"But in a turbulent environment the change is so widespread that it just routes around any kind of central authority. So it is best to manage the bottom-up change rather than try to institute it from the top down"
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Kelly is smuggling a whole theory of power into the bland vocabulary of “managing change.” The line’s engine is the metaphor of routing: like packets on the early internet, transformation in a “turbulent environment” doesn’t ask permission. It finds paths of least resistance, sidestepping chokepoints, making hierarchies feel less like command centers and more like slow, fragile bottlenecks. That’s not just descriptive; it’s a rebuke to institutional reflexes that treat uncertainty as a PR problem solvable with a rollout plan.
The intent is pragmatic, almost managerial, but the subtext is closer to a worldview Kelly helped popularize in Wired-era techno-optimism: networks beat pyramids. When change becomes “widespread,” authority doesn’t disappear; it becomes porous. People coordinate laterally, tools and norms evolve in public, and culture iterates faster than policy. “Central authority” reads less like government alone and more like any organization that believes it can freeze-frame reality long enough to impose order.
“Best to manage the bottom-up change” is the carefully chosen compromise. Kelly isn’t calling for chaos; he’s arguing for influence over enforcement. You don’t decree adoption, you design conditions: incentives, platforms, guardrails, feedback loops. The context here is late-20th/early-21st century complexity: markets that move at software speed, media that fragments instantly, workplaces where expertise is distributed. It lands because it tells leaders what they don’t want to hear: your job is no longer to steer the ship; it’s to build a fleet that can steer itself.
The intent is pragmatic, almost managerial, but the subtext is closer to a worldview Kelly helped popularize in Wired-era techno-optimism: networks beat pyramids. When change becomes “widespread,” authority doesn’t disappear; it becomes porous. People coordinate laterally, tools and norms evolve in public, and culture iterates faster than policy. “Central authority” reads less like government alone and more like any organization that believes it can freeze-frame reality long enough to impose order.
“Best to manage the bottom-up change” is the carefully chosen compromise. Kelly isn’t calling for chaos; he’s arguing for influence over enforcement. You don’t decree adoption, you design conditions: incentives, platforms, guardrails, feedback loops. The context here is late-20th/early-21st century complexity: markets that move at software speed, media that fragments instantly, workplaces where expertise is distributed. It lands because it tells leaders what they don’t want to hear: your job is no longer to steer the ship; it’s to build a fleet that can steer itself.
Quote Details
| Topic | Management |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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