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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

Misunderstanding

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" All imaginable futures are not equally possible. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The organization and the environment are in concert. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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