Liberating Structures - 32. Panarchy

The first is learning how to disperse power on an orderly, nonchaotic basis. Right now the word “empowerment” is a very powerful buzzword. It’s also very dangerous. Just granting power, without some method of replacing the discipline and order that come out of a command-and-control bureaucracy, produces chaos. We have to learn how to disperse power

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Futures of polycentrism , beyond either atomized decentralization or top-down centralization, where collective self-determination is protected through overlapping rights and responsibilities, abundant digital public infrastructure, and mechanisms for accountable governance.

Every part of a system is in a harmonious relationship with the entire system. When this principle of natural ecology is applied to human society, we see it as competition and cooperation in balance and an equitable distribution of wealth and power.

Perhaps the greatest “phase transition” in our thinking that such an approach could engender is the maturation in our willingness to live with relatively high levels of uncertainty in the domains of complex phenomena—and thus give up on ideas like complete “cures,” the elimination of “risk,” the design of perfect “stability,” and achieving total “s

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