Emergent Guidance

Jeff Vail spends hundreds of words getting at how to guide emergent thinking. In essence he argues for:

Platforms to ‘Keystone’ ecosystems.
Engineering by principle rather than by design (Consult Wiggins’ latest post on complexity.)
Local systems as critical.

Sounds about right, but you have to be careful not to:

Confuse guidance for control. In a real decentralized context (marked by an equal distribution of a critical level of empowerment) a multiplicity of goals and actions will emerge. You can call this guidance, but it will actually reflect the grounding of the system – the keystone platform and the system principle.
Get hung up on terrorism. The test for ‘flatness’ is whether or not you can adapt to all storms – literal or not.
Think the local community is the end game. It is all moving to one.