Quantum Physics and Why It Matters...

And why we need to leave classical ideas of organisations and leadership behind and embrace more relational practices...

I have just completed a course in Quantum Mechanics with the Pari Centre. Quite an experience, and a profound reminder that reality is far stranger than our ordinary consciousness allows.

Our sensory systems and our consciousness seem tuned to perceive a Newtonian world. One of solid bodies, predictable movements, and separable parts. This perceptual bias has shaped much of modern life. It has informed our political economy, our health and care systems, our education, our digital networks, and even our conceptions of self.

The crisis of modernity, fragmentation, burnout, polarisation, ecological collapse, can be understood, at least in part, as the result of forcing relational, living, and emergent systems into mechanistic frameworks.

We have tried to manage the living world as though it were a machine: predictable, controllable, optimisable. But as quantum theory reveals, mechanism was never the truth of reality, only a partial approximation. A useful simplification of something infinitely subtler and more alive.

In the quantum world there are no isolated entities, only interactions; no dead matter, only potential in motion. What we call a “thing” is really a temporary coherence in a sea of becoming. David Bohm called this the implicate order, a deeper wholeness in which each part enfolds the whole.

Alfred North Whitehead described a similar insight: reality is made not of substances but of events, each a pulse of relationship, inheriting from and contributing to the ongoing creation of the world.

Seen in this light, our work as leaders, carers, educators, and citizens becomes less about fixing or managing and more about listening and participating. The question shifts from “How do we control the system?” to “How do we attune to the living patterns that are already unfolding through us?”

This shift, from mechanical to relational, from control to participation, is what I have been seeking to express in The Thread, The Listening World, and Relational Disobedience. These projects are not new systems or models, but invitations to remember that coherence is not imposed from above but discovered in the between, in conversation, silence, imagination, and care.

Quantum theory reminds us that reality itself is relational, participatory, and mysterious. We are not detached observers, but part of the pattern, each act of attention a thread in the fabric of becoming.

The work, then, is to live as though this were true: to cultivate hospitality, presence, and imagination; to honour uncertainty as the wellspring of creation; and to rediscover the quiet art of becoming together.

It is quite a ride…

Mechanistic leadership assumes:

• behaviour driven by incentives

• systems governed by force, rules, pressure

• predictable, linear cause and effect

But in lived, messy organisational life what matters most is felt sense, resonance, pattern, coherence. Leaders who recognise this respond to:

• the tone of conversation as well as its content

• aesthetic signals

• tacit understanding

• intuition

• moral presence

• the “hum” that tells us when something is wrong or right

These are forms of active information in the human realm.

In quantum theory, active information refers to a subtle, non-mechanical, non-local influence through which the form or pattern of the whole system guides the behaviour of its parts. Rather than force acting upon matter, it is a meaning-like influence shaping what becomes actual.

In our work, this idea offers a scientific analogue for relational practice and the ethic of care: transformation arises not from control or pressure, but from the quiet, patterned flow of information within living fields of relationship. And it maybe more than just an analogue. It may offer justification and a solid theoretical undepinning that takes account of the most contemporary physics.