Margaret Wheatley has written an important book, Leadership and the New Science. Her publisher, Berrett-Koehler, performed a public service by making chapter 6 Information - The Creative Energy of the Universe available on the Internet. Here are a few quotes from her chapter.

At the many organizations she has worked with around the globe, "poor communications" has ranked at the top of the major issues. She has concluded that we are all suffering from "a fundamental misperception of information: what it is, how it behaves, how to work with it. The nub of the problem is that we've treated information as a "thing," as a physical entity. A "thing" has material form; you can get your hands around it, move it from place to place, expect to pass it on unchanged. You can manage things."

"In the universe new science is exploring, information is a very different "thing." It is not the limited, quantifiable, put-it-in-an-email-and-send commodity that we pretend it to be. In new theories of evolution and order, information is a dynamic, changing element, taking center stage. Without information, life cannot give birth to anything new; information is absolutely essential for the emergence of new order."

"All life uses information to organize itself into form. A living being is not a stable structure, but a continuous process of organizing information. A dramatic example of this, one that pushes our self-concept to the edge, is demonstrated by asking: Who am I? Am I a physical structure that processes information or immaterial information organizing itself into material form?"

"At any point in the bodymind, two things come together-a bit of information and a bit of matter. Of the two, the information has a longer life span than the solid matter it is matched with. . . .This fact makes us realize that memory must be more permanent than matter. What is a cell, then? It is a memory that has built some matter around itself, forming a specific pattern."

Your body is just the home your memory has built for itself.

"For a system to remain alive, for the universe to keep growing, information must be continually generated. If there is nothing new, or if the information that exists merely confirms what already is, then the result will be death. Closed systems wind down and decay, victims of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The source of life is new information - novelty - ordered into new structures. We need to have information coursing through our systems, disturbing the peace, imbuing everything it touches with the possibility of new life. We need, therefore, to develop new approaches to information - not management but encouragement, not control but genesis. How do we create more of this wonderful life source? "

[new information requires] "freedom; information must be free to circulate and find new partners. The greatest source of information is the freedom of chaos, where every moment is new."

"Of course, such freedom is exactly what we try to prevent. We have no desire to let information roam about promiscuously, procreating where it will, creating chaos. Management's task is to enforce control, to keep information contained, to pass it down in such a way that no newness occurs. Information chastity belts are a central management function."

"But if information is to function as a source of organizational vitality, we must abandon our dark cloaks of control and trust in its need for free movement, even in our own organizations. Information is necessary for new order, an order we do not impose, but order nonetheless. All of life uses information this way."

"Everybody needs information to do their work. We are so needy of this resource that if we can't get the real thing, we make it up. When rumors proliferate and gossip gets out of hand, it is always a sign that people lack the genuine article-honest, meaningful information."

"For so long, we've been engaged in smoothing things over, rounding things off, keeping the lid on (the metaphors are numerous), that our organizations have literally been dying for information they could feed on, information that was different, disconfirming, and filled with enough newness to disturb the system into new possibilities."

"Several years ago, a major long-distance phone company discovered that telephone calls could be routed more efficiently and effectively anywhere on the globe if the routing was not controlled by a centralized unit. In place of centralized decisions, they created the technology to support a rapid exchange of information among the various switches. Each call could find its own best route by quickly scanning what was going on in the system. However, as one manager sadly reported, at the same time that his company was discovering how well this worked for technology, it had yet to trust that similar processes also would lead to far improved functioning at the human level among employees." "Everywhere in our organizations, at all levels and for all activities, we need to challenge ourselves to create greater access to information and to reduce those control functions that restrict its flow. We cannot continue to fearfully circumscribe employee access to information through information technology and management systems that serve as gatekeepers, excluding and predefining who needs to know what. Instead, we need to evoke one another's contribution by trusting them with the freedom to decide how best to make sense of the information, based on what they know their job to be, and the purpose they are working to support. Restricting information and carefully guarding it doesn't make us good managers. It just stops good people from doing good work. Many studies over many years have demonstrated that people are most effective when they self-manage their responsibilities. Jan Carlson, former head of Scandinavian Airlines and one of the pioneers in the customer service revolution, said it clearly: "An individual without information cannot take responsibility, but an individual who is given information cannot help but take responsibility" in KM book, Willett, p. 2). Free flowing information provides true nourishment that enables people to do their jobs responsibly and to develop innovations that contribute to the organization." "We only create the capacity for growth when we invite in newness. Such newness is only found in something that is different or surprising. Although such situations often make us uncomfortable, they truly are to our benefit. We need to search out difficulties and surprises, bring them into focus and allow them to grow large before our eyes, because then we are creating the conditions for new order to emerge."

"My own faith that organizations are evolving to greater intelligence comes from my understanding that we live in an intrinsically well-ordered universe. As I read further into new science, I recognize that living systems engage with life differently than we do. We struggle to carefully build order, layer upon layer, while their order emerges. We labor hard to hold things together, while they participate together openly and self-organized structures emerge."