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From The Aesthetics of Change

Cybernetics therefore suggests that "all change can be understood as the effort to maintain some constancy and all constancy as maintained through change".
Change cannot be found without a roof of stability over its head. Similarly stability will always be rooted to underlying processes of change.

From How Buildings Learn: Chapter 2 - Shearing Layers

The rates of change over time define the layers as clearly as the individual physical changes.

Hummingbirds and flowers are quick, redwood trees slow, and whole redwood forests even slower. Most interaction is within the same pace level.

From Understanding the Professional Programmer

You must begin to see change as something wonderfully rare, and worth observing. You must stop taking change for granted if you wish to master the art of productive change.

From How Buildings Learn

By far the greatest rate of change comes right at the beginning, as it does with everything that lives.

From Managing the Design Factory

Best practices are only "best" in certain contexts and to achieve certain objectives. A change in either the context or the objective can quickly transform a "best practice" into a stupid approach.

From The Gift of Time

When a system that continues to change or that is in a changing environment is subjected to a fixed set of tests, it will inevitably over-adapt to those tests, leading to a higher probability of severe or surprising failures in the field.

From Progressive Fly Fishing for Salmon

In my opinion most anglers change their flies too often, generally because they lose faith in it. Moreover, when they change flies it is normally for one of a different colour, and not size, and I believe that this is a great mistake.

From Slack

The more efficient you get, the harder it is to change.

From The Silent Language

Life, in a changing environment, places such strains on the organism to adapt that, if this does not take place constantly, the organism as a species dies out.

From The Importance of Living

What lives always has change and movement, and what has change and movement naturally has beauty.

From Quality Software Management. Vol 1. Systems Thinking

A culture is a self-sustaining pattern that has remarkable powers of resistance to change.

From Quality Software Management. Vol 4. Anticipating Change

Human systems don't change unless the individuals change, one at a time.

From What Did You Say?

One of us is going to change, why don't you go first?

From Mind and Nature

The unchanging is imperceptible unless we are willing to move relative to it.

The Aesthetics of Change

Is an excellent book by Bradford Keeney. This is its first set of book snippets. Here's the second. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages...

All simple and complex regulation as well as learning involve feedback. Contexts of learning and change are therefore principally concerned with altering or establishing feedback.

Corrective action is brought about by difference. The system is technically "error activated" in that "the difference between some present state and some 'preferred' state activates the corrective response". Cybernetics therefore suggests that "all change can be understood as the effort to maintain some constancy and all constancy as maintained through change". [Gregory Bateson]

Occidentals ... practice in order to get a skill, which is then a tool - in which I, unchanged, now have a new tool, that's all. The Oriental view is that you practice in order to change yourself.

In the [predator/prey] example, the battle over food and territory between two species is only one half of the story. The larger cybernetic picture is that the battle is a means or process of generating, maintaining, and stabilizing an ecosystem.

For the most part, people take distinctions to be representations of an either/or duality, a polarity, a clash of opposites, or an expression with a logic of negation underlying it.

Both Don Juan and Erickson also made use of introducing confusion to bring about change.

A "dormative principle" is a more abstract repackaging of a description of the item you claim to be explaining. To paraphrase [Gregory] Bateson, this occurs when the cause of a simple action is said to be an abstract word derived from the name for the action... What one does, in this case, is to say that an item of simple action is caused by a class of action. This recycling of a term does not constitute a formal explanation.

When we encounter sufficient complexity, such as recursive organization of human interaction, our inability to discern higher orders of patterns leads us to committing what Whitehead called "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness." We then "abstract from relationship and from the experiences of interaction to create 'objects' and to endow them with 'characteristics'".

The more "fundamental" a premise, the less accessible it will be to consciousness. As Samuel Butler proposed, the more one "knows" something the less aware one becomes of that knowledge.

Mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life. [Gregory Bateson]

The truth which is important is not a truth of preference, it's a truth of complexity.

Slack

is the title of an excellent book by Tom DeMarco. This second snippet (here's the first) continues my tactic of rereading good books several times. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Talented managers are ... all sense organ, constantly attuned to the effect their leadership is having on their people ... Managers without such talent find themselves relying on formulas and "principles" of management. They reason, "This thing I'm trying to do should work; the fact that it isn't working probably suggests that I'm doing it half-heartedly." And so they do more of whatever they've been doing.

When the new automation is in place, there is less total work to be done by the human worker, but what work is left is harder. That is the paradox of automation: It makes the work harder, not easier.

In my experience, standard processes for knowledge work are almost always empty at their center.

The power you've granted is the power to err. If that person messes up, you take the consequences. Looked at from the opposite perspective, it is this capacity to injure the person above you that makes empowerment work.

When there is neither time nor staff to cope with work that runs more slowly than expected, then the cost of lateness is paid out of quality. There is no other degree of freedom.

... voluminous documentation of everything that will hold still for it.

Successful change can only come about in the context of a clear understanding of what may never change, what the organization stands for... the organization's culture... If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change. When there is no defining vision, the only way the organization can define itself is its stasis.

Are your lights on?

is an excellent book edited by Donald Gause and Jerry Weinberg (isbn 0-932633-16-1). This is my second snippet for this book - I've set myself the goal of reading all of Jerry's books twice. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

The fledgling problem solver invariably rushed in with solutions before taking time to define the problem being solved. Even experienced solvers, when subjected to social pressure, yield to this demand for haste.

There are hundreds of things that can be be overlooked in any problem definition. If you can't think of even three, all that says is that you can't, or won't, think at all.

Human beings are so adaptable, they'll put up with almost any sort of misfit - until it comes to their consciousness that it doesn't have to be that way.

Are your lights on?

Bureaucracies always begin with some process of selection - a process which is never quite "natural" selection.

The source of the problem is most often within you.

These young computniks will acquire one valuable lesson from their unrelenting quest for problems to fit their solution - "solution probleming," we call it. As they quest so shall they learn. Mostly, they'll learn about problem definition.

If we seek a universal solvent, we can hardly deem it a "side effect" that it dissolves any container we try to keep it in.

Habituation allows us to cancel out the constancies in our environment, thus simplfying our lives.