In assembling complexity, the bounty of increasing returns is won by multiple tries over time. As various parts reorganize to a new whole, the system escapes into a higher order.

— Ilya Prigogine

Remember those times where you share your excitement about a 'new' idea with your colleagues or clients and they look you in the eye and say, "We tried that once and it didn't work."  All the enthusiasm drains out of your body as you see the door closing to the unfolding of a new possibility.  Sometimes people just can't stop talking about why it won't work as they base everything on a single try. 

Structure wins.  Paradigms are strong. They are created to maintain a structure, to create boundaries, to provide certainty to reality.  Imagine if every idea was accepted and given form and authenticity! Perhaps we would all be living in Alice's wonderland! ... a good story, but maybe not an everyday, everywhere way of living that any of us could sustain. 

Every solution, no matter how good or reasonable, fails overtime. It gives way to a higher order, a new solution more fit for the times and learnings of the past. 

"The task decides, not the name, the age, or the budget of the discipline, or the rank of the individual applying for it. Knowledge, therefore, has to be organized as a team in which the task decides who is in charge, for what, and for how long."  ~ Peter Drucker

I have written and spoken much about group genius over the past 40 years. I have told stories about how "my" second  graders taught me a lot about what I came to call group genius. Almost by accident—certainly, not by anything I learned in the school of education—I learned how much more effective teaching and learning flows "from the ground up". I had been teaching about six months when one of my students, Seth, asked a question about why soap bubbles had colors. (This was long before the Internet). My first thought was to remind him that his question had nothing to do with what I was teaching. I was getting frustrated with teaching; it seemed so many of the young minds were closed, dormant, not interested in learning. But, instead of reprimanding Seth, I said, "I don't know". And I turned to the other students and said, "Do any of you have questions you wonder about?" Eyes turned away from the windows toward me, hands shot up in the air. I don't remember it being gradual or hesitant. I remember that moment being full of life and energy.