Images of
Simplicity on the
Other Side of Complexity
Simplicity on the Other Side
of Complexity
Simplicity on the Other Side
of Complexity
•
I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side
of complexity, but I would give my life for the
simplicity on the other side of complexity.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Simplicity on the Other Side
of Complexity
•
•
Chaos is order misunderstood.
Alexander Pope
Complexity is simplicity misunderstood.
Irv & Alison Dardik
Simplicity on the Other Side
of Complexity
•
•
Confusion is a word we have invented
for an order that is not yet understood.
Henry Miller
We see that harmony does not mean a
balance at rest, but a vibrant, bi-polar energy
force that urges on all other energy.
Mathew Fox
Simplicity on the Other Side
of Complexity
•
•
•
It's the best possible time to be alive, when
almost everything you thought you knew is
wrong.
Tom Stoppard, Arcadia Act I, Scene Four
For every problem there is one solution
which is simple, neat and wrong.
Satirist, H. L. Mencken
Some problems are so complex that you have
to be highly intelligent and well informed just
to be undecided about them.
Laurence J. Peter
Managing the Unknowable:
Accepting An Unforeseeable Future
Managing the Unknowable
•
•
I suspect that by not merely accepting an
unforeseeable future, but by building it into my
life, I may come closer to living a true life than
those who struggle against it.
E.B. White
The appearance of control is always an
illusion.
Gayle Pergamit & Chris Peterson
Managing the Unknowable
•
•
No amount of sophistication is going to allay
the fact that all your knowledge is about the
past and all your decisions are about
the future.
Ian E. Wilson
Imagination is more important than
knowledge. It is the preview of life’s
coming attractions.
Albert Einstein
Managing the Unknowable
•
•
•
Planning by its very nature defines and
preserves categories. Creativity, by its very
nature, creates categories or rearranges
established ones... The key is integration
rather than de-composition, based on holistic
images rather than linear words.
Henry Mintzberg
There is a field beyond right and wrong.
Let's meet there.
Rumi
It is good to have an end to journey toward;
but it is the journey that matters in the end.
Ursula K. Leguin
Managing the Unknowable
•
Living systems evolve in variety, resilience
and intelligence; they do this not by erecting
walls of defense and closing off from their
environment, but by opening more widely to
the currents of matter-energy and information.
They integrate and differentiate through
constant interaction, spinning more intricate
connection and flexible strategies. For this
they require not invulnerability, but increasing
responsiveness. Such is the direction of
evolution.
Joanna Macy
Surprising Convergence of Disciplines
Surprising Convergence
of Disciplines
•
By shifting focus to relationships instead of
separate entities, scientists made an amazing
discovery… system properties are awesomely
elegant in their simplicity and constancy
throughout the universe, from suborganic to
biological and ecological systems, and mental
and social systems, as well.
Joanna Macy
Surprising Convergence
of Disciplines
•
•
From a management point of view, the current
division of human knowledge into disciplines
is managerially stupid and an often evil design
of science, which blocks off inquiry into critical
issues because the issues don't fit into the
disciplines.
C.W. Churchman
Managers are not confronted with problems
that are independent of each other, but with
dynamic situations that consist of changing
problems that interact with each other. I call
such situations messes... managers do not
solve problems: they manage messes.
Russ Ackoff
Surprising Convergence
of Disciplines
•
My point is that if we take… types of largelyagreed-upon orienting generalizations from
the various branches of knowledge—from
physics to biology to psychology to theology—
and if we string these orienting
generalizations together, we will arrive at
some astonishing and often profound
conclusions, conclusions that, as
extraordinary as they might be, nonetheless
embody nothing more than our alreadyagreed-upon knowledge. The beads of
knowledge are already accepted: it is only
necessary to string them together into a
necklace.
Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything
Finely Tuned to the Edge:
Innovators As Heretics
Finely Tuned to the Edge:
Innovators As Heretics
•
•
•
Every truth passes through three stages
before it is recognized. In the first, it is
ridiculed. In the second, it is opposed. In the
third, it is regarded as self-evident.
Marianne Williamson, Illuminata
If a man would persist in his folly, he would
become wise.
William Blake
Genius in fact involves sufficient energy and
passion to question assumptions that have
been taken for granted over long periods.
Physicist, David Bohm
Finely Tuned to the Edge:
Innovators As Heretics
•
•
Security is mostly a superstition, it does not
exist in nature, nor do the children of men
(and women) as a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run
than outright exposure. Life is either a daring
adventure or nothing at all!
Helen Keller
Changelessness is a sign of death,
transformation a sign of life.
Commentary on the I Ching
Finely Tuned to the Edge:
Innovators As Heretics
•
•
•
What is accepted is no longer valid,
what is valid is not yet accepted.
Jamshid Gharajedaghi
Crooked is the path of eternity.
Nietzsche
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
George Bernard Shaw
The Leader’s Paradoxical New Work
The Leader’s Paradoxical
New Work
•
•
•
Reality is only a consensual hunch.
Lily Tomlin
To know how to listen is to know how to wait.
an improv jazz musician
To know how to wonder and question is the
first step of the mind toward discovery!
Louis Pasteur
The Leader’s Paradoxical
New Work
•
•
•
Given the right circumstances, from no more
than dreams, determination, and the liberty to
try, ordinary people consistently do
extraordinary things. To lead is to create those
circumstances.
Dee Hock, Visa Founder & CEO Emeritus
In the beginner’s mind there are few
possibilities. In the master’s mind there are
many.
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
I dwell in possibility.
Emily Dickenson
The Leader’s Paradoxical
New Work
•
•
•
We often feed the critic gourmet meals and
starve the rest.
Angeles Arrien
There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Albert Einstein
We must be the change we wish to see in the
world.
Gandhi
The Leader’s Paradoxical
New Work
•
•
•
At such times, it is no failure if you fall short of
realizing all that you might dream, the failure
is to fall short of dreaming all that you might
realize.
Dee Hock, Visa Founder & CEO Emeritus
What ever you can do or dream you can begin
it, boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Goethe
You've got to have a dream, if you don’t have
a dream, how you gonna have a dream come
true?
Oscar Hammerstein
The Leader’s Paradoxical
New Work
•
•
•
Human capacity is equal to human cruelty,
and it’s up to each of us to tip the balance.
Alice Walker
We know finite disappointment, but
we know infinite hope.
Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The only way out is through.
Robert Frost
Order Arising from the Grass Roots Up
Order Arising from the Grass
Roots Up
•
Intrinsic motivation lies at the heart of
Deming’s management philosophy. By
contrast, extrinsic motivation is the bread and
butter of Western management.... A corporate
commitment to quality that is not based on
intrinsic motivation is a house built on sand.
Peter Senge
Order Arising from the Grass
Roots Up
•
•
•
Truth? I care about the job, of course.
But mostly, I just want to be inspired.
Jerry McGuire
Change the environment, not the person.
Buckminster Fuller
What unites all beings is their desire for
happiness.
Dalai Lama
Order Arising from the Grass
Roots Up
•
•
The greatest revolution in our generation is
the discovery that human beings by changing
the inner attitudes of their minds can change
the outer aspects of their lives.
William James
Lasting improvement does not take place by
pronouncements or official programs. Change
takes place slowly inside each of us and by
the choices we think through in quiet wakeful
moments lying in bed just before dawn.
Peter Block
Holographic, Interdependent Systems
Nested in Systems
Holographic, Interdependent
Systems Nested in Systems
• A human being is part of the whole called by us the
Universe. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and
feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of
optical delusion of consciousness.
• This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to
our personal desires and to affection for a few persons
nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this
prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace
all living creatures, and the whole of nature in its beauty.
• Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the
striving for such achievement is, in itself, a path of the
liberation and a foundation for inner security.
Albert Einstein
Holographic, Interdependent
Systems Nested in Systems
•
•
•
Perceive all conflicts as patterns of energy
seeking a harmonious balance in a whole.
Dhyani Ywhoo
Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not
cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark
is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a
straight line.
Mandelbrot on fractals
If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear as it is, infinite.
William Blake
Order For Free:
Perpetual Self-Organizing Novelty
Order For Free:
Perpetual Self-Organizing Novelty
• Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be
always cast; in the pool where you least
expect it, there will be a fish.
•
•
OVID
All success boils down to accidents.
Tom Peters
More than half the world’s greatest
discoveries have been made through
serendipity—the finding of one thing while
looking for something else.
Melvin Saunders
Order For Free:
Perpetual Self-Organizing Novelty
• If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.
•
•
Katherine Hepburn
The improvising jazz band is an open system,
both richly coherent and in constant flux. Thus
it is capable of endless transformation.
Sally Helgesen
Creativity comes from freedom.
W. Edwards Deming
Order For Free:
Perpetual Self-Organizing Novelty
• Fail often to succeed sooner.
•
•
IDEO company slogan
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
Wayne Gretzky
I don’t care if the final results are true to my
original idea, because my ideas constantly
change.
Dale Chihuly, glass artist
Seeing With New Eyes…
Through A Complexity Lens
Seeing With New Eyes
•
•
•
You don’t see something until you have
the right metaphor to let you perceive it.
Thomas Kuhn
We don’t see things as they are, we see
things as we are.
The Talmud
A hunch is creativity trying to tell you
something.
Frank Capra
Seeing With New Eyes
•
•
Don’t play what’s there, play what's not there.
Miles Davis
The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers,
but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong
questions.
Anthony Jay
Seeing With New Eyes
•
•
I believe that all, or almost all, learning is
remembering, in the sense of bringing forth
what is already latent in us and giving it new
form appropriate to the moment.
Roger Harrison
Perhaps the only limits to the human mind are
those we believe in.
Willis Harman
Seeing With New Eyes
•
•
It is not because things are difficult that we do
not dare; it is because we do not dare
that they are difficult.
Seneca
The reasonable man adapts himself to the
world; the unreasonable one persists in trying
to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
Seeing With New Eyes
•
•
All things are ready if our minds be so.
William Shakespeare
The real voyage of discovery lies not in
seeking new landscapes but in having
new eyes.
Marcel Proust
Coming Back To Life:
Our Interdependent Co-Evolution
Coming Back To Life:
Our Interdependent Co-Evolution
•
We have received an inestimable gift. To be
alive in the beautiful, self organizing
universe—to participate in the dance of life
with the senses to perceive it, lungs to
breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from
it—is a wonder beyond words.
Joanna Macy
Coming Back To Life:
Our Interdependent Co-Evolution
•
We must draw our standards from the natural
world. We must honor with the humility of the
wise the bounds of that natural world and the
mystery which lies beyond them, admitting
that there is something in the order of being
which evidently exceeds all our competence.
Vaclav Havel
Coming Back To Life:
Our Interdependent Co-Evolution
•
If we think about it, we find that our life
consists in achieving a pure relationship
between ourselves and the living universe
about us. This is how I “save my soul”—by
accomplishing a pure relationship between
me and another person, me and a nation, me
and a race of people, me and animals, me
and the trees or flowers, me and the earth, me
and the skies and sun and stars, me and the
moon; an infinity of pure relationships, big and
little… this, if we know it, is our life and our
eternity: the subtle, perfected relation between
me and the circumambient universe.
D. H. Lawrence
Coming Back To Life:
Our Interdependent Co-Evolution
•
•
A human being is part of a whole, the
“universe.” Our task must be to free
ourselves from the delusion of separateness.
Albert Einstein
Fitness is... the ability of a species to play a
coherent role in the web of ecological
processes.
R. Ulanowicz
Coming Back To Life:
Our Interdependent Co-Evolution
•
When you begin to understand the power of
self-organization, you begin to understand
why biologists worship biodiversity even more
than economists worship technology.
The wildly varied stock of DNA, evolved and
accumulated over billions of years, is the
source of evolutionary potential, just as
science labs, libraries and scientists are the
source of technological potential.
Donella H. Meadows
Coming Back To Life:
Our Interdependent Co-Evolution
•
The greatest challenge of the 21st Century is
to settle humanity down and accommodate 8
to 10 billion people with a decent standard of
living before we wreck the planet.
Humanity’s responsibility to the rest of life and
future generations is clear: bring with us as
much of the environment and biodiversity
through the bottleneck as possible.
E.O. Wilson
Coming Back To Life:
Our Interdependent Co-Evolution
•
This we know: The Earth does not belong to
man, man belongs to the Earth. All things are
connected like the blood that connects us all:
Man did not weave the web of life, he is but a
strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he
does to himself.
Chief Seattle, 1852
Images of Simplicity
on the Other Side of Complexity
Imagined and created for
Plexus Institute
by
Keith McCandless
ecotopia@accessone.com
206/324-9332
Ken Yu
and
ky@dbug.org
206/523-5255
Thanks to our reality instructors
Anne Jacobs and Lesley Jacobs
Copyright © 2001 Plexus Institute
This presentation may not be used in whole or in part without
the express permission from the copyright holder.
If interested in use of specific photos used herein,
contact Keith McCandless or Ken Yu.