An anti-consensus swarm will find novelty.

An anti-consensus swarm will find novelty. A consensus swarm will become bland.

An organization with a coherent identity and top-down goal will tend towards consensus.

Every idea that someone might have will be checked for whether it fits with the top-down goal.

Anyone in the organization who thinks a given idea will be a net negative can, in the limit, veto the entire idea.

An organization that is a swarm; an emergent, bottom-up thing, will tend towards novel ideas.

Members of the swarm are implicitly in competition.

To compete, the members want to do the thing unlike their neighbors, to stand out and get an edge.

This competition leads to differentiation, trying new things, most of which will fail, but some of which will succeed.

The things that fail naturally die off; the things that succeed naturally get more investment as other members of the swarm flock to it.

Of course, consensus vs anti-consensus is not a black and white trait but a spectrum.

Inside of organizations there's always competition (e.g. for promotions).

And even bottom-up swarms often have a motivating ethos or emergent goal that participants were all attracted to.

But where along that spectrum a given organization is leads to if you'll get blandness or novelty.