As a leader, you are trying to unlock the judgment, the choices, the insight, and the creativity of your people. But, as we’ve seen in the last two chapters, the way we go about this doesn’t make much sense. We cloister information in our planning systems, and we cascade directives in our goal-setting systems. Instead, we should unlock information through intelligence systems, and cascade meaning through our expressed values, rituals, and stories. We should let our people know what’s going on in the world, and which hill we’re trying to take, and then we should trust them to figure out how to make a contribution. They will invariably make better and more authentic decisions than those derived from any planning system that cascades goals from on high.

Eight practices can help you make sure you are seeing what is going on along the edges.

1. Ensure direct connection between the people at the edges of your company and the people making strategy. 

1. Go out of your way to include diverse perspectives in thinking about the implications of the future. 

1. Use deliberate decision-making processes for consequential and irreversible (type 1) decisions. Use small, agile, empowered teams for reversible (type 2) experimental decisions. 4. Foster little bets that are rich in learning, ideally distributed across the organization. 

1. Pursue direct contact with the environment—“get out of the building.” 

1. Make sure your people are incentivized to hear about reality, not the reverse. 

1. Realize when your people are in denial. 

1. Expose yourself and your organization to where the future is unfolding today.

Having one person who is explicitly keeping an eye on a particular future event increases the likelihood that whatever knowledge is in the organization has somewhere to go and will be seen holistically. And remember to incorporate feedback from people who may not be sitting in the executive suite. Go back to the periphery for information and insights about these events.

We’ve explored the idea of an arena, rather than an industry, as being a crucial level of analysis. We’ve looked at how irritants and blockers in key stakeholders’ paths to getting jobs done can open the door to an inflection sparked by an organization that removes those attributes. We’re now on the brink of considering what actions should be taken next.

In a complex situation, when you want to empower the entire organization to be able to act without direction from the top, having a shared view of what the purpose is and how each participant fits into it is absolutely critical. It is only with a basis of a shared understanding of what we’re all trying to achieve here that distributed action is possible.