LOCAL/GLOBAL IN A QUANTUM UNIVERSE 

"I believe the evolving emphasis in our society to "think globally, act locally" expresses a quantum perception of reality. Acting locally is a sound strategy for changing large systems. Instead of trying to map an elaborate system, the advice is to work with the system that you know, one you can get your arms around. If we look at this strategy with Newtonian eyes, we would say that we are creating incremental change. Little by little, system by system, we develop enough momentum to affect the larger society.

A quantum view would explain the success of these efforts differently. Acting locally allows us to work with the movement and flow of simultaneous events within that small system. We are more likely to become synchronized with that system, and thus to have an impact. These changes in small places, however, create large-systems change, not because they build one upon the other, but because they share in the unbroken wholeness that has united them all along. Our activities in one part of the whole create non-local causes that emerge far from us. There is value in working with the system any place it manifests because unseen connections will create effects at a distance, in places we never thought. This model of change—of small starts, surprises, unseen connections, quantum leaps—matches our experience more closely than our favored models of incremental change." 

—Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science