Nature has spent over 4 billion years experimenting, adapting, and evolving the most effective ways to organise life. These aren’t accidental patterns—they’re the result of relentless pressure to survive, thrive, and optimise energy. In nature, nothing is wasted. Everything is purposefully arranged for performance and resilience, constantly adapting to an ever-changing environment. Because if there’s one constant we know, it’s change.
So what structure has nature consistently turned to? The answer is found in complex systems. Whether you’re looking at ant colonies, fungal networks, or neural pathways, nature organises itself as decentralised, network-based systems—not through top-down command. There’s no single mastermind running the show. Instead, intelligence is distributed. Every part of the system interacts locally with a small subset of others, and through those local interactions, the whole system self-organises and aligns around a shared purpose (Camazine et al., 2003, Self-Organization in Biological Systems).
These systems are what scientists call "highly aligned but loosely coupled". They operate with minimal central control, yet they are deeply coordinated. Each element of the system is sensing, responding, and adapting in real time. It’s flexible. It’s resilient. And it works.
But then we, humans, came along. A few hundred years ago, during the industrial age, we introduced a very different concept: command and control. We decided that intelligence belongs to a few at the top, while the rest were simply "resources"—tasked with execution, not thinking. People became machines. Narrowly specialized, tightly managed, and stripped of agency. That’s how the pyramid hierarchy was born: efficient at extracting value in static environments, but painfully ineffective in dynamic, complex ones.
And yet, most of our organisations today—across business, government, and even non-profits—still run on this outdated blueprint. These systems optimise local efficiency (e.g. task completion, departmental KPIs) but sacrifice system-wide effectiveness and adaptability.
Let’s take a moment to examine how information flows in such a system. To create value, a system needs to:
- Sense its environment (what’s happening?),
- Decide what matters (what do we value?),
- Act using its resources.
In a command-and-control hierarchy, this is deeply flawed.
- Information is at the edges (e.g. frontline staff, customers).
- Decisions are made at the top (far from the context).
- Resources are scattered at the bottom, siloed and often stuck waiting for permission.
This design is inherently slow, rigid, and energy-wasting. It introduces delays, filters insights, and forces people into narrow roles that underutilise human creativity and initiative (Laloux, 2014, Reinventing Organizations).
Compare this to a network-based system—like a forest ecosystem or a bee colony—where sensing, decision-making, and action are all distributed. These systems are fast, responsive, and built for resilience, not control.
So the question is not: Should we keep the hierarchy?The question is: Why haven’t we learned from the one system that’s been evolving for billions of years?
Stay tuned for Part 2: What a Decentralised System Looks Like in Practice
