The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.
It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.
Technological advances could allow us to see more clearly into our own lives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Changing things from the top down works when things are stable.
We are infected by our own misunderstandin g of how our own minds work.
The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.
Much of outcomes research is a systematic attempt to exploit what is known and make it better.
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.
Managing bottom-up change is its own art.
An organization is a set of relationships that are persistent over time.
The organization and the environment are in concert.
Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.
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.
Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex.
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.
