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.
From Kevin Kelly
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.
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.
Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.
The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.
All imaginable futures are not equally possible.
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.
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.
An organization is a set of relationships that are persistent over time.
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.
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