... is not that the Gaia hypothesis is correct or incorrect. Its point, and Resnick's point, is that what we learn in math class has a powerful effect on which alternative views of the world we are able to listen to and which we cannot even hear. In particular, the old equational maths can make us tone deaf to behaviors that work simultaneously in parallel and to behavior for which history matters.

James Bailey, Afterthought

Ilya Prigogine, the Nobel Prize-winning pioneer of the study of self-organizing systems, has observed that a breakdown of progress is frequently an illusion. Under the shattered fragments new structures and processes ferment. And from these innovations come fresh orders whose wonders appear numberless. The new organisms had vastly increased their capacities as individual information processors. These advanced modules could be linked worldwide, the result would change the nature of the very game of life.

Howard Bloom, Global Brain, page 28, 2000

If science always insists that a new order must be immediately fruitful, or that it has some new predictive power, then creativity will be blocked. New thoughts generally arise with a play of the mind, and the failure to appreciate this is actually one of the major blocks to creativity. Thought is generally considered to be a sober and weighty business. But here it is being suggested that creative play is an essential element in forming new hypotheses and ideas. Indeed, thought which tries to avoid play is in fact playing false with itself. Play, it appears, is the very essence of thought.

David Bohm

In civilizations with long nows, says Brian Eno, "you feel a very strong but flexible structure . . . built to absorb shocks and in fact incorporate them." One can imagine how such a process evolves: All civilizations suffer shocks, yet only those that absorb the shocks survive. This still does not explain the mechanism however.

In recent years a few scientists (such as R.V. O'Neill and C.S. Holling) have been probing a similar issue in ecological systems: How do they manage change, and how do they absorb and incorporate shocks? The answer appears to lie in the relationship between components in a system that have different change rates and different scales of size. Instead of breaking under stress like something brittle these systems yield as if they were malleable. Some parts respond quickly to the shock, allowing slower parts to ignore the shock and maintain their steady duties of system continuity. The combination of fast and slow components makes the system resilient, along with the way the differently paced parts affect each other. Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.

All durable dynamic systems have this sort of structure; it is what makes them adaptable and robust.

Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, page 34 , 1999

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

Daniel Burnham, Chicago Architect (1864-1912)

In the shift from mechanistic thinking to systems thinking, the relationship between the parts and the whole has been reversed.  Cartesian science believed that in any complex system the behavior of the whole could be analyzed in terms of the properties of its parts.  Systems science shows that living systems cannot be understood by analysis.  The properties of the parts are not intrinsic properties but can be understood only within the context of the larger whole.  Thus systems thinking is “contextual” thinking; and since explaining things in terms of their context means explaining them in terms of their environment, we can also say that all systems thinking is environmental thinking.

Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, page 37

From the systems point of view, the understanding of life begins with the understanding of pattern.

Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, page 80

I shall argue that the key to a comprehensive theory of living systems lies in the synthesis of those two very different approaches, the study of substance (or structure) and the study of form (or pattern). In the study of structure we measure and weigh things. Patterns, however, cannot be measured or weighed; they must be mapped. To understand a pattern we must map a configuration of relationships. In other words, structure involves quantities, while pattern involves qualities. 

The study of pattern is crucial to the understanding of living systems because systemic properties, as we have seen, arise from a configuration of ordered relationships. Systemic properties are properties of a pattern. What is destroyed when a living organism is dissected is its pattern. The components are still there, but the configuration of relationships among them -- the pattern -- is destroyed, and thus the organism dies.

Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, page 81

Whenever we encounter living systems -- organisms, parts of organisms, or communities of organisms -- we can observe that their components are arranged in network fashion. Whenever we look at life, we look at networks.

Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, page 82

The Gaia theory, as well as the earlier work by Lynn Margulis in microbiology, have exposed the fallacy of the narrow Darwinian concept of adaptation. Throughout the living world evolution cannot be limited to the adaptation of organisms to their environment, because the environment itself is shaped by a network of living systems capable of adaptation and creativity. So, which adapts to which? Each to the other -- they coevolve. As James Lovelock put it: 

So closely coupled is the evolution of living organisms with the evolution of their environment that together they constitute a single evolutionary process.

Thus our focus is shifting from evolution to coevolution -- an ongoing dance that proceeds through a subtle interplay of competition and cooperation, creation and mutual adaptation.

Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, page 227

The conventional view is that information is somehow -- lying out there --to be picked up by the brain.  However, such a piece of information is a quantity, name, or short statement that we have abstracted from a whole network of relationships, a context, in which it is embedded and which gives it meaning.  Whenever such a -- fact --is embedded in a stable context that we encounter with great regularity, we can abstract it from that context, associate it with the meaning inherent in the context, and call it information.  We are so used to these abstractions that we tend to believe that meaning resides in the pieces of information rather than in the context from which it has been abstracted.

Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life, page 272

The Anomaly of the Industrial Age Weath creation is the driver of all human civilizations; it propels everything else. All civilizations are built and rest on the wealth and wealth-creation paradigm and system of the period. The wealth-creation system is based on the current worldview, and the worldview is based on the latest science of the day. Built on this foundation are all of the social institutions of the period: work, family, spirituality, justice, government, education, commerce. These social institutions must be compatible with the wealth-creation paradigm and system of the era. As the wealth-creation system and paradigm change so too must all of the institutions.

. . . If (a serf) were transported to the year 2020 he would see the civilization of mass-privatization communities as very fitting with his values. Decentralized wealth creation replaces our entire bureaucracy-centered society with a family-centered society. It is a society where individual's needÑlearning, work, trade, social order, emotional growth, recreation, rest, and spiritualityÑare met, controlled, and facilitated locally through the family. It is a return to a more natural system of organization similiar to that of the Agricultural Age and the Hunter-Gatherer Age. For all human history, the family has been the institution through which we meet our needs. Only recently have we evolved to a system where each family member goes off to a different bereaucracy each day to have his or her unique needs met.

As historians 300 to 1,000 years into the future look back over all of human history they will likely see the Industrial Age as a period of abnormality, unlike anything before or after. . .

Barry C. Carter, Infinite Weath: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era, 1999

In the market, language grew. Became boulder, more sophisticated. Leaped and sparked from mind to mind. Incited by curiosity and rapt attention, it took astounding risks that none had ever dared to contemplate, built whole civilizations from the ground up.

Markets are conversations. Trade routes pave the storylines. Across the millennia in between, the human voice is the music we have always listened for, and still best understand.

The Cluetrain Manifesto, 2000

Innovation is the interlocking thread of ideas, people and events woven into a web of knowledge and bingo -- we get today's world of business technology.

Collaborative Economics

We are living in an interminable succession of absurdities imposed by the myopic logic of short term thinking.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau

The new emerging industries, therefore, embody a new economic reality: Knowledge has become the central economic resource. The systematic acquisition of knowledge has replaced experience as the foundation for productive capacity and performance.

Peter Drucker, The Age of Discontinuity, 1968

The task decides, not the name, the age, or the budget of the discipline, or the rank of the individual applying for it. Knowledge, therefore, has to be organized as a team in which the task decides who is in charge, what, for what, and for how long.

Peter Drucker

Invisible College

But beyond formal organizational structures there are "invisible colleges" -- the loose aggregates of individuals scattered throughout the nation and the world who periodically communicate with one another. They are sociologists, architects, lawyers, doctors, teachers, and others whose avocation is "change" and how it might be effected. All are intimately involved in reality -- some participate quite actively in the affairs of an organization; others have removed themselves from decision-making by becoming advisers, consultants, or assistants. Their communications are via the telephone, the Xerox machine, and the jet. They meet, exchange information, ideas, theories, and concepts. Tied neither to time, place, nor position, they operate on many different levels at the same time. They are a link between industry and government, between the public and private sectors, between the federal, state, and city governments, between the governments and neighborhoods, between the money receivers, between the theorists and activists. Their value lies both in their access to information from many sources and their rapid dissemination and utilization of that data. Differing combinations of these agents of change may assemble for many purposes: to explore the possibilities of and to launch a New Town, to discuss a Watts and its implications for planning, or even to weigh the impact of systems technology upon forecasting. The long-range planner must connect informally with one or another level of these "invisible colleges" for the information developed and passed on in them is not of the typical census type, but part and parcel of the day-by-day reality of social systems and the people functioning within them. These planners are not dreamers. They have cultivated what Sir Geoffrey Vickers has called "the art of judgment" -- the process of making decisions in the present that dramatically affect the future. They are experts in combining and reforming data and information, in redefining the problem, and, most importantly, in causing others to feel they must do likewise. They achieve this by presenting additional information relative to the issues at hand in a way that convinces others. They are experienced in working imaginatively with performance standards that are not potentially multi-applicable. They have the ability to "feel" data. They have an appreciation of the implications of decisions and how they might affect a staff as well as tangential activities.

Leonard J. Duhl, General Systems Theory and Psychiatry, 1969, pp. 345

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not as in fiction, to imagine things that are not really there, but just to comprehend those things that are there.

Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law

Few laymen realized how tightly compartmentalized the scientific community had become, a battleship with bulkheads sealed against leaks. Biologists had enough to read without keeping up with the mathematics literature -- for that matter, molecular biologists had enough to read without keeping up with population biology. Physicists had better ways to spend their time than sifting through the meteorology journals. Some mathematicians would have been excited to see Lorenz's discovery; within a decade, physicists, astronomers, and biologists were seeking something just like it, and sometimes rediscovering it for themselves. But Lorenz was a meteorologist, and no one thought to look for chaos on page 130 of volume 20 of the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences.

James Gleick, Chaos, page 31

Each person, as life progresses, develops a set of high-level concepts that they tend to favor, and their perception is continually seeking to cast the world in terms of those concepts. The perceptual process is thus far from neutral or random, but rather it seeks, whenever possible, to employ high-level concepts that one is used to, that one believes in, that one is comfortable with, that are one's pet themes. If the current perception of a situation leads one into a state of cognitive dissonance, then one goes back and searches for a new way to perceive it. Thus the avoidance of mental discomfort -- the avoidance of cognitive dissonance -- constitutes a powerful internal force that helps to channeled the central loop in what amounts to a strongly goal-driven manner.

Douglas Hofstadter, Analogy As the Core of Cognition,
in The Best 2000: American Science Writing, page 137

My point is simple: we are prepared to see, and we see easily, things for which our language and culture hand us ready-made labels. When those labels are lacking, even though the phenomena may be all around us, we may quite easily fail to see them at all. The perceptual attractors [metaphors] that we each possess (some coming from without, some coming from within, some on the scale of mere words, some on a much grander scale) are the filters through which we scan and sort reality, and thereby they determine what we perceive on high and low levels.

Douglas Hofstadter, Analogy as the Core of Cognition,
in The Best 2000: American Science Writing, page 139

The distinguishing characteristic of networks is that they contain no clear center and no clear outside boundaries. Within a network everything is potentially equidistant from everything else. . . . The vital distinction between the self (us) and the nonself (them) -- once exemplified by the fierce loyalty of the organization man in the industrial era -- becomes less meaningful in a network economy. The only "inside" now is whether you are on the network or off. . . . Consultant John Hagel says, 'A web limits risk. It allows companies to make irreversible investments in the face of technological uncertainty. Companies with a web enjoy expanding sourcing and distribution options, while their fixed investment and skill requirements fall.'

Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy

The key premise is that the principles governing the world of the soft - the world of intangibles, of media, of software, and of services - will soon command the world of the hard. If you want to envision where the future of your industry will be, imagine it as a business built entirely around the soft. To stay ahead, you chiefly need to understand how the soft world works. The evidence everywhere indicates that the hard world is irreversibly softening. Therefore, one can gain a huge advantage simply by riding this conversion.

Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy

Where do good ideas come from? That's simple ... from differences. Creativity comes from unlikely juxtapositions. The best way to maximize differences is to mix ages, cultures and disciplines.

Nicolas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab

Western education predisposes us to think of knowledge in terms of factual information, information that can be structured and passed on through books, lectures, and programmed courses. Knowledge is seen as something that can be acquired and accumulated, rather like stocks and bonds. By contrast, within the Indigenous world the act of coming to know something involves a personal transformation. The knower and the known are indissolubly linked and changed in a fundamental way. Indigenous science can never be reduced to a catalogue of facts or a database in a supercomputer, for it is a dynamic and living process, an aspect of the ever-changing, ever-renewing processes of nature.

F. David Peat, Lighting the Seventh Fire

In assembling complexity the bounty of increasing returns is won by multiple tries over time. As various parts reorganize to a new whole, the system escapes to a higher order.

Illya Prigogine

We cannot do everything and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for God's grace to enter and do the rest.

The (Late) Monsignor Oscar Romero, El Salvador

The pressures for upscale consumption, and the work schedules that go along with it, created millions of exhausted, stressed-out people who started wondering if the cycle of work and spend was really worth it. And some concluded that it wasn't. So they started downshifting, reducing their hours of work and, in the process, earning and spending less money. Downshifters are opting out of excessive consumerism, choosing to have more leisure and balance in their schedules, a slower pace of life, more time with their kids, more meaningful work, and daily lives that line up squarely with their deepest values. These are not just fast-track yuppies leaving $200,000 jobs in Manhattan to settle in Montana, although there are plenty of those. Downshifters can be found at all income levels, from the comfortable suburbanites whose homes are paid for, to those who are counting every penny, resigned to the fact that they'll never own a home. Their jobs were leaving them drained, depressed, or wondering what life is all about. Now they may not have as much money, but they are spending every day answering that all-important question.

Juliet B. Schor, Social critic

12 WAYS TO SAVE THE WORLD

1. Promote the greening of the market system through such programs as "emissions trading."
2. Stop unnecessary and counterproductive subsidies for the water, transport, energy, and agriculture sectors.
3. Manage Earth and its resources as though it were a business.
4. Accelerate the transition to environmentally sound energy.
5. Close the knowledge gap between rich and poor countries and between science and policy makers.
6. Move away from foreign aid and support homegrown economic development.
7. Move to more flexible, incentive-based regulation.
8. Provide more effective trusteeship over the global commons, such as the oceans, the Antarctic, the high atmosphere, and outer space.
9. Prepare for natural disasters and extraterrestrial threats.
10. Rejoice in human diversity and encourage it.
11. Encourage lifestyles of "sophisticated modesty."
12. Learn from the lifestyles and self-reliance of people in enclave groups, such as monastic communities.

Maurice Strong, chairman of the UN's Earth Council

Eventually the experience makers will form a basic, if not the basic, sector of the economy. We shall become the first culture in history to employ high technology to manufacture that most transient, yet lasting of products -- the human experience. Innovation in commercializing and commoditizing human experience will push faster toward the entire spectrum of what makes us experience who we are physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.

Alvin Toffler

In our past exploration, the tradition was to discover something and then to formulate it into answers and solutions that could be widely transferred. But now we are on a journey of mutual and simultaneous exploration. In my view, all we can expect from one another is new and interesting information. We can not expect answers. Solutions, as quantum reality teaches, are a temporary event, specific to a context, developed through the relationship of persons and circumstances. There will be no more patrons, waiting expectantly for our return, just more and more explorers venturing out on their own.

This sounds unnerving -- I havenÕt stopped wanting someone, somewhere to return with the right answers. But I know that my hopes are old, based on a different universe. In this new world, you and I make it up as we go along, not because we lack expertise or planning skills, but because that is the nature of reality. Reality changes shape and meaning because of our activity. And it is constantly new. We are required to be there, as active participants. It canÕt happen without us and nobody can do it for us.

Meg Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science, 1993, page 150

Lewis Thomas explains that he could tell something important was going on in an experimental laboratory by the laughter. Surprised by what nature has revealed, we find that things at first always look startlingly funny. 'When ever you can hear laughter,' Thomas says, and somebody saying, 'But that's preposterous!' -- you can tell that things are going well and that something probably worth looking at has begun to happen in the lab.

Meg Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science, 1993

This is a strange world, and it promises to get stranger. Niels Bohr, who engaged with Heisenberg in those long, nighttime conversations that ended in despair, once said that great innovations, when they appear, seem muddled and strange. They are only half-understood by their discoverer and remain a mystery to everyone else. But if an idea does not appear bizarre, he counseled, there is no hope for it. So we must live with the strange and the bizarre, even as we climb stairs that we want to bring us to a clearer vantage point. Every step requires that we stay comfortable with uncertainty, and confident of confusionÕs role. After all is said and done, we will have to muddle our way through. But in the midst of muddle -- and I hope I remember this -- we can walk with a sure step. For those stairs we climb only take us deeper and deeper into a universe of inherent order.

Meg Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science, 1993

David Bohm, quantum physicist, stated that any theoretical science has four aspects. They are: insight, to perceive the structure of new ideas; imagination, which projects a mental image of the whole idea, not only as a visual image, but a feeling for it; reasoning, to work out the consequences logically; and finally, calculation, to get numbers that make possible precise tests with experiment.