One of the functions of an organization, of any organism, is to anticipate the future, so that those relationships can persist over time.
The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.
This is actually a very important principle that science is learning about large systems like evolution and that futurists are learning about anticipating human society: just because a future scenario is plausible doesn't mean we can get there from h...
An organization's intelligence is distributed to the point of being ubiquitous.
An organization is a set of relationships that are persistent over time.
It's more along the lines of raising a child: we train the system to a certain range of behaviors that we find most useful. But then we let it go, because we don't want to have to be babysitting it the whole 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.
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.
We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work.
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.
