Duncan Watts on Toyota's recovery after a key factory burned to the ground: “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. The surprising fact was that it was already there, lying dormant in the network of informal relations that had been built up between the firms through years of cooperation and information sharing over routine problem-solving tasks. No one could have predicted precisely how this network would come in handy for this particular problem, but they didn't need to—by giving individual workers fast access to information and resources as they discovered their need for them, the network did its job anyway.”
A little later there is an interesting paragraph about workers of a trading firm in New York City just after Sept. 11th, who gathered to determine the passwords of their colleagues who had perished, because those passwords held the key to the remotely-stored data that the company needed access to. It's a case where insecure passwords—or at least passwords were based on something that, collectively, a group of friends or colleagues (or, more likely, both) could guess if the survival of an organization—and indirectly that collective—are at stake.
The Watts article, especially the password anecdote, is a good example of what James Surowiecki called the wisdom of crowds, although from the password example does not say whether the employees were independent and diverse, but they clearly based their guesses on public and private information.
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