For example, as we expand our animation staff at Pixar, which has the positive impact of allowing us to do more quality work, there is also a negative impact that we must deal with: Meetings have become larger and less intimate, with each participant having a proportionally smaller ownership in the final film (which can mean feeling less valued). In response, we created smaller subgroups in which departments and individuals are encouraged to feel they have a voice. In order to make corrections like this - to reestablish balance - managers must be diligent about paying attention.

If snow melts from the edges, it behooves you to have mechanisms in place to see what is going on there. This is a prescription widely made by futurists, such as Amy Webb in her brilliant book The Signals Are Talking. And yet, when I consider how many executives I work with spend their time, getting to the edges is one of the last things on their agenda.

The dilemma is that when the challenges facing an organization are not about repeatable execution, but about innovation or responding to complexity, the idea of breaking things down into well-understood parts is not only unhelpful, it can also be a dangerous trap.

Empowering individuals to take action broadens the amount of experimentation an organization can undertake, increasing its odds of seeing the early warnings of an inflection point in a timely way.

Transformation, then, happens less by grand design or careful strategy than by the small wins that result from ongoing practices that enhance our capacity to change.