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" An organization's intelligence is distributed to the point of being ubiquitous. "

Related Quotes:

" 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. "

" The organization and the environment are in concert. "

" One of the functions of an organization, of any organism, is to anticipate the future, so that those relationships can persist over time. "

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

" It has become evident that the primary lesson of the study of evolution is that all evolution is coevolution: every organism is evolving in tandem with the organisms around it. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

Misunderstanding

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

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

" But in fact, when you try to model that on a computer you find that because of the very structure of matter and of the chemical bonds that are the basis of every organism, evolution is not random at all. It will tend to follow certain paths. "

" The system continually has to make this choice: it can either continue to exploit a known process and make it more productive, or it can explore a new process at the cost of being less efficient. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Basins of attraction, of self organization, show up as well in our complex social environment, in human organizations. Here again, while we cannot predict the result of any given input, we can say that it will likely fall within one of several areas. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" But in a turbulent environment the change is so widespread that it just routes around any kind of central authority. So it is best to manage the bottom-up change rather than try to institute it from the top down. "

" 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 great advance of personal computers was not the computing power per se but the fact that it brought it right to your face, that you had control over it, that were confronted with it and could steer it. "

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

" All imaginable futures are not equally possible. "

" 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. "

" 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. "