Groups of people have issues scaling. At the scale of the say the DoD you end up with a lot of inefficient redundancy which pushes organisations to specialize.
Google for example does not actually do that many different things, it just has crazy amounts of leverage.
I think people are (slowly) re-learning the importance of redundancy. Having multiple, competing implementations makes you far less vulnerable to shocks.
Using relational databases as a model for the structures in question, some form of redundancy (secondary and primary keys) is needed to avoid more redundancy (dublication). I actually don't know what I'm talking about, if it made sense to someone, please correct me where I'm wrong.
This is not really productive redundancy as for example the Navy and Air Force can't easily swap HR systems. This is mostly everyone being their own little snowflake.
Visionary thinkers still have their place. A Cooperative needs leaders to chart its course. In a complex world, people who can derive inspiration from multiple domains of knowledge will always be valuable.