Harnessing adversity is a discipline tailored to a world of unpredictable outcomes--a world where one can disturb, but not wholly direct, a living system. Because the unexpected--adversity--is guaranteed, this discipline is about routinely making lemons into lemon meringue pie.

Discoveries from one community cannot be repackaged and provided to another as a silver bullet, That's a "best practice" rollout and it invariably evokes the immune rejection response.

Contrary to widespread faith in "communication" and "knowledge transfer," information has a social life, and unless new insights are embedded in the social system they evaporate.

Organizations are, in the last analysis, interactions among people.

Unintended consequences get to the heart of why you never really understand an adaptive problem until you have solved it. Problems morph and "solutions" often point to deeper problems. In social life, as in nature, we are walking on a trampoline. Every inroad reconfigures the environment we tread on.

The real objective isn't just "knowledge" or getting an 80-20 understanding of the situation. The overriding objective is engagement, creating a buzz, mobilizing people to take action.

Corporations, in the name of efficiency, suppress variation by "getting all the ducks in line."To optimize productivity, they evolve highly refined and internally consistent operating systems. Payoff - results - as long as the music lasts. But ... all that streamlining and re-engineering limits diversity, suppresses self-organization ... and curtails a bottom up emergent response to disruptive change.