"The organization and the environment are in concert"
About this Quote
"The organization and the environment are in concert" sounds calm, almost managerial, but Kevin Kelly is smuggling in a worldview that’s closer to ecology than corporate-speak. "In concert" isn’t just harmony; it implies co-composition. The organization isn’t a sealed machine imposing order on chaos. It’s an instrument tuned by the room it’s playing in, and it changes the room as it plays.
Kelly’s longtime project, from Whole Earth thinking to Wired-era techno-optimism, treats systems as living, adaptive networks. In that context, the line reads like a quiet rebuke to the fantasy of total control: strategy decks that assume you can set a direction once and execute it in a vacuum; leaders who talk about "culture" as if it were a poster you can print. He’s pointing to feedback loops. Your hiring practices, incentives, tools, and norms are not internal details; they are sensors and outputs in a larger environment of markets, media, regulations, and technologies that mutate in real time.
The subtext is a shift in moral responsibility, too. If organization and environment are intertwined, you don’t get to blame "external conditions" for what your institution becomes, because you’re helping author those conditions. It’s a sentence built to dissolve the alibi.
What makes it work is its restraint. No Silicon Valley hype, no doom. Just a deceptively gentle phrase that forces you to ask: if we’re in concert, who’s conducting, and who’s pretending not to hear the music?
Kelly’s longtime project, from Whole Earth thinking to Wired-era techno-optimism, treats systems as living, adaptive networks. In that context, the line reads like a quiet rebuke to the fantasy of total control: strategy decks that assume you can set a direction once and execute it in a vacuum; leaders who talk about "culture" as if it were a poster you can print. He’s pointing to feedback loops. Your hiring practices, incentives, tools, and norms are not internal details; they are sensors and outputs in a larger environment of markets, media, regulations, and technologies that mutate in real time.
The subtext is a shift in moral responsibility, too. If organization and environment are intertwined, you don’t get to blame "external conditions" for what your institution becomes, because you’re helping author those conditions. It’s a sentence built to dissolve the alibi.
What makes it work is its restraint. No Silicon Valley hype, no doom. Just a deceptively gentle phrase that forces you to ask: if we’re in concert, who’s conducting, and who’s pretending not to hear the music?
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|
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