Bottom-up Innovation and the Survival of Organizations

Timothy B. Lee has some wise words to ponder:

So far I’ve described top-down thinking as the tendency to underestimate the effectiveness of bottom-up processes like evolution or Wikipedia, based on the assumption that decentralized systems can’t work well without someone “in charge.” The Innovator’s Dilemma critiques the flip-side of this fallacy: the tendency to believe that when an organization does have someone in charge of it, that that person has a lot of control over the organization’s behavior. In reality, hierarchical organizations have an internal logic that severely constrains the options of the people in charge of them. Bottom-up thinkers in both cases focus on the complexity of the underlying systems, and resist the urge to over-simplify the situation by focusing too much on the people in charge (or lack thereof).

No matter which way you look at or perceive the world there is something you'll be missing. That's why it's so important to view the world from as many different perspectives as possible. I think the advantage of "bottom-up" thinking is that inherently there are more people, and therefore more perspectives, at the "bottom" than there are at the top. This gives people at the bottom more chances to see things that others can't see and then take advantage of them (as long as the system allows for it). So I don't know if I fully agree with Lee on the advantages of "bottom-up-thinkers" being their focus on the complexity of underlying systems. I think that "top-down-thinkers" or the people "in-charge" also often focus on the complexity of a given situation, I just think that their particular vantage point blinds them to things more easily seen from a different position. But Lee draws us to an important point nonetheless. Organizations and the people in charge of them often do not have as many options available to them as they might need to survive and succeed. They are often to their detriment attached to their niche, and when the world changes and that niche goes away they die. The adaptable survive, and one common trait of adaptable people is the ability to look at things from many different perspectives, understand the causes and consequences of various changes in the world quickly, and alter behavior accordingly. This is harder for organizations to accomplish because it requires a lot of engagement with the outside world, and empowering employees at lower tiers within the organization to make important decisions. But it can be done.