Many entities are decentralized, including our brains. There is no central command post in the brain, no single agent issuing orders, no one neuron that holds a particular memory (despite what Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind represented). Memory is distributed across networks of neurons. 

Likewise, there is great power in decentralized organizations. Some of these “starfish” organizations discussed in the book are the Apache, AA, Wikipedia, and more. A starfish has no centralized brain and command center. If you cut off the leg of a starfish it grows back. If you cut it in half you get two starfish. 

A spider organization is the traditional model with a CEO at the top who’s in charge. These organizations are good at doing some things but not so good at others. If you cut off the head of a spider it dies. 

If we look upon the starfish and the spider as a metaphor for the self, we can see clearly in to the Buddha’s concept of anatta or no-self. We tend to regard ourselves as spider organizations — there’s someone at the top who is in charge, a CEO, a president, an ego. But when the self is examined carefully as mystics have done for millennia and scientists have done for the past 100 years or so, there is no CEO to be found. What we regard to be self arises out of the aggregation and dynamic integration of different processes. 

We are starfish.