Another fun one is asking for a higher salary - for obvious reasons moderately sized companies have formal systems that make it logically impossible to do on an employees initiative (the boss doesn't control salaries, payroll doesn't control salaries and all the formal systems point to the boss and payroll). The real approach is that a worker has to somehow convince one of the people with serious power to overrule the default systems.

But the important thing to recognise is there are always people who can overrule a given formal process and they are being held accountable to something. The issue becomes what their incentives are. In the success stories in this article (like the one where the doctor saves a bunch of people) the incentives lead to a good outcome when the formal system is discarded. In the leading ground squirrel example someone without doubt had the power to prevent the madness and didn't because their incentives led them to sit quietly in the background hidden from history's eye. Ditto the Nazi example - obviously there was someone (probably quite a few someones) who could have stopped the killing. They didn't override the system because they through it was performing to spec, and it is probably difficult to prove they were in hindsight because informal systems don't get recorded.