Quoting the Brian Arthur interview:

[T]here is no well defined problem with a capital “P.” [Says Arthur.] Imagine it’s five years ago and you’re thinking about Bosnia. You’re in the State Department or the UN and you’re going to put in a UN peacekeeping force. If I said to you, “Optimize the problem in Bosnia,” you’d say, “What problem?” I mean, clearly things aren’t right, but is there a correct problem? […] All you can say is that you have this situation and there are many ways to cognize it.

These situations have a Rorschach inkblot feel to them. You have to read the problem into the situation. […] And what I’m trying to do [as an entrepreneur or business person] is make sense of these [situations]. John Seely Brown says the challenge in the old economy is to make product. The challenge in the digital economy is to make sense.

Further ahead:

Cognition is never extracted from the situation. You don’t make sense from the situation, you impose sense upon the situation. Confusion is the absence of the framework, and known confusion just means that you have framework [sic!]. You can label it. […]

So what is facing management in high tech is confusion. The job of management in high tech, at the highest levels, is not to manage but to find frameworks. Once you have frameworks you’re willing to impose, they imply the appropriate reactions. Not optimal reactions, but appropriate. So you can’t optimize in this area. All you can do is act appropriately.

And:

When you start to take the world seriously from the complexity point of view, you begin to see that organisms are in a world of continual change. If you look at a species in an ecosystem, the ecosystem is much more changeable than we ever supposed. I was watching “Nova” a week ago and they were saying that we’re in a period of remarkable stability. This wasn’t true ten thousand years ago, when there were huge changes worldwide. So it’s hard to talk about optimization or that a species is optimized. Everything is mutually adapting to everything else all the time, and the complexity point of view asks how things adapt to various circumstances.

[…]

A totally different set of rules apply in this new environment [the high-tech economy]. You hang back, you observe. You’re more like a surfer, or a really good driver at night. You don’t act out of deduction; if you do, you’re going to get creamed. You’re acting out of an inner feel, making sense as you go. You’re not even thinking. You’re at one with the situation.

Let me go back again to […] Taoism. In oriental thinking, you might just sit and observe and observe – and then suddenly do what’s appropriate. You act from your inner self. You act from your inner self. […] With deep training and deep observation, you’re reacting appropriately, and the appropriateness of the reaction depends upon the degree to which you are at one with the situation. It’s the same with martial arts: If you have to think in martial arts, you’re dead. The twenty, or thirty years of training you’ve had mean that you’ve internalized lots of possible patterns and instinctively know how to react.

There.