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.
Whenever America sends its citizens into harm's way, it must do so with eyes wide open.
All power is lodged in, and consequently derived from, the people. We should wear it as a breastplate, and buckle it on as our armour.
Victims recite problems. Leaders develop solutions. That might seem like common sense, but common sense is rarely common practice.
Consider what it takes for successful businessmen and businesswomen, effective entrepreneurs and hardworking associates, shrewd retirees and idealistic students to combine forces with a creative pastor to grow a "successful church" today. Clearly, it doesn't require the power of God to draw a crowd in our culture. A few key elements that we can manufacture will suffice.
One cannot govern with 'buts'.
Great leaders never accept the world as it was and always work for the world as it should be
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