Not every center is going to hell, at least not all at the same time. We had this same philosophy at Centers Network, come to think of it, wherein a maverick Area Center might turn around and head off in some seemingly entropic direction -- which in higher risk, experimental or prototyping situations, may in retrospect prove a smartly competitive move.
In a human centers environment (HCE) modeled as lots of personal workspaces (PWSs) -- perhaps as a cube space using shared back office server farms -- we tend to focus on "the team" as a management unit.
The size of teams varies, depending on the challenge, the rules, the walk of life (just like in sports).
We introduce Wittgenstein here, especially his "language games" invention (relates to namespaces).
We also look at emerging disciplines like XP (eXtreme Programming), and what they teach us about optimizing the syntropic maturation processes whereby new goods and services become real and ready for prime time.
Plus in some careers / scenarios, lots of solo work is both required and expected. Bucky Fuller's "Guinea Pig B" experiments were sometimes of this variety, plus were meticulously documented to help him learn by trial and error.
General Systems Theory (GST) provides lots of drag and drop palettes to help you get some overview vis-a-vis whatever vista. The palette styles you choose will tend to reflect your own ethnicity and that's perfectly OK, is a practice we tend to encourage in fact, especially when consulting about branding.
