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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
