PATTERNS OF CHANGE: Invoking Emergence in a Time of Uncertainty

What would it mean to know how to work well with the unprecedented upheaval many of us face today?

Chris, a client of mine who has taken on a complex and ambitious task– the transformation of the corrections system in the U.S. – reflects the heart of this challenge.  He is exercising leadership not by issuing orders but by engaging in open-ended conversational processes that many of his peers view as very risky.  With a board asking very legitimate and traditional questions, like “What are you doing?” and  “What do you expect to achieve?” Chris is providing very untraditional and courageous responses, saying, “We don’t know.  We are making it up as we go along.  If we had the answers, why would we go to all this trouble?”  While keeping the skeptics at bay, Chris is blazing a path that is taking shape as he and the diverse group working with him walk it.

We live in unprecedented times.  With financial systems crumbling, oil prices rising and falling, educational systems failing their students, whole industries like newspaper publishing and auto manufacturing collapsing, it is clear that dramatic change is happening whether we like it or not.  The pathways of the past no longer reliably guide us to understand the needs of the present, much less the future.

Since change is a given, how do we work with it to transform the systems we care about?  All around us, our social systems – organizations, communities, political systems, economic systems, educational systems, etc. – are crying out for radical shifts in how they operate.  More and more, people are venturing into unchartered territory, re-imagining their systems. Leaders and change agents are struggling to find a compass to guide them through the major changes they know are needed. And since their tried and true ways of changing aren’t doing the job, change itself requires an alchemical twist.  Enter emergence.

What is Emergence?

While there is much talk of emergence as the way change naturally happens, it is an elusive idea, particularly when it comes to knowing how to apply it.  A simple dictionary definition of emergence is

“Becoming known, becoming apparent, coming to light, becoming evident.”

We now know there is much more to it than that.  In systems theory and science, emergence is the way novel, higher-order systems arise out of interactions among diverse entities.  So in human systems, when diverse people rub elbows in a welcoming environment, innovations result that have properties none of the people, their ideas, or their projects have on their own.

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 outcomes.  By definition, if you know the steps to generate the desired outcomes, then emergence isn’t happening.  In truth, to say we can invoke emergence is audacious.  But before you throw up your hands in frustration, there’s something very important you need to know:  Just because specific outcomes are unpredictable, doesn’t mean it is impossible to work with emergence. It just requires a shift in orientation.  With clear intentions and a well-set context, it is possible to engage creatively with emergence and generate terrific results.  In fact, people, giddy with excitement, often say “I never could have imagined we’d have come to such a great outcome.”

For Chris, when a diverse group from the system of corrections came together using an open-ended emergent process to advise his organization on how to proceed, they broke through together 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?

While we can’t control emergence, or know in advance the specific outcomes it will produce, we can use our knowledge and aspirations to focus intentions to guide our work.  This distinction between intentions and outcomes helps handle the anxiety most of us feel when facing the unknown.  Even without specifics, there is direction.  With an intention in mind, I have found three questions particularly useful for invoking emergence:

• How do we disrupt coherence compassionately?
• How do we engage dissonance creatively?
• How do we realize novelty wisely?

What entry points allow us to disrupt established patterns, explore the diverse, often conflicting, aspects of the system, and discern the differences that make a difference so that a novel whole arises that serves us all well?

For most of us, the notion of emergence is tough to grasp.  This makes sense, because it, too, is still emerging.  When something new arises, we have no simple, short-hand language for it.  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 their language was different, it was close enough that they knew they were on to something and they were no longer alone.

As they continued meeting, they started to give it language and a name to their experience: emergence.  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.

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.

I posit that 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; novelty that serves those essential needs, intentions, and values more fully.

What follows is an emerging story that puts the old story of change in perspective, opens the way for something new, and provides some insight into how to put the ideas to work.  The story it tells lives at the intersection of four paths:

• A theory of emergence – how simple acts of individual entities can, together, create higher-level order.
• The practice of whole system change – in particular, emergent practices in which conversations  among diverse people about complex, often conflicted, topics lead to unexpected breakthroughs;
• The study of evolutionary dynamics – how change naturally occurs, gained through exploring the mother of all change processes – evolution.
• A pattern language – a means for communicating theory and practice, originated by architect Christopher Alexander and colleagues, that makes visible essential qualities for designs that serve us well.

Now the marketing pitch: invoking emergence is fast, energy efficient, turns disruptions into opportunities, leads to highly innovative results with broad support and resilience over time.  The catch:  you have to rely on the people of the system to make it happen.

Here’s the story…