1. What is Emergence?

Clouds are not regular but are never a mess. But it is difficult for us to describe that kind of order.

– Alan Watts

Emergence is nature’s way of changing. It is the phenomenon by which increasingly complex order arises 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. Emergence can’t be forced but it can be fostered.

This chapter grounds you in a basic understanding of what emergence is, what it looks like, what is known about how it occurs, and what we are learning about how to engage it.   Making sense of a situation is tough when you’re in the midst of the storm.  By understanding something about how nature changes gleaned from the work of scientists and others, we are much better equipped to handle whatever challenges we face in the moment.

 

Defining Emergence

For most of us, the notion of emergence is tough to grasp because the concept is just entering our collective consciousness.  When something new arises, we have no simple, short-hand language for it.  Whatever words we try seem like jargon. So we stumble with words, images, and 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.

Simply put, emergence is order arising out of chaos.  What we call chaos is random interactions among disparate entities in a given context.   Chaos contains no clear patterns or rules of interaction.  Emergent order arises when a novel, more complex system forms, often in an unexpected, almost magical leap.  In other words, emergence produces novel systems — coherent interactions among entities following basic operating principles.  Science writer, Steven Johnson, puts it this way: “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.” (Johnson, 2001)[1] Emergence in human systems has produced new technologies, towns, democracy, and some would say consciousness.

 

A Short History of Emergence

If we want to engage emergence, consciously apply what we know about its patterns, it helps to understand the origins of emergence.  While much of the work has come through evolutionary scientists, our understanding of emergence is itself an emergent phenomenon, unfolding as people from a variety of disciplines struggled to explain this common and mysterious experience of leaps in understanding.  They have been described in virtually every field, such as medicine, history, biology, social science; anywhere someone has stopped to consider how breakthroughs occur.

Scientist Peter Corning offers a brilliant essay[2] on emergence, pulling together a multitude of sources to provide both a history and evolution in perspectives on this subject.  I have paraphrased some highlights:

Emergence has come in and out of favor since 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.

Emergence 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.

When experts 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 didn’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.  Baby’s one-of-a-kind face.

 

Evolving Wholes

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.

One other aspect of emergence: scientists distinguish between weak and strong emergence are different.  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 are not deducible even in principle from the properties of the individual agents.  They can’t easily be traced to the system’s components or their interactions.  With strong emergence, the rules or tenets that shaped a system become unstable, creating a chaotic period.  “Rules” doesn’t quite capture the situation.  Rules imply an external authority, not the internal operating principles that guide individual agents.

In weak emergence, rules or operating principles act as the authority, providing the context for the system to function.  They eliminate the need for someone in charge.  The upheaval of strong emergence occurs, in part, because the operating principles break down.  In human systems, perhaps a situation’s complexity surpasses the capacity of traditional hierarchies to address the situation.  So who makes up and enforces new rules?  In essence, they emerge.  Through trial and error, as the diverse individuals of the system interact around an intention, guiding tenets arise that shape a system anew.  This is the dynamic at the heart of emergent change processes, enabling them to surface innovative solutions in a wide range of settings – solutions to MRSA in hospitals, schools that graduate and send to college the children pronounced unteachable.  This strong form gives emergence its reputation for unnerving leaps-of-faith.

As the notion of emergence makes space for uncertainty, it begins to evoke new ways to think about change.  Our traditional story does not disappear, rather it expands into a larger context:

(in no particular order)

Traditional Ideas about Change	Emerging Ideas about Change
Difference and dissonance as problem	Diversity and dissonance as resource, with problems inviting exploration
Restrain, resist disturbance	Welcome and use disturbance in a creative dance with order
Focus on the predictable, controllable	Focus on the mysterious, surprising from a foundation that’s understood
Ensure no surprises	Experiment, learning from surprises
Focus on outcomes	Focus on intentions, hold outcomes lightly
Focus on the form	Focus on the unfolding, working with forms as they arise and dissipate
Hierarchy	Networks containing natural, often fluid hierarchies
Charismatic leadership	Shared, emergent, flexible leadership
Top-down or bottom-up	Multi-directional
Work solo	Work in community and solo, bringing our unique gifts
Pay attention to the mainstream	Pay attention to the dance between the mainstream and the margins
Build/Construct/Manage	Invite/Open/Support
Follow the plan	Follow the energy, using the plan as useful information
Manufacture	Midwife and cultivate
Assemble the parts	Interactions among the parts form a novel whole
Design Processes	Cultivate nutrient environments and design processes
Handle logistics	Cultivate hospitable conditions, including logistics
Strive for Sustainability	Sustainability exists in a dance of dynamic tensions
Incremental shifts	Periodic leaps and incremental shifts
Classical	Jazz/improvisation, valuing classical skills and intentions
Declare/Advocate	Inquire/Explore, using what is at the heart of your advocacy as a resource to the exploration

 

Steven Johnson speaks of how our understanding of emergence has evolved.  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 world-view.[3] 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 pattern.  The Sante Fe Institute was central to this phase.  Sometime during the 1990’s, we entered a third phase in which we “stopped analyzing emergence and started creating it.” (Johnson, 2001)[4] This book is all about what it takes to create conditions for “applied emergence” – consciously working with the dynamics of emergent complexity so that the outcomes are more life serving.

Characteristics of Emergence

Emergent systems increase order despite the lack of command and central control[5].  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 into increasingly complex forms.  This occurs through some alchemy among diversity, organization, and connectivity[6].  In human 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.

While the conversation continues in the scientific community, scientists generally agree on these 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 ultimate 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, agreement)
• “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)

The phrase the “whole is greater than the sum of the parts” captures key aspects of these ideas.  Birds flock, sand forms dunes, and humans create societies.  Each of these pairs names related but distinct systems, one composed of, influenced by, but different from its mate.

As with all change, emergence occurs through interactions of diverse agents as they come together and break apart to form a novel system.  The two most frequently cited dynamics are:

• No one is in charge. No conductor is orchestrating orderly activity.  (e.g., spontaneous responses to crises like hurricane Katrina)
• Simple rules engender complex behavior.  Randomness becomes coherent as individuals, each following a few basic tenets, interact with their neighbors.  (e.g., birds flock, traffic flows)

Twelve step programs are a great example of these ideas at work.  Most participants I’ve met are fiercely independent people, not prone to following those in authority.  Yet with the guidance offered through twelve statements, these programs are highly complex, world-wide organizations that have influenced the lives of millions.

No doubt the simplicity of these two dynamics may leave many senior executives and government agency heads skeptical.  No one is in charge?  Not likely.  Isn’t it interesting that we use the word “order” as a term for issuing instructions?  What happens when order comes from the top rather than arising from within?  If they are not congruent with the existing functions of the system, they disturb.  Sometimes that disturbance is useful and moves a system in novel directions.  And sometimes it produces entirely unexpected – emergent – outcomes.  Further, if managers say, “we’re too complex for simple rules”, chances are they’re conflating complicated and complex.  Humans often find ways to make things far more complicated than they need to be.  Anyone who has filled out a form in a bureaucracy knows the truth of this.  Complexity is entirely different. Complexity has elegance; it is as simple as possible but no simpler.

Of all the means of accomplishing a given purpose, emergent complexity engenders the most energy efficient approach. Total Quality contains this lesson: if something gets fixed by adding another step, chances are it added a complication and missed the opportunity for a solution that uncovers simplicity in the complexity. Or consider the different cost of achieving agreement between conflicted parties through conversation versus war.

How Does Novelty Emerge?

Two dynamics shape how emergent phenomena arise, how systems learn and adapt.  Increasingly complex and novel forms emerge from interactions among autonomous, diverse agents through:

• Feedback among neighboring agents; and
• Clustering as like finds like.

Feedback. Systems grow and self-regulate through feedback loops – dynamics through which output from one interaction influences the next interaction.  We talk to a neighbor, share some of it with our friends and suddenly everyone in town knows Sally had a new baby.

Disruptions usually signal a focus on the symptoms, the visible outcomes. A fight breaks out and we concentrate on who is winning and losing.  What about the interactions that produce those outcomes?  What caused the fight?  How else might the dispute have been resolved?  Cybernetic systems theory uses feedback loops to understand this important way interactions influence each other.  It names two types of feedback loops:  reinforcing and balancing loops.

Perhaps this is how the fight erupted:  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 – sometimes towards more, sometimes towards less.  They are sometime called vicious or, when in a healthy direction, virtuous cycles.

Feedback also comes through balancing feedback loops, in which opposite forces responsively interact, as needed, 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.

Clustering. As diverse agents interact, feeding back to each other, like attracts like and some individual agents bond around a shared characteristic.  We both like the same candidate for office.  Small groups begin to form: parents advocating a new style of school.  With continued interaction, small groups form larger groups or networks that are increasingly complex, yet with something in common that binds them together.  Parents, teachers, and small businesses for new schools.  At some point, a complex and stable cluster arises that has unique properties unlike its individual elements – a national movement for charter schools.  Something novel has emerged.

Humans are great at pattern matching – clustering like with like.  We even do it unconsciously.  We see it indirectly in how towns and cities form –Asian districts in San Francisco, New York, Seattle; all of the auto dealerships in the same part of town.  As maps of the Internet are created, clusters of highly interconnected sites are starting to appear.  We are experiencing emergence in process.  It is how we learn, adapt, and grow.  Through our increasingly sophisticated technology, we can track the complexity of networks forming, whether the neural networks of the brain, the ecosystems of nature, or social structures in cultures.  New tools that let us see complexity forming is re-invigorating interest in the idea of emergence.  We finally have the means to study how life unfolds over time and space.

Figure 1. North America’s Internet Backbone[7]

The Nature of Emergence

While emergence is a natural phenomenon, we don’t always think of it as 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, longing, anger, fear, or grief.  And it rarely follows 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 before it ends.  They look for signs of the answers they seek in the day’s work and find 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 often hear a different message, as they giddily exclaim, “I never could have imagined this great result!”

This 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.

 

How Do We Engage Emergence?

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

These ideas point to some useful considerations for facing upheaval. They just need some translation to apply them. Think of them as operating principles – simple rules – for engaging emergence.

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, because something new is trying to surface.  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.

Pioneer! Seek new directions. Think different.  Act courageously.  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.  It takes courage to pioneer, to step away from the familiar interactions that define our habits and make up our lives.

Pioneering involves breaking habits, doing the unexpected, breaking a well-worn feedback look.  This in no way implies habits are bad.  In fact, habits are useful!  Remember learning to drive a car?  It took tremendous energy and concentration.  Once we learn the pattern – once it became a habit — we could focus our energy elsewhere.  Reliability has value, so arbitrarily doing the unexpected is less than desirable.

Still, when change is needed, habits can get in the way.  Healthy change requires dynamic tension between our habits and our pioneering spirit.  Without habit, function can’t be sustained.  But without disturbance, no learning or adaptation happens.  We need the familiar and the strange, the comfort of repetition and habit, as well as 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 as well as subtle senses of intuition and other ways of knowing.  And signals at a scale beyond our frame of reference made visible via computers.  Delays in understanding climate change’s signals challenge 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 disrupt the status quo compassionately, since tuning in to signals others may not see 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 the 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 no one is in charge, this quality was described as everyone is in charge, including the overall system?

Have you ever played soccer?  It is fluid, ebbing and flowing, highly interdependent and cooperative.  It requires trust and respect.  Everyone matters. And the flow of the ball, the state of the field, the sounds of the crowd, all play a role in how it unfolds.

While this metaphor of everyone in charge is closer to the truth 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.  An ancient rabbinic teaching story states 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, a difference then magnified and evolved by the rest of us.

Let me hasten to say that trust, respect, and cooperation are not necessary preconditions, 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 is likely to cause heartburn.  That’s where good hosting – clear intention and cultivating a productive container — set the stage for something different, and where knowing how to disrupt compassionately opens the way for creative engagement, in which passionately held differences fuel invention, allowing Intention to draw change towards us.

At a Journalism that Matters gathering focused on news literacy, we brought together a mix of mainstream journalists, academics, students, and media literacy activists.  We discovered that 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.

The group’s unguided interactions had generated a more inclusive, powerful way to frame the ideas and possibilities that had brought them all together.

 

Simplify. Simplicity is design’s holy grail: aesthetically pleasing, energy efficient, broadly effective.  And when we’re dealing with change in complex systems, 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.  Even a CEO who gives an order that isn’t congruent with expectations may wait while to see it executed.  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, with its insights into the role of simple rules offers some guidance on how to approach it.

Emergence involves order arising as individual agents follow simple rules or organizing assumptions: Drive on the right side of the road (or the left if you’re in the U.K); raise your hand and wait to be called on to speak.  Rules provide structure and boundaries. To a surprising extent we don’t have to articulate the rules.  As we seek simplicity, we find that initial conditions tell us a lot about the current guiding assumptions.  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.  With no explanation, each situation sets up a different emotional response and tells us a lot about what is expected of us.   Now that’s simplicity.

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.  Getting to fundamentals is vital: 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, for example, 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 that shapes our approach.  Inviting others into the inquiry allows a guiding intention to emerge.  Our work becomes 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 be present with 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 continually stripping away many layers of complexity. Oliver Wendell Holmes said: “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.”  We don’t want to oversimplify in ways that deny the real complexity we’re dealing with.  But we do want to find simplicity that gets right to the heart of the matter, that taps fundamental truths underlying the complexity we face.

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).  September 11 stripped away all but what was most important to us.  When we met a few weeks after that fateful 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.

Seek meaning. Have faith that meaning arises.  Be receptive.  Suspend the desire for closure. Given time to reflect, humans have a natural capacity for recognizing patterns, discovering coherence where none previously existed. But which patterns matter?  Engaging emergence hones the skill of surfacing 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 angry or confused, full of distrust, holding firm to a position.  Good hosting creates conditions that encourage authentic encounters.  Perhaps a conversation happens among a small, random cluster. Cued by implicit or explicit tenets 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 re-form, 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, a sense of commitment to a shared whole, of being a social body with common cause, while maintaining each person’s distinctiveness arises.  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, each of whom has their own connections.  And then they connect with another hub and something coalesces into a recognizable pattern with hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of people involved.  Spirit is renewed, wisdom 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, 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, when something you have faith in can happen routinely, I doubt you will take it for granted.

We are in the midst of a remarkable shift.  Everywhere I turn, individuals, companies, and social systems, like health care, are struggling to survive.  At whatever scale you are working – families, organizations, social systems, random interactions going on in all of these systems matter.  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.

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, and with great hope, I call it a renewal.  This act of naming is a pattern of emergent change – as something is named, it increases its potential to be realized, so it makes sense to choose a possibility-filled name.

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 forth novelty that wasn’t possible before; innovations serving those enduring needs, intentions, and values more fully.  I see this in journalism, as traditional values of accuracy and transparency make their way into the blogosphere.

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, Loki, or some other mischievous spirit.  And working with a trickster always has some catches.

 

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

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

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

[4] Johnson, pg. 21.

[5] Emergence, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

[6] Emergence, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

[7] Ever imagine how vast the Internet really is?, http://www.riverviewtech.net/membersarea/ITbackbone.htm