Nobody Centrally Planned It

I didn't know, while it was happening, that I was watching a loop. What followed wasn't a strategic plan — it was a series of small responses that invited other responses: a donation drive became a fashion show, a fashion show became a street fair. Looking back, what strikes me most isn't how much happened. It's how little of it was centrally planned.

I see the same shape right now with AI tools inside companies that never approved them. One person on a team starts using an AI note-taker because a colleague showed them. Then that colleague shows someone else. Security teams try blocking it, the way institutions usually respond to something that started without permission — and it doesn't work, the same way it didn't work for iPhones or Dropbox years earlier. The tools that survive aren't the ones companies successfully kept out. They're the ones companies eventually let inside the perimeter, because by then everyone was already using them.

Nobody centrally planned that spread. It moved exactly the way the fashion show did — person to person, need to need, faster than any rollout plan could have moved it.

The instinct to block it comes from the same place as every "we don't have resources" I've heard in coaching rooms: not from strength, but from not yet trusting what's already alive in the system. The cascade isn't a security problem to solve. It's information about where your people already found something worth trusting.

What's already spreading inside your organization that nobody planned — and are you fighting it or learning from it?

From Dancing in the Wind: An Adaptive Leadership Framework in the Age of AI.