I remember reading a book by a mathematician about the field of mathematics, and he mentioned an example from nature. His example from nature helped me improve a design I was working on.
His example was this: he was driving and he saw some birds on a telephone wire. The birds were spaced evenly apart. This happened not because there was some all-ruling bird that was telling each one where to sit. Rather, each bird had within itself a certain “algorithm” for deciding what to do when another bird came by. Birds prefer to maximize their free space, I guess.
This helped me at a point when I was fairly new to OO. I kept tending to make things procedural and have centralized intelligence in “god-objects”. I read this and realized that individual objects could focus only on the things they needed to know and care about, and yet that the result at the big picture level could still be what you want. That the right result can “emerge” without being “controlled”.