Explore Quotes by Kevin Kelly

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 organization and the environment are in concert.

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.

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.