I went to a talk by Margaret Wheatley on the subject of coherence in chaotic times. Some interesting ideas but several flaws. She started by inviting everyone to subscribe to a very negative picture of our current social state. Whilst for some people some of her observations may hold good it is clearly not true that everyone experiences the world in all the ways she described - I think her usual audience might be stressed out amenican businessmen for whom much of what she says probably resonates. The audience of sustainability minded people at this talk also seemed keen to lap up the doom laden scene she painted, which I think reflects very badly on our tendency in the 'environmental movement' to want things to be bad so that we feel justified.

There is nothing 'necessary' about her way of looking at the current social world - certainly there are lots of problems and everyone probably experiences some of them, but equally I think that everyone has something good in their lives and Ms Wheatley's approach tends to throw that baby out with the bathwater.

But there were several interesting ideas in talk which merit further consideration. She started from the viewpoint that everything human is built on relationships - in a sense there is no objective reality, it arises from a network of relationships between things including people.

She then uses this to discuss models of leadership and introduces a number of types or styles of leader; but rather than recognising that a particular set of circumstances may be best served by one style of leader, and at another time a different approach would be preferable, she goes down the route of looking for a one-size-fits-all best solution - which for her is of course distributed model of leadership.

Personally I think that the picture is a lot more complex - the models of leadership we examined at the 'Gaunt's Event' last year were a lot more useful in providing both tools for understanding situations and for dealing with them in the most effective way.

Finally she moved on to look at the role of culture in providing cohesion and identity to a group (from organisational team to society). Here she was much more interesting, although her poistion could be taken as a powerful arguement against a multi-cultural and pluralist society. She seemed to be suggesting that the most effective response to troubled times might be to have a strong cultural identity to provide cohesion and impetus to drive towards the common good...interesting...