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" An organization is a set of relationships that are persistent over time. "

Related Quotes:

" When a system is in turbulence, the turbulence is not just out there in the environment, but is a part of the organization or organism that you are looking at. "

" We tend to think of the mind of an organization residing in the CEO and the organization's top managers, perhaps with the help of outside consultants that they call in. But that is not really how an organization thinks. "

" We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work. "

Misunderstanding

" Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex. "

" Managers tend to treat organizations as if they are infinitely plastic. They hire and fire, merge, downsize, terminate programs, add capacities. But there are limits to the shifts that organizations can absorb. "

" Managing bottom-up change is its own art. "

" Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design. "

" The organization and the environment are in concert. "

" Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other. "

" It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially. "

" But when you are embodied in a location, in a physical plant, in a set of people, and in a common history, that constrains your evolution and your ability to evolve in certain directions. "

" Organizations get invested into a particular product. And sometimes the best thing is to stop making that product, even though it's profitable, because it has optimized at a local peak. "

" The most certain thing you can say about the environment tomorrow is that it probably is going to be just like today, for the most part. "

" Changing things from the top down works when things are stable. "

" Each organism's environment, for the most part, consists of other organisms. "

" Technological advances could allow us to see more clearly into our own lives. "

" A brain is a society of very small, simple modules that cannot be said to be thinking, that are not smart in themselves. But when you have a network of them together, out of that arises a kind of smartness. "

" This is actually a very important principle that science is learning about large systems like evolution and that futurists are learning about anticipating human society: just because a future scenario is plausible doesn't mean we can get there from here. "

" The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work. "

" It's more along the lines of raising a child: we train the system to a certain range of behaviors that we find most useful. But then we let it go, because we don't want to have to be babysitting it the whole time. "

" And they discovered something very interesting: when it comes to walking, most of the ant's thinking and decision-making is not in its brain at all. It's distributed. It's in its legs. "

" Much of outcomes research is a systematic attempt to exploit what is known and make it better. "

" Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment. "

" The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time. "

" In a broad systems sense, an organism's environment is indistinguishable from the organism itself. "

" The current understanding was that it was impossible to predict how something would evolve because it was a very turbulent environment full of things interacting with each other. "

" An organization's reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment. "

" Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far. "

" The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe where it can afford to become prevalent enough to establish its usefulness without being overwhelmed by the inertia of the orthodox system. "

" The most interesting thing about change in the environment is that for the most part the environment isn't changing. "