Imagine a school of fish. No individual fish is overly smart yet the school itself shows remarkable intelligence, durability, and survivability. 

How can this be? There is no fish leader. There is no fish management. No fish sees the big picture. No fish tells any other fish what to do. There are only individual fish who respond to the fish and environment around them. 

It is amazing but rather than leading to chaos, this process leads to order, structure and progress. Because this structure is very fluid, it is quite adaptable to complexity and rapidly changing events.

When a hungry barracuda cuts through the school, it scatters into multiple schools which quickly re-form back into the full school. A fish or two might be gone but the school survives and continues to provide survival benefits to every fish.

Bees, ants, herd animals, in fact all life -- and yes that includes humans -- have unknowingly experienced this same process since life itself began. It may seem counterintuitive but it is reality.

What is actually counterintuitive is the modern belief that top-down, command-and-control systems are superior to this; that a boss or leader of some sort is always required to drive and direct progress.

Think of how that school of fish would function under top-down, command-and-control design. There would have to be “super” fish of varying management power telling the others what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. It is difficult to imagine how a school like this would even function. It would be incredibly slow in responding to almost anything. 

Information would have to flow up from the bottom, going through multiple super-fish layers until it reached the top-fish. If fish communicate anything like humans, the information the top-fish received would be far different than what started at bottom. Then the top-fish would make a decision and the information would flow back down through all those layers of super-fish until it reached the individual fish in the school.

It could never function in the real world. And if by some miracle it did, what would happen when that same barracuda attacked the school? It would completely fall apart. There would be no way for the information to flow up and then back down in time to address the attack.   

Rather than the elegance of the natural school; reacting, bending, flowing apart and then back together again, the top-down school would splinter and cease to function. It would be the end of that school and the ultimately the likely death of all the individual fish.

Of course a school of fish’s time frame is much shorter than a “school” of humans but the same forces are at work. And it is easier for us to see the functioning of the school of fish since we stand outside of it. For us though, we are each a participant in the human “school” and our time frame is measured in centuries, not seconds. Thus it is more difficult to witness the elegance and beauty of our flows, our bending and shaping, our advancement and progress.  

But make no mistake; these forces of self-organization are just as active within us as with the fish. These forces drove the creation of wealth and discovery of knowledge that allows us to live like none before. These forces, sometimes call swarm intelligence, are the direct reason for this abundance of blessings. This is not some warm-and-fuzzy philosophy; it is a fact which we ignore at our own peril.

These top-down political beliefs and the governments they directed were created long before we had any knowledge and understanding of how these natural systems work. Thus it is not surprising they took a “we know best” approach to action and design.

But now we are aware of these fact- and reality-based processes. Our political beliefs and governmental organizations should adjust to these recently discovered facts immediately.

We can argue about what we collectively want governments to do but how they go about it is clear; abandon the demonstrably failed command-and-control system design and embrace the design of swarm intelligence, which at its essence is simply individual freedom. 

The top-down system design is a product of recent human thinking and has a rather poor record in the real world. The other is the driver of all life on the planet and its record is astonishing in its success.

One path leads to chaos and ultimately catastrophic system failure, the other to order, yo progress and wealth. Follow the fish and make certain you understand which is which.

John Conlin is an expert in organizational design and change.  He also holds a BS in Earth Sciences and an MBA and is the founder and President of E.I.C. Enterprises, www.eicenterprises.org , a 501(c)3 non-profit dedicated to spreading the truth here and around the world, primarily through K-12 education.