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

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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" All imaginable futures are not equally possible. "

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

Misunderstanding

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" The organization and the environment are in concert. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "