We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work.
Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.
It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.
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.
Technological advances could allow us to see more clearly into our own lives.
The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.
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.
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.
Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.
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.
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.
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.
The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.
Each organism's environment, for the most part, consists of other organisms.
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.
The organization and the environment are in concert.
Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.
