Quotes By Kevin Kelly

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

We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work.

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

Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.

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.

Technological advances could allow us to see more clearly into our own lives.

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.

An organization is a set of relationships that are persistent over time.

Managing bottom-up change is its own art.

The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.

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.

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.

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

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

All imaginable futures are not equally possible.

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.

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.

Organizations get invested into a particular product. And sometimes the best thing is to stop making that product, even though it's profitable, because it has optimized at a local peak.

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

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 here.

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

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.

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.

The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the 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.

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.

Changing things from the top down works when things are stable.

Each system is trying to anticipate change in the environment.

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 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.