growth eventually will stop. Efforts to extend the growth by removing limits can actually be counterproductive, forestalling the eventual day of reckoning, which given the pace of change that reinforcing processes can create (remember the French lily pads) may be sooner than we think.

Today’s problems come from yesterday’s “solutions.”

You can have your cake and eat it too—but not at once.

Generative learning cannot be sustained in an organization if people’s thinking is dominated by short-term events. If we focus on events, the best we can ever do is predict an event before it happens so that we can react optimally. But we cannot learn to create.

Leadership in designing IT-based infrastructures starts with designing the composition of the team responsible for implementation. “When I led the SAP implementation for HP’s printing group,” says Anne Murray Allen, “80 percent of the team was from business—finance, procurement, manufacturing—and the entire team worked in one physical space. You

Another idea overturned by the feedback perspective is anthropocentrism—or seeing ourselves as the center of activities.

It turns out that people can live very well with the situation where they make their case and yet another view is implemented, so long as the learning process is open and everyone acts with integrity.

The problem is our minds are so locked in one frequency, it’s as if we can only see at 78 rpm; we can’t see anything at 33-1/3. We will not avoid the fate of the frog until we learn to slow down and see the gradual processes that often pose the greatest threats.

The reason that structural explanations are so important is that only they address the underlying causes of behavior at a level at which patterns of behavior can be changed.