Introduction: The Promise of Engaging Emergence

In times of upheaval, the more people who are able to turn disturbance into positive possibilities, the better.  As industries, such as autos and journalism, collapse and the past ceases to be a useful predictor of the future, people are seeking new ways to make sense of their world.  With President Obama’s election, change and how to do it is moving from the margins — geeks, scientists, and practitioners of edgy change processes – towards the center.

Increasing numbers of leaders and change agents face complex challenges and don’t know how to solve them.  Some feel stuck or overwhelmed by the accelerating urgency of the conflicts and challenges facing their organizations, communities, families, or even themselves.  Some have too many choices and neither the time nor expertise to discern among them. Others see no choices at all.   Familiar strategies lead to dead ends, leaving leaders and change agents seeking alternatives.

Perhaps these leaders are aware of “emergent change practices” –strategies that engage the diverse, often conflicted people of a system in addressing their own challenges — but they aren’t quite ready to believe that processes live up to the hype.  Or maybe they have never experienced a group of diverse people accomplishing something useful together and are highly skeptical that it is possible.  For many, it is a leap of faith to believe that disruption is actually an indicator of possibility, that it contains the seeds of an answer just as assuredly as an acorn has within it the potential for an oak tree.  Others have experienced a success but don’t know why it worked or where to begin to do it again.

Consider an industry in disruption: newspapers.  Readership has been falling for decades–a slow, steady decline.  I spoke with a newspaper executive in 2007 about their strategic priorities: reduce costs, increase revenues, and transform themselves.  They had a plan for cost reduction and ideas for increasing revenues.  They had no idea how to begin to change.  Two years later, nothing substantive has happened and rumors are they’ll be out of business by year’s end.  A 2008 article for Editor and Publisher exhorted executive management to “Turn and Face the Change — With Newspaper Industry in Crisis, ‘Everything’s on the Table’.”  It ends “’If this is a seminal crisis, then we have to do some seminal thinking. And it really does have to be radical.’”  Yet the most innovative idea in the body of the article was distinctly small-bore: print less frequently.  With the faltering economy, the increasing rate of decline has turned conundrum into catastrophe.  The 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News printed their final edition in February 2009.  Over the last nine years, roughly 25% of the industry’s news workforce have lost their jobs.  The decline has been predictable, yet virtually every newspaper is choosing extinction over experimentation.

And they are not alone.  In a 2007 Fast Company article, “Change or Die” by Alan Deutschman, experts say that the root cause of the health crisis hasn’t changed for decades, and the medical establishment still can’t figure out what to do about it.  The resistance to change in the face of disruption is also true for individuals.  Deutschman cites research into change or die scenarios for bypass surgery patients and other serious diseases that can be mitigated by life style changes.  Even when we know we must change, there’s a 90% chance we won’t.

The Other 10%

In the spirit of turning upheaval into opportunity, I ask, what goes on in that 10% of cases who do change?  They have reframed disaster as possibility and learned to embrace the emotional roller coaster of change in the process.  In other words, they engage emergence.

Over the last fifty years, a remarkable number of experiments have occurred in businesses, schools, communities and other social systems.  With names like Future Search, Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space Technology and the World Cafe^[i], these emergent change processes have brought people together in businesses, schools, communities, and other settings to radically improve their systems.  These efforts have taught us to value participation and that diversity and conflict used creatively leads to breakthroughs.  For example, a two-year conflict between the co-managers of the Pacific Northwest’s marine waterways – four Native American tribes and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – found unexpected answers from their differences for the benefit of our coastal waters.

Handled well, everyone, including the change agent, is likely to be transformed in the process of surfacing what has been simmering for so long.   Whether it begins with a broken organization or the crumbling of the financial system, there has been a steady growth in experiments with change processes that engage the people of a system in creating their future.  They engender skills and attitudes of resilience — “making stuff up” — when facing actual or potential conflict with some degree of confidence that something good will come of it.

After years of working with emergent change processes, there are some outcomes that we know how to consistently generate.  While specific results are unpredictable, there are types of outcomes that dependably occur when hospitable conditions are created:

• People come away stretched, refreshed, and inspired to pursue what matters to them.  More, they know they are not alone.  They experience themselves as part of a larger community of people who also care and they can act knowing their work serves not just themselves but a larger whole dedicated to a shared intention.

They also find more courage to act, confident of mentors, supporters, and fans.  I have been part of an initiative since 2000 bringing together the system of journalism to create a new future.  At an early Journalism that Matters (JTM) gathering, a young woman, recently out of college, arrived with the seed of an idea – putting a human face on international reporting for U.S. audiences.  At the gathering, not only did she find support for the idea, she was coached by people with deep experience and offered entrée to their contacts.  Today, the Common Language Project is thriving, with multiple awards (www.commonlanguageproject.com).

• New and unlikely partnerships form.  When people who don’t normally meet come together, there can be sparks.  When a creative space makes room for their differences, the interactions are lively and productive.

At another JTM gathering, a young Asian woman from New York and an older Caucasian Californian man who had taken a buyout from his newspaper discovered a mutual interest in travel reporting.  They are now at work creating their version of the future of this genre.

• Breakthrough projects surface, experiments that would never have arisen without the variety of interactions among diverse people.The Poynter Institute, an educational institution that serves mainstream media, was seeking a new direction as its traditional constituency is falling away.  As a co-host for a JTM gathering, they had a number of staff participating.  By listening deeply to what people were saying, and broadly to the range of voices present, they uncovered an idea that builds on the best of who they are and takes them into new territory: supporting the training needs of entrepreneurial journalists.  This is just one of a myriad of projects born at the gathering.  Which ones will succeed remains to be seen, but each will leave its experimenters a little wiser in the process.

• The culture itself begins to change with time and continued interaction.  A new narrative of who we are takes shape.Journalism that Matters has convened thirteen gatherings over nine years.  In the beginning, we hoped to discover new possibilities for a struggling field so that it could better serve democracy.  As the mainstream media, particularly newspapers, began failing, the work has become more vital.  We see not just an old story of journalism dying – and provide a place for it to be mourned — but we also see the glimmers of a new and vital story being born in which journalism is a conversation rather than a lecture and stories engage rather than debilitate.  Journalism that Matters has become a vibrant and open conversational space where innovations emerge.

Experiences such as these show that working with emergence can create not just great initiatives, but leave behind it much more: the energy to act, a sense of community, and a greater sense of the whole – a collectively intelligent system at work.

As more practitioners engage with emergent change processes, something fundamental is changing about who we are, what we are doing, how we are with each other, and perhaps, even, what it all means.  As it changes, it is tearing apart familiar and for many, comfortable notions about how change works.  It is also bringing together unlikely bedfellows.  For example, as the deep divides in the U.S. political system have made it virtually impossible to work across the aisle, a nascent transpartisan movement is bringing together Republicans, Democrats, Greens, Libertarians, Independents, and others to use their differences creatively on behalf of the common good.

We are living in times of extremes – of climate, of financial upheaval, of political perspectives.  It is clear we need to act – and quickly – but how?  Change is far too important to leave in the hands of experts.  How can we make what we are learning about working with emergence visible so that people become conscious of what they already know and apply it in their work and lives?

The old story of change and how to do it, generally called “change management”, like many stories of our times, is no longer functioning well.  It is time for a new story that works with complexity, conflict, and upheaval.  We need to activate that story in our organizations, communities, and the systems we live and work in – health care, education, politics, economics, and more.  As you read, consider your own next steps in engaging emergence to handle the disruptions you face.

How My Perspective on “Applied Emergence” Emerged

Since 1988, I have been on a quest to discover what makes the dramatic results emergent change processes engender possible.  Some might call this a search for theory.  By whatever name, making visible what is at the core of emergent change processes makes it possible to integrate their gifts widely into everyday interactions.  Because they bring us together with people viewed as “the other”, they are often transformative at many scales, in any system, no matter how broken it appears.

My search for why these processes work intersected at three paths:

• A practice using emergent change processes – in which conversations[ii] among diverse people lead to unexpected and lasting breakthroughs;
• A theory of emergence – for understanding how interactions among diverse individuals can create useful collective order.

• A study of evolutionary dynamics – discerning how change naturally occurs gained through exploring the mother of all change processes – evolution.

A Practice Using Emergent Change Processes

“Emergent change processes” is one of a variety of terms used to describe a remarkable group of methodologies in which the people of a system solve their own problems.  These processes focus less on following procedures and more on creating conditions for fruitful conversations that lead to innovative outcomes.  These methods have been used to reorganize and reenergize failing organizations; they have helped communities handle intractable and polarizing conflicts, and currently there are numerous initiatives underway addressing challenges like reforming the U.S. health care system or how we get the news.

Experiments with emergent change practices began appearing in the 1960’s.  The first documented “Search Conference” was at an aircraft manufacturer in Australia.  In their seminal 1996 book, Large Group Interventions, Billie Alban and Barbara Bunker documented 11 change practices that enabled diverse and conflicted groups to create profoundly powerful solutions to complex problems.  In 1999, the first edition of The Change Handbook, which I edited with Tom Devane, told stories of a range of accomplishments achieved using these practices, along with insights into how they worked.

The first edition of The Change Handbook resulted from my desire to understand why these methods worked.  At the time, we described a universe of eighteen change practices.  Eight years later, and with the addition of a third editor – Steven Cady, the second edition contained sixty-one methods.  At a whopping 732 pages, it is far from complete.  Even as we created the book, new practices were coming to the fore so rapidly that important developments were not included (e.g., Theory U, Positive Deviance).  This developmental deluge made it clear to me that something deeper was going on.  My original desire to understand what made these practices work grew stronger.  And I was certainly not the only person pursing this question!  In fact, my friend and colleague, Juanita Brown, developer of the World Café, framed the quest in a way that catalyzed the exploration for me:

What are the deeper patterns of these practices that use conversation to change complex systems?

I have pursued this question through a variety of means – conversations with the originators of these methodologies, my own practice, studying the work of my friends and colleagues, analysis of the practices themselves, hosting workshops for others. Here are some threads of what I have learned.

• Affirming questions focus and attract, bounding a space by drawing people together around an inquiry that matters to them.
• When people share their stories, they discover that what is most personal is also universal.  When they experience each other’s humanity, they rise above well ingrained assumptions about each other to embrace deeper shared truths.
• Reflection, just listening can bring the remarkable gifts of change.  As people are fully heard, they open to the larger, more complex picture painted by their diverse views and, grounded in that bigger picture, start to co-create new ways of seeing, thinking, and responding.
• When people experience themselves as a whole, it shifts their sense of identity and their behavior.  Just as the heart, hand, and brain are all distinct and essential parts of one body, so each of us brings into our collective life different and essential aspects of our larger social body.
• Creating hospitable space – cultivating a spirit of welcome – physically, intellectually, emotionally, and even spiritually matters.
• Conversation is fractal. In other words, when focused on an intention, small groups – each having a unique experience – uncover similar insights.  This enables the heart of an inquiry to surface rapidly and broadly.
• When people take responsibility for what they love, they connect more deeply with themselves and in doing so, act in service to something larger than themselves.
• Be generous.  By sharing what we know and what we are learning, we all grow.
• Strive for simplicity of design by continually asking what is one less thing to do while remaining whole.
• Pay attention to the essence – finding coherence among a diverse group often rests in uncovering what is at the heart of each perspective.
• Include the stranger, both the stranger outside and the stranger within ourselves.
• Follow the energy, even into the unfamiliar.  Mystery is an essential part of the equation.  By definition, if we know the outcome before we begin, there is no transformational change
• Envisioning a desired future is an essential aspect of bringing it into being.

To make sense of these ideas, I looked to another arena. With seminal works like Meg Wheatley’s Leadership and the New Science, and Harrison Owen’s nod to biologist, Stuart Kaufman’s work on complexity, I had been following the literature on the sciences studying complexity, chaos, complex adaptive systems, and related fields for years.  Most fruitful for me has been the emerging understanding of emergence.

A Theory of Emergence

Steven Johnson offers a definition of emergence that I find clarifying.  “Agents residing on one scale start producing behavior that lies one scale above them: ants create colonies; urbanites create neighborhoods; simple pattern-recognition software learns how to recommend new books.  The movement from low-level rules to higher-level sophistication is what we call emergence.” (Johnson, 2001)[iii]

Implicit in this definition are some contrary notions.  First, it defies the belief that change starts from the top.  We are beginning to understand that change is far more complex, starting from many directions at once.  To make it worse, there is no one in charge!  How do these ideas reconcile with everything we know about the power of position, money, and leadership to affect change?  When it comes to human systems, there is much to learn by working at this edge.  In fact, terms like “bottom up” or “top down” cease to have meaning as we start working from a perspective that looks far more like a network of connections among diverse interacting individuals.

As our frame of reference shifts, consider some illustrations of that new story of change.  It is not that our traditional story disappears, rather it is integrated into a larger context:

(in no particular order)

Traditional Framing	Traditional Framing Plus
Strive for Stability	Stability exists in a dance of dynamic tensions
Build/Construct/Manage	Invite/Open/Support
Difference and dissonance as problem	Diversity and dissonance as resource
Predictable, controllable	Mysterious, surprising
Handle logistics	Cultivate hospitable conditions, including logistics
Pay attention to the mainstream	Pay attention to the dance between the mainstream and the margins
Process design	Container creation and process design
Hierarchy	Networks containing natural hierarchies
Focus on outcomes	Focus on intentions, hold outcomes lightly
Charismatic leader	Shared, emergent, flexible leadership that attracts
Work solo	Work in community, bringing our unique gifts
Incremental part by part	Whole system via macrocosms/microcosms
Top-down or bottom-up	Multi-directional
Classical	Jazz/improvisation, valuing classical skills and intentions
Restrain, resist disturbance	Welcome disturbance
Declare/Advocate	Inquire/Explore
Follow the plan	Follow the energy
Manufacture	Midwife and cultivate
Focus on the form of things	Focus on the unfolding of things
Be sure there are no surprises	Experiment

Johnson speaks of how our understanding of emergence has evolved over the last several decades.  In the initial phase, seekers grappled with ideas of self-organization without having language to describe something they could sense was there.  This phase was much like the surprise that indigenous people experienced when Columbus’ sailing ships landed.  The ships’ shapes had no meaning for them because they were outside of their worldview.[iv] As language emerged – complexity, self-organization, complex adaptive systems – a second phase of understanding emergence began in which people started coming together across disciplines to understand the nature of this phenomenon.  Whether they were dealing with biology, physics, economics, or other realms of inquiry, the pattern described what they were seeing.  Mitchell Waldrop’s book, Complexity, tells the story of the Sante Fe Institute and its role in this new field coming into being. (Waldrop, 1992)[v] According to Johnson, sometime during the 1990’s, we entered a third phase in which we “stopped analyzing emergence and started creating it.” (Johnson, 2001)[vi] This book is all about what it takes to create conditions for emergence.

Thanks to the popular writings of Meg Wheatley, Mitchell Waldrop, Stuart Kaufman, Elisabet Sahtouris, and others, emergence is making its way into our consciousness and our language.  It is being integrated into an increasing number of fields.  Without having a name for it, practitioners of emergent change processes have been working with it in organizations and communities since the 1960’s.   Now we have language to tie it with developments in economics, biology, physics, and other fields.  The results are the beginnings of “applied emergence” – consciously working with the dynamics of emergent complexity so that the outcomes serve life.

Applied emergence marries what we know about emergence with the activities practitioners of emergent change have been exploring for the last fifty years.  It makes conscious the capacities that already exist in and among us.  It gives us language that makes visible the practices that work so that more people can apply them with less need for formal training. All of us have examples in our lives of using the ideas that I name in this book.  By giving them form and context, they become more available to all of us.

With the ties between the practice of whole system change a theory of emergence clearer, I found myself searching for something to help make these ideas more accessible, how emergence relates to our everyday experience when uncertainty and disturbance are most prevalent.  Discerning how change naturally occurs seemed promising.

A Study of Evolutionary Dynamics that Inform How Change Occurs

When cosmologist, Brian Swimme, speaks of evolution he sometimes paints a remarkable image:  “Earth, once molten rock, now sings opera.” (Swimme and Berry, 1992)[vii] Just think about this amazing journey over billions of years.  What made it possible?  The slow, incremental shifts, the wrong turns and extinctions, the nourishing times of stability, the rapid and unexpected collapses and explosively creative responses.  You could say that evolution is the mother of all change processes, using a remarkable range of strategies.  As our mothers often do, evolution has much to teach us about the patterns of change. We know there is both repetition and infinite variation.  Isn’t it useful that babies are born looking more or less like their parents, yet each is as different as every snowflake?   It is both violent – storms, volcanoes, wars – and nourishing – a livable biosphere for a remarkable variety of life to flourish, years of peace and prosperity to invent and grow strong.

The word “change” is our term for all of these different forms.  There is incremental change, such as aging, which brings remarkable shifts, many predictable, many unexpected.  On occasion, there is discontinuous change, a complete reordering of our personal world (leaving for college, having an epiphany or a serious accident) or our larger world (a company going out of business, the industrial revolution taking off, a volcano erupting, a meteor hitting causing the dominant species to go extinct).  There is even a sort of “anti-change”, the energy spent to maintain stability (riding a bicycle, building a barricade to keep something in or out).  The better we understand the different dynamics of change, the better we can design processes that are consonant with the deeper patterns that evolution, itself, uses.

In a sense, evolution invites us to see “change” as an ongoing process, a 14 billion year story in which we play an increasingly conscious role.  And just as we can track cosmic, geologic and biological evolution, it is also possible to follow the trail of evolution across human practices of change.  War and force have been common means through the centuries.  Nonviolence has also had a long history of development.  Think of Lysistra – perhaps the original “Make love not war” action — the Boston Tea Party, Gandhi’s Satyagraha – Truthforce — movement for India’s liberation, and Martin Luther King’s approach to civil rights.  When, in the 1960’s social scientists began experimenting with bringing together diverse groups to address complex issues in real-time, another branch of nonviolent change in human systems appeared: emergent change processes.  With the advent of the Internet, such practices are making the leap from face-to-face to electronic forms.  As this occurs, the networked nature of how we self-organize is becoming clearer.  The remarkable success of the Obama campaign demonstrates what happens as people connect to each other using the power of clear intention and commitment, friendship and community outreach, and tools for going to scale.

Among these infinite ways that we change, the research into how evolution makes change helped me move away from the jargon of change processes to a generalized view.  An insight at the heart of the research is that emergence happens as diverse agents interact in a given context.  In other words, we can create the conditions for emergence to produce generative outcomes by inviting the varied people of a system to engage each other hosted in a hospitable environment with a question that matters to them.

Putting the Pieces Together

Through these three paths, a general understanding of emergence unfolded for me.   Emergence is a process in which novel systems arise from interactions among diverse entities in a given context.  Engaging emergence involves creating a nutrient space to work with the disturbance, dissonance, conflict and upheaval that accompany bringing together disparate agents.

Now, how could I share what I was learning, help it all make sense to someone who doesn’t live and breathe emergence in social systems so that they could apply it to the upheaval in their lives, organizations, and communities?

That is my intent in sharing these ideas with you: to express deep theory so that practical application is available to anyone with a good head and a good heart, to use a saying of Harrison Owen, creator of Open Space Technology.  For those who prefer to begin with the practical details, I encourage you to start with Part Two.  For those who wish to dive into a theory of applied emergence, read on.

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[i] See The Change Handbook, Berrett-Koehler, 2007.

[ii] I use “conversation” in an expansive sense.  At root, it means “to turn together”.  While words are most common, any form of interaction – poetry, prose, silence, visual arts, music, and movement can also be forms of conversation.

[iii] Johnson, Steven.  Emergence: The Connected Lives of ants, brains, cities, and software.  New York: Scribner, 2001, p. 18.

[iv] Zinn, Howard.  A People’s History of the United States.  New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

[v] Waldrop, Mitchell M.  Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Chaos. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.

[vi] Johnson, pg. 21.

[vii] Swimme, Brian and Thomas Berry. The Universe Story. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.