Responding to challenges

How do large groups of people respond to threats? It could be argued that civilizations were designed, in part, to protect their people. A leadership structure was established and given the power to raise an army or an engineering team, or whatever was needed to face whatever threatened the group.

Individuals are the engines of change

When we are faced with challenges in our personal life, we can choose how we respond. We might fall back on our basic fight or flight responses, but as intelligent beings, we also have the ability to go beyond our programming. We can respond to cruelty with kindness, to anger with empathy and to hatred with love. Such positive and life-giving responses are a sign of wisdom.

That same personal wisdom also works well when we need to respond to challenges collectively.

Whether our tribe needs to protect itself from a pack of wolves, or all humanity needs to deal with a global crisis like climate change, the problem is the same. We need individuals with diverse capabilities, working in a coordinated way, for the common good.

Centralized VS decentralized coordination

Coordination of people can happen in a couple of ways: in the leadership model, a leader acts as the coordinator, directing individuals. In the self-organizing model, the individuals decide in a decentralized way who will take care of each activity.

We’re most familiar with the leadership model where these kinds of responses are determined from the top down. A leader, commander, or CEO makes a decision and those under their command all work in concert to accomplish the goal. The chief tells the hunters to circle the tribe, spears at the ready. The U.S. President orders an air strike. And whether they like it or not, people mostly follow the directions from the top.

Or at least that’s how it looks from the outside looking in. In almost every top-down organization, the hierarchy is a lot more complicated, with decisions being made at every level and teams of people collaborating across silos.

This decentralized model of solving problems is already happening at a global scale. Everyday people are sharing ideas and knowledge and building movements that transcend national boundaries. We need to nurture and enable this kind of work to solve global challenges.

To handle the global challenges, do we need a global leader? A global government?

So we each make our choices and act, but if we’re not agreeing about what we should do, then we’ll be working at odds with everyone else.