 The most interesting thing about change in the environment is that for the most part the environment isn't changing. |
| The organization and the environment are in concert. |
| 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. |
| Managing bottom-up change is its own art. |
| 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. |
| All imaginable futures are not equally possible. |
| Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far. |
| 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. |
| Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially. |
| Much of outcomes research is a systematic attempt to exploit what is known and make it better. |
| 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. |
| Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other. |
| Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
