in it.
Expect leadership to come from anywhere
Focusing on what works releases creative energy
The wisdom is within us to solve our problems
Everything is a failure in the middle
Humans can handle anything as long as we’re together
Generosity forgiveness and love
Healthy creative systems, like healthy communities, must be cultivated.
Wheatley’s principals are a reminder that the vitality of a network depends above all on the quality of its relationships and the willingness to listen to one another to find solutions.
Further Reading
Wheatley, M. (1992). Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe.
Wheatley, M. (1997). Innovation Means Relying on Everyone’s Creativity.
Wheatley, M. (2001). Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future.
