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About this quote

What does it mean?
Progress involves balancing stability and change; you need order to change and change to update order.
In plain terms
Keep stability while changing, and keep change while staying stable.
What can you take from it?
Balance stability and change for real progress.

Where it applies

  • organizational management
  • social reform
  • personal growth

Putting it to work

  • adapt slowly
  • maintain core values
  • plan transitions

Questions to consider

  • Where is your balance between change and order?
  • What order do you need to keep?

Another view

Sometimes radical change requires abandoning existing order entirely.

More from Alfred North Whitehead

  1. Error is the price we pay for progress.

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  2. Whether or no it be for the general good, life is robbery. It is at this point that with life morals become acute. The robber requires justification.

    Permalink to quote #45
  3. Thus the universe is to be conceived as attaining the active self-expression of its own variety of opposites of its own freedom and its own necessity, of its o…

    Permalink to quote #42

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