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.

People are much more likely to act their way into a new way of thinking, than think their way into a new way of acting.

Great companies make meaning. A company has a name, but its people give it meaning.

The inherent preferences of organizations are clarity, certainty and perfection. The inherent nature of human relationships involves ambiguity, uncertainty, and imperfection. How one honors, balances, and integrates the needs of both is the real trick of feedback.

Leadership is making happen what wouldn't happen anyway and this always entails working at the edge of what is acceptable

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.

Knowledge does not advance practice. Rather practice advances knowledge.

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.

The incremental approach to change is effective when what you want is more of what you've already got.

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