garden/Nine Laws of God.md

The Nine Laws of God are a concept introduced by Kevin Kelly, a founder of Wired magazine, in his book Out of Control.¹ They describe rules for how systems organize themselves and come to grow. Susan Komives adapted these rules for organizations:

• Distribute being: The essence of the organization exists in all of its members.
• Control from the bottom up: Empower members at all levels of the organization.
• Cultivate increasing returns: Focus on what your organization does well and do it even better.
• Grow by chunking: Organizations grow, not one piece at a time, but in bunches.
• Maximize the fringes: Honor your creative members and their ideas, even if they're really "out there."
• Honor your errors: It is only through trial and error that learning happens.
• Pursue no optima, have multiple goals: There is no one "right" answer to complex problems, there are only many partial solutions.
• Seek persistent disequilibrium: Disequilibrium brings energy into the organization.
• Change changes itself: Change leads to more change, which changes the initial change.²

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1. Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (New York, New York: Basic Books, 2003). ↩︎

2. Reproduced from Susan R Komives, Nance Lucas, and Timothy R McMahon, Exploring Leadership: For College Students Who Want to Make a Difference (San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass, 2009), 251-252. ↩︎