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p.7 Humans are such effective predators because we are restless, relentless, and quite skilled experimenters.
p.8 Because "experimentation is a particularly powerful way of learning about causes, providing much more accurate results than observation alone," curiosity that drives us to touch and try for ourselves, and the competition to do it better than others are both forces driving us forward.
p.9 evolution is a forward-moving, incremental process that itself layers one experiment upon the previous, but it is not as far as we know a foresighted one.
p.10 Nature is also a rampant experimenter, as indeed experimentation is at the very core of the evolutionary process.
p.12 To survive we must adapt to the world that we don't really understand even as we see that it is one that we are ourselves creating.
[JLJ - Yes, and we can perform diagnostic tests which 'hint' to us that we are stretching and adapting, or starting to buckle and fail.]
p.46 This is the insidious nature of exponential trends ... they appear rather insignificant for quite some time until quite suddenly, the underlying phenomena explode out of control... Often we are surprised by these types of trends, even when the evidence was available and we therefore shouldn't have been.
p.217 Societies and nations are held together by the power of ideas and through the exercise of authority.
p.243 The genius of nature is that its method, natural selection, systematically creates a species to fill every conceivable niche in every ecosystem... Each species strives to become ever more fit for its niche, but the challenges arise when the structure of the niche changes.
p.244 [Nassim Taleb]
in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.
p.245 Our challenge, then, is to design systems of economy, management, and decision making that promote anti-fragility
p.249 Darwin recognized that nature is an abundant and proficient experimenter... then the built-in process of selection determines which survive, thrive and persevere.
p.258 Perhaps the single most important factor that contributes to the increased complexity is the phenomenon of connectedness... Nothing stands alone, nothing in our world is disconnected.
p.262 As a field of study, systems thinking emerged from the discoveries made early in the electronics age. Much of the pioneering work was done by the scientists who, at the outset of World War II, were working in England under the threat that German bombers would annihilate London. They searched for ways to track the incoming aircraft, and in the process of solving the technical problems that enabled them to invent radar they also had to invent an entirely new body of theory. Their success was a significant contributor to the survival of England and the eventual Allied victory.
[JLJ - see Jones, Most Secret War http://johnljerz.com/superduper/tlxdownloadsiteWEBSITEII/id578.html. Certainly there were systems - large, complex systems, and systems thinking, prior to World War II. Perhaps Morris is saying that systems thinking became an academic discipline of its own at this point in time.]
p.268 our attempt to understand all of these systems, from the simplest to the most complex, relies on our ability to make models of them, and to learn from those models.
p.269 Complexity can be a concept useful to explain how difficult a given system may be for us to understand and manage, and thus systems with a very high complexity... are inevitably much more difficult to understand and to predict than simpler systems... Systems thinkers remind us that if we can't model it, we can't manage it
p.269-270 precisely what we lack is an effective model of the economy. Without a model to experiment with and learn from we have no choice but to experiment with the actual economy even as we also manage it from day to day, season to season, year to year. It's so vastly complex that we simply don't know what works and what doesn't work until we try it.
p.270 The more connections there are within a system the greater the complexity the system can attain.
p.321-322 as Dr. Deming so poignantly reminds us, "Every decision is a prediction."
p.323 While the visionaries may be the ones who see the future more clearly, it's often because they're thinking outside of established norms, and so they may not appear as clear-sighted forward thinkers but as alarmists. Copernicus, Galileo, Forrester, Lovelace, Beer, Meadows, Soleri, Fuller, Randers, Engelbart, and Jobs all saw the world differently than their peers, and they made contributions to human knowledge... And they all were, to some extent, rebels. Most of them embraced the rebel label, and I believe that most of them liked the fact that they were different. But at times they also became quite frustrated... A lament they all shared was, Why don't they understand?
p.341 The messes will persist, though, if we do not distinguish between causal connections and coincidence, as we will constantly misidentify the true causes of our fortunes and misfortunes.
p.400 It's also worth remembering that the objective of these thought experiments is not to arrive at the truth, because in fact there is no such truth when the subject is a highly uncertain future. The objective is, rather, to inform our thinking and enhance our appreciation for complexity, and also to support better analysis and better decision making and especially to enable us recognize emerging patterns of change early on.
p.401 Our goal, however, is not to predict the future, which is probably a fool's errand, but rather to understand what might occur under a variety of different conditions and combinations.
[JLJ - I would argue that our goal is to be ready to respond to the future, whatever it is, in a way that allows us to continue to swim with the tides of fortune, rather than to be dragged away in the undertow. Keep in mind that since we have to decide how to 'go on,' we choose to inform ourselves of the trends and the possible futures, and so inform our choices for how to position ourselves in a present full of the seeds which will become the future.]
p.406 Exploration is an endless cycle, though, because every answer that the explorers bring back creates still more questions and unknowns, which of course stimulate still further exploration.
p.411 To provide insights into unknowable futures, scenario planning enables us to map the terrain by studying what are referred to as the "driving forces" that we anticipate may shape tomorrow's world, and then modeling what might happen as those forces interact with each other as further events unfold. By thinking about the future this way, again, we do not intend to put ourselves in the position of identifying specifically what will happen, to predict, but instead we are thinking about what could happen, and how that might affect us.
p.412 in order to manage complexity we have to have useful models of complex systems
p.412-413 While the specialists in each domain rightly have their own personal views on what is or is not most likely to occur, in reality no one can be certain which way things will go.
p.461-462 These were not predictions, but possibilities built upon the logic of agreed-upon driving forces. Hence it's important to emphasize again that the purpose is not to predict the future, but to explore and model the possibilities that might emerge, rather than attempting to identify the singular reality that would or will emerge, and also to move to a deeper appreciation for the view that the future isn't predictable at all. And as we examine these models the goal is definitely not to choose which seems more plausible but rather to broaden our thinking and to consider how things might unfold, rather than narrowing our thinking to only what we think will occur, or worse, what we want to happen.
p.466 So where does all this "what if" leave us? ...The intent was to bring a much deeper understanding of the future and how it may unfold... one of the most significant benefits that comes from engaging in these thought experiments is that they help us to avoid fixating on a single future as we come instead to appreciate much more deeply how uncertain the future really is, and how a little tug here or a shove there can literally shape reality in one way or toward something quite different entirely... Reality is often much more complicated.
p.467 As planners, then what would we do with these insights? The next step in the thinking process instigated by scenarios is to transition from scenarios to strategies, as the former are intended to inform the latter... Hence, if we can identify a strategy or a set of strategies that is valid in multiple quadrants and in the scenarios that result when we combine multiple different pairs of driving forces, then it is very likely preferable to a strategy that benefits us only in a more narrow set of future conditions. Such a strategy is much more likely to make sense for an organization to pursue when it defines a fruitful and productive path forward in multiple different sets of future conditions.
Another key next step would be to identify the imperatives, the things that our organization must address and accomplish no matter what happens.
p.468 And a third follow up action would be to identify the so-called "leading indicators," the signs and signals, especially the weak signals, which may faintly suggest that change is coming, and that a particular type of reality is emerging. These signals can be immensely helpful by enabling us to recognize early on which of the many possibilities that we have explored in scenarios are actually manifesting in reality.
p.471-472 There's a story often told about the first day of medical school. The Dean is addressing the incoming class... "Half of what you're about to learn," she tells them in a deeply serious tone, "is incorrect." ...The Dean continues, "The problem," she admits, "is that we don't know which half is which."
p.475 Sound and effective plans thus require that we balance realism with ambition; prudence with boldness; and perseverance with flexibility... And it turns out that great planning... begins with not with training in planing per se, but in a more general mindset about what is real, and how the world is, what it means to think clearly.
p.487 All of this causes massive alienation everywhere. Revolutionary forces of disintegration prevail, tearing societies apart... The USSR is reborn as the RSSR, The Reunion of Soviet Socialist Republics. A huge rock concert is held in Moscow to celebrate; Putin plays lead guitar, and prances around the stage.
[JLJ - Morris occasionally self-destructs, as in the above text.]
p.512 Whereas information, knowledge and understanding are concerned with doing things right, wisdom concerns doing the right things, and so it is only from wisdom that compelling visions can come.
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