What becomes possible when we stop imagining that complex systems are held together by controlling agents.
1. The default story
Organisations, institutions, and social systems are almost always described as hierarchies of control.
There are managers, leaders, executives, or central committees; they issue instructions; the rest of the system is meant to follow. Failures are explained as mismanagement, poor oversight, or human error. Success is explained as competent governance.
The story is intuitive because it mirrors our everyday experience of responsibility. It feels true because we naturally treat agency as the source of action.
Yet, when this story is applied systematically, it produces predictable puzzles: why do well-led organisations fail? Why do “flat” networks sometimes outperform hierarchical ones? Why is leadership often less predictive than we think?
2. Control as a representational hangover
The idea that systems require a central controlling agent is inherited from a representational model. Control implies that there is an internal map of the system, which the agent consults to issue commands. Deviations from the plan are errors, and alignment is evidence of skill.
But consider: in most systems, no single agent actually holds such a map. Coordinated activity emerges even when participants have only partial knowledge, incomplete incentives, or inconsistent goals.
The implication is simple but profound: the perceived need for control is an artefact of expecting the wrong explanatory primitives.
3. Coordination as relational process
On a relational ontology, coordination is a property of interaction, not of controllers. It emerges from patterns of mutual adjustment, signalling, and response.
Three principles illustrate this:
Distributed sensing: participants detect conditions locally and respond to them.
Patterned adjustment: repeated interactions produce stable regularities without central instruction.
Constraint propagation: feedback loops transmit consequences of actions, aligning behaviour indirectly.
These are sufficient to stabilise complex activity without anyone needing to hold the whole system in mind.
4. Why leaders feel necessary
Leadership often appears indispensable because humans are pattern-seeking and outcome-sensitive.
When coordination succeeds, we credit leaders. When it fails, we blame them. Both are retrospective attributions, not explanatory mechanisms.
The relational perspective does not deny that leadership exists or matters. It reframes it: leadership is an emergent feature of construals, influence, and alignment, not the lever that holds the system together from above.
5. Examples in practice
Open-source software communities: code is produced and refined by distributed contributors; release management is often procedural rather than controlling; success emerges from conventions, feedback, and iterative practices.
Market systems: pricing, production, and innovation occur without a central mind; order arises from interaction patterns, constraints, and incentives.
Biological systems: flocks, swarms, and neural networks coordinate without top-down control; complex behaviour is a property of relational dynamics.
In each case, looking for a controlling agent explains very little. Observing relational patterns explains everything.
6. What becomes possible when control is relinquished
Relinquishing the expectation of control changes the questions we ask and the interventions we attempt:
From: Who is in charge, and did they fail?
To: Which patterns of interaction maintain alignment, and where do they break?
This perspective makes apparent strategies that are invisible under a control-oriented model:
Adjusting feedback loops instead of issuing commands
Designing protocols rather than issuing orders
Facilitating alignment without coercion
7. The subtle power of the relational view
Coordination without control does not mean chaos. It does not mean that anyone can do anything without consequences. Constraints, history, and mutual adjustments ensure stability. What changes is where explanatory weight lies.
Instead of searching for a “missing leader,” we map relations, dependencies, and sensitivities. Instead of expecting uniform adherence, we design for robustness and adaptability. Instead of blaming individuals, we learn from breakdowns in patterns.
In short, relinquishing control opens up a more precise, more generative way of working with complex systems.
8. Next steps
Understanding coordination without control prepares the ground for questions about learning, ethics, and resilience in systems.
The next post will explore Learning Without Transfer, showing how skills, knowledge, and expertise propagate not by transmitting a core, but by stabilising patterns of re‑construal.
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