The Field Guide › Paper
One of the most prescient texts in the history of organisational thought. Follett argues that orders should derive not from positional authority but from 'the law of the situation' — the shared recognition of what the situation demands, arrived at through joint study by all parties. The manager and the worker are both under the situation; neither is simply above or below the other. This anticipates psychological safety by nearly a century: Follett is describing the conditions under which speaking up is natural rather than risky, where authority is depersonalised and obedience is to shared reality rather than to hierarchy. Her concept of 'circular behaviour' — in which every order produces a response that changes the situation, which changes the next order — prefigures systems thinking, HOP's local rationality, and the feedback loop logic of complexity theory. The 'law of the situation' concept also connects directly to the power-with vs. power-over distinction she develops elsewhere.