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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" All imaginable futures are not equally possible. "

" 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. "

" The organization and the environment are in concert. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

Misunderstanding

" 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. "

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

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