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.

Preserve the core, and let the rest flux. In their wonderful bestseller Built to Last, authors James Collins and Jerry Porras make a convincing argument that long-lived companies are able to thrive 50 years or more by retaining a very small heart of unchanging values, and then stimulating progress in everything else. At times "everything" includes changing the business the company operates in, migrating, say, from mining to insurance. Outside the core of values, nothing should be exempt from flux. Nothing.

And they discovered something very interesting: when it comes to walking, most of the ant's thinking and decision-making is not in its brain at all. It's distributed. It's in its legs.

But when you are embodied in a location, in a physical plant, in a set of people, and in a common history, that constrains your evolution and your ability to evolve in certain directions.

A single thread of self generation ties the cosmos, the bios, and the technos together into one creation. Humans are not the culmination of this trajectory but an intermediary, smack in the middle between the born and the made... The arc of complexity and open-ended creation in the last four billion years is nothing compared to what lies ahead.

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.

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