Every decision has to be made somewhere. The default instinct in most organizations is to push decisions upward, toward whoever has the most authority, the most context on paper, the most seniority. Emergence suggests a different question entirely: not "who is senior enough to decide this," but "does this decision belong to the system of local actors, or does it require a single point of view that no local actor has access to."

Steven Johnson's core claim in Emergence: intelligent, coordinated, higher-order behavior can arise from individually simple agents following local rules, with no central planner. Ant colonies find efficient food sources and cities self-organize into functional neighborhoods. Seems to be a byproduct of many local interactions compounding through feedback. This article is an attempt to separate the two: what transfers, what doesn't transfer at all, and what changes specificall