"...I started thinking about the broader picture of what happens when things stop working -- how, just when it's truly dark, something new appears on the horizon.
Perhaps users and buyers, when sufficiently annoyed with systems that don't work, self-organize without conscious structure to drive toward new ones. Do we come together, begin to swarm around the old monoliths, and build new systems that do deliver?
The synchronicity of new paradigms, technologies, and organizations with the collapse of old orders appears, in retrospect, to be orchestrated, yet it's not. It's just people, one by one by one, then two by two, inexorably driving toward what works -- systems that deliver desired results with the least amount of hassle, the least number of barriers to climb....Once we find the way around one old mountain to build anew, we keep doing it again and again."
Ventures
September 2001
