One of the most important things to keep in mind, wherever you work, is that the failure of an employee to speak up in a crucial moment cannot be seen. This is true whether that employee is on the front lines of customer service or sitting next to you in the executive board room. And because not offering an idea is an invisible act, it's hard to engage in real-time course correction. This means that psychologically safe workplaces have a powerful advantage in competitive industries.

This returns us again to the central point of this section; the primary challenge you face is not in increasing creativity per se, but in making your company receptive to the vast amounts of creativity that already exist. The point is not to build a company that depends on you for its innovation, but to continually work towards an organization that is as receptive to new ideas as if those ideas had come from you.

This brings us to a central truth about organizations: they are inherently messy. There are no panaceas, no structures that solve all problems. Any attempts to completely eliminate the mess are doomed to failure. Yes, there are costly inefficiencies in decentralization, but the fire of personal ownership—of being our own little business—elevates human motivation and stimulates innovation in powerful, albeit somewhat chaotic, ways.

While most CEOs acknowledge the virtues of free markets, the companies they run are typically structured like command economies. As in the former Soviet Union, decision-making power is highly concentrated at the top. Changing this is essential to making our organizations more resilient, innovative, and human. To see how this might be done, we need to understand the conditions under which markets outperform hierarchies and then try to imagine how these advantages might be replicated within our organizations.

And when centralised organisations finally adopt new approaches, they tend to deploy them on too large a scale. State agencies are slow to acknowledge failure and prone to cover it up or even to proclaim that failure is success. The same is true of large corporate organisations, which is why disruptive innovation most often comes from outside.