Managing bottom-up change is its own art.
Kevin Kelly

Much of outcomes research is a systematic attempt to exploit what is known and make it better.
Kevin Kelly

One of the functions of an organization, of any organism, is to anticipate the future, so that those relationships can persist over time.
Kevin Kelly

Organisms by their design are not made to adapt too far.
Kevin Kelly

Organizations get invested into a particular product. And sometimes the best thing is to stop making that product, even though it's profitable, because it has optimized at a local peak.
Kevin Kelly

Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.
Kevin Kelly

Technological advances could allow us to see more clearly into our own lives.
Kevin Kelly

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.
Kevin Kelly

The great advance of personal computers was not the computing power per se but the fact that it brought it right to your face, that you had control over it, that were confronted with it and could steer it.
Kevin Kelly

The most certain thing you can say about the environment tomorrow is that it probably is going to be just like today, for the most part.
Kevin Kelly

The most interesting thing about change in the environment is that for the most part the environment isn't changing.
Kevin Kelly

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.
Kevin Kelly

The organization and the environment are in concert.
Kevin Kelly

The system continually has to make this choice: it can either continue to exploit a known process and make it more productive, or it can explore a new process at the cost of being less efficient.
Kevin Kelly

The way that organizations and organisms anticipate the future is by taking signals from the past, most the time.
Kevin Kelly

The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.
Kevin Kelly

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.
Kevin Kelly

We are infected by our own misunderstanding of how our own minds work.
Kevin Kelly

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.
Kevin Kelly

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.
Kevin Kelly