1. Images of Simplicity on the Other Side of Complexity

2. Simplicity on the Other Side of Complexity

3. 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

4. Simplicity on the Other Side of Complexity
Chaos is order misunderstood.
Alexander Pope
Complexity is simplicity misunderstood.
Irv & Alison Dardik

5. 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

6. 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

7. Managing the Unknowable: Accepting An Unforeseeable Future

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. Surprising Convergence of Disciplines

13. 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

14. 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

15. Surprising Convergence of Disciplines
My point is that if we take… types of largely-agreed-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 already-agreed-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

16. Finely Tuned to the Edge: Innovators As Heretics

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. The Leader’s Paradoxical New Work

21. 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

22. 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

23. 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

24. 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

25. 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

26. Order Arising from the Grass Roots Up

27. 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

28. 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

29. 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

30. Holographic, Interdependent Systems Nested in Systems

31. 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

32. 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

33. Order For Free: Perpetual Self-Organizing Novelty

34. 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

35. 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

36. 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

37. Seeing With New Eyes… Through A Complexity Lens

38. 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

39. 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

40. 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

41. 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

42. 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

43. Coming Back To Life: Our Interdependent Co-Evolution

44. 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

45. 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

46. 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

47. 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

48. 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

49. 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

50. 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

51. Images of Simplicity on the Other Side of Complexity
Imagined and created for Plexus Institute by
Keith McCandless and Ken Yu
/ /
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.