How do people, organisations and other social systems such as neighborhoods, cities, nations, the human species and its societies transform?
Can entities transform by shock and hard intervention and still be viable? Or does development occur in an evolutionary process? The latter is more natural and nature's way.
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Marc Pierson expressed his understanding of development: "I love Christopher Alexander's understanding of non-destructive development. This means Non-Cancerous development. It matches my rudimentary understanding of embryological development. Again, potentially the most important starting question is how well does development scale and by what mechanisms? C. Alexander and S. Beer were tackling a similar problem from different starting points. Architecture and the built environment and human organizations."
It may be easier to get a grip on Non-destructive development when thinking of the development of our children.
Janis is a useful image, an icon for the process of non-destructive transformations with one face forward-outward looking and another face backward-inward looking. Wisdom flows from always acting from the place one stands combined with both Janis insights. This is true integration at manageable scale.
It may be that with a large enough sample, the simple Janis Rule would make our worlds beautiful, without a controller. A simple rule for the creation of beauty. Maybe we then need to add a light weight scavenger to remove cancer (ugly) instances.
Development--as in Alexander's pattern language: Curtesy and love. Love of my family, curtesy toward my neighbors. One could wish for more but it may be enough. Maybe affection is an inverse square function with distance? Maybe it just dilutes? Maybe it requires different dynamics at increasing scale. I think it can be strong enough just beyond my door.
Alexander came to deeper patterns he called 15 Properties-Transformations. Transposing these to society as Ward did with pattern language and software? That will be fun. BrainSite 
When I learned that a Diff function is built deep into computer code I was happy. A diff function is a good place to start and a good place to end. The diff function, Spencer-Brown's "mark" also the beating heart of every homeostat.
Non-destructive = organic, integrative, graceful, co-emergence with adjacencies. Requires a wonderful degree of situated awareness. Aikido. Dancing together. Family at its best.
Development = getting better as a whole, more integrated, more alive, more capable, more graceful. I suspect that this applies to built environment, computer programming, neighborhood relationships, and so much more. There must be enough freedom and choice that each part can move in accord with its adjacencies. It cannot be done to something. It cannot be centrally controlled except by sharing the simple rules, patterns, and principles that still must be used in unique situations.
It is opposed to rip and replace, to re-engineering, to parachuting anything into a strange context--like most consultants and even well intentioned executives vis-s-vis the front line.
Beauty (nondestructive development) requires Intimacy Among Adjacencies.
Patterns are everywhere, it is the only thing we humans can even become aware of. The question is, which patterns do we want to use and importantly, why do we want to use them? What can we learn from the history of dancing-humans-of-the-earth.
As Alexander and his colleagues learned the hard way, a dictionary, even an encyclopedia, is not a language. And even languages can be dead (born dead?) or only written and only studied only by scholars in antiquity libraries. Their hope was to bring a forgotten or displaced or dying language back to life. My belief is that living languages (especially pattern languages) live only in the speaking. They are learned in the speaking. The Speaking in Context is what builds understanding and skill.
And human language is at its most compelling in Stories told around campfires. Ward has kindled a few campfires. I so appreciate being in the warmth of two of them, learning patterns and perhaps some new languages that can become vernacular. I will do what I can to learn and speak patterns of community.
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Go back to Sustainable Development.
Explore Peter Robertson's work including Always Change a Winning Team, ISSS Papers, and Goldilocks’ Quest, and the M Cube.