Alvin Toffler saw all of this change coming in 1970: the threat to modern institutions wouldn’t be change itself, but the rate of change outrunning our capacity to absorb it societal, organizational and individual. He called it “Future Shock”. Fifty-plus years on, most organizations haven’t just failed to outgrow the problem; they’ve built entire operating systems designed to guarantee it. Annual budgets and three-year strategic plans assume the ground holds still long enough for a plan to stay true. Fixed hierarchies and static job descriptions assume people occupy the same role for a decade. Approval chains exist to prevent error, not to absorb novelty, which means the control mechanism itself becomes the bottleneck. This isn’t a story about leaders who failed to notice the world speeding up. Everyone noticed. It’s a story about organizational architecture: the structures built to produce stability are now actively working against the one thing the organization needs most: the capacity to absorb change without breaking.

The Diagnosis

Toffler didn’t just say change was accelerating; he broke down why it overwhelms institutions, and each piece maps onto a specific organizational pathology still very much alive today. He called the first dimension accelerative thrust: not just that things change, but that the rate of change itself compounds. Most organizations respond to compounding change with linear planning, five-year strategy decks, annual budget cycles built on the quiet assumption that the environment will cooperate long enough for the plan to still be true when it’s finished. It rarely is. The second dimension, transience, described how relationships, roles, and structures were becoming shorter-lived, yet most organizations still hire, promote, and structure as if tenure and fixed roles were stabilizing forces rather than liabilities in a fast-moving environment. The third novelty is where the contradiction gets sharpest: Toffler warned that genuinely new things, not variations on the familiar, would arrive faster than institutions could build mental models for them. The organizational response has been to build more committees, more sign-offs, and more risk review mechanisms explicitly designed to slow down and scrutinize the unfamiliar. We built the antidote to novelty backwards. And the fourth, overchoice, predicted that abundance of options would itself become a source of paralysis, which is exactly what happens inside organizations with no real prioritization discipline, where everything is labeled “strategic,” and nothing gets sequenced. Toffler wasn’t describing a future technology problem. He was describing a structural one, and the structures he was diagnosing are, almost unmodified, the ones still running most organizations today.

The Solution

But if rigidity is structural and hard-wired into the organization, does fixing it require tearing the structure down? No. We find the answer inside a US nuclear submarine of all places – about as rigid and high-stakes an environment as exists. David Marquet is a former captain of the USS Sante Fe. The USS Santa Fe didn’t get more adaptive by flattening its hierarchy or rewriting its org chart. It got more adaptive by relocating decision authority to wherever the information actually lived, while leaving the chain of command intact. That distinction is what the whole solution turns on: agility is a property of where decisions get made relative to where the relevant information sits.

Marquet operationalized this through language, which is what makes it usable. Sailors stopped asking “permission to…” and started stating “I intend to…,” a shift that moves the locus of decision-making down to the person closest to the problem, while keeping leadership in a position to redirect and adjust but not approve. This solves Toffler’s novelty problem directly: the bottleneck wasn’t unfamiliarity itself; it was the distance between where novelty appeared and where the authority to respond to it lived. Closing that distance between information and decision making is the fix, and, critically, it didn’t require dismantling the hierarchy that the rigidity diagnosis seemed to indict. It required redirecting how that hierarchy functioned.

But Marquet is explicit that this move is dangerous if done carelessly, pushing authority downward without preparation, and you get chaos, not agility. He builds in two preconditions: competence, the technical skill to make the decision well, and clarity, a deep enough grasp of organizational intent that distributed decisions stay aligned without top-down control. This is the rung most “be more agile” advice skips entirely: leadership grants autonomy, doesn’t invest in the competence or clarity to support it, things go wrong, and the org concludes agility doesn’t work here. Marquet’s sequence is the correct one: certify competence, broadcast intent, then push authority down. The solution is not a flatter organizational chart, but a deliberate relocation of where decisions get made, built on a foundation that makes the relocation safe.

What This Looks Like in Practice

The pattern shows up everywhere agility actually works — and it’s never a flattened org chart. Its authority is relocated to the point of information, backed by competence and clarity.

Frontline override authority. Ritz-Carlton empowers every employee to spend up to $2,000 resolving a guest issue without manager sign-off. Authority sits exactly where the information is with the person facing the problem, backed by clear intent (“exceptional guest experience”) and extensive training on judgment calls.

Production and operations. Toyota’s Andon cord, a physical or digital mechanism in manufacturing that allows workers to signal a problem on the production line, lets any line worker stop the entire production line on detecting a defect. Authority is pushed to the point of detection, not escalated up a chain first Marquet’s mechanism in physical form, decades before he named it. The same logic shows up in tech operations today: the on-call engineer who detects an outage can make production changes immediately, without routing through a change-approval board, because the cost of waiting exceeds the risk of an imperfect immediate fix.

High-stakes command structures. Beyond Marquet’s submarine, modern special-operations units run on commander’s intent: small-unit leaders are told the objective and given full latitude on execution, rather than receiving tactical orders for every move.

Professional services. A law firm associate empowered to make a $5,000 client-accommodation decision without partner sign-off because the firm has invested in training and has clearly communicated what “client-first” means in practice looks completely different from the more typical model, where even small judgment calls get routed up through partner approval under the banner of “quality control.” One is agility. The other is rigidity, wearing a risk management compliance costume.

What it is not: flat org charts with no hierarchy (that’s structural change, not what either framework calls for), “empowerment” memos issued with no investment in training or speed without intent-alignment (fast bad decisions aren’t agility).

Where to Start

You don’t need to redesign your organization to begin. But you need to start ideally with small experiments: This might be:

• Finding the process bottleneck. Pick one recurring decision: a client accommodation, a vendor exception, a scope change, a pricing override, and trace it.  Alternatively:
• Finding a group that is meant to drive change in the organization, the project manager, the change manager, the “innovation team” that cannot innovate without sign-off at 3 levels.

Who has the best information about the decision? Where does it currently have to travel before someone says yes? If the answer is “several levels above the person closest to the problem,” you’ve found a live case of exactly the rigidity Toffler diagnosed and Marquet eliminated. Before moving that authority down, ask the two questions Marquet insists on: does the person closest to the problem have the competence to decide it well, and do they understand the intent behind the decision clearly enough to stay aligned without being told what to do every time? If the answer to both is yes, the fix is simply letting the decision happen where the information already lives.

If this sounds fanciful, it is not. This works – really well. But it requires trust. Trust in the team from management to “do the right thing” and trust from the team in the manager that they will stay out of the weeds.

This is the diagnostic work at the center of what we do with clients, mapping where decisions currently bottleneck against where the information that should drive them actually sits, before recommending any structural change. If this framing resonates with friction you’re feeling in your own organization, we would welcome the conversation. We have done this with our teams and have the receipts.

Author: Andrew Terrett