Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chains and allow decision making to happen on a more local level end up being more adaptive and resilient because there are more minds involved in the problem.
Interpretation
Empowering individuals at lower levels in an organization leads to greater adaptability and resilience.
This quote by Steven Johnson highlights the importance of decentralization in organizations. By empowering those at lower levels and reducing hierarchical structures, organizations can harness diverse perspectives and insights, leading to better decision-making and increased resilience in the face of challenges. The collective intelligence of a broader group allows for more innovative and adaptive responses to changing circumstances.
In practice
In a team meeting, you might say, 'As Steven Johnson noted, organizations that empower individuals are more resilient, so let's all share our ideas.'
How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline: the sociology of error.
The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.
Most new movements start this way: hundreds or thousands of individuals and groups, working in different fields and different locations, start thinking about change using a common language, without necessarily recognizing those shared values. You just start following your own vector, propelled along by people in your immediate vicinity. And then one day, you look up and realize that all those individual trajectories have turned into a wave.
What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don't just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else.
For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want.
We are strangely biased, as individuals and media institutions, to focus on big sudden changes, whether good or bad - amazing breakthroughs, such as a new gadget that gets released, or catastrophic failures, like a plane crash.
The Presidency, even to the most experienced politicians, is no bed of roses; and [Zachary] Taylor like others, found thorns within it. No human being can fill that station and escape censure.
When the decision is up before you-and on my desk I have a motto which says "The buck stops here"-the decision has to be made.
The important thing is that your teammates have to know you're pulling for them and you really want them to be successful.
If someone had told me I would be Pope one day, I would have studied harder.
Supposing Catherine Lim was writing about me and not the prime minister... She would not dare, right? Because my posture, my response has been such that nobody doubts that if you take me on, I will put on knuckle-dusters and catch you in a cul de sac... Anybody who decides to take me on needs to put on knuckle dusters. If you think you can hurt me more than I can hurt you, try. There is no other way you can govern a Chinese society.
In the discharge of the duties of this office, there is one rule of action more important than all others. It consists in never doing anything that someone else can do for you.
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