Part I: A Theory of Engaging Emergence Ch. 1. What is Emergence?

Emergence is nature’s way of changing. It involves increasingly complex order arising from disorder.  Change seems disorderly because we can’t discern meaningful patterns, just unpredictable interactions that make no sense.  But order is accessible, like potential energy, waiting for diverse people facing intractable challenges to uncover and implement ideas that none could have predicted or accomplished on their own.

Characteristics of Emergence

Perhaps the two most frequently named qualities of “emergent complexity” or emergence^[i] as it is usually abbreviated are:

• No one is in charge – there is no conductor orchestrating orderly activity (e.g., spontaneous responses to crises like hurricane Katrina)
• Simple rules guide individual behavior – complex organization comes from the bottom up (e.g., birds flocking, the stock market)

These qualities turn traditional change management practices on their ear: change must be led from the top; it can be planned; it follows steps A to B to C.   Working with emergence involves some counter-intuitive notions:  embracing mystery — questions in addition to answers; following life-energy — intuition in addition to plans; choosing possibility — dreams and aspirations, not just goals and objectives. Emergence can’t be forced but it can be fostered.

Professor Jeffrey Goldstein from the School of Business at Adelphi University provides a definition of emergence in the journal, Emergence (Goldstein 1999): “the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems”.  He articulated these commonly accepted qualities of emergence:

• radical novelty — at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear (e.g., from autocracy- rule by one person with unlimited power to democracy – government in which the people are the primary source of political power)
• coherence – a system of interactions having a sufficiently persistent stable form over time that we name it (e.g., elephant, biosphere, Sally)
• “wholeness” – not just the sum of its parts, but also different and irreducible from its parts (e.g., humans are more than the composition of lots of cells)
• dynamic – always in process, continuing to evolve (e.g., the US constitution and its amendments)
• downward causation – the system organizing and shaping the behavior of the parts (e.g., roads determine where we drive)

Stephen Johnson organized his thinking about emergence around four core principles:

• Neighbor interaction – individual agents taking their cues from their neighbors in a sort of ordered randomness rather than through orders from above (e.g., well-worn trails determine where to pave the roads)
• Pattern matching – agents learning through their connections and forming more orderly structures (e.g., clustering of similar functions in a city: New York’s garment district, diamond district, Little Italy, etc.)
• Feedback – interactions that reinforce consonant patterns and balance dissonant patterns indirectly cause a system to learn and adapt (e.g., real-time feedback via a back channel shapes audience response which affects a tuned-in speaker’s behavior)
• Indirect control – a system’s behavior arises from setting up conditions intended to produce the desired outcomes and giving it a try (e.g., any change initiative)

One other aspect of emergence: there is a distinction sometimes drawn between weak and strong emergence.  Weak emergence describes new properties arising in a system.  A baby is wholly unique from its parents, yet is basically predictable in form.  Strong emergence occurs when a novel form arises that was completely unpredictable.  It has qualities that can’t easily be traced to the system’s components or their interactions.  Think of the Internet and all of its ripples that are re-shaping how we live.  It is this strong form that gives emergence its reputation for unnerving leaps-of-faith.

The Nature of Emergence

While emergence is a natural phenomenon, change unfolding over time, it isn’t always a positive experience.  Erupting volcanoes, crashing meteorites, wars, and other such events have brought about emergent change, such as new species or cultures to fill the void left by those made extinct.  Wars can leave exciting offspring of novel, higher-order systems.  The League of Nations and United Nations were unprecedented social innovations from their respective world wars. Emergence is always happening; if we don’t work with it, it will work us over. So emergence has a dark side. In human systems, it will likely show itself when strong emotions are ignored or suppressed for too long.

Still, people often speak of a magical quality to emergence, in part, because it is impossible to predetermine outcomes. It can’t be manufactured.  It is filled with surprises, frequently producing unexpected results. It often arises by drawing from individual and collective intuition.  It tends to be fueled by strong emotions – whether excitement, anger, fear, or grief.  And it is rarely seen as flowing via a logical, orderly path. It feels much more like a leap of faith.

When sponsors experience an emergent change process for the first time, they often don’t sleep well the last night.  They are looking for signs of the answers they seek in the day’s work and finding none.  I can hear their unspoken thoughts:  “Will I have wasted money and the time of a group of caring, committed people?”  Yet at the end of the gathering, I consistently hear the message, as they giddily exclaim, “I never could have imagined this great result!”

Remember Chris, who was seeking a way forward for the field of corrections?  When a diverse group from the system came together using an emergent change process to advise his organization on how to proceed, they broke through into a powerful question to guide their next step — one that excited them all:

How do we reduce the prison population in half while maintaining public safely in eight years?

No one could have predicted this focus.  It arose out of interactions among deeply caring, knowledgeable, diverse individuals who came together in a nutrient environment around a question that mattered to them.

This example points to a key insight that makes working with emergence possible:  Just because specific outcomes are unpredictable, doesn’t make working with emergence impossible. It just requires shifting attention from doing something to creating conditions for something to emerge.  The primary work is no longer “taking charge”, acting from certainty.  It is hosting, creating a “container” for something novel to happen.  With clear intentions and a well-set context – framing what is relevant to the situation, including the physical, emotional, intellectual, and even spiritual aspects – we can engage creatively with emergence and generate terrific results. An intention provides direction, invokes an aspiration, without tying it to specific results.  This distinction between intentions and outcomes helps handle some of the anxiety many of us feel when facing the unknown.

Emergent Design Principles

Interesting abstractions, but what does all this say about turning disruptions into opportunities?

These ideas point to some useful design considerations for facing upheaval.  They just need some translation to apply them.

Welcome disturbance. For starters, isn’t it useful to know that order actually can arise out of chaos?  In fact, when faced with seemingly intractable problems, conflicts, or differences, disruption is a great indicator that it is time to consciously engage emergence.  Knowing this provides a reason for optimism, not to mention untying a knot or two in one’s gut.  It means that rather than throwing up your hands not knowing what to do, you can apply practices that lead to higher-order solutions that are radically novel, coherent, persistent, whole, dynamic and positively influence individual behavior.

With practice, it becomes easier to see opportunity in disruption, to choose possibility in the face of chaos and disruption. By doing so, opportunities are more likely to surface out of or instead of disaster.  In other words, attitude matters.  Focusing on possibilities is a choice.  Isn’t that useful to realize when faced with challenges that stop us in our tracks? The angst that generally accompanies upheaval is life-energy laden with potential.  When focused on possibility, it flows with excitement.  This can be a salve for the sometimes painful truth that ignorance can be useful when ambiguity is rampant, confusion is likely, and mystery is a given.

Simplify. As appealing as it would be to tell a system what to do, where do you begin?  Imagine commanding the health care system to be accessible and affordable.  And even if you are CEO of a company, give an order that isn’t congruent with expectations and see how long it takes to execute.  Certainly newspaper executives are learning the painful truth that they are not in charge!  Changing systems, no matter the scale – families, work groups, organizations, economies, even our own behavior – is indirect.  Emergent dynamics offer insights into how to approach it.

Emergence involves order arising as individual agents follow simple rules. Rules provide structure and boundaries.  And initial conditions tell us a lot about the rules.  Think how differently we feel when we walk into a softly lit room, the scent of flowers present and music playing quietly in the background.  Now think about entering a sterile meeting room with chairs all facing the front of the room.  Each situation sets up a different emotional response and tells us a lot about what is expected of us.

Given the complexity of human beings, how can we possibly know what sort of rules will create the desired changes to a system? Emergent change practitioners have been experimenting for more than fifty years to uncover answers. Finding simplicity is an art of discovery, continually doing one less thing while seeking the heart of the matter.  What is our purpose in seeking change?  Who needs to be involved?  How do we approach it?  Finding such answers is still far more art than science, and yet we do have some knowledge.  We know that most of us take our cues from a mix of the environment, what others are doing, and our internal guidance system — shaped by our consciousness and our habits.

Those who wish to change a system have access to the environment, their own behavior, and their own internal guidance system.  These elements provide all we need to begin.  Starting within, tuning in to our own motivations, aspirations, dreams for the system opens the way to an initial clarity.  Inviting others into the inquiry allows a guiding intention to emerge.  The work is that of a good host, sharing an intention for coming together and cultivating an environment in which what you do is congruent with the expectations you set.

The environment speaks volumes about who and what are welcome.  It is rife with implicit rules that shape individual behavior.  The art of hosting involves creating  “containers” – energetic and psychic spaces that support people in learning and working well together with the resilience to hold the chaos of discovery.

It may seem remarkable, but the simple elegance of a clear focus and thoughtfully prepared container sets the stage for engaging emergence.

Of course, finding a clear focus can involve continual stripping away of many layers of complexity.  When Journalism that Matters began, it was four people, each with slightly different needs and motives in conversation about something to do with changing journalism.  As we got to know each other, the aspects that mattered most began to surface:  What is the nature of stories that serve the public good?  How can journalism thrive as audience falls away?  How will changes in technology affect the field? We struggled for a name, ultimately settling for Saving Journalism.  And then September 11, 2001 happened.  We were planning our first event five weeks later at the national conference of the Associated Press Managing Editors (APME).  It stripped away all but what was more important to us.  When we met a few weeks after that fateful September day to prepare for our session, we found that the simple truth was that we were committed to Journalism that Matters.  This name has continued to guide our intentions, keeping us focused and energized, and attracting others who care.

Pioneer! Seek new directions. Think different.  If you are holding on, let go.  If you are going with the flow, step out of the stream.  If you are focused on the inside, see what’s happening outside.  If you are working downstream, check out what’s going on upstream.

Systems grow and self-regulate through feedback loops – output from an interaction influences the next interaction.  When there is disruption, we usually focus on the symptoms, the visible outcomes.  What about considering the interactions that produce those outcomes?  Systems theory uses feedback loops to understand interactions.  It names two types of feedback loops:  reinforcing and balancing loops.

I speak my mind.  It pushes your buttons, you get mad and push back.  Even if I hadn’t intended to irritate you, now I’m on the defensive and to protect myself, I attack back.  And things escalate.  This is a reinforcing feedback loop, in which the output reinforces an action in the same general direction.  They are sometime called vicious or, when in a healthy direction, virtuous cycles.

Feedback also comes through balancing feedback loops, in which opposite forces dynamically interact to counter each other.  The separation of powers among the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches of government are a form of balancing loop, each keeping the other in check.  In healthy systems, those that continually learn and adapt, reinforcing loops are periodically balanced by interactions that interrupt their perpetual growth.  Without checks we get climate change, economic meltdowns, and cancer.

What interrupts a feedback loop?  Breaking a habit, doing the unexpected.  Now habits are useful!  Remember learning to drive a car?  It takes tremendous energy and concentration.  Once we’ve learned the pattern, we can focus energy elsewhere.  There is also value in reliability, so arbitrarily doing the unexpected is less than desirable.

Still, change requires dynamic tensions.  In other words, without disturbance, there is no learning, no adaptation.  We need the familiar and the strange, the comfort of repetition and habit, the excitement and mystery of invention.

The art is in knowing when to disrupt — and how – and when to stay with the flow.  The environment is actually quite good at giving us signals.  We just need to listen and follow the energy.  When all is harmonious, proceed.  When it is dissonant, interrupt the habitual with something counter-intuitive. That said, sensors matter.  Who and what we listen to matters.  How diverse are the perspectives we hear?  People on the front line have access to different information than those in the boardroom.  How many ways are we tuning in?  There’s what we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell.  Then there are the subtle senses of intuition and other ways of knowing.  And there are signals at a scale beyond our frame of reference that computers are beginning to help us make visible.  Delays in understanding climate change’s signals challenges our ability to address its root causes.  To do so requires massive changes of behavior.  So how to begin?

Where there’s disturbance, there’s opportunity.  And it’s a good bet that considering a response that takes us outside our usual habits may be just the thing.  Here’s a radical way of thinking differently about a signal: What if we viewed a terrorist attack as the system shouting at us with a message that actually is useful to our well-being?  While not an excuse for vicious acts, given the reality, if terrorism is a voice of the system with something to tell us, what might it be?

Engaging emergence develops flexibility, responsiveness, and resilience to ask such questions and hear the answers because it teaches us to see disruptions as possibilities.  It also helps us learn to bring disruption compassionately as tuning in to the signals may mean acting in unexpected ways unsettling to others.

A state agency I worked with wished to engage the public in setting its strategic direction.  They wanted to go well beyond a one-way public input process.  Their board of advisors worried that individual agendas would prevail: rural versus urban, big versus small, eastside versus westside.  If they opened to way for individual expression, what would prevent the process from becoming a free-for-all, everyone battling it out for themselves?  Ultimately, they engaged several thousand people.  They did it because they knew business as usual would produce more of the same.  By the end of the first of eighteen gatherings they were so thrilled with the spirit of cooperation that they completely forgot they’d ever been afraid.

Encourage random encounters. Remember the idea that no one is in charge?  This typical characterization misses an exciting truth about emergence.  What if rather than saying no one is in charge, this quality was described as everyone is in charge, including the system?  Have you ever played soccer?  It is fluid, ebbing and flowing, highly interdependent and cooperative.  It requires trust and respect.  Everyone matters.  While this metaphor is closer than no one in charge, it still isn’t quite on the mark.  This may be the conundrum at the heart of emergence that frustrates many and tickles some:  we don’t know which interactions or mix of interactions among diverse agents in what sequence catalyze emergent change.  Perhaps there will be a time when that is predictable, but not today.  There is an ancient rabbinic teaching story that since we can’t recognize the messiah in advance, it’s a good idea to assume that it could be anyone.  What a life-affirming stand! No matter what we plan, the magic of emergence arises from the unlikely encounters among us.  And it could be anyone of us who makes the difference.

Let me hasten to say that trust, respect, and cooperation are not necessary going in requirements, though they are frequent outcomes.  In fact, conflict, distrust, people locked in their positions are all sources of life-energy for consciously engaging emergence.  If your only experience of conversation among people with conflicting perspectives is that it disintegrates into a shouting match, then encouraging random encounters likely causes heartburn.  That’s where good hosting – clear intention and cultivating a productive container — set the stage for something different, where knowing how to disrupt compassionately opens the way for creative engagement, in which passionately held differences fuel invention.

At a Journalism that Matters gathering focused on news literacy, we brought together a mix of mainstream journalists, academics, students, and media literacy activists.  Just the term “news literacy” was a trigger; a term invented by recently arrived mainstream media people who seemingly ignored the long-time work of media literacy activists.  As the group interacted, largely through an agenda they set themselves, the mood began to shift as ideas coalesced.  By the end, the group created a consensus statement all were willing to sign:

News surrounds us and as such news literacy is an essential life skill for everyone. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson: Knowledge of current issues is essential to informed citizenship in a democracy. We are concerned about the effects of media messages on children and others. Modern participatory culture makes every citizen a potential creator of news in social media, blogs, email and the web. We believe a literate citizen understands the purposes, processes and economics of news.

Therefore, it is time for American education to include the acquisition of 21st-century, critical-thinking skills for analyzing and judging the reliability of news, differentiating among facts, opinions and assertions in the media we create and distribute. News literacy standards can be research based in multiple content areas. They can be taught most effectively in cross-curricular, inquiry-based formats at all grade levels. It is a necessary component for literacy in contemporary society.

Seek meaning. Humans have a natural capacity for recognizing patterns. But which patterns matter?  Engaging emergence hones the skill of uncovering the ones with legs.  For many, entering the chaos, the mystery, the unknown of emergence is akin to experiencing a dark night of the soul.  Why do it without believing it will lead to something useful…more than useful, something deeply meaningful?

When emergent change practitioners bring together diverse, conflicted groups around subjects that matter to them, it is like watching evolution through time-lapse photography.   People may enter full of distrust, holding firm to a position, angry or confused.  Good hosting creates conditions that encourage authentic encounters.  Perhaps a conversation happens among a small, random cluster. Cued by implicit or explicit rules that welcome different perspectives, the exchanges grow in civility.  Participants become more curious about each other.   As they open up, they may share what they love or what hurts, what makes them angry, what they fear.  Once emptied, they speak of what they long for, their hopes and dreams.

At some point, there’s laughter – a sign that the energy shifted.  It is like a chemical phase transition, from ice to water.  It takes less energy to tend the whole as people begin taking responsibility for their own behavior.  They even start caring for each other. Groups separate and reform, each member carrying seeds of their encounters, many permanently changed by the experience.  They mingle with others and something remarkable begins to happen.  They connect with others around a few key ideas.  They might even discover they like each other, or at least respect each other.   They begin to notice that the same themes are surfacing everywhere.  Before they know it, without ever attempting to reach widespread agreement, there is a sense of commitment to a shared whole, of being a social body with common cause, while maintaining each person’s distinctiveness.  It is a network growing in real-time.  No one orchestrates who connects with whom.  It is just neighbors interacting around what they find meaningful.  Some feel so attracted to the cause that they become hubs in a network.  As they do so, they attract others to them.  And then they connect with another hub and something coalesces into a recognizable pattern with hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of people involved.  There is a renewal of spirit, a wisdom that emerges that was wholly unpredictable.  Some deep truth is re-ignited, yet the form is novel, elegant, dynamic, yet stable, more complex, and more inclusive.  Such is the potential when engaging emergence.

Consider the implications when technologies like Twitter support spontaneously organizing crowds with a cause.  Retrospectively, Twitter may be cited as the reason protests following Iran’s June 2009 election did not go the way Tiananmen Square did two decades earlier.   Activists on the ground in Tehran used Twitter to interact with each other and with the world outside, pressuring a repressive regime from within and without.  They are in a life and death struggle for the soul of a nation.  Whatever happens in Iran, the trajectory of such events is clear: as increasingly complex order is enabled by social network technologies and governments that don’t reflect the voice of the people will have a tough time maintaining control.

When people experience emergence, they are transformed in some way.  They may have more faith in themselves or more compassion for others.  They are likely to be more resilient, more tolerant of the unknown.  They become a living part of a larger whole, a feeling difficult to forget and almost impossible to describe.  Once having experienced the magic, they may go seeking it again.  If this sounds a bit too mystical, I invite you to try it.  Because with repetition, while it may become familiar, something you have faith can happen, I doubt you will take it for granted.

We are in the midst of a remarkable shift.  Everywhere I turn, there are individuals, companies, and social systems, like health care, struggling to survive.  At whatever scale you are working – families, organizations, social systems, it matters.  Like the random interactions going on in all of these systems, none of us know which will be the catalyzing events that help us see that we are changing, maturing, becoming a more conscious social organism.

A History of Emergence[PH1]

For most of us, the notion of emergence is tough to grasp because it is a concept that is just entering our consciousness.  When something new arises, we have no simple, short-hand language for it.  The words we use are called jargon. So we stumble with words, images, analogies to communicate this whiff in the air that we can barely smell.  We know it exists because something does not fit easily into what we already know.  It disrupts, creates dissonance.  When scientists from different fields talked with peers about this odd phenomenon of some unexpected leap in their work, order arising out of chaos, it seemed isolated, elusive.  They didn’t have the word “emergence” to describe it.

The Santa Fe Institute was born out of a hunch that brought together biologists, cosmologists, physicists, economists and others to explore these odd notions all pointing in similar directions.  Though the language of their disciplines was different, it was close enough that they knew they were on to something.  They were no longer alone with their questions but found others exploring the same edges.

As they met, they started to give language and a name to their experience: emergent complexity, emergence for short.  They called it into being, midwived its birth.  While it has aspects of the familiar – mom’s nose, dad’s eyes — it is its own being, with properties that don’t exist in its parts.  It isn’t just the integration of the best of the past and best of what’s new.  It is something more – and different.

Peter Corning offers a brilliant essay[ii] on emergence, pulling together a multitude of sources to provide both a history and evolution in perspectives on this subject:

It has come in and out of favor since the 1875.  According to philosopher David Blitz, the term was coined by the pioneer psychologist G. H. Lewes, writing “…there is a co-operation of things of unlike kinds.  The emergent is unlike its components …and it cannot be reduced to their sum or their difference.”  By the 1920’s, the ideas of emergence fell into disfavor under the onslaught of analysis as the best means to make sense of our world.  As interest in complexity science and the development of non-linear mathematical tools has grown providing the means to model complex, dynamic interactions, the ideas of emergence – how whole systems evolve has revived.

It is intimately tied to studies of evolution. Herbert Spencer, an English philosopher and contemporary of Darwin, described emergence as:  “an inherent, energy-driven trend in evolution toward new levels of organization.”  It is the sudden changes in evolution – the move from ocean to land, from ape to human.

I think of emergence as the learning edge of evolution – in which evolution itself enters the unknown and unfolds into something novel.

Emergent systems increase order despite the lack of command and central control[iii].  In other words, useful things happen with no one in charge.  They are open systems that extract information and order out of their environment, bringing coherence to increasingly complex forms.  This occurs through some alchemy among diversity, organization, and connectivity[iv].  In emergent change processes, this is accomplished by bringing together diverse people, setting clear intentions, creating hospitable conditions, and engaging them in interactions that foster a variety of connections.  Think of it as an extended cocktail party with a purpose.

In a sense, emergence is a perspective that tracks the evolution of systems – how wholes change over time.  Single cell organisms increase in complexity and multi-cellular creatures emerge. Humans have an emergent capacity of self-consciousness and are now tracking evolution.  And our evolution seems to be moving towards increasing self-management.  Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States indirectly tells this story.  Zinn paints a depressing picture of the forces of wealth and power crushing the rise of ordinary people throughout history.  Yet, in stepping back from his account, it is clear that our social systems are slowly, steadily moving towards increasing numbers of people taking responsibility for the choices that affect their lives.

Our attention shapes the nature of what emerges by naming what is unfolding.  Did the industrial revolution – an emergent stage of social evolution – exist before it was named?  What do we call the era we are in now?  We seem to be on the verge of something with even greater self-organizing tendencies.  It doesn’t yet have a name to catalyze it.  For now, I call it a .  This act of naming is a pattern of emergent change – as something is named, it increases its potential to be realized.

The story of emergence is still early in its unfolding. We have struggled with its existence, described some of its properties and given it a name.  We are in the earliest of stages in understanding what it means to social systems – organizations, communities, and sectors such as politics, heath care, education – and how to apply it to support positive changes and deep transformation.

In social systems, when life-energy flows, it moves us toward possibilities that serve enduring needs, intentions and values.  Forms change, conserving essential truths while bringing novelty that wasn’t possible before; innovations serving essential needs, intentions, and values more fully.

Emergence is a process – a continual, never-ending unfolding, a verb.  It places as much emphasis on interactions as it does on the elements interacting.  Most of us focus on what we can observe – the animal, the project outcome, the noun.  Emergence involves paying attention to what is happening – the disturbance when two people interact, the stranger arriving with different cultural assumptions that ripple through the organization or community.  Emergence is a product of interactions among diverse entities.  And since interactions don’t exist in a vacuum, the nature of the context also matters.  That is why just bringing diverse people together won’t necessarily lead to a promising outcome.  The initial conditions that set the context – how the invitation is issued, the quality of welcome, the questions posed, the physical space – all influence whether a fight breaks out or warm, unexpected partnerships form.

In truth, working with emergence can be a bit like befriending Kokopelli or Loki.  And working with a trickster always has some catches.

---

[i] Liota, Vincent (Producer and editor). (July 10, 2007).  Emergence.  NOVA scienceNOW.  Boston: WGBH. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3410/03.html

[ii] Corning, Peter.  “The Re-emergence of ‘Emergence’: A Venerable Concept in Search of a Theory”, Complexity, 2002.

[iii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

[iv] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

---

[PH1]Look for a place to put a sub-head