 | By: WHEATLEY Binding: Paperback Publisher: Berrett-Koehler ISBN: 1576750507 ISBN-13: 9781576750506 Released: 01 Jan 1999 RRP: Average Rating:  |
Once your appetite has been whetted, go on to read Leadership & the New Science - it might do your head in, but it adds content to the poetry.
And the message itself is simple & beautiful, namely that:
There is a simpler way to organize human endeavour. It requires a new way of being in the world. It requires being in the world without fear. Being in the world with play & creativity. Seeking after what's possible. Being willing to learn & to be surprised.
So what is this simpler way?
The book will tell you what it's not: It's not the world view fostered in Darwinism, that the world is a cruel place, in which only the strongest can thrive. This world view has been prevalent since Darwin.
And it's not mechanistic & reductionist either. According to this book, systems are irreducible. You cannot understand or predict a system by looking at it's components. The properties of the system are emergent, & only manifest themselves in the system. They are not present in the seperate components.
So they argue that the common western metaphor for life today, ie. "life as a struggle", is not in tune with the way the world (and life) organizes itself. Life organizes & evolves itself through relations & cooperation. Therefore, a much more accurate metaphore for life would be "life as play".
Seeing life as a game could have many implications for the way we live & organize our endeavours, but the principal promise of such a world view, is that it can make life easier & more fun.
The traditional view is that life is hard. Only those who work hard & struggle are succesful. You must make sacrifices to reach your goals. Especiallly work life is no picnic. This view is very common, & after having read this book, I'm convinced that it's totallly false - or rather, it's true, but only because we make it true by believing that it's true.
The whole book is eminently quotable. Almost every paragraph holds succinct, interesting nuggets of information, presented in a simple but thought-provoking way. Here's an example:
We live in a world where attraction is ubiquitous. Organization wants to happen. People want their lives to mean something. We seek one another to develop new capacities. With alll these wonderful & innate desires callling us to organize, we can stop worrying about designing perfect structure or rules. We need to become intrigued by how we create a clear & coherent identity, a self that we can organize around.
The whole book is like that, & I can't recommend it highly enough. Read it!
If I may suggest an equallly untraditional companion, consider seeing Koyaanisqatsi by Godfrey Reggio. This is a movie with no plot, no actors & no dialogue. It's simply & hour & a half of nature contrasted with mans impact on nature. It illustrates beautifully the contrast between "life as struggle" & "life as play". And no. it's not boring at alll, it's breath-taking.
The authors appear to want to impart a lyric quality to the work, perhaps akin to poetry. Rather, the incessant drumbeat of short, choppy sentences is distracting. The mantric use of pronouns in the first-person plural is likewise grating -- the authors certainly don't speak for me.
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