 I am very glad to be here, very glad. Because I have to say some things to you that I hope will be provocative, clarifying, and consoling. And I will speak to all of those. And I'm really looking forward to the Q&A at the end, because it's my job to really help you form new questions. And I will offer some. It's also my responsibility to provoke you as much as possible, not because I'm a sadistic person, but because we're working with ideas about how much we can create change that I find worth noting because they're not correct. That's how we're going to start. This is the cover of book number nine. And I have come down. I've been outchanging the world. I realize sitting here since 1966, I joined the Peace Corps, went to post-war Korea, worked in a totally foreign environment, completely committed to creating positive change from that point on. At a global level, I long ago wanted not to be seen as an American. And at this point, it's even clearer that it's not a badge of honor these days, but it's a badge of warning. But if you look at the subtitles on this book, it actually describes some of what I'm going to do here with you today, that we have to face reality. Now, that's been brilliantly presented by several of the speakers, especially how Mark began. I mean, I thought, well, I'm going to sound cheerful now. That's good, Mark. But the reason we need to face what's going on is because leadership is required. You've been given many examples of excellent leadership approaches and techniques. But more is required, even, because what is really required of us is restoring sanity. I won't even define what that means, except I will give some explanation to it as we go on. So here we are at the Meaning Conference. And a lot of what I read and a lot of what I heard is about how we give meaning, that what is the meaning of our work? Yes. But I have to contextualize that to what is the meaning of our work at this time. And what I want to offer is a path where you can explore the answer to this question, both of them. Is the way you currently ground your work, the purpose that you have announced that brought you here, is that good enough? Is that sufficient for what's ahead for working well in this time? Because our work begins from passion. I have to warn you, I'm a grandmother. I have a lot of grandchildren. And so any young child you see in my slides is a grandchild. Our work begins from passion. Yes, right? So when Mark quoted that beautiful passage from Yates, that things fall apart, the center cannot hold. When he picked out the phrase to distinguish us, it was the best lack all intensity while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity. The worst, you get the idea, right? I want to focus on the worst are filled with a passionate intensity. I think we are filled with a passionate intensity that can actually get us in trouble. Because what would get us in trouble is what always comes after the passion, which is disappointment. Criticism, failures, this is nothing new. I've written a small book on perseverance because I saw so many of my friends. We have done great work. We have exhausted ourselves because of our commitment and dedication to really doing good with our positions, our influence, our theories. We've really done good work. And what I was seeing was as the work comes back to us that, oh, we didn't change the world. We didn't create participative leadership. We didn't create self-managed work systems. We all worked very hard on those things. My own work has been about trying to change from 1992, trying to introduce. If we could see how living systems organize where they get ordered without control, then we'd put an end to all this command and control nonsense. We'd actually have a means for dealing with chaos that is natural. There's too much man-made chaos at this point, by the way, because we're trying control things. But that's a whole other talk. I was watching, as those of us who've been in this work for over 50 years, as what was happening to us, we were exhausted. We were becoming cynical. We were becoming hopeless. We were becoming lonely. These were all a consequence of working for a meaningful purpose that was not materializing. And this is what I want to stress. This is why I'm talking to you. There is a way in which we need to hold our work from a deeper sense of purpose beyond being effective, beyond changing the world. Because we know people who persevere. Well, I need to explain this to you also. This is a Chinese character for perseverance. And it's a knife suspended over a heart. So it's Chinese. It could mean thousands of things. But I've worked with it long enough that I have my two favorites, which I'll tell you. The first is, as we do the work of our heart, that would be the work we're passionate about, the work we're committed to. As we do the work of our heart, we're at risk. We could be cut down. We could be criticized. We could lose our funding. We could suddenly be overwhelmed by criticism. These are things that are just natural to the path of doing the work of heart. We're always doing this under a state of risk, always. And part of the risk that's involved is that we are counter-cultural. I feel these days we are true revolutionaries. And you know what happens to revolutionaries. Or you know what's required of them. It's not easy. So there's always this state of risk. But the other explanation of this, which is actually given to me by a Korean Zen woman nun in Australia. I think I got that right. Who said that her teacher had given this to her as her practice for the rest of her life. And she was in the contemplation and where she came up, what she came out with, as an explanation was simply that as we do our work, our hearts are cut open. Not that we're killed, but our hearts are cut open. And of course, whenever the human heart is cut open, what comes out is compassion. What comes out is caring. What comes out is attention to the plight of other people. So that is part of what's available to us as we do our work. But this is the history of perseverance. People who persevere. We face all of these things. It's an ugly list, isn't it? Fear, aggression, failure, criticism, betrayal, exhaustion, and despair. And I have to say candidly, I ran out of room. I could add more things. It's not our fault when we experience any of these things. And have you? Yeah? The older we are, the more we can say, oh, gosh, yes. Just yesterday. Oh, this morning. But we have to be prepared for these. We have to be prepared with a rich inner ground to face this time of groundlessness. And that inner ground is what prepares us to not get swept away by aggression, failure. We're going to fail. Of course, we're going to fail. We're human. You now know this phrase, fail forward. It's a good phrase. Another phrase is fail often, fail faster. But failure in this society is not rewarded, but is the path of being a revolutionary. Of course, we're going to make mistakes, of course. But are we prepared for the criticism and then the darker side of human nature? Are we prepared for betrayal? It's happening a lot these days. Are we prepared for the despair that we feel? I have to say, as an American, despair happens to me any time I read the news, any time now, because it is a very despairing, terrible time. We have to be prepared for this. So this requires a kind of inner resiliency, an inner ground that we find. But I was just reading where we are, because this is a photo of a Maori woman with her tribal totem. And I'm always reminded that we're not the first people who've tried to change the world. You understand that. We're not the first people who have wanted social change, social justice, equity. And in fact, so we learned about the dark side of the moon in Abba. That's great to stand on this stage with them. But I also read outside that I'm standing on the shoulders of the suffragettes. Who? I love this story. At the turn of the last century, the Brighton Women's Social and Political Union was one of the country's most active regional branches of the movement. And they regularly disturbed political meetings held at Brighton Dome. Here. This is so funny. In January 1910, two suffragettes, Eva Bourne and Mary Lee, were arrested at Brighton Dome. What were they arrested for? They were discovered hiding inside the venue's organ, about to cry out, votes for women through the pipes to disrupt Prime Minister Asquith's speech. That's a new tactic. Now we just go on social media and spread fake news. So for who we are choosing to be, who we are trying to be in response to this time, it's so essential to realize, as one of my teachers said, it's just our turn. It's just our turn. But one of the ways we differ, and this is when Mark said after his really complete litany, all these systems are broken, they are not working. And then he said, we've been here before. Yes, we have. But what does that mean? It means that human history, we always play out a cycle. And at the end of a cycle, the systems break down. And only a few courageous people who still remember ethics, who still remember what the best qualities of being human are. Only a few people step forward. And they step forward not with the ambition which we have to change the system, but they step forward with a declaration that this is not right. This will not stand. As long as I have breath, I will speak the truth. And I will work on behalf of people. This is where I hope to lead you in these few minutes. Because one of the things that disables us the most, and I speak generally for all the, a lot of people I've talked with and worked with over 50 years, we believe we can change the world. I don't think that's what prompted other revolutionaries. They needed the world to change. That's different than believing we can change the world. Do you get the difference there? We know, we recognize what needs changing, things like justice, food supply, clean air, clean water, the injustice, income inequity. We know the things that need to be changed. But where we get in trouble is we believe that we are capable of changing the world and capable of changing these very large systems, which are in their dying stages. I found that to be a disabling belief. It was my belief, by the way. It was. And when I first gave up saying I cannot save the world, because I actually thought my mission was to save the world, and I had, I had scope. I really could talk to leaders at all different levels in all different places. So that's the experience that I'm coming from. And when I gave up trying to save the world and just discover my right work, I had many friends who said, what happened to make? You're just withdrawing. You're a coward. And I'm talking now about a different kind of bravery, of facing the world as it is, and then doing our work from a deeper place of faith. I'll talk about that, too. But I wanted to just add to the list of everything that describes this time by giving you Gandhi's Seven Social Sins. He wrote these in 1925 in a letter. And then I just read that he wrote them down on a piece of paper by hand. This would be worth a lot of money now, I guess. To his nephew just days before he was assassinated in 1947. So this remained vital wisdom to him, to be giving it to your lineage just before you die. I find it very powerful. So here is what he described as the Seven Social Sins. When we have politics without principle, wealth without work, commerce without morality, pleasure without conscience, education without character, science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice. I think this captures it. Do you feel that way? I mean, is there anything missing, really? These are all major systems. They all interrelate, of course. If you have education without character, then it's easy to have commerce without morality. But this was written in 1925. It already was the trend, already where we were. So I already alluded to the fact that I believe that we are trapped into a belief about what should happen because we do good work. So just think, our work does work. I have to say in the area of self-managed teams, we've known since the 60s that when people are in self-managed teams, and this is in large organizations, when people are in self-managed teams able to determine workflow, parse up tasks, substitute for one another, good teamwork, we know that productivity increases a minimum of 35%. A minimum of 35%. So that's an idea that works. That's an idea that seemingly gives corporate leaders what they've been asking for all these years, and they're still asking for it, but now we're turning to AI to give us productivity. Don't hold your breath on that one. So I think our work works, and this is what I mean. It does solve a critical problem. It does make, therefore, a contribution. It creates positive outcomes. It gives leaders what they said they wanted, and it honors the human spirit. That is work that should be rewarded, right? And I do believe that we have these reasonable expectations that we should be thanked for it. We should be praised for it. We should be recognized for it, because we did good work. And we want to see it widely adopted. We call that now taking it to scale, going to scale, scaling up. But if something works well in one area, in one village, why wouldn't we take it to every village? If something works well in one part of the organization, why wouldn't it be widely, quickly, and easily adopted? And of course, because it is good work, because it does solve critical problems, we really have solutions. We expect that it will change the world. Does this feel anything you're familiar with in your own attitudes or expectations? Certainly was mine. So I want to step back for a moment and give you this powerful definition from Aristotle of what is virtue? He felt that virtue was exercising our distinctive human activity, which is rationality. It's what distinguishes us from plants and animals. I now work in a number of places where I hear stories that leaders will look at good work, look at a document, look at a scenario, look at something that has taken their staff months of good research to develop, and they push it away saying, I don't have time to think. And that's a legitimate excuse. It may be true, they don't have time to think, but that they have the balls to say that is really deeply distressing. Because when we don't think we lose all virtue, we lose what makes us distinctly human. And I think this is a great image of what's going on right now. Yeah? So it's an unvirtuous time, which means the world does not change according to sanity, to reason, to rationality. And yet we keep trying. So we present powerful ideas, look for best practices. This has been my life when I've been consulting in corporate. Proven methods, yes, and we have evidence for those. And then there's the situation of science, which is quickly being degraded into just another set of opinions. Remember I'm an American. So this is why we cannot rely on developing a good idea, showing that it works, giving the evidence, and then expecting it to change the world. Because I think as my best evidence here, if all of those things had changed the world, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in right now. That's what we have to face. So let's go a little deeper now. One of the things that comes back to hit us, smack us, is the level of hope we carry that our good work will achieve scalable results, that our good work will make a difference. This is a very difficult concept to even speak to a group of us, because we are motivated by hope. And hope is where we find great meaning, right? Was with me. So I wanna bring in the work of the great mystic writer, author, consultant, Catholic monk, Thomas Merton. Thomas Merton called his photographic work a hidden wholeness. He was always noticing and revealing our interconnectedness. But when it came to hope, he was very clear. He received a letter from a theologian. This is in 1966. And the theologian was in despair, like, I'm so depressed. I'm in a dark night of the soul. Nothing I'm doing is worth doing. I'm just meaninglessness. And Thomas Merton wrote this letter to him. Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing this sort of work, you have taken on essentially an apostolic work, which I now interpret apostolic work means we know what we stand for. We know what we're disciples of. We know what we're promoting. But when you have taken on essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. Have you ever received this kind of career coaching? No, right? But it's very important to notice in our own experience whether we can validate the truth of this. I certainly can. It's either worthless, you got nowhere with it or it came back to haunt you because it created negative results. And then he goes on to say, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through is gradually you struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything. I have been working with this for probably 20 years and now I know that what Thomas Merton was saying in his great wisdom is absolutely true that when we focus the work on the people in front of us and on the possibility that we could create locally and stop worrying about creating change or stop worrying about looking for praise and recognition, stop noticing that people aren't picking up our great innovation. When we can focus on the work in front of us, on the people in front of us, on the community in front of us, that is deeply satisfying work. So here's some more granddaughters. This is a beautiful quote by Emmanuel Levinas. You may or may not know who is a great French philosopher who wrote about ethics as being in relationship. Ethics comes from relationship, but I love this definition of faith. It's not a question, it's not a spiritual question. It's believing that love without rewards is valuable. This is one of the places I would hope we can locate ourselves, that we're doing the work we're doing out of love for an out of a sense of possibility for what another human being, what a community of people can create together. But it has no other rewards in it. And I wanna talk a little bit about this question of faith and hope. So Voslav Havel is just affirming this, that hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. This is what I would call right work. Work that I know is mine to do, no matter the results that it either achieves or doesn't achieve. And this is the place I would encourage you over time to really discover. Because this is the place where hope does not act as an ambush, does not get us so engaged in something that then when it fails, we go down and despair. And this is something about hope that Buddhists are very wise about. Hope and fear are the same, different sides of the same coin. You hope for a result and you fear when it doesn't happen. Someone else said that expectations, that's the kind of hope we're talking about here, having a goal in mind, a result in mind, like saving the world. This person said that expectations are just premeditated disappointments. So finding ground in this groundless, increasingly chaotic Vukka world is right here. It's developing a sense of certainty about the rightness of the work itself for you. And that's what you work for. And that gives you the capacity to persevere in a way that goals, illusions of progress, all of these things just open us up to despair. I wanna offer one actual practice here. This is a quote from the leadership of Catholic nuns in the United States when they were under attack by the Vatican. It started in 2010, it went on until 2015, and it was a modern day inquisition, except the women were wise and knew how to just stay and actually triumphed at the end. This is a story I tell in my new book, but I just wanna give the source of this quote because it's an actual practice for me now. They were in the Vatican. They had just been blindsided by the first notice of a series of investigations that were gonna be held where there would be visitations of every nun's house, they're called charters, their organizational farm, that the Vatican was gonna send visitation committees to see if the women were leading an obedient life. It was really nasty. And at the end of really just blind siding and no warning, just told the three women leaders of this, at the end of it, the women are still in a state of shock and they're packing up their computers and such. And in this cardinal, who's a genuinely evil person, he's proved it over and over, very life destroying. He comes over and he leers down at one of the sisters and he says, you are not afraid, are you? And she took a moment, she looked at her companions and she said, we are faithful, therefore, we are not afraid. So this has worked so beautifully for me personally and for people that I've shared it with that when you lack confidence, when you feel exhausted, when you feel betrayed, all those things have happened to people who persevere. Can you just relax and ask yourself the question, have I been faithful? Have I been faithful? And you will find in that contemplation that your fear actually goes away, but you have to know what you're faithful to, right? And I'm not talking about faith that is given to you, whether it's in a religious or a cultural tradition. I'm talking about the faith that is your ultimate ground, your ultimate place to stand. And here's a rather diabolical question for you to ask yourselves. This is how you discover what you're faithful to, right? And you need time to think about this. What is my most essential belief that if it is not true, well, I'll just watch everything disintegrate. It's like what is the one thread, the basis of my work, that if it's not true, everything will collapse. You know you found it when you get scared. You know you found it when you suddenly think, oh my God, if that's not true, why am I doing what I'm doing? I really encourage you to do this because then you can say, ask the question, what have I been faithful to? Why am I doing what I'm doing? You're already halfway there by seeking meaning and purpose and wanting to make a contribution, but this enables you to feel confident even when your best efforts have been rejected or criticized or ignored. You know what you're faithful to. This is another quote from Levinas. And so I know what I'm faithful to and that is the human spirit. And so I just wanna offer one image of my own work right now is really focused on calling forth our capacity to be there for other people. I call this Warriors for the Human Spirit. All right, so I will stop in a moment, but I did wanna present this because this is the work of my heart at the moment. Leaders who step forward to lead in whatever way as they can, this applies to all of you. It's still not up on the screen by the way, that we as people develop an unshakable confidence that people can be kinder, gentler, and wiser just as you all are than our current society tells us we are. And to do this, we rely on human good. We rely on our faith in people and the human spirit. And we offer this as a gift to others. We offer it as a gift to others. And even though we're calling ourselves Warriors, our biggest commitment is to not add to the fear and aggression of this time. Our big commitment is to create a good human community wherever we are. This is what you can do if you see your work as local, as focused, and doing it as all these approaches have actually described how you call forth, the creativity and generosity of people. It's just changing the focus that's important. And I wanna talk about this and then I'll close and we'll open for questions. That we rely that joy arises as a consequence of doing hard work together. We don't create joy. We don't decide to be joyful. I mean, I'm with a lot of people who do that, but they're kind of obnoxious from the very beginning. But I've worked in a lot of disaster situations over the years. And when I was interviewing people about their experiences, I mean, there's more than enough people to interview now, but I don't do it any longer. But they would always talk about these times when they were faced with destruction, loss of human life, fires, floods, whatever. They always spoke of it as a joyful moment in their lives. And it really puzzled me until I realized that joy is a consequence of working together in a real spirit of communion, past our own needs, past our ego needs, past our fears, personal fears. We just are there for other people. And that is the experience that's trustworthy, that when we're really fully engaged together and our own stuff isn't getting in the way, that we are capable of experiencing joy, no matter the circumstances. And then the final, this is a good place to end, is that we know this, you know this, right? It's not cynicism, but it is really working to rise above the situation is only, and then you can make fun of it and then you can go back in. And so this is my work, if you're interested, go to my website, Margaret Wheatley.com. But what we'd like to do now is give you a few moments of reflection. This is Maggie, the meditating dog. She belongs to a friend of mine in Alaska. She may be meditating on the disappearance of the glaciers, that's right in front of her. But I'd like you now, we're gonna give you a minute before we go into questions to notice what got your attention here. You could be provoked positively, negatively, I just don't care. It's just what are you now paying attention to? We'll just take a minute for that and then we'll have a brief time for questions. I'm looking for Mark, okay? So let's just take this time. We didn't get any music. You're too heavy for music, Maggie. I want a dark side of the moon. It is the dark side as well. All right. Not the light side. Hi there. So the thing that I reflected on straight away was a bit of a sense of relief. So it was quite bleak, your talk. You said it was gonna be a bit bleak, but it felt quite bleak, but then the relief did come at the end. So the thing that I'm relieved about is I was feeling the same things of this is really difficult being a sort of community business and trying to do the right things was kind of getting me down a bit and it was meant to be the thing that was not getting me down anymore. So my question, I guess, is how long has relief come to you? Cause it sounds like you've gone through a long journey. Have you sort of experienced relief a long time ago or is it reason? Thank you. We're gonna collect the questions and then I'll quickly answer. I have a yeah but no but question or comment. Just cults and terrorist organizations. That's a question or that was a comment. What is the question? Yeah, what is the question? The belief systems with people who are in cults, who are in terrorist organizations. Okay. I actually have an article about that on my website that you could look up. Okay, let's go for one more. Yeah. We could take two more. I just want to hear them. You started with the question, who are we choosing to be? My next question would be, how do we choose what we want to be? Yeah, how do we combat the people who are like the elite and who are leading us off the edge of the cliff? These are all the easy questions, Meg. You should be able to, these are all the easy questions. I think you should be able to deal with them pretty quickly. Yeah, these are real easy ones. You've been in this for years. Can I just ask how it feels now? Where are you? I'm way back here. Hi. Okay. See. Okay, well, so we'll do those points. Well, four. I could summarize this. First of all, it takes a while to absorb where we really are at the edge of the cliff. It takes a while to realize that we cannot stop the plunge, but we can work with the people who don't go over the edge. We cannot change the elites as someone once said to me, Meg, you're trying to get people to fund the revolution against themselves. And we were just talking about corporate leaders at the time. You need to read some of my work. You can download articles for free on my website if you don't want to buy the new book. But we need to understand where we are and part of that is the acceptance is the elites actually don't care about what we're saying and what we're doing and they're working for their own device. The relief comes with really contemplating this. And I hear this from a lot of people and after the relief comes clarity about how do I answer the question of who do I choose to be? I decide, first of all, and then I find others who are quite like-minded and we need community to do this for sure. So I think that... And how does it feel now? How does it feel now? I feel I have found my right work and there's a sense of feeling really blessed and feeling really despairing because it's the right work for this time which is very life-destroying. But at least I feel that level of commitment to it.