The Fabric of Human Intelligence, #18

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Leadership failures during periods of rapid change are often explained in comforting terms. We are told organizations suffer from talent shortages, skills gaps, cultural resistance, or communication breakdowns. These explanations are reassuring because they suggest fixable defects—new incentives, new hires, better messaging. History tells a harsher story.

When systems fail under acceleration, what breaks first is not competence or information. It is coherence: the integrated human capacity to judge, care, coordinate, and act responsibly when certainty disappears and delay becomes dangerous.

Organizations rarely collapse because their people are incapable. They collapse because the system no longer allows human intelligence to function as it evolved to function. Judgment is squeezed out. Responsibility is diluted. Meaning erodes. Energy is exhausted. What remains may look operational on the surface, but it is hollow underneath.

This article exists to clarify what human intelligence actually is, what it evolved to do, and why it becomes fragile under modern conditions of speed, scale, and compression. Until leaders understand this clearly, every attempt to modernize organizations will unintentionally weaken the very capacities adaptation depends on.