 An organization is a set of relationships that are persistent over time. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment. |
| 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 are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work. |
| Changing things from the top down works when things are stable. |
| Each organism's environment, for the most part, consists of other organisms. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Technological advances could allow us to see more clearly into our own lives. |
| The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time. |
| 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 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 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. |
| 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. |
| One of the functions of an organization, of any organism, is to anticipate the future, so that those relationships can persist over time. |
| 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. |
