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.
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.
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.
Technological advances could allow us to see more clearly into our own lives.
Changing things from the top down works when things are stable.
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.
The organization and the environment are in concert.
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.
Much of outcomes research is a systematic attempt to exploit what is known and make it better.
Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex.
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.
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.
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.
It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.
Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.
The most interesting thing about change in the environment is that for the most part the environment isn't changing.
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.
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.
Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.
Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.
All imaginable futures are not equally possible.
