The Nine Laws of God

In his book Out of Control, Kelly (1994) describes the "Nine Laws of God" as universal laws that govern all complex systems in nature. Kelly recognizes that the nine laws he offers are not the only laws necessary in complex adaptive systems; but he suggests that these
principles are the broadest and most representative of all the observations noted in the science of complexity. 

Kelly defines the Nine Laws of God as:

1. Distribute being: Distribution of a multitude of smaller units. – “All the mysteries we find most interesting – life, intelligence, evolution – are found in the soil of large distributed systems” (p. 469).
2. Control from the bottom up: Control must rest at the bottom, in the individual units. “When everything happens at once, wide and fast-moving problems simply route around any central authority” (p. 469).
3. Cultivate increasing returns: Strengthen, reinforce wins, positive feedback, success breeds success.
4. Grow by chunking: Begin with a simple system that works, assemble incrementally.
5. Maximise fringes: Diversity favours remote borders, healthy fringe speeds adoption, increases resilience, and is source of innovations.
6. Honour your errors: Embrace failures, learn from mistakes.
7. Pursue no optima, have multiple goals: “So vast are the mingled drives in any complex entity that it is impossible to unravel actual causes of its survival” (p. 470). Seek "good enough" across functions rather than excellence in each one.
8. Seek persistent disequilibrium: Neither constancy nor relentless change will support a creation
9. Change changes itself: Have self-changing rules that evolve themselves. “When extremely large systems are built up out of complicated systems, then each system begins to influence and ultimately change the organisations of other systems” (p. 470).

References

Kelly, K. (1994). Out of control: The rise of neo-biological civilization. Addison-Wesley.