When people maximize their set of talents, they shine because no one can do what they do. People fully inhabiting their unique mixture of skills are inimitable
This is actually a very important principle that science is learning about large systems like evolution and that futurists are learning about anticipating human society: just because a future scenario is plausible doesn't mean we can get there from here.
It's more along the lines of raising a child: we train the system to a certain range of behaviors that we find most useful. But then we let it go, because we don't want to have to be babysitting it the whole time.
But in a turbulent environment the change is so widespread that it just routes around any kind of central authority. So it is best to manage the bottom-up change rather than try to institute it from the top down.
Managing bottom-up change is its own art.
The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.
In a broad systems sense, an organism's environment is indistinguishable from the organism itself.
The nature of an innovation is that it will arise at a fringe where it can afford to become prevalent enough to establish its usefulness without being overwhelmed by the inertia of the orthodox system.
Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
