Kevin Kelly

“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.”

“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.”

“Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex.”

“...the proper response to a lousy idea is not to stop thinking. It is to come up with a better idea.”

“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.”

“In a broad systems sense, an organism's environment is indistinguishable from the organism itself.”

“Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.”

“It's generally much easier to kill an organization than to change it substantially.”

“Managing bottom-up change is its own art.”

“An organization's intelligence is distributed to the point of being ubiquitous.”

“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.”

“Each organism's environment, for the most part, consists of other organisms.”

“Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Much of outcomes research is a systematic attempt to exploit what is known and make it better.”

“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.”

“Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come.”

“The most interesting thing about change in the environment is that for the most part the environment isn't changing.”

“The current understanding was that it was impossible to predict how something would evolve because it was a very turbulent environment full of things interacting with each other.”