“Belief in the stable state serves primarily to protect us from apprehension of the threats inherent in change. Belief in stability is a means of maintaining stability, or at any rate the illusion of stability. But the most threatening situations are those that confront us with uncertainty, and by ‘uncertainty’, I don’t mean risk, which is a probability ratio which we all know how to handle, particularly those who are managers of industry. We can deal with risk.”

Donald Schon " REITH LECTURES 1970: Change and Industrial Society: Lecture 1: The Loss of the Stable State http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/rmhttp/radio4/transcripts/1970_reith1.pdf" at the BBC, 15 November 1970 – Radio 4; cited in: Richard Duane Carter (1981) Future challenges of management education. p. 102

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Belief in the stable state serves primarily to protect us from apprehension of the threats inherent in change. Belief i…" by Donald A. Schön?
Donald A. Schön photo
Donald A. Schön 3
American academic 1930–1997

Related quotes

Noam Chomsky photo

“Stability means we run it. There are countries that are very stable. Cuba is stable, but that’s not called stability.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Interview by Hugh Gusterson, November 2000 https://web.archive.org/web/20051210055017/http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/2002----.pdf.
Quotes 2000s, 2000

Andrew S. Grove photo

“All of us in business have a responsibility to maintain the industrial base on which we depend and the society whose adaptability — and stability — we may have taken for granted.”

Andrew S. Grove (1936–2016) Hungarian-born American businessman, engineer, and author

Andrew Grove in: " Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/26/opinion/andy-groves-warning-to-silicon-valley.html?_r=0", New York Times, March 26, 2016
New millennium

Ai Weiwei photo
Rab Butler photo
Bruno Latour photo

“The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms”

Bruno Latour (1947) French sociologist, philosopher and anthropologist

Source: Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory

David Brooks photo
Heidi Hautala photo
Ben Bernanke photo
Koichi Tohei photo

“True "fudoshin" is not a rigid, immobile state of mind, but the condition of stability, which comes from the most rapid movement.”

Koichi Tohei (1920–2011) Japanese aikidoka

14 : Fudoshin
Ki Sayings (2003)
Context: True "fudoshin" is not a rigid, immobile state of mind, but the condition of stability, which comes from the most rapid movement. In other words, like the steadiness of a spinning top, the state of perfect spiritual and physical stability arises from movement, which continues infinitely and is so infinitely rapid that it is imperceptible.

Related topics