1. Strategic thinking has two major components: insight about the present and foresight about the future.

2. What we thought would change almost never did, yet change was constant and often unexpected.

3. In a world of sameness, the only possibilities are somehow something might change.

4. One way to look at history is a collection of campfires of thought – dotting social, cultural, and political fields of time.

5. By listening to the historical voices we will learn how we gained our preferences for linear, mechanistic thinking and the assumptions upon which we live and begin to understand the limitations of this worldview.

6. Myths account for the mundane as well as the extraordinary giving form to the formless.

7. Writing allowed ideas and information to be stored, transferred, compared, supplemented, and critiqued.

8. Together, philosophy and science represented the cultivation of knowledge through reasoning, experimentation, critique, and proof.

9. The Greeks believed that all things work or change according to their basic natures. The results of philosophy and science eliminated myth as the probable cause of natural phenomena. The Greeks developed a formal system of scientific inquiry.

10. Plato envisioned two realms: a superior changeless realm of ideas and forms and an ever-changing material world. Plate believed that the truth existed only in the realm of ideas and forms. The world we see and experience through our senses is but a shadow of the true reality. The senses were in opposition to reality.

11. Plato believed various noninterfering gods ensured stability and order in the universe.

12. Aristole believed that natural objects behave in certain ways according to their natures.

13. Aristole believed form and matter were inseparable. Qualities do not exist without matter, and matter is differentiated by its qualities. Form follows function – favoring observation and description over experimentation.

14. Aristole believed the universe was eternal; no beginning, no end. He believed the earth was round and the center of the Universe, with the sun, moons, stars, and planets revolving around it in perfect circular orbits. The celestial realm was made of a perfect and unchanging fifth element called the aether following unchanging cycles. Aristole believed that the motion in the celestial realm was not forced but inspired by the perfection of a supreme and changeless diety whom he called the Prime Mover.

15. The Artistotelian-Ptolemaic cosmos was based more on conceptualization than on observation and experimentation.

16. From its center in Rome, the Roman Church worked to resolve doctrinal disputes among local churches by developing a unified doctrine and a disciplined organization. The Roman Catholic faith assumed three roles: keeper of the faith, translator of important written works, and indoctrinator to the masses. Formal education remained a privilege for the upper class.

17. During the dark ages (500-1000 Ad) some monastic traditions allowed an encourage monks to continue annotating, transcribing, and translating ancient texts while at the same time building libraries. The libraries were safe havens for classic works to survive.

18. Learning began to the spread from the monastries into society during the Renissance (1000-1450 AD). During this time period Latin and Greek texts were recovered primarily from Islamic texts used in their Universities.

19. The Roman Church wanted to be viewed as the center of society and adopted the doctrine of the earth being the center of the Universe. The church institutionalized the earth centered worldview. To question the church was heresy.

20. The Protestant Reformation spread across Europe in the 1500s and lead to the French revolution. The Protestant Reformation promoted freedom of religion and religious tolerance.

21. The inquisition was used to force conformity and unify through fear and power. Individual engages in any type of activity that threatened to undermine the Church’s authority, including thoses exploring new scientific ideas, were subject to tortures.

22. Great leaders anticipate where change is going and make sure their organization gets there first.

23. There exists a type of self-organizing pattern, shape, or structure that becomes obvious when the behavior of the system is seen as a whole. There is order hidden beneath the disorder. the pattern arises because the variables in the system are attracted to and interact with each other in a unique way.

24. While it may not be possible to solve or predict the future of a nonlinear system, it is possible to provide a qualitative description of of its characteristics and behavior as a whole.

25. Chaos theory is a type of mathematics used to explain complex behavior of nonlinear systems. Nonlinear dynamic systems are systems that, like weather, move, grow, or change. It's difficult to predict the outcome of future state of a nonlinear system, because the variables are interacting and changing constantly in response to each other. Most of the world is made up of nonlinear systems.

A predictable attractor is the end state into which a system settles. For example a handful of marbles thrown into a bowl settle at the bottom, the attractor.

A chaotic system that never settles into a predictable or steady state are said to be strange attractors. A tornado is an example of an energy system held together by a strange attractor. No external container or funnel gives a tornado its unique form.

The strange attractor coalesces the energy and creates the system boundaries, while at the same time allowing dynamic activity within its boundaries. Strange attractors have an unique shape and form.

A nonlinear system responds to changes in itself through a type of feedback loop, set in motion by the butterfly effect. Through this process, small changes can produce complex results.

Complex adaptive systems are characterized as non knowing the initial conditions at any point in time and their existence depends on the steady flow of information and are constantly processing/changing and incorporating new information. Complex adaptive system sit on the boundaries of chaos and order.