Being Right Keeps You In Place, Being

This Is How Great Intellectual Breakthroughs Usually Happen In Practice. It Is Rarely The Isolated Genius Having A Eureka Moment Alone In The Lab. Nor Is It Merely A Question Of Building On Precedent, Of Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants, In Newton's Famous Phrase. Great Breakthroughs Are Closer To What Happens In A Flood Plain: A Dozen Separate Tributaries Converge, And The Rising Waters Lift The Genius High Enough That He Or She Can See Around The Conceptual Obstructions Of The Age.

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.

As Much As We Sometimes Roll Our Eyes At The Ivory-tower Isolation Of Universities, They Continue To Serve As Remarkable Engines Of Innovation.

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.

Who Is Giving The Orders To Ants? No One. They Are Self-organizing. Each Of Our Immune Systems Get Smarter Over The Years As Its Biochemical Parts Share Information, And It Responds With Individualized Defenses, But It Isn't Conscious And It Has No Memory. The Host Of That Party Didn't Decree That Everyone Would Gather In The Kitchen, But It Happened Anyway. Emergence Means We Sometimes Act In Concert For Better Or Worse.