Quotes About Adaptation

Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes.

Complex systems can evolve from simple systems only if there are stable intermediate forms. The resulting complex forms will naturally be hierarchic.

Resilience, self-organization, and hierarchy are three of the reasons dynamic systems can work so well.

Serious problems have been solved by focusing on external agents—preventing smallpox, increasing food production, moving large weights and many people rapidly over long distances. Because they are embedded in larger systems, however, some of our "solutions" have created further problems. And some problems, those most rooted in the internal structure of complex systems, the real messes, have refused to go away.

We can't control systems or figure them out. But we can dance with them!

Managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes. . . . Managers do not solve problems, they manage messes. —RUSSELL ACKOFF,

Resilience is a measure of a system's ability to survive and persist within a variable environment. The opposite of resilience is brittleness or rigidity.

Mental flexibility—the willingness to redraw boundaries, to notice that a system has shifted into a new mode, to see how to redesign structure—is a necessity when you live in a world of flexible systems.

Systems often have the property of self-organization—the ability to structure themselves, to create new structure, to learn, diversify, and complexify. Even complex forms of self-organization may arise from relatively simple organizing rules—or may not.

Physical structure is crucial in a system, but is rarely a leverage point, because changing it is rarely quick or simple. The leverage point is in proper design in the first place.

Understanding layers of limits and keeping an eye on the next upcoming limiting factor is not a recipe for perpetual growth, however. For any physical entity in a finite environment, perpetual growth is impossible. Ultimately, the choice is not to grow forever but to decide what limits to live within.

If you have a sense of the rates of change of stocks, you don't expect things to happen faster than they can happen. You don't give up too soon.

Focus on what's ahead. Use what is behind.

Interesting things happen when we give up struggling with a situation or problem outside of our control.

Yet little by little, I was also becoming the girl who was learning to live with this, all of it, letting it weave together with everything else, the good and the bad, as life moved forward, because that's what life did, regardless of whether we were ready for it or not.

How quickly the brain, the body adapts to this new presence in life; how quickly the brain, the body develops a sense for it, for her--the ebb and flow of Addie's nearness and farness, the awareness of her location, her safety, her comfort and well-being.

Better a spirit that does not quite fit in this world than one that is broken.

A young man who had watched her eating with her fingers offered a set of chopsticks- those sticks for eating that had become so popular. He looked at her suggestively. Instead of blushing, she accepted the chopsticks boldly and continued to walk on, using them to eat noodle and vegetable dishes.

All you need is stones... If you have enough stones and the water is shallow enough, you can build a city up through the waves.

Gone was the cream and rose complexion he'd remembered. She was tan, which changed everything. What with the loose, wild hair, it lent an almost... heathenish edge, giving her normally pretty blue gaze a somewhat piercing, laser-like quality. Conversely, though she'd always been a sturdy thing, lithe, but strong and solid, at the moment, she looked... enveloped by the chef coat she wore, as if it were a size too big, or she'd suddenly grown smaller.

Italians know about human nature - they understand human nature perhaps better than anyone else does. They know that people are weak and greedy and lazy and dishonest and they just try to make the best of it to work around it.

Lampedusa had it right—things had to seem to change so that things could remain the same.

Are you a person who peels off a band-aid slowly or just rips it off all at once?" Casey contemplated Alexa's warning, recognizing it for what it was.

DONNA: Why do traditional organizing solutions and tools not work for them?