2. What’s the Catch?

If emergence holds so much promise, why isn’t it more widely embraced?  First, we are just beginning to understand its dynamics so that we can successfully engage with them.  More, there is a catch to working with emergence.  In fact, there are several.

Catch 1: It can be elusive to recognize

At first it seems to be just something we already know.  When encountering novelty, our first impulse is to try to fit it into our existing frame of reference, the forms we already know.

A gathering of journalists explored the question: What is our work in the new news ecology?

For two days, about 80 people from the whole system of journalism engaged in intense conversation.  On the last morning, people spent some time in quiet reflection, paying attention to the patterns that mattered to them in their own life and work.  They shared stories in groups of three or four, listening for what had meaning to them all.  Then, as a whole, they surfaced the ideas that resonated most in the room.  Among the insights, two were most heartily embraced:

• If it serves the public good, it’s good; and
• Journalism is now entrepreneurial.

No news there.  Or is there?  As I watched these seemingly obvious notions sink in, I could feel the wheels turning for many in the room.  These simple statements contained important and liberating truths for this moment in time, for this group on the edge of journalism’s rebirth. Legacy journalists, who thought they needed the name of their news organization behind them to be credible, realized they can make their voice count as an independent.  New media people were affirmed in their wide-ranging experiments into new forms of serving communities and democracy.

At some point, it flips.  What seems familiar and easily integrated into existing ways of thinking suddenly becomes a new organizing idea.  Rather than trying to fit serving the public good into business models that are leading to ever greater pressures to produce content that doesn’t matter, the journalism is liberated from its existing shackles, free to find new ways to survive. It becomes entrepreneurial.  It is clear the path won’t be easy.  It is also clear that journalism is alive and well, simply shedding the sources of funding that made for a happy marriage for many years.  And with this realization, whole new forms appear, aspects made possible by technologies that support communities to co-create, to trigger society-wide action, to develop new forms of expression that meet its core intention of serving the public more effectively than ever.

What about communities of journalists, who come together in novel ways, creating a network of coverage; an idea embodied in an experiment called “Representative Journalism”?  Or crowd-funding, in which people post story ideas and attract pledges for small amounts of funding that add up to sufficient funds to launch an investigation?  Called http://www.spot.us, this is another idea born at a JTM gathering that has received foundation funding.  The implications for a vibrant, albeit chaotic renaissance in journalism are exciting as this simple realization that journalism is now entrepreneurial and serves the public good gains traction. What was outside the realm of imagination – entrepreneurial journalism – becomes part of the system, novelty is born, and journalism itself is renewed.

Catch 2: Outcomes can be virtually invisible

Certainly there are home runs, projects so spectacular they can’t be ignored.  More often, the outcomes can be difficult to spot.  Journalism that Matters has been a seedbed of innovation.  It has generated hundreds of projects that we’ll never know originated through JTM.  In part, we don’t have the resources to track all the ideas, small and large, that people pursue.  Even if we did, sometimes the people themselves may not make the connection.  A few years ago, we interviewed some of our alumni.  It was only through our inquiry that people realized the initiating spark of a major project they were doing, happened because of a change encounter at JTM, perhaps even meeting their working partner.

So how do we know we’re being successful?  People keep coming back.  They tell us how stimulating the experience is, how many ideas, friendships, partnerships, and energy they take home with them.  More, others recognize something about the people.  Five of the six fellows in the inaugural class of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism were JTM alums.

Journalism that Matters has been quite diffuse, since it brings individuals from many different systems together.  When an intact organization or community engages with emergent change processes, or in a community with sufficient infrastructure (e.g., easy communication, access to resources and support staff, etc.), you are more likely to notice tangible outcomes.  Even then, it may not be so easy.  Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff, creators of Future Search, a process that explores past, present, future, and next steps, began bringing together the people they worked with six months after doing a Future Search.  There was a typical story:  Well, not much has happened since the event.  But we did this thing in my department/neighborhood. When thirty or fifty people each name the little something they did and hear each other’s story, they realize that remarkable change is underway.  It energizes and amplifies their work.

This is the nature of emergence: occasional big, discontinuous leaps — usually creating major disruptions – and years of many small, incremental changes integrating those shifts into a new context, a new story of who we are together.  By bringing these patterns to consciousness, we can work with the elegance of change, its rhythm and pace, to move with it towards new possibilities.

Catch 3:  Perhaps what is most important isn’t even on your radar screen.

It is often the unexpected consequences that are the most vital.  We tend to look at what projects were initiated as a measure of success.  Or, if we’re looking longer term, what projects were successfully implemented.  While these are good and important outcomes, the real treasures are often more subtle.

Over many years of watching temporary communities form and disperse, I have observed an exciting trend.  Emergent change practices create a context in which trust and friendship grow, networks form – communities of friends.  Perhaps the gathering launches a few projects, but the network contains capacity for continuous learning and experimentation.

With little or no seed money, the networks surrounding Journalism that Matters, or the communities of practice surrounding different emergent change practices – Future Search, Open Space, World Café, Appreciative Inquiry – are slowly growing.  In the change practice communities, there are literally thousands of practitioners around the world who could be catalyzed into action should an intention of sufficient magnitude call them to act.  In the meantime, they share stories and questions, mentoring and being mentored, researching and learning together, evolving the practices that enable us to work well using emergent practices.

This nascent understanding of how systems can organize themselves quickly – to behave with collective intelligence — holds great potential for new forms of organization.  What if we took seriously the idea that all systems are self-organizing?  By consciously working with those dynamics, we could free tremendous life-energy that serves both the individuals and the systems that we form. Just imagine: self-organization of our social systems becoming conscious of themselves.  In other words, the systems learn to manage themselves without guidance from above.  They operate as an ebb and flow of network connections, regulated by an emergent collective intelligence. No one is in charge.  It takes humility to welcome the self-organizing energies of the system.  And it takes skill, sensitivity to interconnections and tools that provide context and feedback so that we can make choices that serve both individual and collective well-being.

A group of us gathered at Channel Rock, a retreat center on Cortes Island in British Columbia.  Channel Rock was built with a low-carbon footprint.  It is designed to accommodate about 30 people, as long as they are conscious of their energy and water use.  We were 10 people who put the systems supporting us seriously at risk.  Why?  While we knew in the abstract that we should turn off lights or in other ways be mindful of our power use, in practice, we were creatures of habit.  When our host saw that we were close to maxing out the system, he took us on a tour of the power plant.  There we could see the gauges that told us the effect we were having on our environment.  Until then, our power usage was an abstraction, the reality invisible to us.  What an interesting insight:  it is virtually impossible to understand our carbon footprint because the feedback is far removed from our actions.

We are babies in understanding the potential of working with context, feedback, creating containers for working with emergence!  With iteration, people who experience emergent change processes are growing more resilient.  They are becoming comfortable with mystery.  Their ability to work with life-energy, whether it shows up as joy and excitement or fear, anger or grief, is increasing.  They know that focusing on possibility draws them towards what the system and the people in it need.  In effect, a virtuous cycle is unfolding in which emergence brings forth greater capacity for consciously self-organizing, which brings forth emergence and so on. Who knows where this will lead?