America had precisely been a huge unparalleled success. However, many Americans confused and took for granted short time, temporary, conditions as permanent, God-granted advantages that existed for all time. They failed to understand and take necessary corrective actions to prevent nearly every single one of their crushing advantages from turning into paralyzing disadvantages. While prices gouging, underpaying workers, and treating people inhumanely, the American economic and infrastructures are destroyed, crumbling, overloaded, or undeveloped.  #RyanPhillippe 1 of 12

At one time, the United States of America possessed such a wealth of assets and money it could literally afford to squander them, but now America is $19.2 trillion in debt, running out of water, land, and losing jobs and just now figuring out that conservation of energy and materials is a good idea. Every dimension and every level of society, less can be more. For example, smaller manufacturing plants are easier to design, maintain, and manage than big ones, and they permit much more flexible manufacturing processes that are capable of shifting quickly from one production mode to another.   #RyanPhillippe 2 of 12

The United States of America, having always relied on its huge internal domestic markets as being impenetrable, is now at a considerable disadvantage. It knew only how to sell efficiently to one market. Its manufacturing and plant facilities were not only rapidly becoming out of date, much like news on TV is increasingly becoming undesirable, hence inefficient, but increasingly inflexible as well. Organizations themselves should not be viewed as businesses, but as machines. If one part fails to work well, the defective part merely has to be pulled out and replaced with a new one.   #RyanPhillippe 3 of 12

One of the most appealing properties about the American dream is it was once like a machine. The greater the inputs into it, the greater the resulting outputs. And generally speaking this is true if the machine is able to maintain the same level of output efficiency no matter what the size of the material that is input into it. However, machines have a useful life and if you abuse it and do not reinvest money into maintaining them, they fall apart and break. Not sure why so many people think they can use and abuse things and they will stay loyal or function as brand new.   #RyanPhillippe 4 of 12

Ryan Harris

We also find increasingly on every front of human existence that greater inputs into human organizations do not result in greater outputs of benefits. First of all, in order to handle greater inputs, human organizations generally have to become bigger, and bigger organizations and are generally more inefficient than smaller one. Thus, the mergers of more and more organizations into fewer bigger ones that in turn begot even larger organizations, private as well as public, led to their generally increased inefficiency.  #RyanPhillippe 5 of 12

It is well known that all processes have an upper limit to their efficiency. At some point, when too much pressure is put on one resource, it boomerangs and turns back on itself. Instead of leading to greater end benefits, it produces negative end effects and possibly unforeseeable negative benefits that go completely counter to the hypothesized benefits of bigness. Thus, instead of bigger being better, or more inputs into the machine leading to bigger desired outputs, more of bigger inputs into an inefficient machine generally lead to less.   #RyanPhillippe 6 of 12

Once one reaches the ability to affect the whole globe, weird things begin to happen. Actions that in the small or isolation are good can have reverse, completely counterintuitive effect when they are magnified up to the level of affecting the whole globe. If trust and cooperation are missing initially, where and how do they magically appear subsequently, especially, God forbid, in the heat of war, an extreme state that does not exactly contribute to the building of additional trust. No one has been able to answer this key question.   #RyanPhillippe 7 of 12

The point is that managing complexity calls for conventional, new thinking of the highest order. It requires that ability to appreciate paradox and the fact that complex systems have multiple, divers aspects so that they do not always follow traditional patterns such as bigger is better. Those who only see one dimension of complex problems are now so out of touch with reality that they are truly dangerous. The failure to appreciate a panoramic perspective literally threatens our existence.   #RyanPhillippe 8 of 12

Unless the complexities of the whole system are taken into account, something which in isolation appears good can have the complete reverse, opposite, of the intended effect.  The ability to understand and to appreciate complexity and paradox is the quintessential essence of the new thinking we have been discussing. It calls for the ability to see broad patterns that influence our World and to avoid getting caught up in irrelevant details.  #RyanPhillippe 9 of 12

The tragedy is that just when such broad understanding is of vital importance, particularly to understand why the old patterns that have governed the World for so long (i.e., bigger is better) no longer work, instead what we have gotten is more, narrow-trained, incapacity. Just when we require leadership even more on every front, we have gotten managership. As we have required people who can dream big dreams and set even bigger goals for us, what we have gotten instead are bureaucrats who lack the basic ability to dream any dreams whatsoever and to see any broad patters whatsoever.   #RyanPhillippe 10 of 12

It is almost as if when we required a different kind of understanding to cope with complexity, even if it could no longer be fully tamed because such taming like understanding was completely impossible for any one single person, we have produced bureaucrats, the end results of a system that was designed to flee from reality. Hence, the circle became complete. The characteristic features of the new reality are in near complete opposition to the characteristic features of the new unreality.   #RyanPhillippe 11 of 12

It is too much to really posit then that as reality became more complex, so complex that no one single individual could understand all the forces and patters unleashed, we retreated more and more into the invention and proliferation of self-contained Worlds of unreality over which we could maintain the illusion of control? Perhaps it is better to wake up, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one’s life. Words are gas until you condense them into pictures.   #RyanPhillippe 12 of 12