An octopus — most of its neurons living in its arms, each one acting with a measure of independence from the brain.
Distributed
n.—distance as an asset, not a defect.
For most of the history of organized work, distance was a cost to be minimized. Same building, same time zone, same room if possible—coordination got cheaper the closer everyone stood. Distributed teams were a compromise you accepted when you couldn't avoid it, not a design choice you'd make on purpose.
I've come to think the opposite is closer to true, at least for the kind of work I care about. A team spread across genuinely different places—different cultures, different default assumptions, different first instincts when something breaks—produces a wider field of view than the same number of people sitting in one room ever could. The cost is real: coordination takes more deliberate effort, the easy hallway conversation doesn't exist. But what you get in exchange is a team that doesn't share the same blind spots by default.
I have experienced that continuity from inside the same organization, first based in France and now in India. The vantage point moved; the work, relationships, and shared direction did not. It made the idea of a cloud of talent feel less like a metaphor than a practical description: capability belongs to the network, not to one of its locations.
Distributed systems engineering arrived at something similar decades before the same lesson reached how we think about teams. A distributed system isn't just "the same system, spread out"—distance forces you to make coordination explicit, to design for the possibility that any one node might be unreachable, to stop assuming consistency you haven't actually verified. Those constraints, taken seriously, produce more resilient systems than the centralized version ever could.
I think the same logic applies to people. A team distributed across geography that does the work of making its coordination explicit—rather than relying on the accident of shared proximity—ends up more resilient than a co-located team that never had to learn the discipline. Distance, treated honestly, is not the defect. The accident of proximity that let you skip the discipline was.