Adaptive Quotes

Organizations have to come to grips with the fact that tests of adaptive capability aren't always pleasant. Learning can be a powerful emotional event, and organizations have to be cognizant of that. They must understand that those who complete high-quality executive education programs are going to see the organization with fresh eyes after they return. Those who re-enter the workplace filled with new enthusiasm and new ideas often find a chilly response on the part of their supervisors.

The Philippines is strategically located and blessed with the greatest resource: its people, who are hard-working, very loyal, and very adaptive.

We're an amazingly adaptive and resilient species. Once we put our mind to global warming, I have no doubt we'll figure a way through here that won't lead to utter calamity.

Sensitivity to nature is not an innate attribute of indigenous peoples. It is a consequence of adaptive choices that have resulted in the development of highly specialized peripheral skills. but those choices in turn spring from a comprehensive view of nature and the universe in which man and woman are perceived as but elements inextricably linked to the whole.

Bad things happen. And the human brain is especially adept at making sure that we keep track of these events. This is an adaptive mechanism important for survival.

All of great leaders evidence four basic qualities that are central to their ability to lead: adaptive capacity, the ability to engage others through shared meaning, a distinctive voice, and unshakeable integrity. These four qualities mark all exemplary leaders, whatever their age, gender, ethnicity, or race.

In the course of individual development, inherited characters appear, in general, earlier than adaptive ones, and the earlier a certain character appears in ontogeny, the further back must lie in time when it was acquired by its ancestors.

Childhood is a complex dialectical process characterized by periodicity, unevenness in the development of different functions, metamorphosis or qualitative transformation of one form into another, intertwining of external and internal factors, and adaptive processes which overcome impediments that the child encounters.

What we call knowledge does not and cannot have the purpose of producing representations of an independent reality, but instead has an adaptive function.

The ruling quality of leaders adaptive capacity, is what allows true leaders to make the nimble decisions that bring success. Adaptive capacity is also what allows some people to transcend the setbacks and losses that come with age and to reinvent themselves again and again.

Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chains and allow decision making to happen on a more local level end up being more adaptive and resilient because there are more minds involved in the problem.

Human enhancement is now being driven by military imperatives, at least in the US, because civilian society is more conservative in its approach. It’s a missed opportunity for a society-wide push to understand and reduce our need to power the brain down for hours every day. Every hour we sleep is an hour we are not working, finding mates, or teaching our children; if sleep does not have a vital adaptive function to pay for its staggering opportunity cost, it could be ‘the greatest mistake the evolutionary process ever made’.

Exercising adaptive leadership is about giving meaning to your life beyond your own ambition.

United decidedly is not an innovative, adaptive organization.

A terrific, stimulating book...Ramalingam clearly and engagingly shows how the use of complex adaptive systems thinking can significantly strengthen and enhance the impacts and effectiveness of global foreign aid.

And it has been the paleontologist- my own breed-who have been most responsible for letting ideas dominate reality: ...We paleontologist have said that the history of life supports that interpretation [gradual adaptive change], all the while knowing that it does not.

Human judgment is notoriously fallible and perhaps seldom more so than in facile decisions that a character has no adaptive significance because we do not know the use of it.

The Darwinian adaptive trait of our time is the ability to figure out when we are being lied to on television.

As you begin to realize that every different type of music, everybody's individual music, has its own rhythm, life, language and heritage, you realize how life changes, and you learn how to be more open and adaptive to what is around us.

Economists have the correct insight that economics is a theory of choice, the key to the story is the variety of options and centralised political control limits the options. The best recipe is adaptive efficiency coping with novel uncertainty in a non-ergodic world, the maintenance of institutions which enable trial & error experiment to occur, and an effective means of eliminating unsuccessful solutions

It certainly would have been adaptive for ancestral man to have a chubby wife during stressful times of famine. Not only would she have had more calories to burn, and thus more energy and endurance, but since fat stores estrogen, she would have remained fertile for longer.

That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells—he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster.

Often,our immediate reaction to a sudden crisis help us save ourselves. Our response to gradual crises that creep up upon us, on the other hand,may be so adaptive as to ultimately lead to self-destruction.

Unintended consequences get to the heart of why you never really understand an adaptive problem until you have solved it. Problems morph and "solutions" often point to deeper problems. In social life, as in nature, we are walking on a trampoline. Every inroad reconfigures the environment we tread on.

There is something uncannily adaptive about anti-Semitism: the way it can hide, unsuspected, in the most progressive minds.

Leadership is the ability to step outside the culture to start evolutionary change processes that are more adaptive.

Until we become the architects of a society that is truly free and ecological, it will always seem that when the human brain is not adaptive, it is more often destructive than creative.

Lobbyists know that a 0 percent tax rate on capital income is not, in fact, the lowest possible rate. There can be negative tax rates. There can be subsidies. There can be allowances for depreciation. Lobbyists are adaptive creatures.

Highly-adaptive, informal networks move diagonally and eliptically, skipping entire functions to get things done.

Living in an entirely different physical as well as biotic environment, such a population would have unique opportunities to enter new niches and to select novel adaptive pathways.

Effective use of Braille is as important to the blind as independent mobility, knowledge in the use of adaptive technology, and the core belief that equality, opportunity, and security are truly possible for all people who are blind.

Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.

Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man

If you look at body fat, it seems to increase with age, even though your weight does not. That's a physiological fact of aging, they say. Heck it is. It is an adaptive effect of aging.

Theatre people, who are an adaptive species, know that to remain sane in the process of production where everyone and his uncle has an opinion about how to fix a show, you must pick the people whose knowledge and taste you trust and stick only to these few. The Tweetocracy is no place to look.

At Adaptive Path, we've been doing our own work with Ajax over the last several months, and we're realizing we've only scratched the surface of the rich interaction and responsiveness that Ajax applications can provide.

You have to be fast on your feet and adaptive or else a strategy is useless.

Instead of constantly adapting to change, why not change to be adaptive?

The realizations of anarchist ideas and practices are like sociopolitical ecosystems. Local versions resemble each other, but they are endlessly adaptive and everywhere different to meet their needs in their environments. Anarchism can be adapted to meet the culture, economics, ecology, and politics of various people or communities. That's the beauty of it.

The proof given by Wright, that non-adaptive differentiation will occur in small populations owing to "drift," or the chance fixation of some new mutation or recombination, is one of the most important results of mathematical analysis applied to the facts of neo-mendelism. It gives accident as well as adaptation a place in evolution, and at one stroke explains many facts which puzzled earlier selectionists, notably the much greater degree of divergence shown by island than mainland forms, by forms in isolated lakes than in continuous river-systems.

A … difference between most system-building in the social sciences and systems of thought and classification of the natural sciences is to be seen in their evolution. In the natural sciences both theories and descriptive systems grow by adaptation to the increasing knowledge and experience of the scientists. In the social sciences, systems often issue fully formed from the mind of one man. Then they may be much discussed if they attract attention, but progressive adaptive modification as a result of the concerted efforts of great numbers of men is rare.

Civilization is to groups what intelligence is to individuals. It is a means of combining the intelligence of many to achieve ongoing group adaptation. Civilization, like intelligence, may serve well, serve adequately, or fail to serve its adaptive function. When civilization fails to serve, it must disintegrate unless it is acted upon by unifying internal or external forces.

But complex animals had obtained their adaptive flexibility at some cost--they had traded one dependency for another. It was no longer necessary to change their bodies to adapt, because now their adaptation was behavior, socially determined. That behavior required learning. In a sense, among higher animals adaptive fitness was no longer transmitted to the next generation by DNA at all. It was now carried by teaching.

It's not the strongest or the most intelligent who survive, but those most adaptive to change. Over the past 10 years, the need for, and focus on, adaptability has accelerated.

I found out that if you are going to win games, you had better be ready to adapt.

Water is patient; it can stagnate and let itself be coated with scum if need be. It is as gentle as the morning's dew. It is non-confrontational, even respectful, in circumventing the rocks in a stream. It makes room for everything that enters its pools. It accommodates by assuming the shape of any vessel it is poured into. And it is humble, seeking always the lowest level. Yet along with - or rather because of these adaptive, yielding properties, it is ultimately irresistible; it carves canyons out of stone.

The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children's adaptive capacity.

Dissonance between family and school, therefore, is not only inevitable in a changing society; it also helps to make children moremalleable and responsive to a changing world. By the same token, one could say that absolute homogeneity between family and school would reflect a static, authoritarian society and discourage creative, adaptive development in children.

We have the most flexible and adaptive economy. Making sure we sustain the ability of the American economy to perform well is really the priority of economic policy.

Our ability to adapt came from our East African birthplace, a meteorologically unstable place. If you couldn't adapt, you'd be dead. But once you've found a solution, there is no need to continue the adaptive behavioral parrying, which is bioenergetically very expensive to maintain. We are built to find answers, then hang on to them as long as we can.