Self Organizing Quotes & Sayings

The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale. — James Gleick

Thr principle of organization is built into nature. Chaos itself is self-organizing. Out of primordial disorder, stars find their orbit; rivers make their way to the sea. — Steven Pressfield

To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion of what one is ... The whole surface of consciousness - for consciousness -is- a surface - must be kept clear of all great imperatives. Beware even of every great word, every great pose! So many dangers that the instinct comes too soon to "understand itself"
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Meanwhile, the organizing idea that is destined to rule keeps growing deep down - it begins to command, slowly it leads us back from side roads and wrong roads; it prepares single qualities and fitnesses that will one day prove to be indispensable as a means toward a whole - one by one, it trains all subservient capacities before giving any hint of the dominant task, "goal," "aim," or "meaning. — Friedrich Nietzsche

If a self-organizing system becomes too static, it runs down; if it becomes too chaotic, it breaks apart. — Danah Zohar

One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history. — P. J. O'Rourke

We are working on creating self-describing, self-organizing, self-diagnosing and self-repairing networks. — John Seely Brown

The young man who addresses himself in stern earnest to organizing his life-his habits, his associations, his reading, his study, his work-stands far more chance of rising to a position affording him opportunity to exercise his organizing abilities than the fellow who dawdles along without chart or compass, without plan or purpose, without self-improvement and self-discipline. — B.C. Forbes

The proper management of one's feelings clearly lies along a complex (and therefore not simple or easy) balanced middle path, requiring constant judgment and continuing adjustment. Here the owner treats his feelings (slaves) with respect, nurturing them with good food, shelter and medical care, listening and responding to their voices, encouraging them, inquiring as to their health, yet also organizing them, limiting them, deciding clearly between them, redirecting them and teaching them, all the while leaving no doubt as to who is the boss. This is the path of healthy self-discipline. — M. Scott Peck

The key to creating a successful system is to make it as uncomplicated as possible. — Geralin Thomas

Music exists when rhythmic, melodic or harmonic order is deliberately created, and consciously listened to, and it is only language-using, self-conscious creatures ... who are capable of organizing sounds in this way, either when uttering them or when perceiving them. We can hear music in the song of the nightingale, but it is music that no nightingale has heard. — Roger Scruton

Mature striving is linked to long-range goals. Thus, the process of becoming is largely a matter of organizing transitory impulses into a pattern of striving and interest in which the element of self-awareness plays a large part. — Gordon W. Allport

Summary of Scrum vs Kanban

Similarities:
- Both are Lean and Agile
- Both use pull scheduling
- Both limit WIP
- Both use transperency to drive process improvement
- Both focus on delivering releasable software and often
- Both are based on self-organizing teams
- Both require breaking the work into pieces.
- In both, the release plan is continuously optimized based on empirical data (velocity/lead time) — Henrik Kniberg

The great thing about a culture is that once you really get it going, it evolves on its own. It's self-organizing. It's dynamic. It just feeds on itself. — John Mackey

Hell yeah! Twitter was proof that leaderless self-organizing systems could be true agents of change. — Biz Stone

APM focuses on team management, from building self-organizing teams to developing a servant leadership style. It is both more difficult, and ultimately more rewarding than managing tasks. — Jim Highsmith

In his self-serving view of events, Lee believed that he had performed a prodigious feat, rescuing his overmatched army from danger and organizing an orderly retreat. "'The American troops would not stand the British bayonets," he insisted to Washington. "You damned poltroon," Washington rejoined, "you never tried them!" Always reluctant to resort to profanities, the chaste Washington cursed at Lee "till the leaves shook on the tree," recalled General Scott. "Charming! Delightful! Never have I enjoyed such swearing before or since. — Ron Chernow

To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe
to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it
is a wonder beyond words. — Joanna Macy

Successful organizing is not built on self-interest but rather on dignity and a sense of purpose. — Paul Wellstone

The imagination ... that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

But I've always been a sucker for externals alone: the shape, the shine, what the surface suggests to my palm. So mechanically disinclined it's verging on criminal, I never understood the beauty of an object's workings until Linny sat my reluctant self down one day and showed me her camera. Within fifteen minutes, I had fallen hard for the whole gadgety, eyelike nature of the thing: a tiny piece of glass slowing, bending, organizing light - light - into your grandmother, the Grand Canyon, the begonia on the windowsill, the film keeping the image like a secret. Grandmother, canyon, begonia tucked neatly into the sleek black box, like bugs in a jar. My mind boggled. — Marisa De Los Santos

This column was an attempt to convey to British readers something of the flavor of high-school graduation, a ritual largely unknown across the Atlantic and one at odds with the basic organizing principle of English education: The continual assurances by commencement speakers that yours is the most awesome generation ever to walk the earth ring a little odd if you're a survivor of some grim Dotheboys Hall where the prevailing educational philosophy was to lower your self-esteem to undetectable levels by the end of the first week. — Mark Steyn

Who is giving the orders to ants? No one. They are self-organizing. Each of our immune systems get smarter over the years as its biochemical parts share information, and it responds with individualized defenses, but it isn't conscious and it has no memory. The host of that party didn't decree that everyone would gather in the kitchen, but it happened anyway. Emergence means we sometimes act in concert for better or worse. — Steven Johnson

It goes against the grain of modern education to teach students to program. What fun is there to making plans, acquiring discipline, organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self critical. — Alan Perlis

Clearly, there is some invisible force that is moving every aspect of reality to its next best expression. And the universe is not only self-organizing, it is also self-correcting. The embryo becomes a baby; the baby is born; its lungs continue to breathe - not only were they created but then they continue to breathe. The heart is not only created but it continues to breathe. If there is injury and disease that becomes present within the body, the body is also equipped with an immune system to correct that. — Marianne Williamson

Finally, is not liberty the restricting of the law only to its rational sphere of organizing the right of the individual to lawful self-defense; of punishing injustice? — Frederic Bastiat

The universe is a self-organizing, intelligent, creative, trial-and-error learning, participatory, interactive, non-locally interconnected and evolving system. — Edgar Mitchell

If the process of life is about moving toward increased complexity and organization, a sort of sublime unfolding of greater and greater self-organizing systems, then we're actually doing pretty well. — Jason Silva

The double role of living systems as parts and wholes requires the interplay of two opposite tendencies: an integrative tendency to function as part of a larger whole, and a self-assertive, or self-organizing tendency to preserve individual autonomy (see Chapter 7). — Fritjof Capra

Ethics and aesthetics are deeply intertwined. Art, beauty, and craft have always drawn on the self-organizing 'wild' side of language and mind. Human ideas of place and space, our contemporary focus on watersheds, become both models and metaphors. Our hope would be to see the interacting realms, learn where we are, and thereby move towards a style of planetary and ecological cosmopolitanism. — Bell Hooks

What neuroscience has revealed is that there is no such control center in the brain. There are hubs in our brain networks whose activity is more influential than others; however, there is no one single hub that dictates action. Our brains are much more like an ant colony: billions of neurons collaborating to give rise to our selves without any external or internal agent. In other words you are an emergent self-organizing phenomenon. — Andrew Smart

The capability of self-organizing teams lies in collaboration. When two engineers scratch out a design on a whiteboard, they are collaborating. When team members meet to brainstorm a design, they are collaborating. When team leaders meet to decide whether a product is ready to ship, they are collaborating. The result of any collaboration can be categorized as a tangible deliverable, a decision, or shared knowledge. — Jim Highsmith

I think a lot of things will be self-correcting, even in America. After all, human societies are essentially self-organizing emergent systems. The catch is, how much disorder will we have to endure while this re-self-organizing process occurs. — James Howard Kunstler

Self-organizing teams form the core of APM. They blend freedom and responsibility, flexibility and structure. In the face of inconsistency and ambiguity, the teams strive to consistently deliver on the product vision within the project constraints. Accomplishing this requires teams with a self-organizing structure and self-disciplined individual team members. Building this kind of team is the core of an agile project leader's job. — Jim Highsmith

We live in a self-organizing and self-correcting universe. For every problem, there is a potentially miraculous solution. A closed heart deflects the miracle, while an open heart brings it forth ... In every moment, we make a choice between the heavenly awareness of our connection to all living things, or the hell of the delusion that we are separate and alone. The mind will manufacture according to our choice; whichever we choose, we will seem to experience. — Marianne Williamson

(William) Deresiewicz offers a vision of what it takes to move from adolescence to adulthood. Everyone is born with a mind, he writes, but it is only through introspection, observation, connecting the head and the heart, making meaning of experience and finding an organizing purpose that you build a unique individual self. — David Brooks

In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament. — Vivian Gornick

I think of the universe as the body of God, and the creative capability we see and can exhibit as the mind of God. I will use this phrase to describe our system, that it's a creative, intelligent, self-organizing, learning trial-and-error, interactive, non-locally interconnected evolutionary system. — Edgar Mitchell

It is possible to create an epidemic of health which is self-organizing and self-propelling. — Jonas Salk

The Law of Divine Compensation posits that this is a self-organizing and self-correcting universe: the embryo becomes a baby, the bud becomes a blossom, the acorn becomes an oak tree. Clearly, there is some invisible force that is moving every aspect of reality to its next best expression. — Marianne Williamson

The reason that Google was such a success is because they were the first ones to take advantage of the self-organizing properties of the web. It's in ecological sustainability. It's in the developmental power of entrepreneurship, the ethical power of democracy. — Ron Eglash

In every moment, we make a choice about which direction we are going to go. Once we realize that this is a self-correcting and self-organizing universe, then we don't have to look any further than our own life circumstances, the relationships and situations that we are in, to begin the transformation. — Marianne Williamson

The cognitive functioning of a human brain depends on a delicate orchestration of many factors, especially during the critical stages of embryo development-and it is much more likely that this self-organizing structure, to be enhanced, needs to be carefully balanced, tuned, and cultivated rather than simply flooded with some extraneous potion. — Nick Bostrom

Education is a self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon. — Sugata Mitra

There is no extrahistorical or eternalist or abstractivistically pure standpoint where we can get oriented in the absolute Truth per se before dealing with the concrete lineaments of how we happen exist in this time and place. We are participants in a dynamic system and we know its profile only by its action in organizing how we interact together and how we see our own selves. "The truth is the whole," and the whole is a system of living energy: our life as human and historical spirits. — Kenny Smith

Organizing your emotions reclaims your power over any given drama. Nothing is stronger than your own mind. — Jennifer Elisabeth

Nature is pretty good at networks, self-organizing systems. By contrast, social systems are top-down and hierarchical, from which we draw the basic assumption that organization and order can only come from centralism. — Nicholas Negroponte

Leaders who want to create adaptive, self-organizing teams steer rather than control - they influence, nudge, facilitate, teach, recommend, assist, urge, counsel, and, yes, direct in some instances. — Jim Highsmith

The universe is not only self-organizing, it is also self-correcting. — Marianne Williamson

The self-organizing and self-correcting imprint is on all aspects of reality. So not only was your body formed by this invisible hand, not only does your body continue to work by this invisible hand, but every aspect of your life - emotionally, physiologically, and spiritually - is also programmed to thrive, is also programmed for self-organization and self-correction. — Marianne Williamson

Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility ... Artists have had to become self-conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, their materials and methods. — Susan Sontag

Today, for the first time - and the Obama campaign showed us this - we can go from the digital world, from the self-organizing power of networks, to the physical one. — Carlo Ratti

Once the idea of a supernaturalistic creation is fully overcome, the idea returns that the universe must be self-organizing and therefore composed of self-moving parts. Also, insofar as dualistic assumptions are fully overcome and human experience is accepted as fully natural, it begins to seem probable that something analogous to our experience and self-movement is a feature of every level of nature. — David Ray Griffin