Duncan Watts at Slate talks about Decentralized Intelligence:

In 1997, the Toyota group suffered what seemed like a catastrophic failure in its production system when a key factory--thesole source of a particular kind of valve essential to the braking systems of all Toyota vehicles--burned to the ground overnight. Because of their much-vaunted just-in-time inventory system, the company maintained only three days of stock, while a new factory would take six months to build. In the meantime Toyota's production of over 15,000 cars a day would grind to an absolute halt....

The big question was: How? How does one rapidly regenerate large quantities of a complex component, in several different varieties, without any specialized tools, gauges, and manufacturing lines (almost all of which were lost), with barely any relevant experience (the company that made them was highly specialized), with very little direction from the original company (which was quickly overwhelmed), and without compromising any of their other production tasks?...

Nevertheless, they succeeded, but not in the way one might have expected. Rather than relying on the guidance and coordination of an inspired leader (control mode), the response was a bewildering display of truly decentralized problem solving: More than 200 companies reorganized themselves and each other to develop at least six entirely different production processes, each using different tools, different engineering approaches, and different organizational arrangements. Virtually every aspect of the recovery effort had to be designed and executed on the fly, with engineers and managers sharing their successes and failures alike across departmental boundaries, and even between firms that in normal times would be direct competitors.

Within three days, production of the critical valves was in full swing, and within a week, production levels had regained their pre-disaster levels. The kind of coordination this activity required had not been consciously designed, nor could it have been developed in the drastically short time frame required.

Among Watts' points--when a disaster strikes it can seem natural to opt for a 'command and control' mentality where all parties wait on orders from on-high. Most disasters, though, are beyond the scope of a single person to solve and, in the one-person-in-charge-of-everything mode, requires tremendous communication channels to get the word out to all the people sitting and waiting for orders from above. Most organizations, though, have intelligent skilled people all over the place. Of equal importance, these intelligent people have built informal networks that can create expert teams on the fly.