-
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.
-
All imaginable futures are not equally possible.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.
-
Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.
-
The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.
-
An organization is a set of relationships that are persistent 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.
-
One of the functions of an organization, of any organism, is to anticipate the future, so that those relationships can persist over time.
-
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.
-
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.